People expect technology to suck because it sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#201

Post by kayodelycaon » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #6

I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line. And the annoyances I do have on the command line I can mostly work around with wrapping things in shell scripts, aliases, or functions. It's nice to have a simple interface and high extensibility on top of it.

> I'll point out that many of these annoyances don't have equivalents on the command-line.

I'd argue the entire command line is nothing but annoyances. Everything is completely non-obvious and often requires reading man pages that can contain a hundred options that may or may not be in alphabetical order.

The fact people have to write scripts to really function on the command line is telling.

My personal nightmare is exiting vim. If I make a mistake typing, I enter recording mode instead of exiting. This happens to me several times per day. And, no it's not a matter of being more diligent, it's the result of a disability.

The command line is powerful and I absolutely love it but it is a pit of rusty razor blades people keep throwing ropes over. :)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#202

Post by nightski » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55

nightski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only c…

> A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. Sure, a car is just one example of technology. Technology in general is responsible for everything we have and everything we do. Here are some other technologies: - farming - weaving - plastic - glass - ceramics - steel - cooking To the nearest 0.0001%, 100% of people need these things to wor…

Way too broad of a definition. I clearly meant computing and how a person interacts with their devices as that was the discussion at hand.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#203

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

6_past_30_til_6 wrote: post #42

nightski wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only c…

You can’t say that they have a leg up in general because It Depends. I’m an engineer and my job is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My dissertation involved developing highly parallelized solution algorithms for a specific type of problem. As such, I am quite well versed in low level Fortran/C code and MPI because I wrote code to do that, “that” being to solve an equation. I know this set of equations like it was…

[deleted]

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#204

Post by rch » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

_qulr wrote: post #81

The problem is with the idea of "continuous delivery". Many people fail to understand that technological advances only increase productivity if the innovations, the great leaps forward, are relatively rare, with long periods of stability and refinement in between. There's always an adjustment period, where people have to spend time learning a new technology, and any issues with the new technology need to be resolved.…

Developers get paid every couple of weeks, so an agile business tries to track the value gained from that expense on a similar cadence. The process has become more about corporate governance than delivering customer value.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#205

Post by malaya_zemlya » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

brundolf wrote: post #76

airza wrote: post #16

I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…

I would tell a slightly different version of this story, focusing in on "rollout-based quality assurance". I would say that effortless, automatic updates are to blame. When you can always just push an update, the impact of a given bug goes way down. It's no longer mission-critical to exterminate flaws before shipping; a totally broken feature becomes a mere annoyance. So project prioritization shifts from polishing a…

absolutely this. Back in the early 2000s quality assurance was insane. A release is was working on (aaa title from a major studio) was blocked because players' eyes were rendered incorrectly and you had to really zoom in to even see the glitch. And of course you had to find and fix all bugs before october, or else you won't be able to hit Christmas sales.

Once internet updates became the norm, it all became pretty much like the rest of software industry. (At least game companies still have QA departments, a lot of mainstream web companies have dispensed with those as well.)

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#206

Post by TwelveNights » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

adamsea wrote: post #181

hrktb wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but feel like we are biased by what we accepted as normal in our formative years, and that filter doesn’t apply on what we are discovering now that we’re grown up professionals. For instance books have been with us for centuries, and honestly most of them suck. Paper pages are thin and sometimes cut your finger (how many times did you get cut by an ebook ?), most are weak to liquids yet our world is fille…

We’ve also had centuries to improve the technology of books and I think that makes a difference. Although the weaknesses you cite seem like problems in search of a solution. No one ever expected books to have variable font size ... why would they? Lastly let’s recall the book five hundred years ago is dramatically different from the book of today. For example your point about liquids is now in many ways resolved by t…

While nobody expected books to have variable font sizes, the fact that ebooks do allow it to be adjusted means that people with deteriorating vision may still read them.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#207

Post by foobiekr » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #43

airza wrote: post #16

I feel like the slow decline of software quality has been in lockstep with the gradual transition from (expensive and non-measurable) manual software/hardware testing and QA to automated frameworks and rollout-based quality assurance. I constantly encounter broken functionality, buggy or unpleasant UIs, just as the author has. It feels like many of these problems could be avoided if you just had one person whose job…

Um, how long have you been in the industry? Software has always sucked and had these issues. It has nothing to to with automated QA. The reason you see more issues is 'way back in the day' your software had a very limited number of things that it did, and in general it did not involve accessing a network or chugging down massive volumes of data from untrusted sources. I work for a company that has a lot of individual…

I worked for almost 15 years in embedded and have 25YOE, and no, software has not always sucked as much as it does now.

I agree with your last point a lot, though I would modify it slightly: it's much easier to write mountains of code now than it as, and it's now common and much easier to import external dependencies (especially at system level) than ever, and those dependencies have tens of millions of lines of mediocre code all by themselves.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#208

Post by ulrikrasmussen » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #95

efitz wrote: post #83

I have worked for software companies for over 25 years, mostly on teams building software, and I hate software. I find bugs in every software I use (my freaking microwave oven control panel!). In addition to questionable quality, software is often downright hostile (lose all the data you typed into a web form if you accidentally backspace while not in a text field, because it navigates off the page). Ironically softw…

Doesn’t reality suck the same ? My gas car stinks, destroys the planet, needs yearly maintenance, crashes in everything the second I stop paying attention. My house decays days after day. Floors need constant cleaning, wall have holes from small impacts, paint contains inedible fragments and disperse nocive gas. Bees are building nests on my balcony and it’s definitely not what it was built for, nor where they should…

I live in an old house, and routinely discover ugly hacks that were done by the previous owner, presumably due to laziness, cost or just lack of skill. For example, they buried tons of stuff (toys, furniture, water heater etc) in the backyard and built a terrace on top of the pile to cover it up, apparently because they were too lazy to take it to the dump. The terrace decayed, so I had to tear it down, but in doing so I had to clean up their mess so I could actually use the garden. I'm not annoyed at the planks for decaying, as that is to be expected, just like you are expected to e.g. keep up with third party dependencies that you have chosen to include. Discovering a mess like the one I found in my garden, however, evoked the same feelings in me as when I look at a badly written code base and just wonder how anyone could ship something of such low quality to paying customers.

I guess my point is that there is a difference between things sucking because of the laws of nature, and things sucking because of incompetence, laziness or indifference.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#209

Post by ballenf » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #159

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there are things that don’t work, but it’s not nearly comparable. In my life I’ve never had a problem with a refrigerator, had maybe two problems with washer/dryer, my closet Just Works, books Just Work (with an ink smudge maybe every 50-100 reading hours) etc. I can expect each of those things to last decades. Looking at the goods I’ve bought on Amazon recently, digital electronics/software as a category doesn’…

> never had a problem with a refrigerator These turn of phrases make me wonder what we are really expecting from software. I can’t imagine you never slapped the door of your fridge and it didn’t properly close. You gave it a nudge when you realized it, and it was fine, but it must have happened. And your whole food supply would be rotten if you didn’t notice in time. Or do we monitor energy consumption close enough t…

> I can’t imagine you never slapped the door of your fridge and it didn’t properly close. You gave it a nudge when you realized it, and it was fine, but it must have happened. And your whole food supply would be rotten if you didn’t notice in time.

But if the fridge was software it would randomly turn off and ruin all your food. The light would sometimes stay on, except when you open the door. It would require you to decline an update before you could get the milk out for breakfast. During an update the fridge and freezer components would switch places and then give tips about efficient ways you could manually move everything. If you bought a new fridge, part of it would locked shut until you paid more money, but the one in the store was already unlocked. And god forbid you lose your 2FA device used to setup the fridge -- it will destroy everything inside (including irreplaceable heirloom tomatoes) upon reset. It will then update to a subscription model where custom temperature settings will require a monthly fee or you'll be limited in the number of items you can store in the fridge or number of times you can open the door per day.

Re: People expect technology to suck because it sucks

#210

Post by alexashka » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

If Nikita stepped out in the real world and tried to get other humans to do their job right and recorded how often that gets screwed up, he'd run right back to his computer, because at least with computers, you can eventually get it right, with humans, you are always at the mercy of someone having a bad day, being born an idiot, being distracted, etc, etc...

It's just life and that's how it goes :)

When you measure everything in relation to how you would've handled it, you get posts like these. The more different you are from an average human being, the more frustrated/bewildered you will be, until you have the epiphany that others are not like you and cease expecting them to be.

One question to ask is, if everything is so broken, surely you can become rich through this massive opportunity to improve upon it and then proceed to solve a lot of the frustrations you have with money? Go on then :)