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Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

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Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#41

Post by drfuchs »

In FrameMaker's "Book" functionality, where you can stitch together a bunch of individual chapter files into a larger document, there's a very edge-case possibility of hitting a situation where there's no solution to the pagination (say that Chapter One has a forward reference to "(See page 57.xiv)" but added text puts the tagged info on page 57.xv, so the reference gets automatically changed to "(See page 57.xv)", but that text is shorter, so there's a slim chance that the reference has to change back to 57.xiv, but that makes the text longer again, which pushes the tagged info back to page 57.xv, ad infinitum).

Clearly, though it never happens in the real world, my code had to detect if a document seemed to be looping this way, and since I never expected anyone to see it, it just issued the one-word error message "Degenerate", with the intended meaning that "this document has hit a degenerate case".

Well, of course some customer found a bug that triggered the message, and called tech support, irate that our software had called him a degenerate.

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#43

Post by wara23arish »

nicklasss wrote: post #29

Apple Music. I can’t understand how you can develop such an slow and laggy app in your own OS, even in an iPhone 11 Pro. I stayed on Spotify but would have love to be able to enjoy the lossless audio

I also noticed that Apple Music on macOS always opens on its own whenever you connect bluetooth headphones and afaik there’s no way to change that behavior or turn it off. I dont even use apple music and wont consider it on principle now lol.

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#44

Post by dangoor »

mttjj wrote: post #9

I used it for about 30 minutes years and years ago and didn’t really like it but Carrot Weather for iOS fits this bill. I believe it insults the user and generally uses snarky language. That’s pretty much its whole schtick, so it’s not really a hidden feature or easter egg. I don’t even know if it provides any more accurate weather information than other apps; I think people use it mostly for its ‘character’. Again,…

You can configure what kind of messaging you want from Carrot Weather. The reason it has won so many awards is that it's really a great weather app. It's very configurable, and its Apple Watch complications are fantastic.

The other Carrot apps were mostly fun because of the CARROT personality, but Weather is genuinely an exceptional entry in its category.

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#45

Post by fxtentacle »

mrob wrote: post #40

Every forced UI animation is an insult, because its message is "I believe you are too stupid to remember the command you issued approximately 0 seconds ago, so sit and waste your time while I remind you." And worse still are delays added solely to trick you into thinking the task requires more CPU time than it really does.

Thanks to Electron, it's not a trick anymore!!! :) That button click now actually needs 0.1s on your 2.6Ghz CPU while it is wasting 260 million logic operations ^_^

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#46

Post by zvr »

drfuchs wrote: post #41

In FrameMaker's "Book" functionality, where you can stitch together a bunch of individual chapter files into a larger document, there's a very edge-case possibility of hitting a situation where there's no solution to the pagination (say that Chapter One has a forward reference to "(See page 57.xiv)" but added text puts the tagged info on page 57.xv, so the reference gets automatically changed to "(See page 57.xv)", b…

Wow, that was you? I've heard the anecdote decades ago (probably read it on Usenet or in a book) but never thought I'd learn more nor find the person responsible for it...

Thanks -- and you might be interested to know that the example has been used in many lectures/presentations.

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#47

Post by zvr »

rzzzt wrote: post #26
jjgreen wrote: post #2

A long time ago I got an account on an old Unix machine (Irix? HP?), my first, I'd heard that you could get help by typing "man", so did so. The response was Apropos what? which I thought so snooty that I laughed out-loud, and everyone in the room looked at me as if I were some kind of nut.

$ man What manual page do you want? For example, try 'man man'. $ apropos apropos what? Apropos tries to find manual pages that may be relevant to the search string (which should go after "apropos").

Back in the day, man(1), apropos(1) and whatis(1) were all links to the same executable, IIRC.

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#48

Post by azth »

golang (from pjmlp's comment here[0])

--------------------------------------

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike 1"

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike 2"

Sources:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Pa...

https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

------------------------------------------

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30696562

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#49

Post by traceroute66 »

> `Defaults insults` setting in `sudo` that will add a insult every time you get your password wrong.

IIRC on OpenBSD it was not a setting and there was no way to turn it off. It did it by default in the true OpenBSD "like it or lump it" ethos.

However OpenBSD has now defaulted to `doas` and has subsequently had its mouth washed out with soap.

Re: Ask HN: Software That Insults You?

#50

Post by drfuchs »

zvr wrote: post #46
drfuchs wrote: post #41

In FrameMaker's "Book" functionality, where you can stitch together a bunch of individual chapter files into a larger document, there's a very edge-case possibility of hitting a situation where there's no solution to the pagination (say that Chapter One has a forward reference to "(See page 57.xiv)" but added text puts the tagged info on page 57.xv, so the reference gets automatically changed to "(See page 57.xv)", b…

Wow, that was you? I've heard the anecdote decades ago (probably read it on Usenet or in a book) but never thought I'd learn more nor find the person responsible for it... Thanks -- and you might be interested to know that the example has been used in many lectures/presentations.

Well! Yup, "Book" internal design and implementation was all me. I don't think anybody else at Frame even knew the message existed, until that fateful day. The bug that caused it to come up was also mine.

Any pointers to lectures/presentations? That was news to me!

So as to not leave the wrong impression: The entire user-visible document model and feature set of FrameMaker were ultimately the responsibility of one person (V.P. Engineering David Murray), who kept all the features mutually consistent, and the product as a whole "just right" as far as being not too complex or confusing while still being powerful enough for users to be able to do what they needed to do, and have an accurate mental picture of how everything worked. I believe that this approach was essential to the success we had; I'm always astonished when hearing in passing how things go in some other places, along the lines of "so programmer X decided to put in feature Y, got a quick OK from management, and then went off and designed the UX/UI all by themselves, implemented the whole thing, and merged it on in..."

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