Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–835 of 835 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#831

Post by deweyusa »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #25

> People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained. > Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly danger…

I agree whole-heatedly. Every dumb kid thinks he has to be noisier than the next, whether it's a shitty dropped Honda civic covered in primer, a dumbshit F-350 with dumb tires sticking out past the body, or a motorcycle with some ignoramus on it wearing a bandana with a skull over his face, like that makes him tough. It's like everyone has to flex because they think it makes them cool, but really the rest of us are saying "oh look, another dumbass". Yet, you're right, the cops don't seem to care. I don't get it. It's like even they think they have something better to do, and noise complaints are too beneath them to care. I've talked to a number of cops about this, and they have told me they won't enforce these laws unless they are looking for an excuse to pull someone over for something more significant (to them).

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#832

Post by phtrivier »

ben_w wrote: post #776
phtrivier wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ? Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern…

> ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). I have literally never had any of those crash , which is what I was writing about. > some page layout issue, some text display, some translation Almost certainly on some of them, but that's not what I was talking about. I have, 4.5 years ago, had an airline not understand how a + before the @ works in an email address. But it didn't cras…

> I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.

This probably explains why we don't understand each other.

I grew up with fairly crashy stuff too, don't get me wrong. I ordered stuff on a Minitel, for heck sake.

However, I suspect the fact we're old timers makes it even harder to sympathize with "normal people" confronted with unstable systems.

Because, a page not displaying properly on your phone, a form not liking your first name because it has a hyphen, a website suddenly switching to Spanish for half its content, a email that says "you'll soon receive " before not receiving anything, the message received in batch of 10 explaining that your subscription will now be "${sub}€", etc... All those things (that I literally encountered _this weekend_, on systems developped by big corporations and / or public service platforms): we hackers call them "annoyances" ; fancy people call them "bugs".

Real people call them "stuff that does not work".

And when your are forced, by law, to use stuff that does not work because the software got all the funding, and people are too expensive, then, some real people call it "barbary".

It's "death by a thousand cuts", for sure, in a world where so many die by actual bullets. So maybe it does not warrant a violent uprising.

But you'd be surprised how much I hear it contributing to the overall anger - being the rich "computer guy" trying to help the real people navigating this.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#833

Post by nerdchum »

nerdchum wrote: post #49

Little things I've noticed decay in my 40 plus years. I noticed credit card machines fail a lot more. Like 5 or 10 years ago credit card machines very rarely failed. Like you didn't even think about it. Now it's like a 25% chance the credit card machine I'm using will not work properly. This is not a new technology. No one lets you in in traffic anymore. you used to be able to put your blinker on and people would wav…

Additional decay: Spam calls. Very rarely used to have spam calls on the 90s now it's daily occurance.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#835

Post by XCSme »

One thing I noticed are buildings: many old buildings are very good-looking, with a lot of details and passion put into them and using the best materials available, most of the new ones are just usable, with the cheapest materials that do the job.
Post reply on HN