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Everything's broken and nobody's upset

hanselman.com

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Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#81

Post by dons »

luu wrote: post #35

The blurb on the sidebar proclaims Scott's MS experience. It's surprising to see someone with a Microsoft background making this complaint. MS spends more effort than any software company on testing, not only in just plain hiring lots of testers, but also on formal methods. They have some of the top formal methods people in the world doing research for them, and armies of people trying to put that research into pract…

> ACL2 is old and crusty

We have many new shiny FM tools now, though, that are far closer to regular programming languages. In particular, Agda, Coq, Isabelle are fairly easy to pick up for people with an FP background (rather than a formal methods background).

The breakthroughs in SMT solver performance have been astounding to watch, and their use for "brute force" FM is certainly growing.

Of course, verified code is still many times the cost of unverified code, but the gap is coming down.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#82

Post by yesbabyyes »

batista wrote: post #31
yesbabyyes wrote: post #18

I've spent most of my career for 15 years as a programmer. Some days I just want to throw out my computers and phones and never touch them again. Days when I get overwhelmed by the feeling described in the article. Every computer environment is layer upon layer of kludges. There is shit all the way down.

> Every computer environment is layer upon layer of kludges. There is shit all the way down. You missed the AMAZING INGENUITY and BRILLIANCE that is also all the way down.

batista, I often find myself nodding in agreement when reading your posts on HN -- especially when you take a contrarian position.

I do agree with you in this, also -- the hardware and software combination of a single PC or smartphone is, I guess, among the most complex systems humanity has built, and in such a short time frame.

While my post was mostly me venting (bad Monday, frustration with people/clients/spouse/stuff in general), I have to say that I still agree with Scott. Too often are we putting up with things not working. I use Android, Gmail and Google Calendar. Yet, when I get a calendar request, it shows up in the official Gmail client on my Android phone as

  meeting.ics
  1 KB Text
  VIEW  |  SAVE
If I click "view", it opens up in a text editor. This is not helpful at all. Does nobody at Google ever get a calendar request to their phone? The only way for me to respond to such a request is either to get to my computer and open it in web mail, or call back and ask what time the meeting is.

Whenever a family member asked me about something failing in a similar manner, I used to feel slightly attacked: This is my line of work and major hobby, and I know that the reason shit fails is, well, shit is hard. I would perhaps try to explain the probable cause and so on, but to what avail? It still doesn't work.

But now, I rather shrug and say yeah, I know, it sucks. It happens to me too, all the time. I just get used to it, and deal with it. Isn't that all we can ever do, after all?

Lately, I've started trying way harder to remove complexity. I constrain myself on purpose, I get rid of software and file formats, and basically, the last thing I ever want to do is to add a new piece of software. If I am convinced I need a new piece of software, it has to be implemented with minimal change to the rest of the system.

Well, that was a bit of a rant. Anyway, in no way do I mean to disrespect any of the programmers who built this ingenious, brilliant piece of shit. I feel for them and, well, the brilliance sometimes shines through. We're still running the world's financial, communications and distribution systems on layers of shit.

Don't look down.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

I would seriously reconsider Kindle. It beats any kind of screen for reading, and beats any kind of paper materials in logistics. For me, personally, it's pure value; something I can't say about most of other electronics I own.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#85

Post by prof_hobart »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #32
batista wrote: post #24

So, your amazing feat of engineering phone, with a color retina display, audio-video capabillity, 700.000 apps, gyroscope, HD cameras, etc has some extra stuff taking 3GB drive space (of the 16GB device). Your amazing, multi million lines of code Windows desktop, the work of some 1000 people or more, has a problem with indexing. The protocol and apps that connect you via email to everyone you want, free, globally and…

So, your amazing feat of engineering car, with automatic transmission, ABS, a GPS, incredible fuel efficiency etc. stops in the middle of the highway sometimes. Your incredible display, which somehow manages to use liquid crystals to display beautiful 1080 HD video develops a jitter and bright line down the middle after a month. The machine gun which lets you launch tiny projectiles at speeds high enough to kill a pe…

Are they meant to be examples of complex tech that aren't allowed to fail and don't? Or examples of complex tech that does fail, but really shouldn't?

>but a customer doesn't and shouldn't need to understand that, and certainly shouldn't be offered the complexity as an excuse for it not working correctly

It's not an excuse - it's an explanation. These things are complex, and complex things sometimes fail. The average user can be forgiven for not really appreciating this, but lack of knowledge of the nature of complexity doesn't magically make it disappear.

Of couse companies could take the NASA approach of spending huge amounts of time and money on formal requirements/analysis methods, building massively fault-tolerant solutions etc etc, but I doubt there's a vast amount of users out there willing to buy tech that's 5 years behind cutting edge, and costing many times more, simply because it (almost) never fails.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#86

Post by lenkite »

mrb wrote: post #28

I completely relate to that feeling. This has led me to use less of everything over time. One day I realized this, that I was in fact applying the KISS principle to my life. Fewer apps + fewer features + fewer gadgets = fewer bugs irritating my day-to-day life. Examples: My desktop environment on my laptop is Linux with, 99% of the time, just a bunch of xterms and a browser (without extensions... they tend to crash b…

Android FolderSync would help in your music syncing issues...it syncs folder pairs where the other end of the pair can be literally anything - ftp, http, nfs, samba, skydrive, gdrive, etc. If you aren't online - no biggie it can sync with your PC whenever you are in your home network or sync with your office workstation if you are at office or just about any combination you can think of.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#87

Post by pinaceae »

edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

So you're a luddite then?

All that minimalism but still using an iPod?

What is real value? Why is value important? Is fun a part of value?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#88

Post by prof_hobart »

tomflack wrote: post #16

I've been thinking for some years now, I wish everyone would stop implementing features and perfect the ones that are already there. Optimise. Improve. This is why I was so upset at Sparrow throwing in the towel - they concentrated on one thing, email, and did it better than I'd seen it done before. By specialising they were able to spend the time to get it right.

Can I ask what mobile phone you currently use?

Companies like Nokia made some great phone products that did the one thing (well, two if you include SMS) remarkably well in small packages, that had fantastic battery life.

But then the iPhone, and Android, came out and virtually no-one was interested in the old, reliable phones anymore. They wanted the latest, shiniest gadget that they could get their hands on, regardless of how good/poor it was at doing the basic job of making calls.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#89

Post by ganley »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
edw519 wrote: post #73

My sentiments exactly. I got so tired of being upset with the horrendous human design in modern technology that I took action. What I've done: - Buy 2 $350 laptops every year. Move all data. Give away old ones. - All contacts in one .txt document. - Memorize most frequently used contacts. - No smart phone. - No tablet. - No Kindle. - No palm pilot. - No Facebook. - New car ('12 Hyandai) with minimal technology. - Was…

I would seriously reconsider Kindle. It beats any kind of screen for reading, and beats any kind of paper materials in logistics. For me, personally, it's pure value; something I can't say about most of other electronics I own.

Definitely. Like the grandparent commenter, I don't use any technology that frustrates or annoys me, which means that I don't use a whole lot of technology. The Kindle, however, has been great and fairly frustration-free - definitely a net positive.

Related aside: The world seems to be making it more and more difficult not to have a smart phone (or, almost equivalently, to have a dumb phone). This sucks.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#90

Post by hamai »

mattmanser wrote: post #37
batista wrote: post #24

So, your amazing feat of engineering phone, with a color retina display, audio-video capabillity, 700.000 apps, gyroscope, HD cameras, etc has some extra stuff taking 3GB drive space (of the 16GB device). Your amazing, multi million lines of code Windows desktop, the work of some 1000 people or more, has a problem with indexing. The protocol and apps that connect you via email to everyone you want, free, globally and…

You've totally missed the point of his post. You're talking about Scott Hanselman here, he does understand all that.

The point is Mr. DoYouKnowWhoIAm is getting old.
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