Everything's broken and nobody's upset • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#171

Post by batista » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:25 PM UTC

koide wrote: post #104

batista wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. Read his postscript: "Is this a speed problem? Are we feeling we have to develop too fast and loose? Is it a quality issue? Have we forgotten the art and science of Software QA? Is it a people problem? Are folks just not passionate about their software enough to fix it? I think it's all of the above. We need to care and we need the collective will to fix it." I.e, he attributes things to lack of: ca…

Plus, the kind of bugs he describes are not that important compared to what we have actually achieved and DOES work. Bingo! This is one perfect example of the problem he's referring to about people not being passionate enough to fix the problems: "Those bugs are not that important." That's a lame excuse. Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago, the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit th…

>Bingo! This is one perfect example of the problem he's referring to about people not being passionate enough to fix the problems: "Those bugs are not that important." That's a lame excuse. Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago, the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases and that nobody cares enough to fix, because "bah, it's not that important."

Well, this is my other pet peeve, people not understanding the notion of "opportunity cost".

>the point is that we have lots of (seemingly) low-hanging fruit that stays there for plenty of releases

The key word here is "seemingly".

Do you really think that the guys as Apple/Google that pull all-nighters and work themselves to death to finish iOS/Android don't have "enough passion to fix problems"?

Or do you believe that if they took their sweet time they would have fixed every "low hanging fruit"? Even a low hanging fruit can add a couple of days to a month to a project, or delay other, more important features and/or fixes.

"Go attack all the low hanging fruits" is a meaningless proposition. Some projects you use are open source. Why don't YOU go attack them? Who is gonna make those "low hanging fruit" interesting for a volunteer to work? Who is gonna make them profitable for a for profit company, so that it doesn't die in the market while fixing them?

Mozilla tried to build a better browser. They addressed all the low and high hanging fruits.

What happened?

It took them 5 years to ship something that worked kinda OK, by which time the company had died, and the market share went to IE. And even those releases 5 years after the new code started had lots of problems. Eventually they betted on the more minimal Firefox instead of ever perfecting the full blown Mozilla browser/suite. And it's still not perfect.

Result? Besides the parent company dying, they haven't got that old high Netscape market share back even now.

>Who cares that we are better than 15 years ago

I, for one, do.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#172

Post by Impatient » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:25 PM UTC

flexie wrote: post #100

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…

Smart phones add so much value. In fact, I think it would be hard for most who have lived through the iphone age to go back to the world before. Almost like going back to the times before electricity :-)

Agreed. My last vacation showed how much they've changed our lives. Every day was completely improvised thanks to google, yelp, and maps.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#173

Post by bad_user » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:26 PM UTC

AgentConundrum wrote: post #121

jmduke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things in particular I'll attack here: > - No Kindle You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks -- but as someone used to literally lugging three-four textbooks to class, plus periodicals, plus personal reading, there's a clear and definitive value add from the Kindle. (That being said, just because you don't have a Kindle doesn't mean you don't, say, read eBoo…

> You're definitely not alone in this -- a lot of my friends still prefer hard copies over eBooks For me, it's because I own physical books, but I lease eBooks. A fact still lost on many people; there was an erroneous post about Bruce Willis suing Apple over digital property, which then spawned several posts saying "TIL (Today I Learned) I don't actually own my music". It worries me that so many people don't realize…

I bought a Kindle so that I could read all those books from project Gutenberg.

That's basically (a) time saved on shipping + (b) money saved since those books are in the public domain + (c) no trees were cut for me to read those books + (d) storage efficiency.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#174

Post by yequalsx » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:27 PM UTC

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…

A lot of people are surprised that you don't use a dishwasher. This I find surprising.

I don't use a dishwasher either but for a different reason. I do dishes as a fitness hack. No, you don't expend a lot of energy doing dishes. But doing things by hand as much as feasible leads to a less lethargic lifestyle. Another hack is not using a microwave for anything. For instance, I make oatmeal in a pot the old fashioned way; stirring constantly so that nothing burns to the bottom of the pot. I don't use a dryer. After washing clothes (no I don't do this by hand!) I put clothes on a drying rack. I fold clothes right away after they dry.

Overall these little hacks have made me less lazy and have given me a feeling of having more energy.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#175

Post by danielweber » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #157

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got rid of mine and went back to a dumb phone. I didn't like being connected all the time, it wasn't healthy for me.

Then disconnect your data plan. To me, just having the Android Calendar & Contacts interfaces is a huge improvement over most dedicated 'dumb' phones. I guess that you still have to have the discipline not to connect wifi, but I don't think that would be too much of an issue. Disabling/enabling wifi on Android is fairly easy. This barrier, though small is probably enough to help keep you in-check.

I haven't verified this myself, but friends tell me you can no longer get "free" phones from AT&T unless you get a data plan. At $15/month for 2 years and 2 lines, that's 720 bucks. And phones just aren't durable enough to last for 4 years.

It's probably time to start grabbing old phones off of eBay.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#176

Post by jiggy2011 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #151

jiggy2011 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that Spotify doesn't have all the music you want necessarily unless you also add your own files to it. My solution to this would just be a dropbox folder full of MP3 files and a vlc playlist file. I don't use any monolithic player/organiser of music like iTunes or WMP but too a lot of people it seems like it has to be iTunes.

The benefit of liberating yourself from trying to backup and distribute someone else's content is much greater than missing a few tracks. There is plenty of other stuff that you could listen to instead.

That's really quite a subjective thing. It might be true for people who just looking for anything to stick on in the background.

People who are "into" music and have favourite artists that they are very loyal too or who are looking to discovered unsigned or indie artists are not going to want to be restricted to whatever is in the Spotify catalogue.

Personally I'd say around 50% of the music I want to listen to is available on Spotify. There's also a fair number of "big name" artists who's music isn't licensed to them.

The solution for a lot of people seems to be to simply use YouTube as their music player since pretty much anything seems to be available there. On the other hand I'm not sure what the legality of this is.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#177

Post by uniclaude » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

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…

Before reading the replies to this post I didn't realize how important could something as basic as a dishwasher be useful to HN members. Living in Japan, I see this sort of appliance as a total waste of space, and honestly, washing my personal dishes by hand is not tough.

As some others said, I would reconsider the "No Kindle" though. This cheap device saves a lot of space for me.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#178

Post by danielweber » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:35 PM UTC

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…

Who sells laptops these days that aren't loaded up with a bunch of bloatware?

I'd like to look at the System Process List right after boot and have there be no more than 20 entries, knowing exactly what each thing does.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#179

Post by city41 » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:38 PM UTC

timtadh wrote: post #137

eps wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Microsoft and testing Perhaps things have changed now, but previously MS had a setup with 2-4 testers per one developer whereby latter would churn out code as fast as he can (of a respective quality) and testers were expected to identify critical bugs so that the dev can plug them, in the same speedy manner as he'd code the original. I had few close friends work for Microsoft in the 90s and the impression I forme…

My impression is the Microsoft of the 90s has little to do with the Microsoft of today in terms of QA, testing, and security. This impression is "secondhand" (I have never worked for Microsoft). Reforms were made, so if you information comes from the 90s it may be time to update it.

All MS info should come with a grain of salt from the simple fact it's a company of about 90,000 people with thousands of unique teams. I worked at MS and every team I interacted with handled testing and QA very differently.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#180

Post by rand_r » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 2:40 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #125

pmjordan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write a bad bit of JavaScript and the browser just freezes This one always gets me. The browser people are (rightly) obsessed with security, but a simple DoS attack like this has worked for years.

Basically this is just the halting problem.

The browser doesn't have to know or care if some javascript on a page is doing an infinite loop. It's quite possible to sandbox a tab so that it can't take down the browser, just like an OS sandboxes processes so that one can't take down the kernel and other processes just from using too much CPU.