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

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#251

Post by maxerickson » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

jws wrote: post #139

SanjayUttam wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the OP is being serious. Wash dishes by hand? Call me optimistic but, I kind of thought we perfected the craft of producing dishwashers.

We will have perfected it when you can again expect them to last 20 years without failure and at failure there is a diagnostic code that tells which reasonably priced part needs to be replaced.[1] They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit. Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a househo…

It's fun to chase consumer benefit in a circle. At least some of the drive towards more features and low upfront price comes from consumers giving more weight to those aspects of the design (rather than reliability and lifetime cost).

I would still agree that cost optimization has certainly done its part in trampling all over maintainability.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#252

Post by emddudley » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:34 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #243

alexholehouse wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly some of these are life choices, and important ones which almost certainly make sense to you, but one thing; No dishwasher? I don't really understand this. My dishwasher has a single wheel and a switch. The switch is "heated dry" [ON|OFF] and the wheel sets to one of three positions ("light wash", "normal wash", "medium wash"). If you're only washing dishes for one then I guess this makes sense, but I fail to…

Personally, I just don't like dishwashers. They don't seem to save any work - I still basically have to clean the dishes in order to precondition them for the dishwasher, and now they create this monumental chore (put everyone's dishes away) that all the dishwasher users are constantly trying to avoid and foist off on the other dishwasher users. No, thank you.

My dishwasher does not require any rinsing. It has a built-in grinder for larger food particles that get washed off.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#253

Post by SkyMarshal » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:40 PM UTC

mej10 wrote: post #214

irishcoffee wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's therapeutic, for me anyway.

It is funny that you describe it as therapeutic. I have several manual tasks that I would describe that way. Just not washing dishes. :)

After coding all day, almost any manual labor will do. Washing dishes, mowing the lawn, helping a friend move, etc.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#254

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:41 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #243

alexholehouse wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly some of these are life choices, and important ones which almost certainly make sense to you, but one thing; No dishwasher? I don't really understand this. My dishwasher has a single wheel and a switch. The switch is "heated dry" [ON|OFF] and the wheel sets to one of three positions ("light wash", "normal wash", "medium wash"). If you're only washing dishes for one then I guess this makes sense, but I fail to…

Personally, I just don't like dishwashers. They don't seem to save any work - I still basically have to clean the dishes in order to precondition them for the dishwasher, and now they create this monumental chore (put everyone's dishes away) that all the dishwasher users are constantly trying to avoid and foist off on the other dishwasher users. No, thank you.

Been there; done that. And once I bought a dishwasher, I lost all motivation to do it by hand.

Scraping off stuck stuff, the whole process of cleaning the sink, plugging it and filling it with water, sorting dishes by category (do the glasses first! Pots last!), running out of room to put the dry dishes so dry hands and put some away, then back to washing.

Its not unpleasant, but just lots of work and the dishwasher does a decent job with 60 seconds of effort (put dry clean dishes away; rack dirty dishes, push a button). I do it before leaving for work.

Of course, now with the energy-star hoax I'm starting to regret buying a new dishwasher, but that's another discussion.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#255

Post by AgentConundrum » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:43 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #156

AgentConundrum wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My view is that if you're going to do things of questionable legality after legally buying an object, how is that really different from just grabbing the files from TPB? It depends on your motivation. If you buy them to Follow The Law™, then yes, it's mostly the same, but if you buy them to reward the people who made the thing, then it's not. In any case, there are still 40 000 ebooks that don't suffer from such prob…

I did mention in the previous paragraph that I was referring to an unrealisticly strict view, and that most people won't think in those sorts of concrete terms.

My point was that people are used to a certain type of "property" and, before digital media, that view wasn't inaccurate. Yes, there were licenses and you weren't allowed to make copies of tapes or CDs, but there was still the physical property of the cassette, videotape, CD, DVD, what have you that was your property that you could lend, sell, destroy as you wanted. Digital media doesn't follow this model, but a lot of people don't realize that. I do, and it's not a model that really appeals to me for those types of products, so I hang onto the "old ways" and continue to buy the physical products.

I buy physical books, I buy DVDs (I never got on the Blu-ray bandwagon for a number of reasons), and music.. well, I have an odd relationship with music such that radio tends to be good enough for me most of the time anyway. Also, music is the media product furthest into digital territory to the point that it's unavoidable in some ways.

As for Gutenburg, I suppose I should clarify that I'm not anti-Kindle. The device itself seems useful and Gutenberg fits nicely with it. I think Safari Books works with Kindle as well, and most (if not all) public libraries can lend you digital copies of books to your Kindle. My rant wasn't directed at a device, but at the sales model of digital media. I just feel there are some growing pains left to work though. I'm not much of an early adopter for anything, and it still feels like that's the phase we're in to a certain extent.

I hope that made some sense.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#256

Post by xibernetik » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:44 PM UTC

thebigshane wrote: post #197

scott_s wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to Facebook than the friend-feed (the broadcast mechanism). Person-to-person communication is mostly what I use it for; it has replaced email and IM for many people.

What does Facebook's person-to-person communication offer beyond email and IM? (Honest question) No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...

My family uses Facebook heavily to stay in contact since we tend to be in different countries, along with Skype and email. They moved to this long after the initial craze because Facebook offered some really compelling advantages.

For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.

It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#257

Post by pyre » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #175

pyre wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get an Android phone for a decent price if you don't care about top-of-the-line $500+ phones (e.g. the Samsung Galaxy Q here - http://mobilicity.ca/phones/). If all you're looking for a 'dumb' phone with some niceties... I'm sure you can find plenty to complain about with respect to things like browser performance, etc, but that's not necessarily a priority in this case.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#258

Post by guard-of-terra » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:46 PM UTC

perrywky wrote: post #95

why should we care about these rarely happened bugs? They just happened in a complex scenario, which is hard to reproduce and those bugs really doesn't matter. I think it is not worth the effort to deal with these bugs.

It's not hard to grab a rarely happening bug. I stumble upon a few of those each week. The OP has obviously stumbled upon dozens of those rarely happening bugs.

So we should ask ourselves: are they so rare? Maybe we should stop providing lame excuses and write our codez correctly from the start?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#259

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:46 PM UTC

Love the rant, answer of course is in the title "Nobody's upset" which isn't really true of course it should be that "Nobody is actionably upset."

Much of this rant is a variation on 'craptialism' [1] and a number of the problems mentioned can be traced back to disk drove based storage. I've got a RAID6 appliance that I store stuff on and realized I was avoiding a lot of these bullets. (such appliances have their own issues of course but that is a different rant)

Its my hope that people will stop 'adding value' with software hacks to things like dishwashers (do we really need a ringtone to tell you its done? really?) focus on function, but that only happens when people actionably respond to these problems. They return them for their money back.

One of the truths in the consumer goods industry is that returns is an excellent signal for going to far. These things live on very small margins to begin with and returns reduce that margin still further. So folks returning 'broken' products incent the manufacturer to fix them. Its a pain though, that I truly understand.

[1] Crapitalism is the effect of racing to the bottom in terms of price to achieve market penetration / dominance. Sadly it often leads to products that are cost reduced to the point of not being functional.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#260

Post by shanselman » Mon, Sep 17, 2012, 4:55 PM UTC

npsimons wrote: post #187

Stream of consciousness whilst reading article: "Hmm, first one is about iPhone; next one is about Windows; I wonder . . . " Ctl-F "linux" - first hit is the comments, and I close the tab, contentedly.

Heh. Ya, I was going to put a few in around Linux audio drivers and Flash on 64-bit browsers.