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

Free software scares normal people

danieldelaney.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 641 posts

Re: Free software scares normal people

#261

Post by apitman »

squeedles wrote: post #10

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…

I suspect in the short term users are going to start solving this more and more by asking ChatGPT how to make their video work on their phone, and it telling them step by step how to do it.

Longer term I wonder if complex apps with lots of features might integrate AI in such a way that users can ask it to generate a UI matching their needs. Some will only need a single button, some will need more.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#262

Post by Dylan16807 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #258
Dylan16807 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see the other comment Which other comment? If you mean the one saying it's not harder than programming, that's not calling it easy.

It can be a lot harder. Programming, these days, isn't always that hard. Very different skillset. There was a comment about how ghastly a lot of software-developed graphical assets can be. Tasteful creativity does not grow on trees.

"can be" makes it a very different statement. Either one "can be" a lot harder than the other, depending on the task. The statement above is about typical difficulty.

And even if they're wrong about which one is typically harder, they weren't saying it was easy, and weren't saying it was significantly easier than programming.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#265

Post by Dylan16807 »

bugsliker wrote: post #259
Dylan16807 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the software in the article will do what you want? For handbrake you can pick a preset and see what happens. Or don't even do that: when you open it it'll make you pick a video file, then you can just jam the green start button and see if it gives you what you need. Very little time spent.

i mean i don’t know that the green button does what i want either so what’s your point?

Right, you don't know if either program is the right thing just by looking at it. The reason you're uncertain isn't all those options handbrake shows. You have that uncertainty no matter what. You need the same confidence with or without options. So that problem, while real, isn't an argument against showing options.

And as far as time goes, it only takes a few seconds in either scenario. You hit go, you see the progress bar is moving, you check your file a few minutes later.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#266

Post by sublinear »

dhosek wrote: post #198
DrewADesign wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With…

In the 90s I did a tech writing gig documenting some custom software a company had built for them by one of the big consultancy agencies. It was a bit of a nightmare as the functionality was arranged in a way that reflected the underlying architecture of the program rather than the users’ workflows. Although I suppose if they’d written the software well, I wouldn’t have had as many billable hours writing documentatio…

> reflected the underlying architecture of the program rather than the users’ workflows

Is this an inherently bad thing if the software architecture is closely aligned with the problem it solves?

Maybe it's the architecture that was bad. Of course there are implementation details the user shouldn't care about and it's only sane to hide those. I'm curious how/why a user workflow would not be obviously composed of architectural features to even a casual user. Is it that the user interface was too granular or something else?

I find that just naming things according to the behavior a layperson would expect can make all the difference. I say all this because it's equally confusing when the developer hides way too much. Those developers seem to lack experience outside their own domain and overcomplicate what could have just been named better.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#267

Post by Andrex »

OP should check out Gnome Circle:

https://circle.gnome.org

The problem with why so many OSS/free software apps look bad can be demonstrated by the (still ongoing) backlash to Gnome 3+. It just gets exhausting defending every decision to death.

Sometimes projects need the spine to say "no, we're not doing that."

Re: Free software scares normal people

#268

Post by cellular »

squeedles wrote: post #10

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…

This is why i developed GatorCAM for CNC.

FreeCAD is too complicated. Too many ways to accomplish the same task (nevermind only certain ways work too.)

So everything is simple and only 1 way to create gcode. No hidden menus. No hidden state.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#269

Post by NoPicklez »

I struggle to link the title with the article. Aren't both Handbrake and Magicbrake both free? There are plenty of free tools which are very simple to use.

In this particular case I'd just tell people to download and use VLC Player. But I get the point.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#270

Post by analog31 »

cenamus wrote: post #167
zahlman wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. Not at all. Talented human artists still impress me as doing the same level of deep "wizardry" that programmers are stereotyped with.

Trust me, there are enough people here that believe that. Other engineering disciplines are simpler because you can only have complexity in three dimensions. While in software complexitiy would be everywhere. Crazy to believe that

There are many more than three "dimensions" if I may use the term loosely, in software or hardware engineering.

Cost, safety, interaction between subsystems (developed by different engineering disciplines), tolerances, supply chain, manufacturing, reliability, the laws of physics, possibly chemistry and environmental interactions, regulatory, investor forgiveness, etc.

Traditional engineering also doesn't have the option of throwing arbitrary levels of complexity at a problem, which means working within tight constraints.

I'm not an engineer myself, but a scientist working for a company that makes measurement equipment. It wouldn't be fair for me to say that any engineering discipline is more challenging, since I'm in none of them. I've observed engineering projects for roughly 3 decades.

Post reply on HN