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

Everything's broken and nobody's upset

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 418 posts

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#61

Post by batista »

Wilya wrote: post #59
batista wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of the things that really upsets me. I hate how nothing ever works. And somehow you left a comment, using an OS and a browser, on a international network, that put it up so everybody in the world can read it, and I read it in a totally different country. All totally unimaginable for the common folk just 20 years ago. And all that with huge color flat monitors, optical mice, mp3s playing in the backgroun…

I'm leaving this comment from a computer that might crash on me sometime today. Or could decide to reboot to install its updates when I'm looking somewhere else. I'm leaving this comment on a site which technically could have existed 10 years ago. Wireless is working right now, that's great. It might stop working sometime today. Things like that tend to happen, on every network more complicated than "I'm sitting two…

>That might have been unimaginable 20 years ago, but somehow, things are about as unreliable as they were 10 years ago.

10-12 years ago:

1) Windows was Windows ME (not even in the same league as Windows 7)

2) OS X was 10.1 (or before that). Most people still used OS 9.

3) Linux was not quite ready for heavy enterprise use or home use, had worse memory management, filesystem, window managers, desktop environments, drivers and userland.

So, "about as unreliable"? I beg to differ...

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#62

Post by nodata »

Tichy wrote: post #57
nodata wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. What if I find a generic hardware problem with my laptop? or a general problem with my apartment complex? If I have a problem on a Mac, I can report it. I will get no feedback, and maybe the problem will get fixed. If it does get fixed, I will get no information about if my bug report led to the fix: the feedback loop is missing - there is no incentive to report a bug.

Then don't use a Mac. With your appartment complex, I assume you'll receive feedback from the owner or eventually you'll move to a more responsive place. Open source hardware is a problem, agreed - I hope in the future there will be more of it available. Even open source houses, why not. If there is an open source plan for a house, maybe there will be a community fixing common problems with it.

> Then don't use a Mac.

Your solution to the dead-end of reporting bugs to Apple, is to recommend that I don't use a Mac?

No, the solution is that Apple open their bug reporting up.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#63

Post by justincormack »

greggman wrote: post #10

Honestly, there'S just too many things to fix. It's easy to believe with just a little better management or a little more attention to detail or more XP or whatever all these problems would go way but the truth is it's just too damn complicated. Each of the products mentioned are huge HUGE projects layered on top of hundreds of other projects. A browser has a various networking stacks themselves built on OS stacks th…

Start again with simpler stuff?

I did kind of hoped that when we got an open source Linux desktop, back in the 1990s, that these things might improve. But they did not make it debuggable, even for an advanced user. I can debug hard server stuff, but I have no idea where to start with most desktop software. It didn't help that its all compiled, would be much easier to add sane debug hooks in say Python than in C++ for this type of software. The web at least has got that right, with far better debug tooling than any desktop environment.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#65

Post by smutticus »

mrb wrote: post #46
toyg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, as he says, to the question "Doctor, it hurts when I do that" your answer is "Don't do that". It's a perfectly legitimate position, but it's not really helping progress, is it?

My position is the ultimate market-deciding capitalist answer: I don't buy broken products.

How do you know the product is broken before you buy it?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#66

Post by scotty79 »

lazyjones wrote: post #56

With no accountability for vendors at all, no software warranties worth the name, this is hardly a surprise. Until people can start suing for damages (it costs me time = money to get such problems fixed), software will stay mostly broken because vendors have no good reason to invest money in fixing it.

Yes. Because all we need in technology is more lawyers.

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#67

Post by Sauce1971 »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #41
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…

Ten years ago everybody enthusiastically installed every piece of shareware (windows) or open source (linux) software they could lay their hands on. There were a whole lot of portals devised to desktop software. People's desktops had all kinds of weird hacks in it, tweaking every imaginable bit of appearance, user experience and features. But I think we all came to conclusion that it does not pay off. Yes, your 3rd p…

Same boat. Only my essential developer tools and very few apps. Used to try everything. For Win if it's not on Ninite it's not on my PC. It's just to much hassle when reinstall and I wan't the same tools on my MacBook an PC

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#69

Post by Tichy »

nodata wrote: post #62
Tichy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don't use a Mac. With your appartment complex, I assume you'll receive feedback from the owner or eventually you'll move to a more responsive place. Open source hardware is a problem, agreed - I hope in the future there will be more of it available. Even open source houses, why not. If there is an open source plan for a house, maybe there will be a community fixing common problems with it.

> Then don't use a Mac. Your solution to the dead-end of reporting bugs to Apple, is to recommend that I don't use a Mac? No, the solution is that Apple open their bug reporting up.

They don't seem to want to do that. Now what?

Re: Everything's broken and nobody's upset

#70

Post by drunkpotato »

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…

Stop. Re-read the post. Try to understand the point of the post. Understand what it is he's saying about process, craftsmanship and trying to fix things that are broken instead of making excuses. Understand it as a call to action to do better, to be better and to care more.

Then re-read your response and see what a defensive crouch you immediately took. How that immediate defensive reaction led you to miss these points. Crying "complexity!" for things that don't work is not a solution. Time, money, education and understanding are required to implement a solution, and I believe that Scott is explicitly calling for the latter and implicitly calling for the rest.

Post reply on HN