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

Nobody cares

grantslatton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 1001 posts

Re: Nobody cares

#851

Post by ericmay »

bccdee wrote: post #833
ericmay wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Ugly architecture" is subjective. I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else. But this isn't the case. The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted. Architecture is no different. Some buildings quite literally ar…

> The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted. No it isn't. If I saw one of your paintings and liked it better, there would be no way for you to prove me wrong. My opinion might be highly unpopular, but that wouldn't make it objectively incorrect.

How would you compare the two?

Re: Nobody cares

#852

Post by quietbritishjim »

cowfriend wrote: post #821
quietbritishjim wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm don't see why this is downvoted, I think it's an honest and legitimate question. What are pedestrians supposed to do when there's no car passing them right this moment? Carry their own torch? Rely on ambient light from the moon and reflected from nearby lit streets? Are we assuming there's such a high volume of cars that there's never a gap? I'm genuinely confused.

> Carry their own torch You state this like it is a bad idea. If you have a cell phone, you have a torch. If you are walking in a place where there are cars, having a light on you is a great way to reduce your risk of being hit. So yes, you should absolutely be carrying a torch if you are walking near streets after dark. Nordic countries teach this in kindergarden. When I'm crossing a street after dark, I always flas…

You are starting an unrelated conversation.

This comment chain started with someone suggesting that in cities lighting be turned off almost everywhere, and someone replied that pedestrians won't be able to clearly see where they're going without a torch (and I agreed). Where I live, no pedestrian in a city would ever need to use a torch to see where they're going.

You've posted a couple of replies saying that pedestrians should carry a torch so that cars can see them. Well, maybe, maybe not. But that's a different matter.

Re: Nobody cares

#853

Post by listenallyall »

wat10000 wrote: post #658
listenallyall wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was about not caring at all, as in total apathy. Not "we're going to work really hard to purposely create anti-patterns."

I understand that, but it included this particular example which doesn’t fit. I guarantee the people at McDonald’s in charge of the kiosk design care a great deal about wallet.

...which is why I started out by calling it a poor example!

Re: Nobody cares

#854

Post by datadrivenangel »

p1necone wrote: post #26
astroalex wrote: post #16

> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.

The idea that the DMV is a particularly awful experience does seem like something that would be especially susceptible to selection bias. Why would anyone ever announce "I went to the DMV today and it was fine"?

DMV in Virginia has been efficient and relatively painless in my experience.

Re: Nobody cares

#855

Post by rgovostes »

buzzardbait wrote: post #551
rgovostes wrote: post #499

One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and…

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Also, there is often a tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability. The cost of living has gone up, and most people struggling to climb the property ladder would happily sacrifice the former for the latter. With respect, this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems.

The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.

> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems

I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.

Re: Nobody cares

#856

Post by bccdee »

montag wrote: post #578
Tiktaalik wrote: post #369

> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done? > Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the…

It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.

No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.

The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.

Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency

Re: Nobody cares

#857

Post by bjornsing »

bccdee wrote: post #839
bjornsing wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t explain the doctor who doesn’t care that they are misdiagnosing their patients though… Or am I missing something?

I assume the doctor was just wrong. It happens. I imagine doctors get patients coming in saying "look, I have this extremely specific syndrome. I diagnosed myself based on the Wikipedia page" all the time. Usually those patients are wrong and it's something simpler, but sometimes they're right, and this time the doctor's simpler explanation was wrong. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by stupidit…

I’ve personally been incorrectly diagnosed with a life altering condition. When it became more and more clear that the diagnosis was wrong the doctor just doubled down. When I said I thought he was wrong and refused to see him he sent a colleague after me to another hospital to try to persuade the medical staff there of the misdiagnosis. That thankfully failed, but the whole process very much left me with the impression that the only thing that mattered to him and his colleague was to be “right”. My health was completely irrelevant to them. And nobody put them in their place.

Sure, I’m a big believer in Hanlon’s razor. But there comes a point when you have to conclude that something is seriously wrong. My feeling is that it’s a complete lack of consequences that is the core problem. Nobody is ever “forced” to admit they were wrong. Some people can’t handle that, start believing they are always right.

(This was in Sweden and malpractice is a bit different here.)

Re: Nobody cares

#858

Post by bccdee »

avalys wrote: post #373
Tiktaalik wrote: post #369

> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done? > Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the…

Umm, in 99% of the US, cyclists and pedestrians are definitely the special interest group, and the vast majority of voters and especially taxpayers want to see the transportation infrastructure optimized for cars.

Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.

Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.

Re: Nobody cares

#859

Post by SoftTalker »

diggan wrote: post #639
nejsjsjsbsb wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV as you get older and lose that superpower.

What range/years are you specifically referring to? It seemingly is as good as ever, and I'm 32 now. I'm guessing that would start being around 40s, when the general eye-sight starts to decline?

About the time you start needing reading glasses to see your phone or computer screen. Between 40-50 years for most people. You will develop an appreciation for the people who complain about small fonts and low-contrast color schemes. And yes, adapting to darkness takes longer.

Re: Nobody cares

#860

Post by bccdee »

lolwutgood wrote: post #251
frotty wrote: post #200

100% of the people around me at work care. I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view." So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amou…

Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well? Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem. An "era of good…

No, the examples in the article are bad.

The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.

DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.

The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.

Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.

Post reply on HN