Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

This is probably going to be a problem that next-generation lawmakers have to solve: how to force entities to distinguish between different types of changes, and be liable for sticking to that set.

Just like it’s ridiculous to let installers run as root without a sandbox, it should be considered ridiculous that we can’t constrain updaters: I should be able to say “bug fixes only” or whatever, and see only that happen. Instead, it’s UI-of-the-week.

A straightforward way to ensure this would be to have substantial limits on size. It is pretty hard to redo an entire UI if you’re restricted to a 100K update, for example. And it would help to prevent data plans from being sucked up by careless app vendors.

View on HN

Wait. You actually think that individual consumers should be able to, essentially, construct their own unique snowflake version of an app which only fixes bugs but retains the UI (and god knows what other code) from an arbitrary previous version?

Look, I don't like some of these stupid updates either, but that idea is completely unworkable.

The GP does have a point, which is that force-feeding a crippled UX to users of a paid application should be considered a tort. EULAs that permit such behavior are comparable to allowing car dealers to sneak into our garages in the dead of night and downgrade the cars we buy from them. Such a contract would be treated as unconscionable and tossed unceremoniously out of court.

Either allow people to install older versions of the app, or as suggested, find a way to uncouple presentation from functionality. That's no more or less "unworkable" than any other engineering problem.

I wish I had the downvote feature just for your comment.

Unworkable? Are you kidding? It's absolutely brilliant. It's exactly what I want.

Give me a feature set. Give me a separate UI which interacts with that feature set. Let me pick and choose both of them, completely separately. That's what an API is supposed to be and do.

I actually don't disagree with you that it's brilliant. Nor that it would be desirable.

But it's still unworkable, like I said.

> I wish I had the downvote feature just for your comment.

Same.

a) I know this isn't reddit, but it would go against reddiquette to downvote a comment you disagree with. You donwvote comments that don't bring anything to a discussion, which your suggestion doesn't.

b) You installed a piece of software of your own volition. If you don't want updates to your software of a certain kind then choose another software whose developers are contractually obliged not to change it. Or write your own. But don't push your ideas on us.

With 10 toggleable features you add 1023 additional app configurations. This quickly becomes incredibly difficult to maintain and test.

Picking and choosing a feature set for most applications sits in the completely infeasible plane.

Oh boo hoo. Back before this automatic update crap you could at the least keep your old versions. Maybe if we returned to building our applications so they didn't require super-expensive bullshit cloud infrastructure you wouldn't have to worry so much about the maintenance burden of 10 oh-so-scary toggle features. Design like this is the Fischer-Pricing of software, infantilizing users for a little more blood to sacrifice to the petty, vengeful god of costs.

Yes Skype is a comms app that supposedly "requires" cloud infra spend but... wait... they had a decentralized peer-to-peer communication system years ago but decided to move away from it. It was a poor choice if not to further their control over the product, so they could better force their crap on us when all we wanted was to send texts and make calls.

Then don't use it?

I don't see why we need to get laws involved. Also, it sounds like you're chomping at the bit to pull one over on Microsoft. Sure. Maybe you feel wronged by what Skype has become.

But how would that affect every other operation that's smaller than Microsoft that doesn't have the resources to make -- and I'm not even sure what was described -- some sort of pick-and-choose UI/API adventure.

Just doesn't seem like a coherent reaction. Can you actually pitch a solution that sounds reasonable for everyone instead of just corporations?

> Picking and choosing a feature set for most applications sits in the completely infeasible plane.

I find it rather interesting that there have been tons of applications that have, historically, had optional features. Many of them work quite well.

We're not talking about an API. We're talking about an entire app. That kind of thing is unworkable, especially for small teams. You're exponentially increasing the number of combinations that have to be tested together. "Well, for that issue, they've got bugfixes #2562, 6834, and 3945, but they're still on UI Tweak #201."

Use well designed, minimalist, open source software then. No need to write a law.

Are you arguing that backend/frontend isn't a valid abstraction? For web apps, UI is never anything more than a suggestion. It's not unworkable for the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com