Comment by tree_of_item | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tree_of_item | Hacker News Reader

I really don't know what to make of Bingo Card Creator.

Sure, it's great that Patrick's found a profitable niche, and can use it as a platform to give others business advice and advance his own craft.

But it really seems as if BCC is a painful reminder of how terrible the computing experience is for most people in 2011. Patrick refers to BCC as Hello World attached to a random number generator, seemingly as an example of how business is not solely about technical prowess but fulfilling people's needs and providing a useful service as well. Yet I can't help but feel that people sitting in front of incredibly powerful general purpose computers paying someone else to make bingo cards for them is a failure of the "personal computer" vision.

This line of thinking usually gets the response "most people do not want to program their computers as they're much too busy with other things", but I really don't think this is an example of a task that requires some inordinate amount of computing skill. If it's too complex for a nontechnical user to print a bingo card with a computer today, that complexity is incidental (i.e. a bug) and should be fixed.

really don't think this is an example of a task that requires some inordinate amount of computing skill

You live in a reality which is far removed from the one inhabited by most of my customers.

I am aware that there exists a dish called risotto. I don't actually know what risotto is. Supposing I one day wanted to eat risotto, I know that with absolute certainty going to an Italian restaurant and saying "I'll have the risotto" means I get good risotto. If I had to cook it, that would be problematic for me, because a) I am not a good cook, b) I lack the ingredients, and c) I don't know what risotto actually is.

Unlike most of my customers, I am capable of rectifying my lack of knowledge on how to prepare risotto, because while I am not a good cook I am not totally unaware of cooking primitives like "cookbook", "punchfork.com", "boil water", "slice it fine with a knife", etc. This is where the analogy breaks down. Imagine if I were trying to cook risotto without being first aware that either water, fire, or cutting implements existed, and also unaware of the steps by which, given that I have been told there exists a substance called "water", I could discover how to manipulate water in such a way that it turns into risotto.

That is approximately where my customers are at.

That is a phenomenal example. I am going to steal this example to discuss it with 'business people'.

[PS: Congratulations on the engagement! :) You are an inspiration.]

I'm in the same boat. After reading this, I'm ready to get married too!

While I like your analogy, I think tree's point is that a bingo card generator is the programming equivalent of making toast, not risotto.

It's really not, though. I'm not a programmer, but I can solve Fizzbuzz and Hello World in Ruby, and I still wouldn't know where to start with a bingo card creator.

I could manage to randomly reorder a series of words, but putting them into a nice graphical layout and programmatically making sure that short words and long words both look okay without anything getting squished or cut off is already beyond what I can do without hours of research. And that's as a geek who's generally interested in programming. My mom, who's far more likely to need bingo cards, panics every time I minimize a window.

And if you don't know how to get fire or bread, or how to make bread, or how to get bread, then you don't know how to make toast.

I encourage you to make risotto; it's a really easy dish to make. And there's a million variations depending upon what you want to add.

Completely aside, I love to cook. It's my therapy from programming. Creating things in the real world! That I can share with my friends and family! That I don't have to explain! And there's almost never bugs in my food!

I don't think it's a question of complexity, but of where you want to invest your free time. If I wanted to create bingo cards, would I design them myself? Absolutely not - I have better things to do with my time. If I can instead pay $30 and be done with it, that's an awesome timesaver for me.

I can't help but feel that people sitting in front of incredibly powerful general purpose computers paying someone else to make bingo cards for them is a failure of the "personal computer" vision.

I would disagree and think that it's the perfect embodiment of all the wonderful things that are possible with personal computers.

Average, common people now longer have to do the boring grudge work that takes up their time. It directly affects and improves the lives of people.

It doesn't matter that the machine is really powerful, and isn't being used to solve Really Hard Serious Problems™, it's only a machine! It doesn't have feelings, it's not going to get upset or hurt because it's doing boring work. However the user does have feelings, and dislikes doing boring work. If it's a choice between "make the machine do boring work" and "make the human do boring work", then we should make the machine do it!

Machines & Computers are there for our usage, and to make our lives better.

They could either think up, arrange and print a set of random bingo cards each time they have to run a lesson, or they buy it once so they can run the app and print each time, and go have dinner.

They're really buying lower stress in producing future classroom activities for a range of lessons.

P.S. congrats Patrick :) Doesn't your family read your blog? Think they'd miss the reference at the bottom?

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