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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> Why is there so much useless and unreliable software?

https://twitter.com/maxkreminski/status/887815522061926400

"a reminder: if inexperienced creators are using your tool to churn out loads of half-baked garbage, your tool is a phenomenal success"

Software is such a powerful concept - it basically imbues physical objects with magic - that even bad software is hugely empowering to its users and takes off very quickly. The demand is staggering.

I appreciate that when you see yourself as the most intelligent person in the world it becomes intolerable to be surrounded by unthinking muggles scratching in the dirt, but after a while you realise that life is more complicated than that, people usually have good reasons for doing the things they do, and that perfection is neither attainable nor necessary for most of that.

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On one hand I want to agree with the quote you posted, but on the other hand implying or making it seem like the OP sees themselves as "the most intelligent person in the world" is putting the question into a wrong light and seems disingenuous. The OP's question is valid and one should be allowed to ask it.

Most tech choices are made on the basis of incomplete information and incomplete planning or even no planning ahead. Many are merely following hype, instead of truly looking at the options and making a wise choice. Hype creates awareness of products or software, which ultimately reaches the uninformed masses. People not in the business of making software themselves have usually vastly less information to base their choice on and often make questionable choices. This in turn generates more incentive to continue making software like the one they chose. This is what amounts to the quote you posted.

It's never about perfection, but lifting up the acceptable lower bound. Around 150 years ago, Joseph Lister had to go to great lengths to persuade surgeons to apply antiseptics, which seems like a no-brainer nowadays. The methods I mentioned have been well-established for decades.

Generally, nobody forces you to use software you don't consider reliable. That's especially true if you use open source software (and if you don't, you've got other problems).

That is technically true but in practice one has to use certain software to some degree or at least faces consequences of some software's output. Bad software has sent innocent people to prison, declared some officially dead etc without those people ever having a say in what system should be used.

Unfortunately high quality software tends to be so much more expensive in various ways that almost nobody bothers. Which is understandable, but in some cases still unacceptable.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about open source software, those developers don't owe me anything and often produce better results anyway.

I agree that in some areas the bars could and probably should be set higher. While in most domains there are strict certifications (e.g. cryptography, military, banking, aviation, medical devices) there are certain grey zones in which unreliable software impacts our lives. Ideally, these gaps are closed. For example, EU legislation requires a certain amount of transparency for a system a citizen is subjected to, e.g. according to the GDPR customers have a right to know why they were given a low credit score.

It's a double-edged sword because certifications are complex and sometimes expensive (e.g. FIPS certification for encryption), so smaller software companies have a hard time competing, potentially leading to more quasi-monopolies and cartels.

"Acceptable" is a transitive verb. Acceptable to whom?

And a more subtle question: what happens below the acceptability theshold? It doesn't seem that acceptability can be driven up costlessly at zero time investment, so what this means is either "less software is produced" or "software is more expensive".

(We see a version of this with the app stores, which enforce a really crude "quality filter" by banning apps)

"Acceptable" in not even a verb, never mind transitive.

Surgery isn't learned at home, the cost of failure is so high that a certain skill level is considered the minimum.

Though if you're talking about the lower bound for calling one's work "software engineering" you have a point, I think it's reasonable to expect some best practices from experienced developers. One problem seems to be how easy it is to underestimate the cost of bad software and what it takes to produce good quality. This reminds me a bit of the wildly inconsistent quality of CGI effects in today's movies, which is often the result of late changes and in turn insane deadlines, to some people VFX is magic anyway so why can't it also magically be done faster?

You could say the same thing about most things. A "bad" chair from ikea empowers people to not sit on the floor. A "bad" meal from the local cafe is still nutritious and tasty even if it's bad compared to something 5x more expensive.

Yes. Although the original concept was about tools-for-tools, specifically various sorts of "game maker" software. This stuff is so "bad" that OP wouldn't recognize it as software .. except that it allows people who wouldn't otherwise to make and share games, having fun and enjoying creativity.

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