Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

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Your first sentence is in conflict with your example. The UI complication of the refresh button is minuscule in comparison to the technical complexity of implementing universally canonical web page views. But even assuming you could make that work well enough it's impossible to make software that anticipates all needs correctly. A good example was brought up on 5by5 a few weeks ago: should the iPhone alarm be silenced by silent mode. People will expect it to work one way or another and they will be burned badly when it doesn't do what they expect (think setting an alarm to catch an early flight vs being in an opera).

It's easy to sit on a mountain top and spout off declarations about how things should be, but in no place is the old adage "the devil is in the details" more apropos then software development. Even the UI designer runs into these fundamental conflicts, but the low-level programmer is inundated with them. And worse yet, software stacks are so deep and CPUs so powerful that the scope of what software actually does is increasingly difficult to mentally model. The only way out of this is to ruthlessly narrow the scope and have an organization-wide emphasis on UX. This works for Apple, but consider that in order to do this they basically punt on all the hairiest business requirements because it just doesn't serve their vision. Nevertheless those requirements are real and unignorable which is why SAP et al thrive.

The reason most software is bad is not for lack of effort, it's just damn hard to do right. It's good to ask big questions, but then go try to solve some of them rather than admonish those of us who pour our lives into this.

Stop making stupid excuses. The fact that some people might get confused by some detail (like your iPhone alarm example) does not change the fact that some some other things are idiotic (like the refresh button). And your take on the refresh problem shows why this whole thing is a complete mess: I'm not suggesting "universal" auto-refresh. This is why the browsers is such a failure technologically: people want to try to solve all the problems in the platform instead of just providing simple, powerful primitives. As you recognise we need to restrict scope. The only software that actually works is simple and small. And I'm not just "admonishing others". I dropped out of academia and industry and moved into a cheaper neighbourhood to be independent so I can write the simplest software possible. To me that's better than empty talk about "UX" and other modernistic double-talk about how hard we've got it. And having an independent perspective, I can see that it's rationalisations all the way down. We will have botnets etc forever until people tackle the problems as a basic level by simple designs that eliminate the problems. But people can't even conceive of putting ethics before their own financial well-being because as an industry we have no ethics. Just pride in spreading our bullshit around as much as possible.

If software engineers built bridges we'd make it drive up and down the river, put in a few houses to be "efficient". And then when the thing breaks down we'd complain that it's "too hard". No shit it's too hard: because we promise more than we can deliver, hiding the risks and problems from the user. Firefox has as a feature in every version the ability for criminals to install rogue programs on your computer. And yet you won't see this in their marketing material. This is a solved problem. We know how to eliminate memory-safety problems, but Mozilla would rather take N years to do their rust rewrite (if it even happens) because it's in their self interest. If we had any ethics as an industry Firefox would come with a warning that it makes it possible to install rogue programs on your computer. But it won't.

You're off the deep end man. Sure, things could be immeasurably better if you could get everyone to swim in the same direction to solve the big problems. That's not how things work though, we're all in the same boat you are, trying to do the best we can in an imperfect world. This is not a failure of the profession, it's a universal human failing, maybe even more universal than that.

I only seem off the deep end because the industry has brainwashed itself. The computer no longer exclusively serves humans. Rather, humans now look to the computer to know what to do. Talk about "imperfect worlds" is the same thing irresponsible scientists say about "imperfect information". People think spreading harmful theories is fine because they have "imperfect information". It is the same with software. People have lost touch with the possibility of doing nothing instead of engaging in harmful action. If the economy was in a downturn would you see that as an excuse to turn to the tobacco business? The basic misconception here is that the production of more software overrides problems such as increasingly irreversible dependency on complex systems. I keep hearing the same thing I heard when I was in academia: admissions that people were creating problems along with endless excuses and expressions of career-motivated cowardice. Anyone who criticises the bank bailouts as moral hazard and who is also working to build complex systems today is a hypocrite. Because it is the same heroin addict thinking: that we can fix an addiction by increasing the dosage.

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