3 ms·

The problem with confirmation is it trains the human to always press "yes". You need a system that only activates if something really unusual or wrong.

gertef 11y ago
unusual, like paying 1 billion times over recent prices?
- nxzero 11y ago
  A billion times over market price, funny; who in their right mind would even pay 20x over market price in any meaningful amount without requiring some sort of control?
  - salgernon 11y ago
    See also rm -rf
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Yes of course. I'm just saying that usually these systems are badly designed, and recognizing errors correctly is a surprisingly hard problem. In the medical world, many people have been killed by mistakes in prescriptions, despite everything going through computers and multiple humans checking it. The problem was that the machines were too sensitive to mistakes and trained the humans to ignore warnings. They also didn't distinguish mild warnings from extreme warnings. E.g. a prescription being 2x larger than recommended, or 100x larger than recommended, which are very different situations. A well designed interface might have different shades of red for different levels of severity. To give an indication if something is really wrong.
  - speeder 11y ago
    My mother use computers all day, and also hates them and think they are illogical. In a way she is correct, I saw her many times freaking out at a dialog box and calling me to "fix it", and it was just some absolutely useless "warning", but I also saw her many times clicking "ok" on a important message without reading and then wondering why things broke.
enraged_camel 11y ago
So instead of a yes/no confirmation, you force the user to explicitly type what they are doing, i.e. "Sell 610,000 shares of stock X for 1 yen each." This is similar to how Github forces you to type the name of a repository when you try to delete it. You can also configure a threshold such that the "hardcore" prompt kicks in only if the system detects that the user is trying to do something unusual, i.e. sell a stock for much cheaper than it is.
- funtober 11y ago
  These sorts of mistakes happened when I was trading options more than a decade ago. In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters. Back in the old days, I feel the broker would have gone to the market makers, said there was an error, and gotten out of the trade.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters. Which is why I said you would enable it based on a threshold and/or only on unusual threads. These systems are capable of extremely complex decision-making at very high frequency. Surely something like "sell 610,000 shares for 1 yen" would have stood out as strange.
- achr2 11y ago
  Though I wish Github didn't do that for forks that are less than a few minutes old or have no commits...
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I like what mycelium does. You type the amount, and there's a button that will change state on every press, and cycles though "generous", "normal", "economical" and "stingy" or something like that. That way, a user doesn't have to know what value to use. You can also set this once in settings and never see it again, except as a report.

gertef 11y ago

unusual, like paying 1 billion times over recent prices?

nxzero 11y ago
A billion times over market price, funny; who in their right mind would even pay 20x over market price in any meaningful amount without requiring some sort of control?
- salgernon 11y ago
  See also rm -rf
Houshalter 11y ago
Yes of course. I'm just saying that usually these systems are badly designed, and recognizing errors correctly is a surprisingly hard problem. In the medical world, many people have been killed by mistakes in prescriptions, despite everything going through computers and multiple humans checking it. The problem was that the machines were too sensitive to mistakes and trained the humans to ignore warnings. They also didn't distinguish mild warnings from extreme warnings. E.g. a prescription being 2x larger than recommended, or 100x larger than recommended, which are very different situations. A well designed interface might have different shades of red for different levels of severity. To give an indication if something is really wrong.
- speeder 11y ago
  My mother use computers all day, and also hates them and think they are illogical. In a way she is correct, I saw her many times freaking out at a dialog box and calling me to "fix it", and it was just some absolutely useless "warning", but I also saw her many times clicking "ok" on a important message without reading and then wondering why things broke.

enraged_camel 11y ago

So instead of a yes/no confirmation, you force the user to explicitly type what they are doing, i.e. "Sell 610,000 shares of stock X for 1 yen each." This is similar to how Github forces you to type the name of a repository when you try to delete it. You can also configure a threshold such that the "hardcore" prompt kicks in only if the system detects that the user is trying to do something unusual, i.e. sell a stock for much cheaper than it is.

funtober 11y ago
These sorts of mistakes happened when I was trading options more than a decade ago. In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters. Back in the old days, I feel the broker would have gone to the market makers, said there was an error, and gotten out of the trade.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters. Which is why I said you would enable it based on a threshold and/or only on unusual threads. These systems are capable of extremely complex decision-making at very high frequency. Surely something like "sell 610,000 shares for 1 yen" would have stood out as strange.
achr2 11y ago
Though I wish Github didn't do that for forks that are less than a few minutes old or have no commits...
StavrosK 11y ago
I like what mycelium does. You type the amount, and there's a button that will change state on every press, and cycles though "generous", "normal", "economical" and "stingy" or something like that. That way, a user doesn't have to know what value to use. You can also set this once in settings and never see it again, except as a report.