9 ms·
Software sucks
- chx 9y agoBudapest, a city of two million has place names only unique per district, there are 23 of them. So this is ubiquitous there, for example if you enter "deak ter" it will bring up some insignificant spot out in the boondocks instead of the central square of the city with three underground lines, the terminal of the airport bus and so on...
- cjhanks 9y agoUsually happens due to very high uncertainty in localization estimates.
- btilly 9y agoI have it happen to me over and over again when Waze has my GPS coordinates. Its uncertainty is on the level of where I am in my house, and not which town I'm in.
- bpicolo 9y agoBy adding a distance measurement they've solidified a best-guess, though.
- cjhanks 9y agoYeah, often the guess you have is something you have no confidence in. Also, I am just speculating as someone who has had similar problems... I did not contribute to this app. Another common case is the history of your behavior is fully remote and your instantaneous connectivity is out-of-sync. So the map falls back to this kind of primitive state more similar to TomTom rather than being intuitive and catered.
- sharkbot 9y agoLooks like it prioritized historical locations over nearby locations. The little clock icon usually represents a prior location that was selected. Could be an interesting design approach to know which locations are "fungible". I.e., one Wawa is as good as another, but your parent's house isn't a replacement for mine [1]. [1] I'm sure your parents are very nice, of course :)
- jonknee 9y agoAnd ironically the OP was complaining that it didn't return him to the same WaWa: > Last time I asked for directions to a Wawa, it was to the one on Oak Lane, 5.9 miles away. Why doesn't it guess that I might be trying to go back to the same place?
- Gary404 9y agoI'm working on b2b software and when working with the designers at http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro I've learned many things from their approach as to why (a lot of) software sucks. Personal example: I've been measuring qualitative feedback users have been giving us and passing it to them to make design updates. They (design team) would come back with me with questions about data & metrics. They were more interested in what the users DID vs what they told me. This sounds small, but has made a huge difference in the way I look at product design & development. The things users told us in a few cases, didn't match the way they were acting in the product. After some research, we found out why and managed to redesign those features and solve the problems. The thing with most software, just like ours, is that many of us engineers don't have the deeper design knowledge to really understand how a product needs to be build from a user's perspective.
- fgonzag 9y agoOne thing I've learned is that the user's complaint is always valid, the user's proposals seldom are. That is to say, users know when they don't like something, but they are often wrong about why they dislike it or what is interrupting their workflow. Our job is to find and fix the root cause starting from user feedback, and fix the product in accordance to what the user is actually trying to accomplish. This is often very hard
- Gary404 9y agoExactly this. What I used to do is listen to the user's proposal and go build that. 80% of the time it's not the correct thing to work on. I know spend much more time talking with users about their problems/pains, and then use metrics to figure out what they are trying to do. The combination of these two + a good set of eyes will point you in the right direction. Very very hard to do, but it's at least a leap better from my previous approach.
- milesvp 9y agoWhat's interesting about this, is that user complaints can be suspect too. I read an anecdote recently about the American auto industry. They'd ask people about what they didn't like about the cars they bought. And they'd get all these complaints, then try to build cars based on those complaints. The problem was, many of the complaints were for things that took them out of the market for the car they bought. For instance, people who bought sports cars would complain about lack of doors, or lack of back seat, and so GM or Ford would build a car that wasn't quite a sports car, because it was too big, and it wasn't quite a sedan (for whatever reason, too sporty? whatever that means?), and so no one bought it. I honestly don't know what the solution to this problem is, since feedback is invaluable. I guess, always be careful?
- ramenmeal 9y agoUnrelated but similar and I feel like venting... On Google Maps you'll search for something, and the results are shown as a list that almost covers the entire map. It's Google MAPS and it hides the map for so many things. I'd rather go to a place that's 3 miles straight down a free way than 2 miles of stop lights, but I don't know that if the map is covered!
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- jonas21 9y agoIf you're talking about the mobile app, you can swipe down on the list to see more of the map. In many cases, I think defaulting to the list makes sense because of the extra data it has. For example, I'd rather go to a restaurant that has a 5-star rating and is open now as opposed to one that is rated 2 stars and is closed, even if the 2-star restaurant is easier to get to.
- jonknee 9y agoYes, and the list is sorted with the closest / most recent hits on top. It's way better than just seeing a bunch of pins on a map.
- danShumway 9y ago> It's way better than just seeing a bunch of pins on a map. Is it? Showing the pins on the map seems like it would show you roughly the same distances but with the added information of direction and area. At worst you might eyeball the distance wrong, but does it matter if something is 3.5 miles away or 3.6 miles away? Most of the time I search something in Google maps I want to see the relative area so I can make a choice based on route and whatever else is near the location. I guess it comes down to how likely you are to rely on Google map ratings/info. If I'm searching for a restaurant, I generally trust Google's location information, but otherwise I don't trust their ratings and store times to be accurate. Other people could be different though.
- interdrift 9y agoHave had this problem many many times, maybe someone from big G will tell us why
- Tyr42 9y agoI think the clock icon next to the entries they're complaining about means that it's surfacing them because the user had looked at those particular stores' search results before, and would likely want to revisit those search results.
- passivepinetree 9y agoThe HN hug of death strikes again. Cached version from Google: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:E3wiNTW62PUJ:https://shitpost.plover.com/s/software-sucks-4.html https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:E3wiNT...
- SwellJoe 9y agoIt's a static site (built with Bloxsom, as far as I recall). I can't imagine HN could hug it to death and it's working fine for me right now. I'd want to blame something else for being unable to reach it.
- mjd 9y agoDefinitely not. My site hits the front page of Reddit a few times a year and handles it just fine. Today's HN hit was only about twice as much traffic as a typical day.
- mjd 9y agoCase in point: my article about traffic control systems (https://blog.plover.com/tech/highway-stuff.html https://blog.plover.com/tech/highway-stuff.html) is on the front page and has already received twice as much traffic as this one, and the West Coast hasn't even come to work yet.
- shastacans 9y agoCase in point, the site is down.
- HyperTalk2 9y agoI feel that the worst new "feature" in Google Maps is when you're on your way to your destination and it suddenly suggests you might first want to go to a random place you've never heard of before. You then have 3 seconds to tap "No" before it silently adds the destination (and 15-30 minutes of extra driving) to your route. I have found no way to disable this feature. I'm worried that there could be people who were in a hurry to get somewhere and perhaps wound up in a grave instead because they felt the urgent need to look away from the road and fiddle with their phone to reset their map destination while on the highway.
- xanderstrike 9y agoHuh? This has never happened to me and I use Google Maps daily. Is there an update note or something for this?
- mental1896 9y agoSame. This is news to me as well.
- jrq 9y agoThat seems crazy! I've never heard of this feature. Maybe you should contact support. Surely they'd have thought that through more!
- mattnewport 9y agoSupport?? This is Google we're talking about
- coldcode 9y agoI've always thought of Google's mantra was "don't do support".
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- wintorez 9y agoSoftware does not suck; requirements, especially from non-technical stake-holders suck. Every single piece of software starts with a single and easy to understand idea, then different stakeholders arrive and start adding inputs and often conflicting requirements, and then software starts to suck. None of these would have happened if we knew how to say "No". :(
- na85 9y agoRight. Engineers can do no wrong, never have bad ideas, and it's just those pesky managers that screw it up, right?
- Double_a_92 9y agoI see you've read that terrible book by uncle Bob and now you're a professional coder. :)
- canihavelogin 9y agoWhat book are you referring to?
- Double_a_92 9y agoThe Clean Coder
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago> Every single piece of software starts with a single and easy to understand idea I take it you're not a developer?
- wintorez 9y agoThis was intended to be a rant on complexity, but I just got carried away. Important lesson on not letting emotions getting the best of me.
- protomyth 9y agoHe should be happy it actually looked up the place he wants. I go to maps.google.com and not only does it give the wrong town for my location (correct GPS coordinates, it just won't acknowledge the town exists even though it is the reservation seat of government), but the first result for "gas station near" is a Catholic Church and then gas stations in the next, next town over. Google doesn't seem to know about businesses on the reservation. Apple, sadly, is worse.
- omalleyt 9y agoIt's showing him Wawas he's been to before. That's what the clocks mean. For the search "wawa" it doesn't make a lot of sense to prioritize history over distance, because Wawas are nearly identical. But for "farmer's markets" this would probably be a useful feature. Figuring out how to differentiate between those two examples algorithmically is super non-trivial though
- RussianCow 9y agoThis is incorrect: the clocks mean he has selected those search results before, not that he has physically been there. Source: Just tested this in-app.
- danShumway 9y agoOof, that's really bad if that's the case; it means that a mis-click can poison your search results and make them less useful. I get that Google's all about saving clicks now, but I've noticed between maps and other apps (Google Music comes to mind) the extra inference sometimes just makes me scared to click on things. Can you at least long press or something to remove a location from your history?
- l9k 9y agoThis is usually true for any big website you browse on the internet. Any click on Facebook or Amazon is influencing the content you're going to see. Google has a user history website where you can see everything they recorded from Search and other apps, and you can delete the entries
- danShumway 9y agoThis is one of my biggest pet peeves with modern recommendation systems. It's like somebody decided "no, the user can't click a 'show-me-more-like-this' button, it has to be automatic" and now I have to treat every website like I'm doing reinforcement training with a cat. But at least with AI there's something marginally close to an excuse, because you need a ton of data to make it work. With maps it's just plain and simple bad UX design, I can't think of any reason why locations shouldn't be sorted by last visited instead of last clicked. > Google has a user history website From a usability standpoint, if it's not accessible from the same same interface where your results are displayed, then it doesn't exist.
- vortico 9y agoThe reason for pretty much any bug found in software driven by a huge company is that there is a large disconnect between fixing bugs and profit. Fixing a bug almost never excites users, and even if it did in this case, they won't see a measurable increase of users of their software, so you can't prove a profit increase. Even if a bug is fixed, the effort might be wasted when a large overhaul of the system happens because they want to add a huge feature, like a new searching system or some internal backend refactor. Fixing the bug might be much more difficult than you think due to the scale and complexity of their database or some other reason. Then the change needs to flow through the review and testing pipeline. My point is to explain that software gets harder with scale, which might cause a bug like this to cost tens of thousands of company dollars to fix, while the benefit to each user (and therefore the company) would be a tiny fraction of a cent, so both managers and financially-aware engineers would easily brush this off as "not worth it." Any argument of the form "why not just fix it?" would be countered with "you could say that for any of the 40k open bugs."
- pdonis 9y ago> The reason for pretty much any bug found in software driven by a huge company is that there is a large disconnect between fixing bugs and profit. Exactly. The answer to any complaint like the one described in this article (and I have similar ones about my phone all the time) is "how much would you be willing to pay to fix this?" Of course, it doesn't help that, even if I were willing to pay to fix this, I have no way of doing so; even if, say, 100,000 or 100 million users would all be willing to pay to fix it, so that the amount in play might actually be enough to compensate a developer to do the work, we have no way of coordinating such a payment. That's not just because the companies involved are large; it's because the software running on, say, my phone is a cost center to begin with, not a profit center. The profits come from locking users into multi-year contracts, and "too many bugs/misfeatures in the software on the phone" is so far down the list of things the phone provider is worried about people switching for that there is no motivation to spend money on it. > which might cause a bug like this to cost tens of thousands of company dollars to fix, while the benefit to each user (and therefore the company) would be a tiny fraction of a cent But if there are 100 million users, that might still work out to a tidy profit--if the users could somehow coordinate the payment, and convince the company that the alternative to accepting the payment and fixing the problem was that all 100 million of them switch providers. In the real world, of course, this will never happen.
- bitwize 9y agoGoogle Maps apparently thinks I'm Prompto from Final Fantasy XV, and will send me alerts of points of interest (usually restaurants) suggesting I take pictures of them. Uh, no. If I want to go somewhere, I'll ask you, Google Maps. It's shit like this that makes me glad I switched to OsmAnd (despite the latter lacking in features, such as finding an optimal foot/bus/train route).
- fjsolwmv 9y agoYou can turn off those adnotifications. They are kind of annoying, but one popup plus a button to block future popups is a small price for a powerful app.
- Doxin 9y agoFor those unfamiliar. On android phones you can just long-press a notification to disable that notification category from that app. Granted most apps lump all their notifications in a single category, but google maps is not one of them.
- tuukkah 9y agoConsider using a better geocoder? https://pelias.io https://pelias.io