7 ms·

No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at

by mojuba 5y ago

No. 13 is gold: > We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people. Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy" and making the lives of engineers (and users) miserable.

zerocount 5y ago
It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  if it's a near-universal problem, it's not "bad apples" it's bad incentives. IE, capitalism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hotstickyballs 5y ago
  Bad environments make bad apples.
- el_ravager 5y ago
  The exploitation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
- mojuba 5y ago
  I'd like to see examples of well known good apples outside of OSS that care about performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Even in OSS caring about performance, compatibility, security and privacy is the exception. The biggest projects do tend to care, but the majority don't. The biggest examples in OSS are mostly funded by capitalism to care ab out those things.
  - db48x 5y ago
    Although they have many faults, Microsoft has cared about compatibility for 30 years (you can still run DOS programs on your Windows 10 computer). They have cared about the security of their users since about 1999, and they cared about their user’s privacy for about 10 years before dropping it in favor of advertising revenue a few years ago. People still install Windows on new their computers, so it evidentially isn’t a big concern for most people either. Their support for accessibility technologies is probably better than most operating systems, though it’s a bit hard to tell from the outside. Performance is an odd one. It is my understanding that the Windows kernel gets high marks for performance, but aside from that almost nothing does.
- delecti 5y ago
  Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. The bad apples exploiting it are the people who own the means of production, and saying they're the bad part of capitalism might as well be saying "capitalism is only bad because of what makes capitalism what it is".
  - adwn 5y ago
    > Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.
    - simion314 5y ago
      >Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world. Sure, now tell me your opinion on this idea I have Today for music there are many parasites that suck the profits and creators barely get something. So my idea is to make a cooperatives (or non-parasitic company) to help the creators of content. First step is to have mobile apps and here we just HIT the parasites, Apple and Google , any transaction or subscription will be taxed by7 this parasites. It seems impossible to make money for the right people without fating up the parasites.
      - merpnderp 5y ago
        When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.
        simion314 5y ago
        >When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care. My issue is with "free markets" solve everything when most of the time you don't have free markets(like when you have too few competitors or when you have collusion not to compete ) , or when you forget to specify that free market would solve the problem but only after you make illegal all the bad or evil practices companies will abuse. If someone is an economist is there a theorem /law that proves that imperfect free market will covere to an evil state so you always need supervision to intervene when you notice the effects and apply a correction/bug fix ? In my example with mobile applications we don't have free markets , where free market would mean you have many agents competing to offer you something, we have basically 2 competitors and this 2 are happy to be in a balance and share this big pie then aggressively competing to make happy the custoemrs but reduce their profits.
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  It's not the fault of a system that rewards unethical behavior by having a massively skewed risk/reward profile for said behavior, it's the fault of people with low-normal levels of empathy who make rational decisions. Sure.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    "The system harnesses the power of incentives to make people do the right thing!" "But here the incentives point in the wrong direction." "It's not the system's fault! People shouldn't follow those incentives!"
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    That same line of argument could work for socialism/communism. What country that doesn't use the free trade paradigm for their economy isn't some authoritarian nightmare of poverty and despair? Are they just bad actors using the system wrong, or is it a system that always ends that way?
    - lupire 5y ago
      If every system ends up the same way, it's probably the people not the systems.
    - mojuba 5y ago
      Not always the case. There are non-democratic capitalist societies with varying degrees of performance, from great (Singapore) to awful (the entire post-Soviet space). On the other hand, over-regulated or fully socialist societies seem to be incompatible with democracy, I'd agree with that one.
    - CuriouslyC 5y ago
      Corruption isn't a problem of free trade, it's a problem resulting from centralization of authority. A single (or small cabal of) regulatory gatekeeper is comparatively cheap to pay off compared to satisfying all interested parties. Bribe one person? Check. Bribe 10,000 without having it break the bank or turn into a PR nightmare? Not so much. Clearly, our "free market" isn't really free, and our regulatory and enforcement strategies are the problem.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  It is a bit naïve to just blame the free market for everything wrong in the world. When I read complaints like that I wonder what "alternative" the author has in mind. Capitalism in this sense also gave us much of the software and hardware that is praised on HN. It is more accurate and useful to discuss which motivations, cultural shifts, or even psycological traits that have caused the decline in software quality and freedom. These are more practical than proposing mass economic realignment.
  - mojuba 5y ago
    It's not about the free market per se, but rather a system that allows to turn the information asymmetry into money without consequences most of the time.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  From a capitalistic POV, it's irresponsible not to exploit ("make full use of and derive benefit from") underlying economic systems, no? This is why a purely capitalist, free market economy would be a societal disaster.
xwdv 5y ago
Software is not charity. I will not work hard to deliver all those things out of the goodness of my heart. The ROI on those things isn’t great. If it’s easy to do I’ll do it, but none of those are trivial things.
- XorNot 5y ago
  I'll go further: I would love nothing more then some well-defined common standards to work towards. Weighty documents I can drop on product manager's desk and tell them the ways in which our customers and the government will legally have their way with them if we don't meet those requirements.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    This is why I like working in highly-regulated industry. Technically correct is almost always what flies at the end of the day, because there certainly exists some audit item tracking the thing. I absolutely loathe the audit process on one hand, but its a useful tool for getting everyone to play the same game on the other. It also means your solution is compliant in a lot of places if you can get it signed off in one.
- mojuba 5y ago
  Software is not charity but it's a responsibility. As probably the most innocent example, when you ship an app that drains a user's battery you betray your users. But then how about an app that sneakily collects data knowing that users won't even understand what you are doing or why? You can be a responsible business which unfortunately won't necessarily be appreciated. Or you can be a typical business that exploits information asymmetry to the last bit.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    If you don't like our current system that lets users decide what they can put up with or not then are you proposing some sort of centralized authority to enforce this? Like the government? The same governments of the world that produce the crappiest, most insecure, user hating software with some of the most ridiculous rules and regulations or else 10 layers of subcontractors making the price per line of code outrageous?
StevePerkins 5y ago
I'm honestly starting to feel like I transported back in time to my 1980's small town childhood, when the adults around me all blamed "Satan" for everything in the world they didn't like. "Capitalism" has about as much to do with software performance as actual devil worship had to do with my Dungeons & Dragons or heavy metal cassettes. And if your life as an engineer or user is "miserable" today, then I wish I could transport YOU to the 1980's. Yeah, existence is suffering... it sucks to be in the top 5% of household incomes, be inundated with open source platforms and tools that didn't exist too long ago, and a have a supercomputer in my jeans pocket.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  What sucks is having a supercomputer in your jeans' pocket that is significantly less responsive to your input than a Commodore 64 and is mostly used to deliver ads to you.
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    I realize that this will get some reflexive upvotes from the meme crowd. But neither of those statements are remotely true.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I frequently have to pause while typing and wait for my pocket-supercomputer to catch up and actually give me feedback like putting text on the damn screen. Multi-second non-interactable pauses are not uncommon at all. If that isn't "unresponsive" I'd really like to know what is. The ad thing I admit might be a touch hyperbolic.
      - StevePerkins 5y ago
        I have never experienced input lag on a iPhone, other than perhaps a context where the input is traversing across an Internet connection. And I assure you that a C64 with a 300 baud modem had that issue, too.
snth 5y ago
Counterpoint: life in communist countries is not known for being "not miserable".
- mojuba 5y ago
  That's the most irrelevant counterpoint that can be made here. "Communist" states were also totalitarian, i.e. undemocratic and that was the main reason for their ultimate failure. With democracy they'd be able to self-correct and likely switch to free[er] markets for example. Consumer software and Internet are probably the least regulated areas of engineering today, that's the problem. Compare that to aerospace, construction, etc. Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm, it's the prerogative of democracy.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    > Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm Who told you that? People like to simplify views and say that people are "anti-regulation", but really people are anti-poorly-thought-out-regulation. What famous capitalist do you know that argued theft for example should be unregulated?
    - mojuba 5y ago
      Show me a corporation that would whole heartedly support regulation of the market they're in.
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        Facebook[0]. Regulation could make it more difficult for competitors to get off the ground so they are in support of regulation to that effect. [0]https://about.facebook.com/regulations/ https://about.facebook.com/regulations/
        mojuba 5y ago
        You bring one of the most hypocritical pages on the Internet as an example?
Chris2048 5y ago
The problem with blaming capitalism, is that these things are by no means unique to capitalism. People are as self-serving in communistic "utopias" as in capitalist ones. Plus many economies are a mix of both capitalist/socialist elements - people cherry-pick things they like/dislike according to what they want to prove; but the US is by no mean more/less "capitalistic" than any other nation. Some capitalistic value could just as well be described as conservative. Fostering co-operative communities has less to do with the political/control system, and more to do with how it is implemented - and the mindset of the population. I could just as well blame multi-culturalism, or globalism, or lack of religion, or metropolitan lifestyle on lack of social cohesion.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Every response seems to have missed the joke by not reading the actual article. No. 12 makes fun of "blame capitalism" and this comment is riffing on that.

by mojuba 5y ago

zerocount 5y ago

It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.

beaconstudios 5y ago
if it's a near-universal problem, it's not "bad apples" it's bad incentives. IE, capitalism.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hotstickyballs 5y ago
Bad environments make bad apples.
el_ravager 5y ago
The exploitation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
mojuba 5y ago
I'd like to see examples of well known good apples outside of OSS that care about performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Even in OSS caring about performance, compatibility, security and privacy is the exception. The biggest projects do tend to care, but the majority don't. The biggest examples in OSS are mostly funded by capitalism to care ab out those things.
- db48x 5y ago
  Although they have many faults, Microsoft has cared about compatibility for 30 years (you can still run DOS programs on your Windows 10 computer). They have cared about the security of their users since about 1999, and they cared about their user’s privacy for about 10 years before dropping it in favor of advertising revenue a few years ago. People still install Windows on new their computers, so it evidentially isn’t a big concern for most people either. Their support for accessibility technologies is probably better than most operating systems, though it’s a bit hard to tell from the outside. Performance is an odd one. It is my understanding that the Windows kernel gets high marks for performance, but aside from that almost nothing does.
delecti 5y ago
Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. The bad apples exploiting it are the people who own the means of production, and saying they're the bad part of capitalism might as well be saying "capitalism is only bad because of what makes capitalism what it is".
- adwn 5y ago
  > Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world. Sure, now tell me your opinion on this idea I have Today for music there are many parasites that suck the profits and creators barely get something. So my idea is to make a cooperatives (or non-parasitic company) to help the creators of content. First step is to have mobile apps and here we just HIT the parasites, Apple and Google , any transaction or subscription will be taxed by7 this parasites. It seems impossible to make money for the right people without fating up the parasites.
    - merpnderp 5y ago
      When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.
      - simion314 5y ago
        >When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care. My issue is with "free markets" solve everything when most of the time you don't have free markets(like when you have too few competitors or when you have collusion not to compete ) , or when you forget to specify that free market would solve the problem but only after you make illegal all the bad or evil practices companies will abuse. If someone is an economist is there a theorem /law that proves that imperfect free market will covere to an evil state so you always need supervision to intervene when you notice the effects and apply a correction/bug fix ? In my example with mobile applications we don't have free markets , where free market would mean you have many agents competing to offer you something, we have basically 2 competitors and this 2 are happy to be in a balance and share this big pie then aggressively competing to make happy the custoemrs but reduce their profits.
CuriouslyC 5y ago
It's not the fault of a system that rewards unethical behavior by having a massively skewed risk/reward profile for said behavior, it's the fault of people with low-normal levels of empathy who make rational decisions. Sure.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  "The system harnesses the power of incentives to make people do the right thing!" "But here the incentives point in the wrong direction." "It's not the system's fault! People shouldn't follow those incentives!"
- merpnderp 5y ago
  That same line of argument could work for socialism/communism. What country that doesn't use the free trade paradigm for their economy isn't some authoritarian nightmare of poverty and despair? Are they just bad actors using the system wrong, or is it a system that always ends that way?
  - lupire 5y ago
    If every system ends up the same way, it's probably the people not the systems.
  - mojuba 5y ago
    Not always the case. There are non-democratic capitalist societies with varying degrees of performance, from great (Singapore) to awful (the entire post-Soviet space). On the other hand, over-regulated or fully socialist societies seem to be incompatible with democracy, I'd agree with that one.
  - CuriouslyC 5y ago
    Corruption isn't a problem of free trade, it's a problem resulting from centralization of authority. A single (or small cabal of) regulatory gatekeeper is comparatively cheap to pay off compared to satisfying all interested parties. Bribe one person? Check. Bribe 10,000 without having it break the bank or turn into a PR nightmare? Not so much. Clearly, our "free market" isn't really free, and our regulatory and enforcement strategies are the problem.
HeckFeck 5y ago
It is a bit naïve to just blame the free market for everything wrong in the world. When I read complaints like that I wonder what "alternative" the author has in mind. Capitalism in this sense also gave us much of the software and hardware that is praised on HN. It is more accurate and useful to discuss which motivations, cultural shifts, or even psycological traits that have caused the decline in software quality and freedom. These are more practical than proposing mass economic realignment.
- mojuba 5y ago
  It's not about the free market per se, but rather a system that allows to turn the information asymmetry into money without consequences most of the time.
CharlesW 5y ago
From a capitalistic POV, it's irresponsible not to exploit ("make full use of and derive benefit from") underlying economic systems, no? This is why a purely capitalist, free market economy would be a societal disaster.

xwdv 5y ago

Software is not charity. I will not work hard to deliver all those things out of the goodness of my heart. The ROI on those things isn’t great. If it’s easy to do I’ll do it, but none of those are trivial things.

XorNot 5y ago
I'll go further: I would love nothing more then some well-defined common standards to work towards. Weighty documents I can drop on product manager's desk and tell them the ways in which our customers and the government will legally have their way with them if we don't meet those requirements.
- bob1029 5y ago
  This is why I like working in highly-regulated industry. Technically correct is almost always what flies at the end of the day, because there certainly exists some audit item tracking the thing. I absolutely loathe the audit process on one hand, but its a useful tool for getting everyone to play the same game on the other. It also means your solution is compliant in a lot of places if you can get it signed off in one.
mojuba 5y ago
Software is not charity but it's a responsibility. As probably the most innocent example, when you ship an app that drains a user's battery you betray your users. But then how about an app that sneakily collects data knowing that users won't even understand what you are doing or why? You can be a responsible business which unfortunately won't necessarily be appreciated. Or you can be a typical business that exploits information asymmetry to the last bit.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  If you don't like our current system that lets users decide what they can put up with or not then are you proposing some sort of centralized authority to enforce this? Like the government? The same governments of the world that produce the crappiest, most insecure, user hating software with some of the most ridiculous rules and regulations or else 10 layers of subcontractors making the price per line of code outrageous?

StevePerkins 5y ago

I'm honestly starting to feel like I transported back in time to my 1980's small town childhood, when the adults around me all blamed "Satan" for everything in the world they didn't like. "Capitalism" has about as much to do with software performance as actual devil worship had to do with my Dungeons & Dragons or heavy metal cassettes. And if your life as an engineer or user is "miserable" today, then I wish I could transport YOU to the 1980's. Yeah, existence is suffering... it sucks to be in the top 5% of household incomes, be inundated with open source platforms and tools that didn't exist too long ago, and a have a supercomputer in my jeans pocket.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
What sucks is having a supercomputer in your jeans' pocket that is significantly less responsive to your input than a Commodore 64 and is mostly used to deliver ads to you.
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  I realize that this will get some reflexive upvotes from the meme crowd. But neither of those statements are remotely true.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I frequently have to pause while typing and wait for my pocket-supercomputer to catch up and actually give me feedback like putting text on the damn screen. Multi-second non-interactable pauses are not uncommon at all. If that isn't "unresponsive" I'd really like to know what is. The ad thing I admit might be a touch hyperbolic.
    - StevePerkins 5y ago
      I have never experienced input lag on a iPhone, other than perhaps a context where the input is traversing across an Internet connection. And I assure you that a C64 with a 300 baud modem had that issue, too.

snth 5y ago

Counterpoint: life in communist countries is not known for being "not miserable".

mojuba 5y ago
That's the most irrelevant counterpoint that can be made here. "Communist" states were also totalitarian, i.e. undemocratic and that was the main reason for their ultimate failure. With democracy they'd be able to self-correct and likely switch to free[er] markets for example. Consumer software and Internet are probably the least regulated areas of engineering today, that's the problem. Compare that to aerospace, construction, etc. Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm, it's the prerogative of democracy.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm Who told you that? People like to simplify views and say that people are "anti-regulation", but really people are anti-poorly-thought-out-regulation. What famous capitalist do you know that argued theft for example should be unregulated?
  - mojuba 5y ago
    Show me a corporation that would whole heartedly support regulation of the market they're in.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      Facebook[0]. Regulation could make it more difficult for competitors to get off the ground so they are in support of regulation to that effect. [0]https://about.facebook.com/regulations/ https://about.facebook.com/regulations/
      - mojuba 5y ago
        You bring one of the most hypocritical pages on the Internet as an example?

Chris2048 5y ago

The problem with blaming capitalism, is that these things are by no means unique to capitalism. People are as self-serving in communistic "utopias" as in capitalist ones. Plus many economies are a mix of both capitalist/socialist elements - people cherry-pick things they like/dislike according to what they want to prove; but the US is by no mean more/less "capitalistic" than any other nation. Some capitalistic value could just as well be described as conservative. Fostering co-operative communities has less to do with the political/control system, and more to do with how it is implemented - and the mindset of the population. I could just as well blame multi-culturalism, or globalism, or lack of religion, or metropolitan lifestyle on lack of social cohesion.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Every response seems to have missed the joke by not reading the actual article. No. 12 makes fun of "blame capitalism" and this comment is riffing on that.