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I program for a living and I know why sites need "cookies", and still, for me most software really really sucks. Just because I can figure out how each and ever

by yosefk 11y ago

I program for a living and I know why sites need "cookies", and still, for me most software really really sucks. Just because I can figure out how each and every new cell phone works doesn't mean I want to, similarly for other kinds of gratuitous changes and incompatibilities. And BTW systems built "by hackers for hackers" are among the worst offenders (*nix clones in general and Linux distributions in particular are good examples.)

unimpressive 11y ago
I have some bones to pick with this talk, especially when it comes to the 'insane' singularity parts. But damn if I'm not on team user. The truth of the matter is that our software is gratuitous in features, lazy in performance, but the most important issue that gets overlooked is that it requires a great expenditure of effort to configure understand and use. I spent hours today trying to set up prosody XMPP on a local LAN and found I couldn't do it with the server software that promises to have you 'up and running in minutes'. It made me think that perhaps in the same way you have test cases for features, you might have test situations to determine what features you should have in the first place. Does your software work if I'm in environment X? How about environment/situation Y? I at this point feel so disgusted with the entire experience that I would prefer to just write my own, the cost of creating a new code has become lower than fully understanding an old one: "It is easier to write a new code than to understand an old one." - John Von Neumann to Marston Morse, 1952 as quoted in Turing's Cathedral EDIT (Mon Jul 20 23:30:32 PDT 2015): Lots of people citing Nick Bostrom on the AI stuff, for a different perspective I'd like to recommend Scott Alexander's (Looong) Meditations on Moloch: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ "They broke their back lifting Moloch to heaven!"
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  RE Scott Alexander's perspective, which I find to be an excellent piece of writing (hell, I have that Moloch quote with Disneyland printed on a t-shirt) - the point of that article is that if we keep doing what we're doing, going user-first and business-first, short-term thinking market economy, we'll be doing exactly that, lifting Moloch to heaven.
NhanH 11y ago
> And BTW systems built "by hackers for hackers" are among the worst offenders (*nix clones in general and Linux distributions in particular are good examples.) Interestingly, I've found it to be the opposite. Most of systems built "by hackers for hackers" both have a surprisingly long (yet not obsolete) life, and are vastly more compatible across different environments. Emacs/vim has been around for a really long time, and there is no reason to believe they will disappear at this point. Similarly, I can comfortably switch from Linux to OS X to FreeBSD thanks to bash and the gazillion posix tools (grep, ps, awk...). The same definitely can not be said for Windows 7 to 8 so far.
- _yosefk 11y ago
  "Been around for a long time" - yes, but that doesn't mean hair-pulling will not result from upgrading emacs and having files in .emacs stop working. (I have a very simple vim configuration so I never had a problem there, I don't know if it's because they break less or because I depend on less.) As to easily switching... erm... just the other day I fixed a script bundled with a hardware system costing around $1M/year to lease to use basename instead of /bin/basename because I wanted to run it, not on RHEL but on Ubuntu and the latter put basename in /usr/bin. Hell, even #!/bin/env bash will break because on another system it's #!/usr/bin/env!! Other scripts did not run because ksh was not installed. At other times scripts break because /bin/sh is (wrongly) assumed to be bash but Ubuntu uses dash, whatever that is. And this goes from trivial stuff like the above all the way down to gdb being broken by a kernel upgrade to a minor version, or kernel memory leaks caused by minor upgrades, or NFS-related kernel panics. As to "yet not obsolete" - only if you use the box as a server needing nothing but a CPU, some RAM, an Ethernet connection and some media to boot and serve files from. Try running or compiling an old KDevelop on a new Ubuntu or vice versa and tell me if it's "surprisingly long life yet not obsolete". Also I can assure you that most of my complaints about breakage are met, if the person is a Linux aficionado, with bewilderment at my desire to run such ancient software where "ancient" means "6-12 months old". Certainly the only part of Linux which gives a shit about compatibility is the kernel (you can still run statically linked binaries from 1993), however it doesn't help much because every userspace program outside the very useful but rather limited set of the original Unix tools (grep etc.) happily breaks compatibility at every turn. I have to say that Windows has far less variants and far less incompatibilities between variants than *nix, so you switch both more smoothly and less often in my experience. This is not to say that it's a lovely experience, just that it's not nearly as terrible as Linux.
ploxiln 11y ago
I just wanted to mention that I really liked this article/slides, and agree that most software sucks... ... but I think the systems built "by hackers for hackers", nix clones in general and linux distributions in particular, are generally the best stuff out there. It's all the attempts to be "intuitive" and "easy" and "just work" that really fails. It's the stuff "by designers for users" that sucks. The old-ish core unix/linux stuff has been slowly polished over the years and works pretty damn well, and you depend on its quiet stable operation for all your fancy user-friendly (and "dev-friendly") layers that need to be completely replaced every couple of years, for your favorite phone and your favorite websites. EDIT: you complain about trying to compile kdevelop, on ubuntu... well there's your mistake, both of those things are trying hard to be user-friendly. Try plain debian, plain vim, etc.
- klum 11y ago
  There's a quote by someone (Steve Jobs?) to the effect that there are three phases of understanding a problem: first, you don't understand it; second, you research it and come up with all kinds of complicated solutions and, third, you really understand the problem and you can find a solution which is elegant and actually works. This is oversimplified, but I think most of the things today that try to be user-friendly and intuitive are stuck in the second phase--it takes a lot of effort and care to get to the third one. The iPhone interface (touch, swiping, ...) might actually be an example of a successful attempt at the "just works"-category--we've all heard of babies learning to navigate iPads etc. And today it seems so obvious, you don't even think about all the nuances that have to be right for this to work, but that's probably a hallmark of the designs that really are intuitive--they seem so obvious you don't immediately realize someone had to come up with them, and iterate on them until they just worked.
  - chipsy 11y ago
    There's definitely a learning curve involved. UX improvements tend to follow an arc from "configure everything, expose everything" towards "a bit too crude for power users, but 99% of use-cases are automated, defaulted, and profiled into nothing". Hacker personalities tend to fall into conflict with that ambition(even if they enjoy the results) since "hackability factor" is dependent on having something to configure, and you can't configure a nothing that just works - especially since in the space between "configure everything" and "just works", you have a form of the uncanny valley effect where the experience gets a lot worse and there is no possibility to configure yourself out of it. That stops UX from enjoying simple incremental improvements.
plonh 11y ago
Unix clones are fantastic. Ubuntu and Desktop projects are disasters.
nmesse 11y ago
Linux distributions are not the worst offenders of over-complicated software. Instead, that would be Windows. Linux is there for the people who need/want to understand and manipulate their system. To a greater degree than any other system around. No one is recommending Linux software to people who don't need or what this level of manipulations. What I feel is the greatest abusers of these types of over-complications is Windows. I used to volunteer at a library helping elderly people (plus anyone else that needed help). No one came in with a Linux computer. What the majority of these people came in with were Windows laptops. Laptops that were just too complicated for them to get a hand on.

by yosefk 11y ago

unimpressive 11y ago

I have some bones to pick with this talk, especially when it comes to the 'insane' singularity parts. But damn if I'm not on team user. The truth of the matter is that our software is gratuitous in features, lazy in performance, but the most important issue that gets overlooked is that it requires a great expenditure of effort to configure understand and use. I spent hours today trying to set up prosody XMPP on a local LAN and found I couldn't do it with the server software that promises to have you 'up and running in minutes'. It made me think that perhaps in the same way you have test cases for features, you might have test situations to determine what features you should have in the first place. Does your software work if I'm in environment X? How about environment/situation Y? I at this point feel so disgusted with the entire experience that I would prefer to just write my own, the cost of creating a new code has become lower than fully understanding an old one: "It is easier to write a new code than to understand an old one." - John Von Neumann to Marston Morse, 1952 as quoted in Turing's Cathedral EDIT (Mon Jul 20 23:30:32 PDT 2015): Lots of people citing Nick Bostrom on the AI stuff, for a different perspective I'd like to recommend Scott Alexander's (Looong) Meditations on Moloch: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ "They broke their back lifting Moloch to heaven!"

TeMPOraL 11y ago
RE Scott Alexander's perspective, which I find to be an excellent piece of writing (hell, I have that Moloch quote with Disneyland printed on a t-shirt) - the point of that article is that if we keep doing what we're doing, going user-first and business-first, short-term thinking market economy, we'll be doing exactly that, lifting Moloch to heaven.

NhanH 11y ago

> And BTW systems built "by hackers for hackers" are among the worst offenders (*nix clones in general and Linux distributions in particular are good examples.) Interestingly, I've found it to be the opposite. Most of systems built "by hackers for hackers" both have a surprisingly long (yet not obsolete) life, and are vastly more compatible across different environments. Emacs/vim has been around for a really long time, and there is no reason to believe they will disappear at this point. Similarly, I can comfortably switch from Linux to OS X to FreeBSD thanks to bash and the gazillion posix tools (grep, ps, awk...). The same definitely can not be said for Windows 7 to 8 so far.

_yosefk 11y ago
"Been around for a long time" - yes, but that doesn't mean hair-pulling will not result from upgrading emacs and having files in .emacs stop working. (I have a very simple vim configuration so I never had a problem there, I don't know if it's because they break less or because I depend on less.) As to easily switching... erm... just the other day I fixed a script bundled with a hardware system costing around $1M/year to lease to use basename instead of /bin/basename because I wanted to run it, not on RHEL but on Ubuntu and the latter put basename in /usr/bin. Hell, even #!/bin/env bash will break because on another system it's #!/usr/bin/env!! Other scripts did not run because ksh was not installed. At other times scripts break because /bin/sh is (wrongly) assumed to be bash but Ubuntu uses dash, whatever that is. And this goes from trivial stuff like the above all the way down to gdb being broken by a kernel upgrade to a minor version, or kernel memory leaks caused by minor upgrades, or NFS-related kernel panics. As to "yet not obsolete" - only if you use the box as a server needing nothing but a CPU, some RAM, an Ethernet connection and some media to boot and serve files from. Try running or compiling an old KDevelop on a new Ubuntu or vice versa and tell me if it's "surprisingly long life yet not obsolete". Also I can assure you that most of my complaints about breakage are met, if the person is a Linux aficionado, with bewilderment at my desire to run such ancient software where "ancient" means "6-12 months old". Certainly the only part of Linux which gives a shit about compatibility is the kernel (you can still run statically linked binaries from 1993), however it doesn't help much because every userspace program outside the very useful but rather limited set of the original Unix tools (grep etc.) happily breaks compatibility at every turn. I have to say that Windows has far less variants and far less incompatibilities between variants than *nix, so you switch both more smoothly and less often in my experience. This is not to say that it's a lovely experience, just that it's not nearly as terrible as Linux.

ploxiln 11y ago

I just wanted to mention that I really liked this article/slides, and agree that most software sucks... ... but I think the systems built "by hackers for hackers", nix clones in general and linux distributions in particular, are generally the best stuff out there. It's all the attempts to be "intuitive" and "easy" and "just work" that really fails. It's the stuff "by designers for users" that sucks. The old-ish core unix/linux stuff has been slowly polished over the years and works pretty damn well, and you depend on its quiet stable operation for all your fancy user-friendly (and "dev-friendly") layers that need to be completely replaced every couple of years, for your favorite phone and your favorite websites. EDIT: you complain about trying to compile kdevelop, on ubuntu... well there's your mistake, both of those things are trying hard to be user-friendly. Try plain debian, plain vim, etc.

klum 11y ago
There's a quote by someone (Steve Jobs?) to the effect that there are three phases of understanding a problem: first, you don't understand it; second, you research it and come up with all kinds of complicated solutions and, third, you really understand the problem and you can find a solution which is elegant and actually works. This is oversimplified, but I think most of the things today that try to be user-friendly and intuitive are stuck in the second phase--it takes a lot of effort and care to get to the third one. The iPhone interface (touch, swiping, ...) might actually be an example of a successful attempt at the "just works"-category--we've all heard of babies learning to navigate iPads etc. And today it seems so obvious, you don't even think about all the nuances that have to be right for this to work, but that's probably a hallmark of the designs that really are intuitive--they seem so obvious you don't immediately realize someone had to come up with them, and iterate on them until they just worked.
- chipsy 11y ago
  There's definitely a learning curve involved. UX improvements tend to follow an arc from "configure everything, expose everything" towards "a bit too crude for power users, but 99% of use-cases are automated, defaulted, and profiled into nothing". Hacker personalities tend to fall into conflict with that ambition(even if they enjoy the results) since "hackability factor" is dependent on having something to configure, and you can't configure a nothing that just works - especially since in the space between "configure everything" and "just works", you have a form of the uncanny valley effect where the experience gets a lot worse and there is no possibility to configure yourself out of it. That stops UX from enjoying simple incremental improvements.

plonh 11y ago

Unix clones are fantastic. Ubuntu and Desktop projects are disasters.

nmesse 11y ago

Linux distributions are not the worst offenders of over-complicated software. Instead, that would be Windows. Linux is there for the people who need/want to understand and manipulate their system. To a greater degree than any other system around. No one is recommending Linux software to people who don't need or what this level of manipulations. What I feel is the greatest abusers of these types of over-complications is Windows. I used to volunteer at a library helping elderly people (plus anyone else that needed help). No one came in with a Linux computer. What the majority of these people came in with were Windows laptops. Laptops that were just too complicated for them to get a hand on.