Hacker News Reader

It's truly awful. The last time I bought a car I wanted to take a hammer and smash the freaking "screen" because the UI was such a POS (VW Beetle). A 20-year-old radio is a better audio system, and the cheapest smartphone is a better navigation system than anything that comes in a car nowadays. But I suppose the manufacturers think they can't sell a car nowadays without "teh shiny screen." And they might be right.

Automotive "climate control" has been around since the mid-60s, and the controls of the early versions were also far more straightforward; basically, one knob for temperature and another for turning the system on/off at various settings. Here's one from 1973:

http://i44.servimg.com/u/f44/16/54/79/13/1973_c12.jpg

I had no idea that automatic climate control (i.e. user just sets the target temperature) dates back to 1970, because it was not a standard option for low/mid-price cars yet in 90s (at least in Finland). Heck, my parents bought a Toyota Corolla in 2003 with no automatic climate control. Fascinating to see it implemented with old-style analogous controls. Same for 6-way power seat.

Indeed, it was originally only on luxury models --- Cadillac introduced it in 1964.

https://ccco.s3.amazonaws.com/kb_photos/290/2284_1964_Cadill...

I thought most of YC HN was based out of/lived in a California bubble. Surely the rest of the commenters here have modern cars? I have a VW GLI that has climate control that beats the shit out of any car I've owned before it. There was also another posted complaining about their radio having to ''boot up'' before they could change the audio volume. I've literally never heard of these issues. This is ridiculous.

I know. I'm not saying they invented it. I'm saying that it wasn't a common feature on lower price cars.

That wasn't particularly early. I learned to drive in a used (but perfectly functioning, of course) '91 Lexus LS400. It was the make or break car for the new Lexus marque, and they put serious effort into the experience.

It has excellent thermostat-controlled AC and heat, and it was very easily controllable using dedicated buttons without looking away from the road at all. I wish modern cars (cough, Tesla) would put a tenth the care into UX.

Tesla's console is the embodiment of form over function for UI. It looks beautiful having a flowing button-free cockpit, but I'd rather be able to adjust settings without looking away from the road. Whatever happened to HUDs? It seems like a HUD with a dial on the steering wheel would let you have the best of both worlds.

Don't get me started about TVs. When I grew up our family TV turned on in seconds, and pressing channel up/down reacted in tens of milliseconds.

How long ago? My color CRT TV took a good 10 s or so to warm up the tube before you'd see much/anything. But at least it responded instantly, so you could spend that time walking back to the couch instead of waiting for some stupid menu. Instant and trustworthy response is basically gone from most appliances. I think it's a combination of marketing (has to look high tech) and cost (touch buttons are cheaper than mechanically interlinked toggle buttons.

I still can't tell if my computer monitor is on or off because I don't know the weird LED flashing code it uses to communicate that (Holy crap! appliances use something like morse code to tell you important information about their state! How did they get so needlessly cryptic? If there's no picture, I have to check all the cables and push the power button a couple of times to see what happens.

Web programmers are as much to blame too. Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it.

> Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it.

The only player which ever worked properly — even allowing the user to step through a video frame by frame — was part of Apple’s QuickTime framework.

Fun fact: QuickTime will be 26 years old in December.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime

mps / mps-youtube :)

We have some recent TVs. They have no buttons. Including power buttons. If you want to turn them on, you need the remote control.

The ones I've seen don't have physical buttons, but have nearly invisible capacitive buttons, at least for power/channel/volume. For most other functions, you do need the remote control.

To be fair, you weren't getting near-instantaneous full HD quality broadcasting with DVR support on your TV back then.

The problem is that there's no reason one couldn't design a TV that had both full HD and zero boot time with instantaneous channel switching. The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness.

Mine is almost instantaneous. Except it's a lie because the TV is never actually off. It's "Standby" mode consumes a crap ton of wattage and the manual literally says "unplug it" if you intend to not use it for a long time.

Not to mention the damn spyware that's included with it...

> The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness.

If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved.

> zero boot time

That's not going to happen, ever, but I'll assume you meant "faster" boot times.

Probably. Keep in mind that your average set-top box likely goes through a more complex secure boot process than most electronic devices you would ever interact with. Why? Because if people can run arbitrary firmware on a set-top box, your cable company would lose a shit ton of money.

> instantaneous channel switching

You are bound by the latency required to demodulate a signal being broadcast from some satellite ~30,000 km away from the receiver, decrypt the resulting stream, and finally decode it, all on the fly so you get a nice, continuous, stutter-free full HD broadcast.

I am no expert, so there is probably way more stuff happening behind the scene that someone else could probably shed light on. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that things can sometimes be more complicated than they seem at first glance.

> If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved.

The answer is never "engineers are lazy". The answer is, the company doesn't give a flying fuck about this problem and will actually prevent engineers from working on solving it, because they can sell you a TV perfectly well with this problem still present, and there's other work for engineers that makes TVs easier to sell than actually delivering a quality product.

When you change channels it has to wait for the next key frame before it can display video.

Booting a computer doesn't have to be slow, and that's even more true for embedded computers. But making the boot process fast requires very careful engineering, which is both a rare skill and also not very well supported by management for consumer products companies.

The distance to the satellite has nothing to do with it. You're using big numbers to exaggerate the problem.

Decrypting and demodulating have be as fast as the data is coming, otherwise the delay would grow until you never saw the end of the show. So that's not the reason either.

Yes, the MPEG-2 decoder in your TV needs to be fast enough to keep up with the transmitted data rate, but that doesn't mean that it has instantaneous stream startup times.

Your TV doesn't have the information it needs to start displaying MPEG-2+ATSC A/53 video for as long as 700ms. It needs to buffer quite a bit of timing information and at least an I-picture frame before it can start displaying anything: http://www.bretl.com/mpeghtml/startbuf.HTM

Not only that - the overall standard has tight timing tolerances to keep video arriving at the encoder/transmitter in-sync with audio/video leaving the decoder in your TV. It's not like MP3 streaming where every client has its own buffer size and time to start playing depending on network conditions, bitrate, etc.

Having a reliable buffering process to keep receivers in-sync is a feature, not a bug.

And the way to solve this -- at least for the case of consecutive channel surfing -- is to have multiple decoders and multiple buffers. It's simply precaching.

Eventually you're going to run into RF limits, especially if the signal is coming in over the air.

You're sure this is engineering laziness? How much extra would you pay for a TV with faster channel changing?

I'd pay extra for it. I'd pay even more for a TV that didn't spy on me and that couldn't update its firmware without my consent. But I'm probably not the target consumer.

> If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved.

Simple solution: just put 10x decoders/tuners for most recently used channels. I don't think it's really an engineering problem but more about cost-effectiviness, i.e. not enough consumers are willing to pay the premium.

Exactly. Just having two decoders instead of one would drastically improve the 80% use case of consecutive channel surfing.

Some TVs including Samsungs have dual tuners.

However, even if the read-ahead tuner was perfectly predictive you'd still need to flip through channels fairly slowly, otherwise you'll outrun it - about a second a channel.

Fair enough, but you were getting useful fallback, the image quality progressively degrading, and even with almost no image, the audio was still intelligible. With digital boradcast, it's all-or-nothing: all is fine, all is fine, until the error correction can no longer save you...and you get soundless picture, with block artifacts. Very useful for emergency broadcasts, when anything unicast will be overloaded as well.

Wish I could get that...

Y'know how they say "don't touch that dial"? When I grew up, TVs actually still had dials you had to turn. The tuner responded instantaneously when you changed the channel. Now get off my lawn you damn kids.

Of course it did, you were directly manipulating the a resistor in its circuit. Getting the channel just right...and keeping it there...that was, of course, the flipside.

>So you may start the car and have 5-10 seconds of blasting radio that you can do nothing about.

What some people do is make an audio file consisting of several seconds of silence, and do whatever is needed (call it "AAA.mp3", or put it first in a default playlist) to have it play while the player boots.

But yeah, it's really messed up that that should be considered acceptable.

Microwave oven UI's are terrible but they weren't always that way. My old Amana had 5 controls: a knob for intensity (never changed it) and a knob for the timer, plus start, stop and light buttons. When the the start button broke we just jammed it in the "on" position with a penny making the UI even simpler: put the food in, and turn the knob for the time.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Cookmatic-Radarange-Made-by...

I don't have the same feeling. Different brands have different UI's, and some are as simple as "Press then numbered button for how many minutes of full power cooking you want"

Unless you want more than 10 minutes, then you have to press a different button and then type in the time. Fortunately, there are only something like 20 buttons...a big improvement over a knob and a button that is immediately usable by anyone.

What do you cook in the microwave for that long? You could also look at much cheaper brands/models. I find that cheaper products seem to be keeping older UIs and therefor staying more functional

I was mistaken, my microwave makes you press somewhat hidden button if you want cook something longer than 6 minutes, not 10.

Thanks for pointing this out.

As cool as my friends' new car's features are, I still love my Acura RSX. I can reach from the steering wheel to adjust anything on the console without taking my eyes off the road. No fuss, made for human hands, knobs and buttons.