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Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

> Anybody who’s seen the systems inside a major tech company knows this is true. Or a minor tech company. Or the insides of any product with a software component.

Anybody who's seen the sun rising east and setting west knows that this is true: the Sun rotates around the Earth.

The other, less-obvious alternative, is that software is NOT crap, we just like to complain a lot. And it's just so easy & fun to blame everything on the software we work with.

Most software that doesn't immediately die does its job fairly well. In fact, better than whatever alternative that existed before said software.

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Oh no no.

Most software we use daily is barely running, filled with holes, in fact crap. Developed by multiple contractors, barely maintained.

Software I use daily:

- Gmail

- Google Search

- Android

- Firefox

- IntelliJ

- OSX

- Slack

Except maybe for OSX, none of those fits the definition of "barely maintained" (I'm kidding ofcourse - obviously OSX is maintained too!). I suspect none of it is "developed by multiple contractors" either (though, why would that automatically imply "crap"). None of it is "barely running" - they might have some issues, but they run. Some of them, impressively well (take Google Search, or Gmail. They have outstanding uptime; Slack isn't too bad, either; and both IntelliJ and OSX run rather well too).

One of my former teacher used to say; "a program is like an airplane; it either works or it doesn't. You can't say that an airplane mostly flies". If you take that worldview, sure, all software is crap. But that worldview is deeply flawed IMO, in a very practical sense.

I think the flaw in your argument here is that you're only considering software products. A large amount of software does not have a name (beyond internal denomination), and that's where most of the crap is. A lot of the products with names are crap, too, but those are more likely to be worth anything because they are governed by evolutionary processes (bad products are more likely to fail on the market, whereas an in-house accounting solution has no option for failure, just for death march).

> I suspect none of it is "developed by multiple contractors" either

> None of it is "barely running"

You do realize that Android is on your list, right? "Barely running" fits the bill for most Android devices out there, and "developed by multiple contractors" is the primary reason.

> You do realize that Android is on your list, right?

I added it later (realized I use it quite a lot and it's unfair to not put it there), but you do get to an interesting distinction: Android runs quite fine on my phone. So when it's barely running, it's a software/hardware mismatch. And products, as long as they're software products, tend to be rather good. When they are part of other products the quality may be more of a "hit and miss".

But, is that a fault of the software? Take cars, I'm sure the software in my car is imperfect, "crap" by some standards.... but, I haven't had it fail. I did have a sensor failure, though. And on the previous car, I've had lots of other hardware failures, and no observable software failures. Would a pacemaker with crappy battery (say, an exploding one) be any better than a pacemaker with crappy software? And how often is the software actually used to mask/work around the crappier parts of the product? That must be quite a lot, and increasing. Sure, the software in a product might be crappy - but products are crappy all the time, so why should the software in some of them make any exception? You buy a cheap pair of sport shoes, you don't expect them to be the same quality as a pair of Nike shoes (and even Nike ones are imperfect)... why do you expect good software on crappy cheap security cameras?

My Android device:

* When it finds a wireless network that it recognises the audio it outputs (my .mp3s) start becoming choppy.

* Software is presently unable to read the status of the battery properly (probably a hardware failure).

* Many apps struggle with being persistently on and my mobile data connection and require occasional reboots to function.

* Video apps appear to take some sort of exclusive lock somewhere so if YouTube struggles with a video and I close it down and open up TwitchTv then Twitch will have exactly the same problem or even completely fail to render.

* Mine has none of those issues, so they may be at least partially hardware

* There's a difference in my book between e.g. "ocasionally annoying" and "crap"; e.g. try listing the good things Android does for you, and compare the lists.

"The bridge has collapsed and these 10 people are dead." - "Okay, but let's try listing all the people who used this bridge everyday without being killed by it, and compare the lists."

While a harsh analogy, this illustrates that the difference here is in the definition of "crap". Your definition of "crap" is "does not work", whereas the submission's author's definition is more like "unsound design".

If our metric for "good" is based solely on what people choose to use, then one is forced to admit that we also have generally good security and privacy safeguards.

Actually, I kinda agree with that assessment. "Good enough" is never good enough for academics, but practical reality is different.

> then one is forced to admit that we also have generally good security and privacy safeguards.

It's a tremendous conceit of the software community to actually believe these are purely-software problems that can be solved through software. Sure, software goes a long way, but I argue that it's a fool's errand to hope they can or should be solved in software, exclusively. Like - hardware will always be a factor, at least that should be obvious. But also culture/ society/ laws/ etc. have important practical implications. The very fact that we have lots of people scrutinizing these aspects suggests that the state of software security&privacy is really not "crap" (far from perfect, but definitely not "crap").

To you believe that article to be true, one must have a fairly black&white view of the world. 99% (probably much more) of the humans can't really bypass those "crap" security safeguards.... it's good that we have high standards (especially in areas like this), but come on. When in the human history was security(in general) better? What are we comparing it with, to postulate it's "crap"?

I think the point of the article is something that does an 95% job for 10% the cost works for a lot of things, but somethings that trade off doesn't work.

Maybe. And I could get behind a viewpoint that says, "some things are so dangerous, that a 99.999% job is not good enough". That's definitely true. But that is much less of a rant, and it requires the writer to do the hard work of defining those dangerous things, and arguing the benefits of adding the 4th, 5th, 6th nine against the cost. Saying "everything is crap" makes me just not take the article seriously, because the author only did half of the thinking job (not even half, maybe).

> Anybody who's seen the sun rising east and setting west knows that this is true: the Sun rotates around the Earth.

Just small remarks: technically it's not East and West, it changes.

Well, according to the basic physics laws: also yes. Yes because it depends on the observer. No, because it depends on the observer. The Copernicus book was about a theoretical model of an observer outside the planetary system (he didn't even claim that it was true "it was just a theory" - that's why he had no problems with the funny Catholic guys who burnt people for less).

But back to the point: both claims a true: Sun travels in space around Earth... and at the same time Earth does the same around Sun. All depends on the observer.

Maybe with the software it's the same?

> technically it's not East and West, it changes.

technically I only talked about a subset of people :)

> Yes because it depends on the observer. No, because it depends on the observer.

This gets metaphysical. If the observer's viewpoint is all that matters, the earth is flat (maybe not for you, but for me, and by definition you can't argue with me on that!). An argument that "I find software to be crap" is completely uninteresting and not worth engaging. If that's the only thing he meant... yeah, sure, more power to him, for all I care he may find all news to be fake too.

Let me guess, you've never worked in software industry, right?

I think we should define what 'crap' actually is...

Most software actually is crap.

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