Hacker News Reader

Ted Nelson was banging this drum as far back as 1974 with the concept of Cybercrud as discussed in Computer Lib/Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens. If you go back and actually read that book, you'll realize that basically everything he says about computers then is applicable to computers now when it comes to lies told to users. As an example, he points out that 'computer people' will routinely tell users that something can't be done when the reality is it's entirely possible but the software won't do it.

That we don't seem to have made much progress in 50 years is pretty disappointing.

> tell users that something can't be done when the reality is it's entirely possible but the software won't do it

As we digitize increasingly "serious" systems, this is increasing a logistical crisis in addition to a social issue. Variations that would have been trivially handled by even the least helpful of bureaucrats becomes outright impossible to submit to computer systems, often with no channel for appeal or remedy.

The story of Ellis Island screeners changing the spelling of names is infamous, but in that story at least the immigrants ended up with coherent paperwork and a usable name. Today, people with PII that doesn't match software formats are increasingly out of luck. If your name includes 'é', ASCII systems will flatly refuse to accept that. You can enter 'e', but when down the line the ASCII field gets compared to some UTF-8 record of your name, they might well be ruled different people. If you live in Apartment C, you'll suddenly and unhappily learn how many computer systems treat apartment number as a strictly numeric field. And god forbid your apartment has a name, or your street number has a decimal - there isn't even a graceful conversion for those values.

Robust design is the first step here: many systems could easily be adjusted to fail in 1% of the cases as they currently do. But human-focused design on a much larger scale can't be avoided either; when these standardizations _do_ inevitably fail, there needs to be some way of conceding that the system, and not the data, is wrong. As @patio11 put it years ago, "anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them".

> tell users that something can't be done when the reality is it's entirely possible but the software won't do it

This bit really stands out to me, and it bothers me to no end when I encounter it in the wild.

It even afflicts FLOSS software! Without meaning to single out any one project in particular, a concrete example that's fresh on my mind is KDE's Dolphin. Lately "sudo dolphin" results in the flat-out lie that "Executing Dolphin as root is not possible.", rather than a much more informative statement such as "Doing this would make an entire class of otherwise impossible exploits possible, so the maintainer has made a personal judgment call to disallow this behavior."

I think all software everywhere ought to conform to KDE's Human Interface Guidelines of "simple by default, powerful when needed" but would also like to see something added along the lines of:

* Don't lie to users - be as transparent as reasonably possible.

* Don't make value judgments or be (needlessly) authoritarian - software should restrict itself to doing its job and doing it well.

Another (historical) example that comes to mind: https://github.com/tpope/heroku-fucking-console

> he points out that 'computer people' will routinely tell users that something can't be done when the reality is it's entirely possible but the software won't do it

This is not the full equation though. Usually, "it can't be done for the price that users want to pay and the reality is it's entirely possible but I will not do it for free for you".

>While I think the term "abuse" is likely too strong for corporate software's relationship with their users.

For much of it, I don't think it is too strong a term. I think most Dark Patterns can be accurately described as abusive. There are Games that are specifically designed to irritate people into spending more money than they intended.

There are layers, Some of it is ignorance, some of it is willful ignorance, the worst of it is deliberate and focused.

That's fair. I originally worded it as "is perhaps sometimes too strong," but I've been trying to cut back on my weasel words lately.

I think it is a very interesting choice of words given the moral imperative that launched the FSF. I always found it frustrating that while the FSF had a word for software they wanted -- free software -- they never had a word for software they didn't want. It tends to go by a variety of different names: closed, proprietary, non-free, etc. However, it's become increasingly clear to me that free (as in freedom) or not, people often leverage software to achieve pretty despicable goals. It's even interesting to me that there are occasional projects that aren't free (as in freedom) that I hold in really high esteem. For example the game Dwarf Fortress does not enable you to fix bugs, learn about the code, help your friends by making derived works, etc. However, I can understand the authors' desire to keep the project as close to their own vision as possible. It's more of an artistic venture than a utilitarian one. I'd be hard pressed to find a project that is as welcoming and nice as Dwarf Fortress.

Over time software will have a bigger and bigger impact on our lives. Already there are organisations which make assumptions about me based on data that their software gathers that is completely untrue. While it is currently laughable that Google is convinced that I want to go to Hawaii, the potential for it to beyond even what the most famous dystopian novels warned us about is truly frightening.

> What's a more appropriate shining star, our new beacon to show everyone how Software Ought To Be?

Well, there's Wikipedia. Everyone uses it and it models great respect for its users and itself.

Other than obnoxiously begging for unnecessary donations each year...

Myself and many others might argue the "unnecessary" bit...

But I don't think there are a lot of better options for Wikipedia to ask for money.

The Wikimedia Foundation already has enough money to run Wikipedia for decades if they stopped blowing money on other things: https://www.legalmorning.com/wikimedia-foundation-rich-one-c...

Let's be fair, the Wikimedia Foundation does many other worthwhile things besides keeping the English Wikipedia running. By way of example their latest full-project, Wikidata, was only started in 2012 and is already getting more edits than Wikipedia.

Thanks, good to know! This year's will be my last donation to Wikipedia.

Realized the same thing about a year ago about SPLC (splc.org). Once I realized how much cash they have I saw that my contributions would have more effect elsewhere. I like what splc does: help discriminate which groups are hate groups and which aren't, among others. But they simply don't need any more money IMO.

It's my understanding that by donating a small, but recurring amount such as $1/month, you are still helping organizations like SPLC or PP by adding to the numbers of their contributing supporters. That seems like a good alternative to cutting off support, which would free up the money for a more cash-strapped cause.

How does The Internet Archive get funding? From an outsider’s perspective, it should cost much more money to run (web crawler, storage space, responding to legal requests).

Seemingly via donations only: https://archive.org/donate

"The Internet Archive is a US 501c3 non-profit organization."

So, similar to Wikipedia.

Pray tell how you would argue it, keeping in mind the (supposedly) pretty beefy salaries being paid out and the enormous nest egg the foundation is currently sitting on.

Would you prefer the government to take your money by force and give it to Wikimedia instead of them 'begging' for money?

The next one is an Open Alexa - voice UIs will treat people very differently

(I do think there is a value in something like a MOOP - massive open online psychology - an agent that monitors us as deeply as is done currently but listens to our conversations but with intention of learning and guiding - not CBT but reviewing the past day, almost automated therapy)

This is most likely to start in corporate environments but it has value (if done at medical levels of no harm and patients best interest - of course a Black Mirror version for the Chinese government would explain why your conversation with a neighbour was not in line with party policy)

Many, perhaps most people don't want to think about software. It should just work and you shouldn't have to mess with it. If something is broken, they will ask for help. Somewhat cumbersome procedures are okay as long as they always work and don't change.

I don't see how that fits all that well with a do-it-yourself, volunteer ethic. It fits better with a service-based approach where people just hire others to help if they need help. But then you're competing with Apple stores.

Or, alternately, you can buy a Chromebook for a less tech-savy relative. It's a rather practical solution.

The place where open source really works is with young people who want to get involved. There is a big enough community to sustain it, but not enough to really take over.

> Many, perhaps most people don't want to think about software. It should just work and you shouldn't have to mess with it. If something is broken, they will ask for help. Somewhat cumbersome procedures are okay as long as they always work and don't change.

There are free software distributions that stick quite close to that model, such as Debian and CentOS. The problem with the Chromebook is that it is only "on support" for 5 years after release, past that it's just a brick. Plus it expects you to depend on outside "cloud" services when there's no real reason to do so - a mainstream Linux distribution won't do that.

> a mainstream Linux distribution won't do that

With apt, there's no straightforward way to download packages on one machine and take them to an offline machine. Apt assumes that you you will be installing on the machine doing the downloading and only downloads the packages the downloading machine needs, which may be different from the one the offline machine needs, and last I checked you had to do quite a lot of piping and text parsing to work around it.

You can add a local file based repository to your sources.list "deb file:/mnt/debian-dvd/ wheezy main contrib", redownloading the whole ISO is probably the easiest way to handle upgrades like this. There's also "dpkg -i <some package file>" will install packages from anywhere.

If those options don't cover your needs can you tell me what they are?

The need is: for any given package, download that package and all dependencies, regardless of their installed status on the current system, so that they can be put on some external storage and taken to the other system.

It's not exactly the same as what you described, but apt-offline[1][2] comes close. You run it on the offline machine to obtain a "signature" which is then used on the online machine to download the correct set of packages.

[1] http://rickysarraf.github.io/apt-offline/ [2] https://www.ostechnix.com/fully-update-upgrade-offline-debia...

So now I have to visit the target, then schlep back to the source, then back to the target again. What if it is several hours away? You know, the kind of place likely to not have an internet connection to do it itself?

To solve the original problem of downloading all potential dependencies without any knowledge about the state of the target machine, I suppose you could just prepare a minimal Debian installation in a container with only essential packages and run "apt-get clean && apt-get -d install $package". In principle you could then copy the downloaded package files to the target and install them offline with dpkg. You'll probably end up downloading much more than you need, though. That's inevitable without two-way communication about the state of the target.

That isn't actually a better solution than the bash and awk hacking that I'm trying to avoid though.

I have no experience with this but there's apt-mirror, basically mirroring the entire repo: https://www.howtoforge.com/local_debian_ubuntu_mirror

We're pretty much at the point where you could mirror the entire archive including every arch onto a portable hard drive, the total size is 2453GB: https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

Great, so best case it takes me 1.13 days to download. Why is this so hard? The whole purpose of a package manager is to know the dependency chain of any given package, yet that information is completely useless because nobody ever considered this simple use case.

This simple use case was actually the norm back when apt was created and most people installed from CD. In fact, if downloading the whole repo is too much you can still order a DVD set: https://www.osdisc.com/products/linux/debian?affiliate=about... .

It is completely ridiculous that I need the entire repository to install a single package and its dependencies. End of story.

You can connect to the public repository or copy your own version of the repository. How else could it possibly work ?

Issue a command to apt that says "download this package and all its dependencies regardless of installed state on this machine".

Five years isn't great, but it's not so bad for something inexpensive, and you need to be able to buy a replacement in case of hardware failure. It's more important that getting a new one is easy, it works the same, and no data is lost.

In my case, it's a nice improvement over maintaining a relative's increasingly unreliable Windows XP computer running obsolete software for long past its expiration date.

> The article calls out examples like Emacs, Perl, and Python, but the proportion of people who use software and have used (and liked) these tools is vanishingly small.

All tools have benefitted from standing on the shoulders of these and other giants. Software doesn't exist in a vacuum and it doesn't appear fully formed from nothing. Ideas and inspiration are drawn from a multitude of projects. Take a look at the third party software required to build Firefox sometime.

Audacity, GIMP, Firefox, Android, the opensource Chrome-version Chromium, every ad-blocker worth installing on either browser?

We have the examples. Then again, we have a lot of corporate bs in between the user and the opensource projects that actually drive our world.

> I think a conversation we need to have is how to teach people that they deserve to be treated well by their software.

I don't think we need to teach people so much as we need to teach programmer. Emacs, Perl and Python were made to do something in a better way for the user. Any esoteric technology was the result of that. Not as you often see today were it is the other way around and the use case is shoehorned in at the end. If you want to do something nice you don't start with your super advanced back-end, you start with how someone is going to use it.

> What's a more appropriate shining star, our new beacon to show everyone how Software Ought To Be?

VS Code, but that is probably a bit obvious. Maybe something like Jupyter Notebook? WordPress used to be a big one. The thing is that so many things these days are proprietary web applications, mobile applications and/or networks.

VS Code comes default with "you need to turn this on" when it comes to invasive telemetry. If you don't want it at all, you must compile it yourself (as there are chunks of the telemetry you can't turn off without a compile flag). When you compile it yourself, it's unclear whether or not you can actually use the plugins that exist.

Without plugins, you are left with a text editor of only nominal use and mediocre novelty. That, or enabling telemetry. That's a pretty coercive pattern.

Perhaps I've misunderstood what you've said, but VS Code enables telemetry by default. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/search?q=telemetry&type=...

It's extremely abusive. The parent company, also.

Nobody likes someone else expressing opinions on their relationships though. And nothing gets someone to defend their abuser more strongly than telling them they're being abused.

Exactly, that's why you gotta show, not tell. We've been telling them stuff like "walled gardens are bad" instead of showing them a better way, and allowing them to realize that they can have better on their own.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the editor wars. I have been trying to convert vi users to emacs for years. They just go running right back into the arms of their abuser.