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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

I see you don't have much experience in development. It probably went more like this:

business: "Opening the camera seems slow", dev: "it takes 200ms for the system to start it", "Can you make it faster?", "Not really, unless we keep the camera on", "Do that!", "Won't it have privacy issues?", "Don't worry about that".

EDIT: And in the end business is correct, because nobody really cares about this. Every happy instagrammer keeps happily instagramming.

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This is so true that at other companies it often takes a lawyer (in-house counsel) reminding product that something is legally precarious to stop it, and they still push.

For something that has no real legal ramifications, there’s no way you’re stopping it.

People will care a lot when news gets out that they were spying on a 13-year-old (or whatever) girl.

This is why Facebook's culture is the real problem, and it won't be fixed no matter how many "independent" oversight boards they produce.

+1 for realistic dialogue

As realistic as this is, it seems like contempt for mediocrity

That’s how the explicit narrative goes.

The implicit one we can never admit to is something like: Instagrammer has a different sensitivity for 200ms than the dev and never cared.

Dev has to justify his egregious salary by manufacturing statistics to “experiment with engagement” nevermind the literal reality of having such a gadget is titillating as is, manufacturing belief that specific dev making a camera respond 200ms faster is what really made the app is where that paper is.

Camera start up time actually is quite important in my opinion. For example, I stopped using snapchat primarily because it felt laggy to get the camera open. That really grates on you when an app is mostly used for spontaneous image/video capture.

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