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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

In the 1980's, taking away the 'choke' lever which assisted starting a car was seen by some as removing a critical control.

Yet automatic chokes became standard, and today's drivers usually don't even know or care what a choke even is. Todays people have other things to spend their time learning.

People of tomorrow may not need to know or care what the difference is between a search box and a URL bar. All they know is they can type what they're looking for into any box, and they'll find it. And like the choke, it might turn out that most people might prefer not to know.

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This is a good analogy. Quite frequently I think "if only more companies did a better job at educating users instead of dumbing things down." But then I remember a lot of users don't want to be educated about things they're not interested in. They just want things to work so they can move on to whatever else they have going on in their lives.

Users not knowing what a url bar even is will be actively dangerous when they've somehow managed to land on a fishing site though.

I don't think that can be engineered away in any reasonable way soon, so saying they shouldn't need to know seems irresponsible to me

> somehow managed to land on a fishing site though.

Hmmm. It took me a while to figure out that you weren't referring to sites for angling enthusiasts.

This is the only issue I see with the new bar. The system would work fine if it wasn't for malicious actors trying to pose as other sites. Some official documents give specific instructions to type the whole url and not to use google.

A choke on an engine does not do anything other than control the flow of air to the engine. That's it. That's all it does.

Allowing the URL bar to also act as search or vice versa, the simple act of trying to do the one thing now does something else that you might or might not have intended or been aware of being possible is not the same as a single purpose choke. When that possible thing is sending your data to a 3rd party, then that is just bad.

Edit: finished an incomplete thought

IIRC, chokes are only necessary with carburetors to control the fuel/air mixture. I think today's cars are all fuel injection and thus don't need to have a choke. Cheaper gas powered garden equipment still has chokes, I think.

So now its all computerized. You don't get a knob on the dash to personalize exactly how much fuel to air you want. The OEM sets that and you go on about your day without ever caring.

No, not quite. The choke was basically just a kludge to enrich the fuel-air mixture beyond the limits of what a carburator would otherwise be mechanically able to achieve. If it had had this ability -- something like "below-idle", where idle is the lower limit of where the carburator can keep the engine running -- then there would never have been a choke. Fuel injection can do that because of the different physical / mechanical way it mixes air and fuel. It has nothing to do with the computerization per se.

Bad example. Choke lever was a control device that became unnecessary as technology made the relevant part of the process fully automatic, and it was completely incidental to the overall purpose of a car - to move people places.

Messing with URL and search is like messing with the steering wheel, or - in case of self-driving cars - with navigation input.

This is only true if you assume that differentiating between a url and a search query. In a sense, a url (or uri) is just a specific type of query.

We could equivalently ask why ftp and http and https and such don't have different types of entry uis, since they're different protocols. If we consider the "resource location via plain language" protocol (which we could even formalize!) that defers to http(s), ftp, Tor, and Bing based on aspects of the request, it's just one higher level protocol.

I don't think this is good example, choke valve just doesn't exist on any "modern" car.

Yeah, I only know about it from using other carbureted things (lawnmower, generator, motorcycle, etc.) If I'd only ever started up a modern car, I probably wouldn't know about it either.

That is true about the choke, but I bet we could [and this is not an invitation, go away keyboard warriors] start a raging inferno in the comments right now about manual vs automatic transmissions.

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