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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

>Users don't have the mental model to differentiate search terms and a URL.

I don't think good software always aims for the lowest common denominator. It's not an unequivocal good that users' lack of education is catered to. Infantilizing users makes them more dependent on services, and less able to navigate the internet.

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I feel like this is the same argument as "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works

Except conflating the address and search bar, then adding search suggestions, has objective problems. It's a bad thing that typing URLs in your address bar leaks them to Google/etc.'s search completion service, allowing search engines to track which URLs people begin visiting (not just searches they make).

> "kids these days don't know anyone's phone number!" If it works it works

My passenger had my phone number memorized. I went to visit him when he called me from jail. I used his gmail password to get his contacts' phone numbers to try to get someone else to bail him out, but it was only $300. After a few days I paid up to bail him out. He missed his next court date. I went to the bail revocation hearing a couple months later, and got $200 of that $300 back (iirc).

I make an effort to regularly exercise my mental phonebook, on his account.

Who are your lifelines? - https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html

That story reminds me of this homeless guy I helped out one night. He was wearing a suit, which is why I believed him, actually. He said he was a pilot, who just moved into a house but locked himself out with his wallet inside. So he attempted to break into his own house. The neighbors called the cops and he was arrested. Now he was “homeless” until he got things sorted out. I ran into him a few days later, he taught me how to fly and became a friend that I still email from time to time.

Are these blobs of text being generated by some language model or something? They seem like wildly incoherent generated stories 100% unrelated to the content of the article or this thread.

Phone numbers are stored in your phone's contacts app, a tool that does the remembering for you. Making an input box do two different things and then adding a heuristic to guess what the user wants might be handy, but can go wrong. And then, as the linked post demonstrates, users get used to that and treat every input box as if it can do both of these things. It's a race to the bottom. Now your users "got stupider" and you need to come up with even more stuff behind the scenes to fix it.

Nobody ever questioned that you have to learn driving a car. How to handle it, what would break it, traffic rules etc. Why don't we demand that cars become so smart that a 16yo can just buy one, jump on all the pedals and turn all knobs and be a safe while doing so because the car will prevent anything bad from happening? We somehow accept that driving a car is something non-trivial that has to be learned, has certain rules that need to be followed, etc.

> Nobody ever questioned that you have to learn driving a car.

At the same time, nobody ever questions what you don't learn to drive a car. You have one acceleration pedal; you don't have separate controls for the fuel/air mixture and ignition timings. You don't manually control the differential. You have one brake pedal, not separate ones for the front and rear brakes, and automatic anti-lock braking is even a useful safety feature.

Modern cars even have warnings for tire pressure, so the driver has less need to manually check.

Modern cars are so smart that a 16 year old can buy one and drive it without having to know how to rebuild the engine, unlike cars of a hundred years ago.

The trick is that we have a long cultural history of deciding just what aspects of car driving are non-trivial and need to be learned and what aspects can be automated successfully (or even beneficially). Consumer computing is still in its relative infancy, and it's a moving target.

You have an automatic transmission, so you don't have to know how to use the clutch (a thing people used to complain about the kids not learning)

Just US things... No one in Germany likes automatic transmission.

Oh Idunno... It's getting harder and harder to find even German cars with manual transmissions.

But you don't confuse your automatic transmission for something which has another function -- perhaps your ignition.

I think the more 'magic' they bake in to help non-technical users, the more it makes it harder to understand how the thing works for everyone else. As you allude to, cars have some fundamental rules that don't tend to get broken. The steering wheel, accelerator and brakes for example are generally all in the same place and operate the same between models, brands, updates.

It's just as straightforward to interpret the browser bar as only being a search bar that accepts any textual representation of intent from the user and does its best to interpret that intent (that's what search engines do, after all). And if that intent looks like a URL [0], then it might interpret that as your intent and load that URL. It's just one of many cases that are expected from a search engine–other might include showing a map for a query that looks like a location, doing arithmetic calculations for queries that look like arithmetic expressions, etc.

[0] Or a domain...even the most tech-savvy among us probably types in domains without examining the difference between a domain and a URL or how software might detect whether a given string looks like a domain

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