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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

No. 13 is gold:

> We’re never going to get the broader SE culture to care about things like performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, or privacy, at least not without legal regulations that are enforced. And regulations are written in blood, so we’ll only get enforced legal regulations after a lack of accessibility kills people.

Sorry, can't help but blame capitalism for saying "fuck performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy" and making the lives of engineers (and users) miserable.

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I'm honestly starting to feel like I transported back in time to my 1980's small town childhood, when the adults around me all blamed "Satan" for everything in the world they didn't like.

"Capitalism" has about as much to do with software performance as actual devil worship had to do with my Dungeons & Dragons or heavy metal cassettes.

And if your life as an engineer or user is "miserable" today, then I wish I could transport YOU to the 1980's. Yeah, existence is suffering... it sucks to be in the top 5% of household incomes, be inundated with open source platforms and tools that didn't exist too long ago, and a have a supercomputer in my jeans pocket.

What sucks is having a supercomputer in your jeans' pocket that is significantly less responsive to your input than a Commodore 64 and is mostly used to deliver ads to you.

I realize that this will get some reflexive upvotes from the meme crowd. But neither of those statements are remotely true.

I frequently have to pause while typing and wait for my pocket-supercomputer to catch up and actually give me feedback like putting text on the damn screen. Multi-second non-interactable pauses are not uncommon at all. If that isn't "unresponsive" I'd really like to know what is.

The ad thing I admit might be a touch hyperbolic.

I have never experienced input lag on a iPhone, other than perhaps a context where the input is traversing across an Internet connection.

And I assure you that a C64 with a 300 baud modem had that issue, too.

Yeah but that 300 baud modem is connected to another computer. I'm just typing on this somewhat laggy phone inside a textarea -- which while worse than a C64, isn't usually so bad that I regularly notice.

Amen to that!

One time at Sunday school in the 80s we did a craft project, little lanterns out of coffee cans with patterns of holes punched in them. Mine was a star and a simple cross. As a kid I knew I could not play with matches but wanted to try out my new creation. So I snuck behind the garage and lit a bunch of matches and melted the candle. A week later my dad finds it, I’m adamant I have no idea where that thing came from. Later on in the day I overhear him tell mom he thinks there are some kids in the area doing some kind of satanic ritual behind the garage.

Rock and Roll however that is from satan.

The problem with blaming capitalism, is that these things are by no means unique to capitalism. People are as self-serving in communistic "utopias" as in capitalist ones. Plus many economies are a mix of both capitalist/socialist elements - people cherry-pick things they like/dislike according to what they want to prove; but the US is by no mean more/less "capitalistic" than any other nation. Some capitalistic value could just as well be described as conservative.

Fostering co-operative communities has less to do with the political/control system, and more to do with how it is implemented - and the mindset of the population. I could just as well blame multi-culturalism, or globalism, or lack of religion, or metropolitan lifestyle on lack of social cohesion.

Software is not charity. I will not work hard to deliver all those things out of the goodness of my heart. The ROI on those things isn’t great.

If it’s easy to do I’ll do it, but none of those are trivial things.

I'll go further: I would love nothing more then some well-defined common standards to work towards. Weighty documents I can drop on product manager's desk and tell them the ways in which our customers and the government will legally have their way with them if we don't meet those requirements.

This is why I like working in highly-regulated industry. Technically correct is almost always what flies at the end of the day, because there certainly exists some audit item tracking the thing.

I absolutely loathe the audit process on one hand, but its a useful tool for getting everyone to play the same game on the other. It also means your solution is compliant in a lot of places if you can get it signed off in one.

Software is not charity but it's a responsibility. As probably the most innocent example, when you ship an app that drains a user's battery you betray your users.

But then how about an app that sneakily collects data knowing that users won't even understand what you are doing or why?

You can be a responsible business which unfortunately won't necessarily be appreciated. Or you can be a typical business that exploits information asymmetry to the last bit.

If you don't like our current system that lets users decide what they can put up with or not then are you proposing some sort of centralized authority to enforce this? Like the government? The same governments of the world that produce the crappiest, most insecure, user hating software with some of the most ridiculous rules and regulations or else 10 layers of subcontractors making the price per line of code outrageous?

You could start with e.g. requiring full legal disclosure of what my data is used for. Apple is trying to move in that direction, but we can't be at the mercy of a private corporation no matter how good the intentions are, when it comes to user data and privacy. But Apple's new requirements on the App Store are an example of what's possible to do.

Performance and quality are a bit different, they are much harder to regulate but still possible to an extent.

Case in point the Governor of Missouri in the US claiming that a report was hacking[1] when they hit F12 and viewed a website's HTML which contained Social Security Numbers.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/us/missouri-st-louis-post...

It is unfortunate that parent latched on to capitalism. Point number 13 from the post resonated with me the most since the software I write can damage the environment or expensive machines that are difficult to replace if there are errors, and as a professional electrical engineer I do sign off that it is built correctly and am liable, and therefore I limit the scope so I can manage the workload, document test results that show it works correctly, and put a lot of effort in to handling faults so machinery shuts down safely when there is a problem with a sensor or actuator. Also I keep it as simple as it can be to get the job done so it is readable for other people to understand and troubleshoot.

Imagine if you could sue software vendors for lost revenue due to bugs.

The posts point about people taking responsibility for their software not happening until there are regulations and regulations being written in blood is a good one.

True, but I'd argue that regulation is not part of the free market capitalist paradigm. Regulations are created and enforced by the democratic institutions that are not part of the market paradigm.

>"Imagine if you could sue software vendors for lost revenue due to bugs"

It does happen when software is made under specific contract. You do pay an exorbitant price for such software though.

For generic software - this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Go sue your politicians instead. I am pretty sure you'd find enough cases of lost revenue / income coming as the results of their actions.

Why should software be unlike other industries that are held accountable for their products? Imagine everything in your life had no warranty and click through eula type terms and changed uncontrollably to improve some metric for the manufacturer. I suppose it all comes down to when life and environment are on the line instead of just revenue, and for revenue as you say the people who can afford it pay for it and enforce it with their contracts. To me therein lies the difference between programming and software engineering.

Every response seems to have missed the joke by not reading the actual article. No. 12 makes fun of "blame capitalism" and this comment is riffing on that.

Counterpoint: life in communist countries is not known for being "not miserable".

That's the most irrelevant counterpoint that can be made here. "Communist" states were also totalitarian, i.e. undemocratic and that was the main reason for their ultimate failure. With democracy they'd be able to self-correct and likely switch to free[er] markets for example.

Consumer software and Internet are probably the least regulated areas of engineering today, that's the problem. Compare that to aerospace, construction, etc. Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm, it's the prerogative of democracy.

> Regulation though is not part of the free market capitalism paradigm

Who told you that? People like to simplify views and say that people are "anti-regulation", but really people are anti-poorly-thought-out-regulation. What famous capitalist do you know that argued theft for example should be unregulated?

Show me a corporation that would whole heartedly support regulation of the market they're in.

Facebook[0]. Regulation could make it more difficult for competitors to get off the ground so they are in support of regulation to that effect.

[0]https://about.facebook.com/regulations/

You bring one of the most hypocritical pages on the Internet as an example?

Corporations also have the means and the connections to lobby the state, which ensures the regulations are more to their liking. All helping entrench the corporation.

The effect is that small competitors are kept out. They can't afford legal departments and legions of developers to match the regulatory requirements.

For now, the Internet is relatively unregulated, which allows alternative media and platforms to emerge. This is a good thing, imagine having just YouTube and Facebook forever.

> Corporations also have the means and the connections to lobby the state, which ensures the regulations are more to their liking.

I understand but under proper democracies regulations are something the society should benefit from in the first place.

What if they weren't democratic because Communism is incompatible with democracy

It's not capitalism, but the bad apples exploiting it.

if it's a near-universal problem, it's not "bad apples" it's bad incentives. IE, capitalism.

Bad environments make bad apples.

The exploitation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

I'd like to see examples of well known good apples outside of OSS that care about performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and privacy.

Even in OSS caring about performance, compatibility, security and privacy is the exception. The biggest projects do tend to care, but the majority don't. The biggest examples in OSS are mostly funded by capitalism to care ab out those things.

Although they have many faults, Microsoft has cared about compatibility for 30 years (you can still run DOS programs on your Windows 10 computer). They have cared about the security of their users since about 1999, and they cared about their user’s privacy for about 10 years before dropping it in favor of advertising revenue a few years ago. People still install Windows on new their computers, so it evidentially isn’t a big concern for most people either. Their support for accessibility technologies is probably better than most operating systems, though it’s a bit hard to tell from the outside. Performance is an odd one. It is my understanding that the Windows kernel gets high marks for performance, but aside from that almost nothing does.

Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. The bad apples exploiting it are the people who own the means of production, and saying they're the bad part of capitalism might as well be saying "capitalism is only bad because of what makes capitalism what it is".

You replied to that comment using a computer. That computer is the means of production for software. You own the means of production here. What have you been doing with that capability?

> Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by.

Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.

>Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.

Sure, now tell me your opinion on this idea I have

Today for music there are many parasites that suck the profits and creators barely get something. So my idea is to make a cooperatives (or non-parasitic company) to help the creators of content. First step is to have mobile apps and here we just HIT the parasites, Apple and Google , any transaction or subscription will be taxed by7 this parasites. It seems impossible to make money for the right people without fating up the parasites.

When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.

>When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.

My issue is with "free markets" solve everything when most of the time you don't have free markets(like when you have too few competitors or when you have collusion not to compete ) , or when you forget to specify that free market would solve the problem but only after you make illegal all the bad or evil practices companies will abuse. If someone is an economist is there a theorem /law that proves that imperfect free market will covere to an evil state so you always need supervision to intervene when you notice the effects and apply a correction/bug fix ?

In my example with mobile applications we don't have free markets , where free market would mean you have many agents competing to offer you something, we have basically 2 competitors and this 2 are happy to be in a balance and share this big pie then aggressively competing to make happy the custoemrs but reduce their profits.

Don't confuse free with unregulated. Not even Adam Smith wanted unregulated markets. Free simply means everyone is equally free to play in the same market created by a system of laws and equal enforcement. And I doubt you'll find anyone defending monopolies or duopolies. All systems are corrupted, we just try to minimize it when we can.

It's not the fault of a system that rewards unethical behavior by having a massively skewed risk/reward profile for said behavior, it's the fault of people with low-normal levels of empathy who make rational decisions. Sure.

"The system harnesses the power of incentives to make people do the right thing!"

"But here the incentives point in the wrong direction."

"It's not the system's fault! People shouldn't follow those incentives!"

That same line of argument could work for socialism/communism. What country that doesn't use the free trade paradigm for their economy isn't some authoritarian nightmare of poverty and despair? Are they just bad actors using the system wrong, or is it a system that always ends that way?

Not always the case. There are non-democratic capitalist societies with varying degrees of performance, from great (Singapore) to awful (the entire post-Soviet space).

On the other hand, over-regulated or fully socialist societies seem to be incompatible with democracy, I'd agree with that one.

Corruption isn't a problem of free trade, it's a problem resulting from centralization of authority. A single (or small cabal of) regulatory gatekeeper is comparatively cheap to pay off compared to satisfying all interested parties. Bribe one person? Check. Bribe 10,000 without having it break the bank or turn into a PR nightmare? Not so much.

Clearly, our "free market" isn't really free, and our regulatory and enforcement strategies are the problem.

It is a bit naïve to just blame the free market for everything wrong in the world. When I read complaints like that I wonder what "alternative" the author has in mind.

Capitalism in this sense also gave us much of the software and hardware that is praised on HN.

It is more accurate and useful to discuss which motivations, cultural shifts, or even psycological traits that have caused the decline in software quality and freedom. These are more practical than proposing mass economic realignment.

It's not about the free market per se, but rather a system that allows to turn the information asymmetry into money without consequences most of the time.

From a capitalistic POV, it's irresponsible not to exploit ("make full use of and derive benefit from") underlying economic systems, no? This is why a purely capitalist, free market economy would be a societal disaster.

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