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Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

This is just raw pessimism, you could rant like this about anything.

I hate all cars, especially my own. I hate that heavy, dangerous, gas-guzzling honda civic with an over-sensitive brake pedal and enormous, completely pointless blind spots over both shoulders. I hate filling it up with gas, which is expensive, smelly, and bad for the environment. I hate the dishes that I have to wash every day after I use them. I hate my Aeron chair that I sit in all day long. I hate peeling grapefruit. I hate the sound of my central air conditioning fan powering up. I hate how I'm either sore from working out or depressed from not working out.

There's nothing wrong with a rant now and again but let's recognize it for what it is.

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

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Software really is sort of a special case though. Most of the problems you mentioned are at least partially caused by the constraints and resources of our physical environment. However, the complexity of software is almost entirely generated by human ineptitude. The one exception might be complexity caused by necessary optimization for hardware limitations, which would in fact explain some of problems cited in the blog post.

Most of the problems I mention aren't objective. Sometimes I like washing dishes, it's relaxing. I certainly like eating from dishes. Some people like cars and like driving. It certainly saves people time. Peeling grapefruit is very satisfying and makes the room smell nice. Central air is so much nicer than setting up a fan by my window and hoping that blowing the 75 degree air from outside will cool down the 85 degree ambient temperature inside.

Blaming "human ineptitude" is pessimistic. Sure, the fact that humans can't all manipulate computational machines directly and require layers of abstraction to effectively model problems can, technically, be called ineptitude, but really-- why be so down about it? That's the way things are and there's a lot of good that comes from software if you think about it for more than 30 seconds.

> However, the complexity of software is almost entirely generated by human ineptitude.

Human ineptitude is a part of our physical environment. We're just animals. Clever ones, but not perfect.

Unix (for example) was most certainly designed around the constraints of hardware at the time.

Furthermore it is a physical limitation for how much software you can write (and have it work) if you can get something that "mostly works" by building on top of yesterday's cruft then you do it, since the alternative is starting over from scratch and not being able to finish.

Time is a constraint and mental effort is a resource of our physical environment.

> mental effort is a resource of our physical environment.

One of the more intriguing comments I've seen on HN. Care to elucidate?

I'm ignoring the argument here, but I don't think any modern(ish) car actually has any blind spots if you set up your mirrors correctly.

Chevy HHR. No matter how much I adjusted the mirrors on that beast there are spots along the sides, and directly behind, that you just aren't going to see.

You clearly haven't driven a Koenigsegg then.

You could have picked about a hundred "regular" cars to illustrate your point better and not one of the fastest and most expensive in the world.

For example my brand new Hyundai Sonata has pretty shitty rear visibility due to it's 'sleek' styling and therefore smallish rear window. I could cite many more.

And then there's all this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_visibility

It's more than the mirrors, and unless you have transparent pillars on top of the car (giving up the structural integrity of the cabin) it's going to have blind spots.

Also, most side-view mirror blind spots are caused by improper mirror positioning. If you can see the side of your car, or see the same object in both the rear view and side view mirror, you've positioned them wrong.

You should actually have them a lot farther out such that visibility in your side mirror coincides with losing rear-view visibility. That position is a lot farther out than most people think and is tricky to do the first few times.

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