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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn't even touch on the main pain point: bugs. Virtually all software is just as buggy as can be. I dread every time I need to take a piece of software down a non-happy/non-common path. It almost always fails. Working around and dealing with bugs is just a normal, every day part of modern society now.

Simple example, I sold my car to Carvana the other day and just baaaarely pulled it off using Chrome and Firefox. In Chrome the upload image wizard would get a JS exception. That part of the app miraculously worked in FF, but virtually the entire rest of the site was mired in issues as it's obvious Carvana devs don't test in FF. I pulled off the transaction by bouncing between the two.

Even worse, most non-technical people think they did something wrong when they encounter a bug.

Software that is bloated and slow but stable and rock solid? I'd gladly take it at this point.

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On one hand I cannot believe what we have actually works as well as it does. Duct tape and bubblegum everywhere at all levels and it actually still works. I’m amazed everyday at what humanity has accomplished with that in mind. On the other hand I can’t help but notice just how damn buggy everything is, and I’m not sure if everything is actually more buggy or if I’m just losing patience with big business software development as I age having seen how the sausage is made. I can’t help being angry at some illusory product person telling people to ship feature X or else with it having a glaring bug in the UX that is easily caught.

The vast majority of humanity has always run on duct tape and bubblegum. :)

There are still computer systems designed with high reliability and accuracy. See flight control systems.

New technology typically doesn't work on duct tape and bubblegum. So it has to be good. Current technology is going to be just right enough to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_tape

It can be hard to tell what is "duct tape" and what is "speed tape" in software these days. An aircraft mechanic doesn't need to know the structural differences between the two - just use speed tape to be safe. Similarly, a pure programmer doesn't have to know the difference between ufw and Windows Firewall - just use the latter and move on.

However, an engineer (mechanical or software) better understand the differences in both situations

You're 100% right. Ever since watching the Jonathan Blow talk on the end of the world I have started paying attention to it and it's amazing how many absolutely shitty software experiences we just accept on the daily.

I understand all the points about financial costs and opportunity costs and pragmatism and the rest, and I partially agree with it, but it's hard not to sometimes feel like we've accepted living in a half built world.

Agreed. I remember as a teenager when the first generation Macbook Airs came out, my friend realized you could reliably crash them (brand new, the demo models sitting out at the mac store) just by opening all the apps on the dock in quick succession. Took just a few seconds of clicking and the machine would crash and reboot.

And it's not like things have gotten any better, now I'm an adult with young children and if one of them gets their hands on my phone or laptop, they seem to be just as reliably be able to lock up, crash, freeze modern devices all the same. These kids are not physically damaging the phone in any way, they're just pushing buttons too quickly or in unexpected orders. That's the state of modern tech that we're in.

To be honest, I can understand why this hasn't been fixed. As mentioned in the article and throughout these comments, we've just come to expect to need to restart every now and again. In this case, people are likely to blame such a problem on the child, and a restart fixes the issue anyway. I just would've hoped for better by now in the lifecycle of these operating systems.

https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/

I don't think software is anywhere near as buggy as it was in the past. Some of us had to support Windows machines in the late 90s and early 2000s.

That may be true. But software is also much more ubiquitous and essential these days. At least in the 90s you could be confident your car wasn't buggy.

Yeah, and I shit you not, many vehicles have had software updates to solve oil consumption issues. People walk away from those service encounters just shaking their head wondering how in the fuck software was causing their car to lose/burn oil. Truth is, several different reasons.

The number of vehicle software updates are staggering.

American cars in the 90s were terrible. The domestic automakers wouldn't be in business today if people actually bought based on reliability. Now you can buy almost any brand and reasonably expect it to last over 100k miles.

Sure, but that had very little to do with software.

When the networking stack got worked out by Windows 98, everything was pretty smooth sailing. Until the drive-bys started. Then we moved to Windows NT and complexity, and albeit security, increased significantly. Windows XP was stable as fuck until the root kits started flowing. We moved through Vista, hopefully avoiding it all together until we landed at the fucking dream that was Windows 7. I would have stopped right there and been happy.

Then something got pushed over the cliff. Windows 10 and the UWP...like seriously WTF!? Satan's very own dumpster fire.

But if the software keeps getting modified and expanded it will not be stable. Bugs will be added. And that also causes bloat. I think they go very much hand in hand (and very much correlates with the frequency of upgrades... usually upgrades that no user asked for anyway).

Not sure I agree with that. It's possible to add new features with minimal or even no bugs. It requires good engineering, good test coverage, and often good manual QA and even alpha/beta rounds. But it can be done. Is it done today? Sure, some organizations absolutely follow this approach. I would guess, especially in the commercial space, these things are often lacking.

Heck, half the time even the happy path is bug filled.

The upload wizard wasn't an adblock problem? Anecdotally, I have encountered several cases where that has been the issue.

Not testing on Firefox just makes sense given how niche it has become. Not worth the effort to go beyond Chromium.

I disabled my ad blocker and cleared out all caches and it still persisted. Even if it was, the JS exception was unhandled. Carvana is built in React, the absolute bare minimum would be an ErrorBoundary at the top of all flows (in this case, a modal).

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