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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

> Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past

The user experience of an ATM has certainly declined over the decades. Monochrome screens with 2 columns of buttons were the pinnacle. But the uselessness of today's ATMs doesn't fall on the software developers, except indirectly. It isn't their fault that the product people wanted it to be the way it is now. If good software engineers refuse to implement bad ideas, the thinkers of the bad idea will simply reach deeper into the barrel to find someone desperate enough to do the job, and the result will be commensurate with this process.

That said I generally agree with your point. The lazy article fails to establish the premise.

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I don't think I ever saw a monochrome ATM that could deposit checks. Letting me choose what denominations I want also seems to be a more recent development. IMO the ATMs now are better than 10 or especially 20 years ago in those ways.

Games-wise, KOTOR2 has to be one of the leading contenders for bad release quality - 20 years old.

We had ATMs that could take deposits in the 1970s, and machines that accepted checks without deposit slips appeared in the mid-1980s. The only thing we gained in ATM technology in the last 30 years is laggy touchscreens and waiting forever for the transaction to finish.

This one near me prompts (1 of 4 before the transaction) if I want the balance printed on the receipt. I select No. Balance is printed on receipt.

At least KOTOR2 was salvaged with the TSLRCM mod, one of the best stories for a video game ever, and certainly the best story to come out of the entire Star Wars franchise...

There is one big improvement - now ATMs force you to remove your card before they dispense cash. The problem of people forgetting cards in ATMs was completely eliminated due to improved UX design.

I'm not sure how it was before 10 years ago, but in the past ~5 years my banking app has become far worse and less secure objectively. Specifically, since they moved from a hardware auth token to a digital token on a mobile app. Consumers lost Millions of dollars past year alone. The situation was so bad that this year govt passed a new law holding banks partially responsible for such scams. The attackers succeeded in emptying entire bank accounts despite multi-factor authentication (all of which depended on the mobile phone), transfer limits, etc,. "Technologists", of course, blamed the consumers for downloading untrusted apps. They also went as far as to say that Android is less secure than iOS because it's open source.

I don't know how many different ways you have tried to communicate with your bank, but in my personal experience a bank will transfer money any way you want if you send your request by fax. The fact that one platform has 2FA doesn't seems to solve a real systematic problem. And of course there's the whole ACH system on which the level of authentication is "none".

But how else are you going to be tempted by their excellent mortgage rates?

Undoubtedly this is what the product manager was thinking.

The funny thing is we now have an extremely excellent way to dispense money. It should be possible for me to unlock my phone, enter the amount of cash I want, be directed to the nearest ATM, and just tap that phone on the ATM when I get there and the money comes flying out instantly. We now have technology way beyond what anyone could have imagined in the 1960s, but we aren't exploiting it. The closest we've got is using a mobile phone as a tap card on an ATM, then you continue with the ATM's terrible UI, which is like using 1% of the abilities of the platform.

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