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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

For kicks, try replacing "software" with "automobiles" in your paragraph.

The innards of a modern car are incomprehensible to all but "the few elite", and its interface goes a long way to hide all that complexity. I only have the vaguest idea how it works, and am perfectly happy to outsource its maintenance to professional mechanics, because all I care about is that it works.

This should apply to computers. My family love their iPads and Macs, because they abstract away all the crap they don't care about in, in favor of letting them get stuff done. It's a form of reverse snobbery to insist that no, my grandmother actually should care deeply about whether she's searching via DNS or via Google, or that my preschooler needs to understand the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

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>This should apply to computers.

No, no, a thousand times no. What happened to cars - the replacement of mechanical, inspectable, (dare I say it) hackable components with electronic black boxes was not a good thing. You used to be able to fix and replace most things in an automobile engine with parts from the local auto shop and a shop manual. No longer. Now you have to spend hundreds or thousands to get the correct electronic doohickeys to talk to the closed source, locked down, DRM'd to hell and back engine control modules. And many of the parts aren't repairable in any meaningful sense - you have to go to the dealership to get a new widget, and if your car is too old or too rare, you're just SOL and you have to buy a new car. If this is the world you want for software, I want no part of it.

Old cars: you could fix it yourself. Modern cars: rarely need fixing; also much more efficient. I know which I prefer.

> Modern cars: rarely need fixing; also much more efficient.

That really has nothing to do with what is being discussed though. The reliability and efficiency of modern cars are consequences of advances in technology and engineering, not user interface redesign.

Modern computers have also gotten... not more reliable exactly (they have, but it's not the point), but more robust against the need for manual configuration. When's the last time you had to defragment a disk, or figure out why some device in Windows Device Manager had a question mark next to it or what driver cocktail to install, or enter complicated settings to access the Internet? (Or XF86Config, for that matter...)

In other words, just like modern cars, it's not as necessary to pay attention to the innards for continued operation.

figure out why some device in Windows Device Manager had a question mark next to it or what driver cocktail to install

I did this just last week with a fresh Windows 7 installation because the drivers for the Ethernet adapter had to be manually installed...

When was the last time you thought about IRQ settings?

Is it some kind of a test? Why is knowing IRQ relevant?

I am joining many people here, who prefer having configurable tools. I do not want to configure 'IRQ' on any tool I use, but if it will misfunction, I will search for it and find out what IRQ means and how I adjust it to my needs. Worse, is being unable to change 'IRQ' when you need to, because people in charge decided it draws 95% customers away, and you are being in a 5% boat.

I don't think robustness has much to do with the need for manual configuration. Configuration is needed not (only) because users need to do troubleshooting, but also because they want to adjust and tweak their cars/computers/gadgets to their needs. The current trend is less configuration, less control in the hands of the consumer, more lock-down.

I believe hiding implementation details is part of this trend to reduce complexity (which is good) but also to wrestle control away from the user (which is bad).

Umm...

Actually, yes, it is relevant.

A large chunk of the reason behind the efficiency in particular of newer cars is the addition of those opaque black boxes. Being able to have the car's engine directly tune things according to complicated algorithms, instead of power-hungry mechanical controls, etc, etc.

Those black boxes would function just as well if they had public and standard specifications. Their opaque secrecy is not a feature.

True.

I was commenting on the black boxes, not the software contained within.

Every modern car becomes an old car.

It's fine if you want to turn over your vehicle every three years.

'Modern' cars are not fixable - even the specialists tear our their hair on some cases and give up completely.

Classics are rising steeply in value for people who want to own and understand a piece of machinery for its own sake. Much of modern automotive history will disappear into the maw of the crusher because irreplaceable, irrepairable parts render them useless.

> It's fine if you want to turn over your vehicle every three years.

more like eight years, which is not a bad deal.

Are you implying that new cars rarely need fixing and are much more efficient because they are completely closed down and harder to work on than old cars?

It's pretty obvious that is the implication... How about rather than condescension you make your counter point?

The converse: advances in automotive engineering have made cars more reliable and efficient, with the unfortunate but tolerable side effect of making them internally more complex and inaccessible.

There is this weird phenomenon I see happen online sometimes.

There have been two steps forward. Simultaneously released alongside, but not dependent on, one step backward.

So why do people defend the step backward under the guise of the steps forward.

That's not a problem with abstraction, though, that's a problem with the manufacturers.

You can have complex, highly configurable software that's still locked down, and you can have simple, abstracted software that's open source. It's not a result of the simplification of UIs.

I take your point, but I would argue that it's not comparing apples to apples. Some time ago I read the Douglas Rushkoff book Program or Be Programmed, wherein he puts forth his view (if I may paraphrase) that this last communication revolution based upon the computer is a very important one, because now we’re actually getting to the point where the tools we are creating are starting to take on the characteristics of living things and the people who program these almost-living tools will continue to take on an increasingly important role. Conversely, in the years to come those who do not at least have a basic idea of how programming is done will be at an acute disadvantage (politically, socially, financially, culturally) much like the illiterate following society’s adoption of the written word.

Potential hyperbole and the fact that Rushkoff was talking about programming more so than general computer knowledge aside, I still think there's a relevant point there. I personally feel that giving up all pretense of needing to know how my computer works would put me at a far greater disadvantage in the coming years than were I to do the same with my car. My car is very useful yes, but I don't use it to view the world, my country and its politics, my culture, my future, my finances, and make decisions based on those views.

I think literacy generally is a very good example to study to clear up some widely held misconceptions about "usability". Usability should not be about making things effortless for idiots, but about improving the overall economics of using something - and literacy is far more economical than illiteracy even though an enormous up-front investment is necessary (learning to read and write is a lot of work).

Luckily, society (mostly) seems to have recognized that in the case of literacy and essentially forces everyone through it, instead of assuming that people are morons that can not be taught anything. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about a lot of recent technological development.

Let's take the automobile analogy further.

A browser that doesn't show the exact URL of a page is like a car with a built-in GPS that doesn't show the exact location where it's at. After all, who cares about street addresses? The address is occuplied by a Starbucks and we're in Mountain View, so let's just show a Starbucks logo surrounded by a shape that vaguely looks like an outline of Mountain View. You want to go someplace else? We'll show you your destination and the series of turns you need to make to get there, but we won't show you anything else on the way.

If you think a preschooler doesn't need to know how URLs work, you are vastly underestimating the curiosity of a typical preschooler. If you show him a bar with a bunch of letters in it, he'll start typing random letters into that box to see what happens. Likewise, if you show him a detailed map of the town, he will want to explore parts that he's never been to so far. Tinkering and exploration are the foundation of every science, including computer science. Therefore, I don't think it's a good idea to discourage tinkering and exploration, whether in a car or in a browser, unless the benefits greatly outweigh the long-term costs.

With cars, the benefits are probably quite large, since complexity is exactly what makes modern cars so safe and efficient. With browsers, I'm not even sure what the benefits are supposed to be, other than the obvious financial benefit to Google. People who don't want to tinker with the URL bar will just ignore it most of the time. Also, we're talking about the desktop browser here. There are plenty of pixels to waste.

You could argue it's instead like a built-in GPS that doesn't display your exact latitude and longitude - precise information about your location that is interesting, but usually not useful, since you have to take roads/links to actually get from point A to point B.

Most URLs are human-readable enough that I think street addresses make a better analogy.

Latitude/longitude would be more like IP addresses and HTTP headers. They require some technical knowledge to use and understand, but they're still quite human-readable unlike raw GPS signals or ethernet frames.

(As an aside, most GPS units also display the altitude. I live in a mountainous region, so I often make use of this figure.)

> Most URLs are human-readable enough that I think street addresses make a better analogy.

I'd like that to be true, but I think we lost that battle a long time ago. Google results aren't a readable URL; nor are products on Amazon or Ebay or anywhere else I can think of. Newspaper-type URLs are often "fake human-readable"; the URL is something like http://somepaper.com/12345-Local-Man-Found , but in fact http://somepaper.com/12345-Local-Man-Still-Missing will give you exactly the same story. Even HN stories aren't human-readable, just an opaque id number.

I agree about Google and Amazon's long and cryptic query strings.

But I don't think "fake human-readable" URLs break the analogy with physical addresses. There are many different ways of writing the same address:

    987 Some Avenue West, Unit 123, Brooklyn, New York, NY 12345-6789
    Unit 123, 987 W. Some Ave., New York 12345
    123-987 Some Av W, NYC, NY

Some are more correct than others, and there's probably a canonical version that USPS wants everyone to use. But at the end of the day, a letter addressed to any of the above will be delivered to the same apartment. And of course all the numbers above are "opaque id numbers".

If you meant to send a letter to "The Foundry, 28 Some Street" and instead put 26, the postman would probably deliver it to the right place. Not so with these fake human-readable URLs.

And the numbers aren't just opaque identifiers (except for the zip), at least if you're walking down the street: you know that 28 is next to 26, opposite-ish 27, and halfway to 56. There's nothing that corresponds to walking along the street on a website.

You could say that, but it is an awful analogy. Since most people do not care what website they are at, and anyway they still get that info.

But Ipads and Iphones are very consumer focused, in the same way the television is (with more interactivity of course..)

With our editing and creative capabilities getting away from us..(with the keyboards/mouse as last frontiers) we are ending in the same bi-class system of the TV/Radio.. a class that creates the content, working for the monopolies of the industry.. and us only, consuming..

Thats not how the Web was supposed to be.. the idea that we can be both, independent, create novels, music, programs and publish ourselves in pure freedom .. thats what we are loosing by every move of the tech monopolists of our time..

Usability is one thing, being teached to be just a user or a consumer of something is to get back to the XX century, just with a new powerful medium..

Perhaps even the radio/TV revolution of the XX should be free back than, in our own hands.. so people could create tv and radio stations (on free frequencies of course).. but the olders missed this train

It's happening all over again, and it has something to do with this capitalistic nature in formation of big monopolies and their neurosis for controling their results, and create loyal consumers to their products.. when we accept the label of consumers, we giveup our natural right of being human beings.

Technology must create the channels, not BE the channels themselves.. i think that's the original comenter's point

I remember talking to a friend who owns a Mercedes recently and he was telling me how he had to take his car into the shop and they gave him a fancy loaner (an ML 63, IIRC). He talked about all the cool gadgetry in there like blind-spot monitors, side rear view mirror wipers, and such.

He also mentioned that the cars are pretty much impossible to work on on your own since you need to have the right diagnostic equipment, as opposed to a car one might have bought 15-20 years ago, where a good manual was all that you needed to get into the thick of it.

While I agree that knowledge of the inner functioning should not be required for using a product, I think that it would be nice if there was some sort of effort made to allow one to poke inside. I am guessing that with Chrome there will be some sort of setting that you can use to undo this change (I use Firefox, and rarely, but occasionally, use the about:config tool).

This concept is something I've been playing out in my mind and that I'm starting to explore in my programming. A simple interface that "doesn't make me think" (me being the user), and a well-tucked-away "Advanced" button that, having given the proper warnings, allows the user to poke around on the inside.

> and a well-tucked-away "Advanced" button that, having given the proper warnings, allows the user to poke around on the inside.

I simply don't understand that this point, which is bloody obvious, is completely lost on the so many UI (re)designers. I don't mind you simplify (and most of the time thats all we need) but what is the point behind cutting-off all access for good for those who wish to tinker?

For example in the recent Firefox 29 release, the add-on bar has been taken out. They might argue most of the people don't care about it and even though I disagree (I spent 20 minutes trying to put FoxyClocks (to display world time) everywhere else and it simply didn't fit), its ok as long as you put an option in the Preferences to turn it back on (I ended up doing that via installing an extension/add-on). I don't even mind if you turn the option off by default. It is incredibly frustrating to see the designers think that their way is the only way and their use case is the sole case.

Sorry to hijack your point but I suppose you made it well enough to elicit a rant.

Shifting the add-on bar to an extension is the right way for Firefox to head. The core product is simplified, removing something that a very small fraction of its target audience want, and the feature is shifted into an extension. You can still have it, but it’s shifted out of the core. The maintenance burden is then shifted from its being something that might be accidentally broken in the core product to a separate extension that can focus on that one feature, and do it better.

A browser doesn't have much in terms of visible elements, (excluding the main display area) beyond the various toolbars and buttons on them.

If we start considering even those as optional, where does the simplification end? Then why don't we take out the bookmark bar, navigation bar, menu bar, status bar etc and attain supreme simplification by displaying a single text field which should lead to search. Surely the user can search for add-ons from that field and get whatever they want. It'll have the side benefit of helping users attain UI nirvana as well.

>why don't we take out the bookmark bar

Go for it, show bookmarks on the new tab page.

>navigation bar

It could certainly stand to be shrunk at the very least.

>menu bar

Yes please, I have my browser configured to no menu bar, saves a nice bit of space.

>status bar

There's a popup when I hover a URL and otherwise I get to save space.

More on point, the add-on bar was a dumb idea and behaved weirdly. Good riddance. While a built-in real status bar would be nice, an extension to provide one is pretty good too.

A car has a simple goal: get you from one place to another. A computer does not. It's a general purpose tool that is near infinite in scope and possibility. The analogy is a complete failure.

For most people, "A to B" means getting stuff done, not hacking around with the system.

So they won't care about the technology stack, as long as that spreadsheet, text document, 3D image, .... can be edited, saved and printed or a game played.

Glad you put spreadsheet in that list. "Spreadsheet" is also programming, just one form of programming that by accident of history made it to "things users do".

Advanced reactive programming for mission critical computational task!

A car has that simple goal of A/B movement....for you. Plenty of other people want to hack with their general purpose mobility machine infinite in scope and possibility.

I think the stakes are really higher with a computer than a car. We use computers to communicate and transact with others. It's a tool for us to learn and acquire skills, connect, trade in business etc. It has almost become an accessory for the human brain. So it's important that users remain in control of their devices, can learn how they work and not be dependent on a few chosen ones.

I don't know man, an elevator, escalator, and moving walkway, all have the same purpose of getting you from one place to another - a car is infinitely more capable than all of these and does a whole lot of other manoeuvring and functions (storage, transportation, etc), to the point of requiring actual education and in fact literal adulthood just to drive. To say nothing of all the other functions in a car from radio to full electrical system, towing, etc.

You can call the function of a car "simple" and a computer infinite in scope, but a twelve year old is allowed to use the latter but not the former. This implies the scope (for mischief) is in some sense far narrower with the computer...

I do get what you're saying of course. But I feel like in the past decade or so we've moved past the car analogy :)

Usability is important, but so is the option to expose how something works under the hood to those that desire the knowledge. Computers are too important for humanity's progress to turn them into consumption-only appliances. Over-simplifying and locking everything down will deprive us of many future inventors.

Since this is getting misinterpreted: I'm not saying software (or computers) should be locked down, DRM'd to death and hidden. I'm saying that hiding complexity that does not serve the average user is desirable, and browsers are going down the same path now that cars did a hundred years ago.

So for this specific case, if Chrome wants to hide URLs, go for it; and I'm sure there's a configuration toggle somewhere to turn them back on if you're one of those people who care.

Yes, yes, logical thinking, I even agree with it.

But imagine this happening, average users will become fully IT illiterate. Growing children will no longer know anything about computers, as they grew up in an environment where everything is hidden from them for sake of simplicity.

What will happen, after our generation(s) all get old, and the growned up illiterate children take place of improving world's technology?

There will always be curious people, and relatively inexpensive ways to get access to the inside of things, and large communities of people supporting each other in this endeavor. Yesterday's Commodore 64 game pirate is today's Minecraft modder or iOS jail breaker with Cydia.

We might have an engineering shortage in future ( we do already ), but it will be for many factors , not just lack of opportunities to tinker. If it isn't addressed, we will go long periods of time without nice things (think of the relative stagnation of the web from 2000 to 2008).

No one who is indifferent to URLs has had to pay much attention to them for most of the last 20 years. The UI change discussed here doesn't bring any positive change on that front.

Being able to attend to URLs offers significant utility to a portion of users, though, and this UI change takes that away.

You and your family don't want to think about URLs? Fine. Nobody's asking you to.

But they might ask you to apply that ostensible concern for other people's use patterns a little more broadly.

The user interface with cars is more complex than it used to be. Not just gears, pedals, and a wheel. You now have an entertainment centre, adjustable seats, reversing camera, so on and so forth. Driving is more complicated with more road rules, longer commutes, and a larger culture to absorb. So if the public can deal with an increasing complexity in vehicles, why can't they deal with staying at the same complexity with software, given your analogy?

Not knowing the innards of such a car has nothing to do with the UI - just the same as the people complaining about the change in UI don't need to know the innards of the browser: the source code.

And no, your preschooler isn't in need of understanding the difference between http/s, but sticking with your analogy, your preschooler also isn't driving. Maybe playing with a toy car instead, but not the full monty.

> The innards of a modern car are incomprehensible to all but "the few elite", and its interface goes a long way to hide all that complexity. I only have the vaguest idea how it works, and am perfectly happy to outsource its maintenance to professional mechanics, because all I care about is that it works.

This makes the same false assumption about the world when applied to computers: The world does not exist of a binary-human type: people who are experts and people who are not.

I own a 28-year old Volkswagen van. It is completely hackable: the only electronics are three relais. But I don't hack it all by myself. I still, gladly drop it at the local garage to get something fixed. I can stop in nearly any town at the local garage and get stuff replaced, fixed or solved. I've had a waterpump fixed in Germany, my brakes replaced in Sweden, the battery replaced in France and so on.

And that is where the importance of hackability comes into play. Not the fact that /I/, myself can open up a browser or tweak it, but the fact that someone in my proximity can. Instead of having to ship my Macbook-pro to the US to get a fan replaced, my local fixit-guy can open my Thinkpad and replace the fan. Instead of having your computerized and closed-down car towed to the nearest official BMW-garage, I can drop my car at any place where they have a set of screwdrivers and some nuts and bolts and have it fixed.

Cars are physical objects that are difficult and expensive to reconfigure. This is not the case of software.

My smartphone has a "simple" mode that people can activate for their hypothetical "computer illiterate grandmothers". The option to enable it is even presented to the user during initial setup, so people who feel intimidated by their phone can enable it themselves right out of the box. However other users are not forced to use the interface optimized for the computer illiterate.

> For kicks, try replacing "software" with "automobiles" in your paragraph... This should apply to computers.

A very bad analogy.

Auto drivers don't have be concerned about phishing attempts. Nobody sneaks into your garage and replaces your 2009 Toyota Camry with a near perfect duplicate that's wired up with snooping and tracking devices in order to steal your identity, bank accounts, logins, etc.

After 20 years educating the public on what URLs are and how they work we're going up and change things around just to appease the "senior citizen / soccer mom" stereotype. Bad idea. How about we design software for the next generation of tech savvy kids instead of 75 year old senior citizens who still haven't figured out how to use a computer mouse no matter how many times they've been shown?

Also one last point. The software UI was the abstraction of the hardware. We don't need to further abstract the abstraction.

Making cars (and computers) more difficult to work on makes changes more expensive even if you rely on an expert. It cost $400 to replace the battery in my Mini Cooper because it's a huge pain. I would have done it myself and saved $300 except - it's a huge pain. See the problem? Having an easier car to work on also benefits people who depend on experts.

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