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Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

in pro audio equipment, there is often a flashy colored button on the panel, unmarked, that the documentation call the "client button". it does absolutely nothing, and the manufacturer suggest you press it when the client is annoying you for "more weight" or "more color" or some other nonsense.

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This is brilliant, reminds me of the story I heard of how Michelangelo was working on a statue, might have been the David, and the patron walked in and said something along the lines of, "Looks good, but the nose is a little big, can you make it a little smaller?".

Michelangelo knew the nose was just right, so he grabbed a handful of marble dust, went up to the face and pretended to chisel it while slowly letting out his handful of dust.

When he was done, the patron said, "There! It's perfect."

Really wish I had had a button like that back when I was doing audio production.

Sounds like a "duck" in programming parlance:

http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

acts_as_enterprisey gives you a similar effect for Rails.

https://github.com/airblade/acts_as_enterprisey

Was it because he couldn't tell, or because he didn't want to push on the issue?

Couldn't tell.

See bikeshedding. People just want to feel like they contributed something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_trivialit...

Interesting article. In my experience, the converse is often true: Engineers want to solve the difficult issues, while the more trivial get relatively little attention and end up causing most of the issues.

This fake button digital nonsense does nothing for me; I need that fake knob analog placebo effect!

It sounds crazy but most sound engineers have accidentally done this to themselves. You tweak a knob, hear the difference, and then noticing the whole channel was muted and wonder what it was that you just heard change.

The alarming thing is how that can happen to you over and over and you still you're SURE you'd never fall for it.

Not to dismiss what you're saying, but in this case the 'client button' is for tricking the annoying client into thinking you're making a change when you've really done nothing.

This is kind of the same idea as throwing in a duck[1] or hairy arms[2]:

1: http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ 2: http://www.oliverburkeman.com/blog/posts/the-theory-of-the-h...

Digital placebo can work.

I was once debugging some issue with my laptop's multimedia buttons driver. I found some tweak which helped: enable the tweak, reboot - works fine, disable tweak, reboot - no go. Tested repeatedly several times.

I filed a bug report and received an answer that my tweak absolutely cannot work. The tweak was disabled at the time and the button didn't work. I pressed it again after reading this email and boom - it works.

I swear.

I figure my mind must have been believing so much in futility of pressing this button that it didn't even bother pushing it all the way down. Scary stuff.

I heard a minor variation of that, in which the button just kicked the playback volume up, exploiting the effect that louder music often feels "better".

Hmm. Could you please give a reference? Couldn't come up with results on Google...

A different approach I've seen is often referred to as "hairy arms".

It's not the same as a placebo or client button but it addresses the issue of people who would otherwise diminish a project through nitpicking and wanting to put their own touch on everything.

The idea came from animation (Disney, I believe) where the art directors were always asking the artists to make changes just to feel like they had some input and control. The animators started adding hair on the arms of the characters as an obvious thing the directors could latch onto and demand the artists modify. The artists didn't want the hairy arms to begin with but it was a way to keep the directors from screwing up something "important" just so they could feel special.

Do you have any examples of this? My dad owns a recording studio and I've joked with him about turning up the "silver knob" which doesn't exist. Kind of an inside joke, but never seen anything like you're talking about. Certainly haven't seen it "often".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button

This link had three examples, none of which had anything to do with audio equipment.

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