People Start Noticing That The Web Competes With iPad Apps - <AUTHOR> http://techdirt.com/articles/20100513/1513039419.shtml <comment><USER2> Hmm. Wouldn't it be great if the whole nasty 3.3.1 business turned out to be a moot point, because web apps were what mattered?

People who work on browsers and libraries for them are in a position to make this happen if they want-- to make the Web win as the platform even if the iPad wins as the device. All you have to do is make _other_ browsers fabulously powerful for web apps. If there start to be a lot of things you can do on e.g. Chrome that you can't do on Safari, Safari will be pushed to follow suit.

In fact maybe it will be Chrome and not Android that saves us from Apple's locked-down future. It's certainly a more straightforward problem. Android can only win through partnerships with handset makers, while Chrome can evolve at its own rate.

<comment><USER3> seems a pretty obvious outcome, but only for apps/webapps that are content- oriented, not for apps that actually use custom mobile device hardware. like gps, sms, multitouch.

in the meantime, my android browser doesn't seem to be caching websites aggressively enough, because it seems to take up to several seconds to load the (few) bookmarks i have. so native content-oriented apps are faster, for now.

<comment><USER4> There are certainly features that are better suited for native apps, but the ones you stated aren't necessarily them. For example, GPS is doable on both Android and iPhone OS. Multitouch is also doable (check out Google Maps on the web on iPhone for an example here).

Accelerometer, native graphics, etc are the key features I think about that are not well suited for web apps.

My startup, AppStoreHQ (<http://www.appstorehq.com>), is a huge believer of mobile web apps, and we even have a private alpha going on for monetizing your mobile web app (check out an example like fortysquires: <http://fortysquires.com> ).

<comment><USER5> Another example of multi-touch is Naughts and Crosses, one of the two demos I made for the iGesture jQuery plugin:

<http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture>

After drawing some naughts and crosses, you can rotate the board by placing two fingers on the screen and rotating them 45 degrees or more.

It's all Javascript and jQuery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This brings into focus one of the App Store's main advantages-- a micropayment platform that users have actually adopted in large numbers.

The only reason that media companies need fear cannibalizing app sales is that people have become accustomed to paying for Apps (even apps that are 99% content) but not paying for web sites.

Imagine for a second if Apple rolled out the ability to pay for anything on the web (that made it past a review process-- ha!) with your iTunes Store account?

Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some serious traction).

See also my previous comment on this topic:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498>

<comment><USER7> > Either Apple needs to extend their payment system out into the rest of the > web, or the media companies need to band together hulu-like and establish > their own payment system (or some micropayment startup needs to get some > serious traction).

Amazon. I already have an Amazon account. Allow everyone else to tap into that for micropayments.

I'm not going to sign up for some new micropayment system unless I have to. And anything that resembles PayPal will send me running the other way.

<comment><USER8> Checkout by Amazon, Amazon Simple Pay, Amazon Flexible Payments Service <https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/index.htm>

...and yet, people don't run to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this a bit of a complacency issue? To compete with the web, you're going to have to create an experience that's significantly better than the web. I get the feeling most content providers want to rehash the same thing in a different way, and hopefully be able to charge for it this time around.

Then again, maybe they're paralyzed with fear and have reached the end of the creativity road... I just can't imagine there isn't innovation to be done in this area.

</comment><comment><USER10> Just wait for the latest version of jQTouch. It'll have iPad support so after few hours of hacking you can make your website look "native" on iPad. Can't wait!

<comment><USER11> Off topic: I tried visiting the jQtouch site on the iPad - the demo video uses Flash ;) Found it at least a bit amusing :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of when Sony Records sued the MP3 portal Launch.com earlier this decade, even though Sony had been a part owner of Launch.com for more than a year at that point. I wonder when a similar folding-onto-itself might occur here.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love web apps, but...

can you monetize them as easy as the AppStore?

<comment><USER14> I'm guessing there are not all that many applications on the AppStore that sold 3,000 copies at $30 each. That isn't really a stratospheric level of success on the open Internet. Trust me.</comment></comment>


libtap - Testing library for C, implementing the Test Anything Protocol. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pozorvlak/libtap

<comment><USER2> This looks great, thanks for submitting! I've recently been working on a little C project and wondering how to test it. I'd been running little ad-hoc tests in the main() of each of my .c's, but that was getting unwieldy.

Be sure not to skip the link[1] at the top of the github page! It shows how to use the library. I clicked the "Read More" but not the link, and then was confused as to how to use this.

[1] <http://jc.ngo.org.uk/trac-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/LibTap>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using another C TAP library for a project for a few months now, but I think I'll switch to this since it has fewer dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's already a bazillion C unit testing libraries, how is this any different?

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > There's already a bazillion C unit testing libraries, ...

Do you know of any comprehensive list? I'd love to see a comparison.

      > ... how is this any different?

In this case, it's short, clean, and written by someone I know and whose code I trust.

<comment><USER5> Here's a list I found a couple weeks ago:

<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/65820/unit-testing-c-code>

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool - thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


5 types of programmers - <AUTHOR> http://stevenbenner.com/2010/07/the-5-types-of-programmers/

<comment><USER2> I am an Anti-Programming Perfectionist Programmer. Why should I write code that already exists, and has been developed on for years? I use other people's code then fit it in perfectly with whatever I'm working on.</comment>


Living online, with web apps - <AUTHOR> http://fortuito.us/2007/04/living_online_with_web_apps <comment><USER2> Ug. That band at the bottom of the page is intolerable...

<comment><AUTHOR> But it's "cutting edge" design (in a salute to disco sort of way) and probably will look like your best set of flairs and loose open shirts in a couple of years. My list for cutting edge design this year and last is:

\- large fonts (because the rest of the text is 8pt italics)

\- fading text (more is less, but fade so there is less)

\- minimalism sans menu (so I can't find my way around)

\- excessive js (slows down browser for longer reading time)

\- bright pastel colours (so the message burns into your eyes)

\- link to 'foo' (because everyone needs to read it)

\- rounded corners (we tried with html, we can use the images as beacons)

\- hard to read names (if it's hard you'll learn it... forever)

\- non-iconic icons (because every image can be an icon)

\- date dice (Y2k proof MMM, NN in a box)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No concerns about inaccessible data, or security, or back ups. or vendor lock- in?</comment>


Are science fiction/fantasy writers insane? - <AUTHOR> http://www.keepingthedoor.com/2009/08/10/are-science-fictionfantasy-writers-insane/

<comment><USER2> I think the author of this article is insane.

 _In Stranger in a Strange Land, perhaps Heinlein's most famous work, he pre- empted or_ perhaps even caused _much of the sexual enfranchisement of the 1960's and 1970's [...]_

</comment><comment><USER3> _When it comes to sci-fi/fantasy writers, I feel their ability to envision speculative worlds heightens their ability to impartially observe their own reality._

This is crucial. In order to get distance from the assumptions that govern our modern lives, and why they do or don't work.

Expanding the possibility space gives you the perspective to see how you fit into the universe.

<comment><USER4> While I agree that this is the ideal, I don't know that this is always what happens. I think its dangerous to make conclusions about sci-fi/fantasy writers based on some of the best in the genre. I'm not very widely read outside the best, but I wonder if most sci-fi/fantasy writers do use their expanded world as a way to look at ours (as opposed to just creating a "cool" world full of magic and fun technology).

<comment><USER5> I think I'd prefer well written fantasy/sci-fi that is not an allegory of sorts, than a story that is dead obviously a reflection on today's society. My favourite Star Trek episodes are the least moralizing ones.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough. What I was really trying to get across is my hesitation to take conclusions from the best/most well known series and apply them to the genre in general.

But I'm curious to know which ones are your favorites. A lot of Star Trek is at least to some degree moralizing - often about accepting other cultures (although sometimes its more obvious than others).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If there is anything that helps for inspiration when looking for new stuff to do it is near future science fiction.

Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and lots of others give you these nice little ideas that are _just_ a little bit into the future, some of it is within reach if you try hard enough.

Maybe not quite the way they see it but still, plenty of hooks to hang a new project off.

</comment><comment><USER7> No, but it helps.

Spec fiction authors are thinking ahead and pondering how things might be - based on to some extent how things are now. You don't have to be barmy, but as the author suggests, you have to think differently - which of course can be mistaken.

</comment><comment><USER8> the quoted author is simply describing meta cognition. I think some intelligent people would be shocked to know just how infrequently most people engage in it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Excellent article. I like how the author's head turned to Star Wars at the face of death lol. I wonder if there's any similar kind of deviant thinking among hackers.</comment>


Have Software Developers Given Up? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dantup.com/2016/04/have-software-developers-given-up/ <comment><USER5> We haven't given up, there is simply not enough financial incentive to make the software any better. See 'We Could Write Nearly Perfect Software but We Choose Not to' [https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/sapm/2014/03/14/we-could-write- nea...](https://blog.inf.ed.ac.uk/sapm/2014/03/14/we-could-write-nearly- perfect-software-but-we-choose-not-to/) "The simple truth is that bug–free on- time software is just more expensive than we (or our clients) are prepared to pay."

<comment><USER6> Is there some reason to believe that with enough money software could be bug- free? Developers are often guilty of just refactoring for no particularly good reason other than their personal sense of aesthetic, which can lead to endless (and destructive) refactoring. More money also makes people design lazy, so that instead of finding clever ways to reduce effort and improve uniformity, you just have everyone make their own forms.

<comment><USER7> There is. See the space shuttle software.

[http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right- stuff](http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff)

<comment><USER8> It isn't a practical solution for the majority of software out there. I also think that while their method works, it is pretty archaic. Looking to the future I hope we can find a way to achieve the level of results they do, without the ridiculous effort and cost.

<comment><USER9> > Looking to the future I hope we can find a way to achieve the level of > results they do, without the ridiculous effort and cost.

That is unlikely. For computational complexity theory reasons, writing correct software is _extremely_ computationally expensive (regardless of whether or not the language is Turing complete). In fact, it is "the hardest problem in computer science", in the sense that any problem with bounded complexity can be efficiently reduced to software verification. Even verifying finite-state- machines (the simplest computational model) is PSPACE-hard.

What we _can_ do is find many ad hoc ways, each helping to some extent with some kinds of correctness properties.

<comment><USER8> Most software problems I encounter in the real world ARE of bounded complexity, and they can be reduced to software verification. But this is still a very tedious process and there are significant gains to be had by making this more accessible without having to solve the hardest problem in computer science.

<comment><USER9> Certainly. It's just that there cannot be one (or a few) advances that would make writing correct programs generally easy. We can concentrate on domains (in the safety-critical embedded world this is almost a solved problem for some kinds of applications thanks to the invention of synchronous languages in the '80s, that make formal verification relatively efficient). We can also address some "internal" properties, like memory safety and transactions, that on the whole might make writing correct programs easier (though not provably correct).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see what you mean and am often equally frustrated, but you know what this reminds me of? The state of infrastructure in a booming underdeveloped country, which is a good thing. Let me explain it a bit further.

Have you tried hiring a programmer lately? It is very hard, there is a huge demand and most programmers I know receive several offers a month. The demand for software is CRAZY. So we all do what we can: quick and dirty when it is good enough. Just like in a country with no roads, any dirt road and crappy pavement is better than nothing if you have hundreds of trucks that need to go through RIGHT NOW.

So here it is, websites are made hastily, tech half work, but are better than nothing. How much of the things you screencaped have more than 5 years of existence? Like you said, we are software developers. We write software and we write bugs. Right now, there is far more need to implement new features than to correct bugs. Hopefully it will change at one point but right now this is the crazy race forward, and that is a good thing!

<comment><USER11> > most programmers I know receive several offers a month

:'|

Could you take a look at how they're receiving offers and perhaps put some suggestions together on how to duplicate that effect? Most programmers I know have had extreme difficulty getting a job, especially one that would pay at- or-above the average rate (per Glassdoor).

<comment><USER12> Programmers can do very well by becoming contributors to high profile open source projects and standards committees. Post pull requests on github, write tech articles, answer tech questions on reddit and hacker news, and do it under your own name. Register yourname.com and put your resume there. Essentially, make a name for yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.

<comment><USER13> Can you think of any other profession that does anything like this? No doctors or lawyers or accountants or civil engineers or pastry chefs find work by posting on Reddit.

And besides, that is very specific to web jobs. There's an awful lot more to the industry besides.

<comment><USER14> > Can you think of any other profession that does anything like this?

Photographers, graphic designers and musicians.

<comment> nommm-nommm Photographers, graphic designers, and musicians are expected to work for free in order to get hired?

<comment><USER15> Aren't they? I don't know much about musicians, but graphic designers are expected to bring their portfolio with them to the interview. There's no interview at all without the portfolio... and you're not always lucky enough to have all your best works paid for by someone, especially if you're just starting.

EDIT: and, come to think of it, don't musicians need to practice for a long time before even getting a chance to perform for pay?

<comment><USER12> They sure do, and they often play for years for free in the hope of building a brand and being discovered. Like The Beatles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember what software, and the internet, used to be like 20 years ago. My user-experience, and expectations, has increased in almost every way imaginable during this time. From a 10,000 foot view, I'm extremely pleased with the way things have changed in the past 2 decades.

To answer your question with a question of my own: If you think that software/service X sucks, why not see this as an opportunity to do something about it? If X really does suck, and if the reason X sucks is because it's being designed/managed all wrong, you could make a ton of money for yourself by building a company around building a better X which doesn't suck. Build an alternative that prioritizes reliability over agile/fast-releases/new-feature- rollout, or whatever you think the problem is.

If you're right, if users genuinely care so much about reliability, if reliability is important enough to sacrifice feature-experimentation, time-to- market and development-costs, then you should be able to achieve great market success and win over the current unreliable dinosaurs. More generally, some other company/startup that espouses the above reliability-centered philosophy should be able to enter the market and start dominating it.

The fact that neither you, nor anyone else, has killed off the companies/services/products that you're complaining about, leads me to suspect that users in general are willing to give up some reliability, in exchange for other benefits like low price and novel features. I know I certainly do.

<comment><USER17> > users in general

Blaming users is part of the problem. Yes, they vote with their wallet, but their vote is usually made in ignorance and is often mislead by companies that are so used to dissembling and exaggerating they call such antisocial behavior "best practice".

That said, it _is_ true that this is largely a problem with the economic incentives. Capitalism optimizes for businesses that are financially efficient, so the business that sells the lowest quality product they can get away with is "successful". This becomes even worse in software, where quality is harder to see directly. Even the people that write software can have a hard time evaluating "quality".

The solution for this situation is simple, but it's basically taboo to talk about it: _liability_. If you sell software, you need to be _liable_ for any damage it causes when "used normally". For a decent sketch of how this might look, see Dan Geer's explanation[1]. There may be other ways to implement liability. I suggest that the software industry should find a way to implement this as soon as possible, if they want any say in what "liability" means.

Yes, this will raise development costs; spending more for better development practices was the _goal_.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT- TGvYOBpI#t=1531](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI#t=1531)

<comment><USER18> Software companies are sued all the time for damages.

<comment><USER19> Do you have any citations for this?

Even sites who clearly deliver _malware_ through their ad network don't get sued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What I do in this "war" is constantly reminding and educating my coworkers that they should care more and also teaching them HOW they can do that.

I had already several very hard and harsh fights with my bosses, even with the CEO telling them "everyone is not very good at this company" because I care about quality very much and rather fight over it than sit quietly and just produce shit.

I gave "talks" about specific topics, constantly grab the opportunity when I can tell them about a new concept, Clean Code, better tools, whatever. I introduced TDD, CI, automatic deployments, will introduce CD next month over a year I have been working at my current company.

If you are one of the better developers you can and should fight against lazyness and low quality, even teach the ones who cares/know less.

Also it's very comfortable to blame your boss, but you can do very much about this. I introduced automated testing not because they asked me for it, but because I thought is important. I educated them that this way, development will take a bit longer, but will be higher quality. You can even do things which improves quality and they don't even know about. My next step is to introduce third party services (which they never used before and always went with the open source or cheap solutions) which makes our work easier, so we can focus on what's important, and make it better.

<comment><USER17> > If you are one of the better developers you can and should fight against > lazyness and low quality

This can be thought of as a type of error correction. If you don't fix problems as they rise up the chain of command, those problems eventually become policy.

[http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html](http://ogun.stanford.edu/~bnayfeh/plan.html)

(mild language warning, of the form "____ happens")

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just spent half a week with the following... I re-joined as a contractor in a new role at (big corporation), I arrived my first day (only gone a couple weeks), was able to pick up my security badge (no problem), issued laptop, bag an accessories, no problem..

AD login was written down, missing the last character that was there before, tried as it was, finally tried with the missing character, still no go... three calls to cusomer support later, disconnect ethernet, and able to login with secure wifi.

Able to login, setup a couple things... hmmm, no access... Told my email address was now a different one, ask about original email address. No bueno... wait a day, call back (still waiting on response from original issue), decide I can't wait, needed to get in. No email access, no lync.

Finally get a call from email support the next day (weds), but it's 7:30pm and I'm out to dinner, didn't recognize the number, sent to vmail... the issue was that I _had no email_ , the message on the voicemail said "email me", no callback number, no email address, how the hell was I supposed to email them.

Two days later, I come in, I'm able to send mail, but not receive... there were somehow two email addresses configured. After the weekend, I'm finally able to send and receive, but now have a 3rd email address, and have to manually fix my profile in a bunch of internal services that were auto- populated at first login. Not to mention a VP in another division (with the same name) getting a bunch of email meant for me, because my email was fubar'd.

It isn't just software, it's entire processes. I basically sat for a week, twiddling my thumbs (mostly), because I couldn't communicate... still waiting on access to our ticket tracking system (was told to wait until I had email and lync).

I'd cry if it weren't so funny.

</comment><comment><USER22> Coder are soldiers paid to do a job. If the army fails, blame the generals that totally do not care about quality and will prefer to pay dozens of obedient coders lower and lower that do not care than be eventually facing opposition based on concern in quality.

Most over heard arguments before standing up: hey, we don't have a choice, there are all these companies competing with us doing the same. The other arguments for not caring about quality is : not having customers because you are a startup and that well, we will all be wealthy after we will have sold our shares and you will be able to care with the next management.

Bosses get what they ask and pay for.

<comment><USER23> _> Coder are soldiers paid to do a job. If the army fails, blame the generals that totally do not care about quality and will prefer to pay dozens of obedient coders lower and lower that do not care than be eventually facing opposition based on concern in quality._

"But I was just following orders" isn't an acceptable excuse in any situation. You are inextricably tied to a set of moral obligations by your decision to build things that affect other human beings, and you cannot shirk them or push them upward. They are yours, they remain yours, and attempts to rationalize the abrogation thereof are at best gross.

Own your shit. If you cannot do good and do well, then quit. (I have done this; it is not that hard.)

<comment><USER24> That just leaves the field to the incompetents. They are not going to stop inflicting this crappy code on the world just because you quit.

<comment><USER23> Then own it, and fix it, and be with a clear conscience. I couldn't, at that particular job, and I could do good elsewhere. So I made the decision to do that.

"We're just coders, it's not our fault" is _not an excuse_. Either own your shit (and, implicitly, fix it) or refuse to participate. There is no middle ground.

<comment><USER22> Trying to change job here to avoid taking part in this buffoonery.

I can't. Nowadays so much jobs are regulated per diploma/certifications that it is hard beginning again and regain while "older" the momentum for credibility.

The funny part I see breadmakers, cooks, construction is also suffering the same problem. I am currently in France, restaurants for average people are so bad, they do stuff that intoxicate people. I can do bread, cooking, fixing bikes and I do better than "pro" nowadays" without a diploma in their field.

Something systemic seems to be going on. Like people are just taught to execute and required to obey, and bosses don't know the craft of the people they should lead.

Basically being a boss boils down to the capital you can have, and competition seems rigged in favour of people being born wealthy.

I don't think that birth merit outweight a sane competition.

I find the Figaro monolog that inspired French and US revolution about the old monarchic regimes to be very actual.

Weirdly enough author's right says it should be in public domain, but it is impossible to find a link to this essay that is very actual.

<comment><USER25> The systemic thing is called "professional managers". In the past, only people "from the trenches" were promoted to manage and lead others. Nowadays, we have managers who studied nothing but management. And it shows.

<comment><USER22> Karl Marx analysis was that through education you can capture the praxis (savoir faire) and transform it into both stealing it from the craftsman and also making expert in doxein (savoir faire) that knows nothing (Donning Kruger effect).

I think that it has always fueled my intuition that a profession should be defined by the craftsmanship and not he education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oh, thats nothing. Just today Firefox managed to freeze up the entire X server with some WebGL content. Gedit become unresponsive several times, also had rendering faults (just 640kb file with autogenerated html and js). SublimeText2 crashes daily. (it's faulty plugin) Office outlook for Web is a general usability horror and has many features that do not work. Win10 has number of bugs that I encounter almost daily, Edge is generally very buggy.

I think generally all these problems are indicative of several factors combined. Laziness, general lack of attention to detail and pure developer incompetence, general need to push out stuff too fast (marketing decisions policies) and then finally complexities in the software systems itself. Today any given software system is enormously complicated to a degree that nobody really understands the systems completely. In fact it's a more or less a miracle that things work as much as they do considering all the billions of bits that need to be just right for me to even write this comment. That being said, I don't think there are shortcuts here. Better quality can be achieved but it requires the mindset for doing things that way. And it's going to require testing. And a lot of it, unit tests, regression tests, automated test suites.

Personally I find that when I write code I often need more unit testing code than the actual code to cover the system under test functionality properly. I'm talking about a ratio of up to 5 lines of testing code to a 1 line of real code. Sometimes I can get close to 2:1 or 3:1 if the function/class/method is not very complicated. Anyway even if you now take that conservative ratio of 2:1 and go look at any random open source project I'd be surprised if you would actually find that much testing code there. Good luck.

<comment><USER27> Overhead of unit testing is why I'm not a fan of it for personal projects. Testing even the simplest 400 lines of code needed more than 1000 lines of testcode and I'm doing as little as possible.

<comment><USER13> 99% of what unit testing does you get "for free" with a strongly-typed language like OCaml.

That developers insist on using unsafe languages like Javascript speaks volumes.

<comment><USER28> 99% is a way high over-estimate. Yes, strongly statically typed languages eliminate a LOT of potential bugs and I always try to use them. But it's not like they eliminate 99% of all bugs.

<comment><USER29> > Yes, strongly statically typed languages eliminate a LOT of potential bugs

They don't. AFAIK, lines of code is the only known metric with significant correlation with bugs so far. And if you ever wrote anything in a good dynamically typed language, like Perl, you know that its type system never causes any problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hear a lot of complaints from non-programmers about the software they use and they always try to make sure I'm not offended. I can't even begin to explain how I'm not only not offended, I hate these lazy problems even more than they do.

Some of those are clearly complicated issues but there's so many cases of just plain laziness it's infuriating. However, I don't blame the developers entirely. There's so much pressure from management, product managers, etc. and so much cost cutting it's ridiculous. It doesn't directly affect the bottom- line though so I'm not sure we can do much except expect more from ourselves and get used to it.

<comment><USER18> I get so aggravated with other software's bugs. But at the end of the day, you have to ship.

<comment><USER31> In a well-functioning industry, shipping broken items would just create a money-sink at the support end. One of the reasons this doesn't happen is that many software is unique (effectively, every vendor has a monopoly on their program), so software vendors can get away with ignoring most of their users. Even if there's multiple programs the user can choose from, switching costs are high (they usually require expertise).

This is not just a failure of the software industry, you see this in every field where there's hardly any feedback from end-users to the vendor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ultimately it's not really about software developers, is it?

Most of these issues seem to be management decisions.

Like giving a car mechanic a few cheesegraters and a dog, sticking him in an open field in a thunderstorm, and asking him to rebuild your engine.

He could be a prodigy. But there's water in it, man. There's bloody water in it.

Half of the stuff on that page should not involve any programming at all. The nPower one, for example. Yeah, it's broken, but that's not the actual problem. The problem is that it would take about 5 years to report the issue, so no-one knows it's broken. Just give an email address or a telephone number, and actually employ customer support instead of paying yourself $50M/second. Done.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. While there are management/process/whatever issues, there's also a lot that could be improved by the devs.

For example, take the podomatic example - that's just a sloppy function written by a dev. The NPower thing is just sloppy setup of the website and bad links in email templates. The MS thing, well why did the devs add jQuery to a site that is so incredibly static?

Devs make a lot of decisions that influence the quality of software and I think we need to start taking more responsibility for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As software evolves and gets more complicated it only makes sense that bugs will become more obscure and tougher to chase down in projects that are reaching sizes we've never seen before. Most developers have a bug list longer than they can handle. It's not about 'giving up' it's about prioritizing. It's not about being lazy it's about only having so much time in a day.

<comment><USER21> Start with very small, modular code... avoid spaghetti coupling (that is removed by multiple laters)... organize structure by feature, not type/class, and accept that all features don't look the same... Some features may only be data structures, service libraries and/or ui.

Separate event chains from your UI so much as practical, and avoid classes that look like Car, Wheel, etc that are too smart for their own good.

<comment><USER34> We do this. What next?

<comment><USER21> Actual code reviews, experienced architect(s) that actually understand the whole project, and paired development. Not being afraid to refactor... creating componentized pieces that can live in separate codebases if possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What's most interesting to me is that people choose to blame developers for their observations of quality or content of software, games, etc. Completely ignoring the organizational or institutional structure involved, as if we all have complete autonomy over the products we work on.

I've seen people blame developers for, like, female characters in games being oversexed. Newsflash- that's a business, product, and design decision. People even tried to blame engineers for the VW emissions scandal! Companies nowadays set ridiculous release schedules, overwork their developers, and release crap. But sure, blame the devs, that will probably help.

The author here is a dev so there's really no excuse.

<comment><AUTHOR> My post was actually aimed at the industry more than specifically developers. The headline was a bit bad (it was written before the post) but I didn't expect to get 30k visitors overnight so I probably didn't proof-read/tweak as much as I could've done :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've never written unit tests in my life, and my code works most of the time. There used to be times where I'd write code for an entire week in Java without compiling (because it was taking forever) and back then we used pretty basic IDEs that didn't help as much as they to today to help you prevent stupid errors. And, usually, my code compiled just fine and worked. Today's developer is a trial-and-error one, tweaking a few lines of code, refreshing the browser, and seeing if stuff works or not. Today's developer spends disproportional amounts of time writing unit tests and, yet, producing buggy code.

<comment><USER37> Are you suggesting that an increase in unit tests is correlated with a decline in code quality? That would be a surprising correlation.

<comment><USER21> Unit tests do not correlate to quality, and even at 100% coverage only guarantee that you've looked at every line of code twice (usually). Not only that, a lot of projects skip adding testing until well after a proof of concept is working... why? because we don't want to not ship features for two weeks while we backport in tests... Now you have less than optimal code _and_ less than optimal tests.

This persists, every suggestion to refactor structure rebuffed, and this persists until the code debt is so high, it takes 4-5x as long to add a feature as it should. Where, if you're lucky, you can make a new version using only 3-5 year old technology, instead of the decade old stuff you've been supporting for half a decade. Even then the 2-5yo stuff isn't as nice as it was sold, but it's "enforced" by the company powers that be (god I hate angular sometimes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Software development is still young. 30 years ago it really wasn't an industry and 50 it was pretty much an academic venture.

We have better procedures and tools. The groups not using version control, unit tests, peer reviews and other common means to increase quality will be out-competed by those who do.

Just write the best software you can, with the best group you can in the mean time and in the long run this will sort itself. Of if you think you can sort it out, try to.

I don't know what "sorted out" looks like but I would not be surprised to see apprenticeships like plumbing and HVAC or certifications like medicine and law. Sorted out could look like just about anything, perhaps we will be drenched in shitty software until unit testing is taught to second graders along-side basic arithmetic.

<comment><USER39> >30 years ago it really wasn't an industry

30 years ago it was definitely an industry. The commercial games market exploded with the arrival of cheap 8-bit micros in the early 80s. Mini and mainframe application development has been around for a lot longer.

Commercial software development has been happening _since the 1950s._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_\(computer\))

"Sorted out" means that software doesn't fail in stupid, avoidable ways.

The current state of the industry is shockingly bad. But users have been trained to expect broken software, developers rarely have enough of quality ethic to care about those boring bug fixes, and management just wants more money.

So here we are.

Personally I blame Microsoft for gifting the industry with a tradition of bullshit EULAs that more or less said "We can ship any old bug-ridden crap we feel like, and we're not responsible if it blows up in your face and takes your business down. Besides, if something goes wrong it's clearly your fault for being too stupid and ignorant to use the software properly. Whatever - definitely not our fault, so don't even think about suing."

After the Pavlovian conditioning and Stockholm syndrome set in, it became impossible to expect consumer pushback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> You can really tell when web developers don't actually use the website they're building (especially contractors). Same for applications and for overly complex software where developers only use few features themselves (hence web browser bugs).

Only very talented or disciplined people manage to write flawless code without stumbling over their own bugs first. A good, opinionated, statically typed language helps, IMHO (scripting languages are one of the reasons for crappy web pages).

</comment><comment><USER41> "Write Failed: Success" is my new favorite error message.

<comment><USER30> I had one of those once so I winced when I saw it. I was printing 'Error: ' with the message that came back from the server and in one case saw 'Error: Success'.

<comment><USER42> In a similar vein, applications that output in red when everything is running fine cause a lot of wincing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> As a software developer, there is always an infinite list of stuff to do, things to build, issues to fix, etc. Why do we spend time doing other things rather than fix these annoying quirks?

In my experience, it's usually because there was something more important to do.

I don't think it's fair to criticize these decisions unless you know what was done instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true; and the post wasn't aimed specifically at devs, but more of the software dev industry as a whole (I know the title is pretty badly worded).

I think companies should start caring more about their quality and users should stop giving money to those that don't. Some of these silly bugs are pretty ridiculous and should never have happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Developers want to build quality stuff that they can be proud of. Time, budgets, marketing promises, and reality have a way of interfering with that. Rare is the job where you can tell your boss "We could release this now, and I could start on the next thing, but I'm not happy with the quality and would rather rework it." and they will just say "Ok, do that. Make it good. We'll tell all of our clients that they'll just have to wait for what we promised would be ready this month. They'll just have to deal with however that impacts them and their business."

More layers = more bugs, both at the software level and the business level. And there are a lot more layers now. We're not just compiling raw ASM or C and handing it to the end-user anymore. Every couple of years we add more layers to both.

</comment><comment><USER45> I got a bad one. I tried a few years back to log into flickr with my yahoo account. No matter what I tried, I kept getting this error:

"Hello- new account signups are temporarily unavailable from this network address space used by your Internet Service Provider.'

Flash forward 2 or 3 years. They've gotta have it fixed by now, right?

Nope.

<comment><USER46> That looks more like an IP (range?) blacklist than a bug, doesn't it?

<comment><USER45> Sure, it is. But I can log into the yahoo account with no problem. You'd think this many years after the acquisition they would have one source of truth on what should be blocked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Nah, they just get bored easily.

Writing new stuff is like building model airplanes, fun.

Bug fixing is like chores, unless someone gives you some kind of "incentive" to do them you don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> For some devs, I'm sure that's true. For me, I like to take pride in my work and be proud of the products I work on. I love people reporting bugs so I can improve :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The "Pro_Hacking" story made me laugh. In that case, I think the support person is just providing the body of a response template, where "Hello Pro_Hacking," is fixed (i.e., not something the support person can easily change).

<comment><AUTHOR> I wondered that; but the first several emails didn't start like that. It was only after I complained that wasn't my name it started, like they were taking the piss :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Hi! I work on an incredibly relevant project called Product Pains. [https://productpains.com](https://productpains.com)

Products aren't perfect. Whether they have frustrating bugs or are missing a useful feature, there's always room for improvement. The best way to help them improve is to give them feedback.

Unfortunately most companies aren't the best at taking feedback. They either don't provide a way to give feedback or don't prioritize it enough in their roadmap.

Which is why we created Product Pains, a new feedback channel for every mobile app and website. It works like so:

\- People can post feedback about any product.

\- People can also vote and comment on feedback.

\- Teams can subscribe to feedback about their products and mark feedback as "In Progress" or "Fixed".

Voting is critical because teams get a clean, prioritized list of the issues that are most important to their users. Rather than having to manually aggregate individual app store reviews, emails, tweets, etc, they do virtually no work.

It's so satisfying to see a Product Rep mark your feedback as "fixed" and know you had an impact on their product and everyone who uses it. I'd love to see your feedback on Product Pains.

<comment><USER31> Product pain #1: webpage renders as an empty page without javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> My guess is that it's always been this bad and often worse. But maybe we are more adventurous and use a wider variety of software these days, so there are more chances to see something go wrong.

Software updates alone will expose you to more versions, so you'll have more chances to see different bugs (rather than the same ones that you learn to adjust to or ignore).

</comment><comment><USER51> It has not been mentioned that software engineering differs from other types of engineering (like civil engineering) in that it builds abstract objects (software) that are then expected to function in a number of differing material contexts (hardware). Think about how strange that is. Engineers building a bridge for example translate their ideas into specific arrangements of carefully chosen material. The software engineer builds for a limited number of reasonable architectures and for a virtually unlimited number of hardware in various states of disrepair. It is a testament to human ingenuity that software works at all as well as it does.

For this reason, the example Shuttle's software misses the mark. Writing code for a single known device is by orders of magnitude a simpler problem than writing code for numerous permutations of hardware.

<comment><USER29> > that are then expected to function in a number of differing material > contexts (hardware)

It's not like that. Sometimes they are expected to function in a presence of any kind of errors, other times - not so much and everyone is ok with them breaking occasionally. But we really do have a way to make software that functions reliably in a presence of errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think the "go fast and break things" mantra is causing programmers to doubt that stable, bug-free software can be built at all.

At my last company i was an older developer in a mostly younger team.

We were working on a full rewrite of our product. Version 2 was going to address all the hastily patched together misfeatures of version 1.

Even with this admission that we had a quality problem, I could barely convince them to let me take time to design the new version.

I was supposed to be the architect in charge of designing the new system, and I was constantly being rushed. I would tell them that if we think this through, we'll have a more coherent and stable product.

It was like I was talking Swahili to them.

On the few parts of the system where I was given enough time, I got very few bug reports. As for the rest, well I did what I could. It's no use being a martyr.

</comment><comment><USER53> The real question is why a missing final newline should cause an abort on an install and this was not detected on package creation

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah; that got me too. Needless to say I won't be trying that again :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Expect this to get much worse as the profession is stripped of its remaining threads of prestige by the explosion of bootcamps and the supplanting of the terms "software developer/enginer/programmer" with "coder," one that equally well describes medical data entry clerks (no doubt the way many managers and spiteful journalists actually view us), if Google search results are an accurate representation.

Why expect professionalism from people who aren't treated like professionals and shown the respect that would normally be their due?

<comment><USER55> I agree, but we don;t always act like professionals either. People see development as a commodity because we treat ourselves and our product as a commodity. You don't see lawyers lining up to undercut each other - <USER2> that's a race to the bottom. We do see it in software development all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUps...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EverythingsBrokenAndNobodysUpset.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER57> A lot of the decisions made behind software products depend on management's decision as to what is 'good enough' and when to release a first version to iterate upon.

Every day, I encounter parts of the codebase that could be refactored or sections of a page that probably do not make sense to half of the user base, but in the eyes of management, this is not a problem as customers will learn. If I were to spend all day polishing aspects of the site, that would not be as preferable as working on a major feature release.

</comment><comment><USER58> That guy keeps finding an awful lot of errors, is what I thought while reading this article.

It seems many users like myself don't even notice errors any more or have developed an instinct what software or services to stay away from, have low expectations from support (read a logfile?) and a general disdain for a lot of what is going on by using adblocker or avoiding switching services unless really necessary.

So yea, we've given up mostly :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I don't know if I get more than my fair share, or if I just notice them more. Maybe it's good attention to detail =D

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> It's always been really, really bad once you try to take the experience into your own hands. The path of least resistance with technology is to stay well behind the curve, choose the popular brand, avoid niche use cases, use the minimum amount of features, and modify nothing - in effect, to use everything as if it were an Apple device in stock configuration. However, sometimes more effort is worthwhile because the unmodded experience is so poor or ill-fitted.

Yesterday I finally got fed up with my cheap Android phone and flashed it with a modded rom. It took probably 8 hours of reading and downloading and testing and waiting to get it into a working state, because there are so many points along the chain where a little misconfiguration breaks the process, and the people making mods often have working software with poor documentation and inadequate testing.

In the end, there just is never enough time to go around to make it perfect for everyone in every use case. You have to choose carefully when you want to fight the battle - and you can expect to lose, a lot of the time.

</comment><comment><USER60> Well, if you really want an example of software developers 'giving up' and systems not working correctly, there's always the video game industry/world. Where in some cases, products actually do get released in a completely broken state and where bugs like these are endemic.

But it's probably all due to one simple thing; people aren't encouraged to do things well, they're encouraged to get them done by the 'deadline' at all costs. Which often means writing hacky code, not testing edge cases (or sometimes, any cases), and then hoping anything that breaks can be fixed later.

The latter is also why both web development and game development is arguably more messed up than any other software development, because patches are seen as fairly easy and inevitable. Why get it right the first time when it can be fixed 'post production'?

</comment><comment><USER61> One issue that separates software from most other industries is that software is not a physical entity. This makes the desire to change - refactor, add features, redefine use cases, etc - all the more tempting, since the only cost is getting someone to fix/alter some code (despite the fact that labor is obviously very expensive). In contrast, in aerospace for example, you have to get it right the first time, else you have millions of dollars worth of payload and equipment exploding. In these industries it means teams will probably be more reluctant to accept rapid change in development and deployment since the cost of failure is so much higher than software. This isn't the only reason for bugs in software by any means, but the sheer innate mutability of software makes the desire to pile on requirements, iterate frequently, and just generally not be averse to change a massive reason for buggy code

</comment><comment><USER62> Everything is a moving target.

Write a web UI? Prepare to re-write it next year. Desktop is reasonably stable but now desktop is "dead" and mobile is the new thing. Mobile is a rapidly moving target and there's lots of platform fragmentation. Everyone knows next year or the year after mobile as we know it will now be "dead" and time to rewrite everything all over again. There will be VR and AR which will demand entirely new interface metaphors, totally new platforms, etc.

I didn't even start in on the hip language of the week. Now we have to rewrite it all in Go, or Rust, or Swift, or ...

If everything is changing this fast there's little incentive to perfect anything. It'll be obsolete next year. Just ship ship ship and then throw it away and ship again.

Some of this churn really is related to progress but some of it isn't. I'm skeptical of whether all of it is really necessary.

<comment><USER63> > Desktop is reasonably stable

Have you ever written desktop GUI programs? ;) Particularly on Linux, but I remember that when I was still writing .NET programs on Windows, it was a running gag that every major .NET release brought a completely new UI framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It's why I started keeping track of all the annoyances I run across on wtfmac.com. Because, well, these are stupid, annoying things that piss me off. So yeah, when the richest company in the world does fundamentally wrong things with software, what does that say about the state of the industry as a whole?

</comment><comment><USER65> VNC passwords being limited to 8 characters isn't a software bug, it's a VNC specification bug.

From [https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6143.txt](https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6143.txt):

> To form the key, the password is truncated to eight characters

<comment><USER66> That and allowing anyone access to your computer's graphical interface as if they were at your computer, even yourself over a web connection, is a bad idea.

I think the 8 character limitation is helpful. Because if you need to protect yourself against it, you can ask "but wtf do I _really_ want to do? Probably not a VNC server..."

<comment><USER67> There are many instances where VNC is useful. Do you think SSH access is also useless? This is the same, except you can also run GUI programs.

<comment><USER68> You can run GUI programs over ssh as well.

<comment><USER69> And it has other security implications (you have to trust the server).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Dropbox has same sign up non-validation mentioned in the article. I mentioned it to them when I got a phantom sign-up notice. Reset password and found an account with my email and uploaded content! You can fully use DB w/o validating your email. Hello anonymous dead-drops!

</comment><comment><USER71> Apparently this person was not using technology any time before the iPhone?

Quirks, useless error messages, website rendering problems... they've been around forever. Has this person even tried to install software packages on Linux 10-15+ years ago?

Have software developers given up?

I'd argue the vast majority never cared.

And really, why bother caring so much that you take to the web glorifying others glitches?

We hear about data theft stories, companies shutting down due to data loss fuckups... life goes on. It's shit that many people are burned because of these things, but really our society does not care. The loss is absorbed for the most part and we move on.

Stop being so dismayed with the world, or how other people aren't as good at things as you are. Move along.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did use technology before the iPhone, but I don't remember being as frustrated by it as I am now.

The most frustrating thing is that we seem to be getting worse, not better. We're not learning from mistakes, we're too busy churning out the next buggy release to review the mistakes in the last one :(

When huge software companies like Google and Microsoft are churning out buggy crap, it's easy to see why others assume they can't do any better.

<comment><USER72> Maybe a recency bias. I have used computers since I was a kid, my earliest memories are Windows 95 but I am sure there was some before then too. I remember constant BSOD, constant application-crashing bugs with vague error messages, no ability to Google the solution to the problems you do have. Sometimes a game wouldn't work and there was really nothing you could do to even troubleshoot.

I doubt we're getting worse. At worst, we're staying even as complexity grows tremendously. I would guess we're probably improving slightly despite insane growth in complexity.

I would say that with great size, like Google and Microsoft, comes a greater difficulty in making bug-free products. Too small and you don't have the funding, but the sweet size is probably somewhere between a "small business" and "Google". Companies the size of Google have a lot of bureaucracy. They have a million products. They have thousands of developers. And in the end, the majority of the business doesn't even come from these glitchy products. It's understandable that noone is really up in arms over these bugs because upper management doesn't give a shit, and the developers only give a shit in so far that they aren't fired. Sometimes you'll have developers who care because of pride in their work, but they're the minority.

<comment><USER73> it's not getting worse, we're just using software in so many more places today. seeing bugs is simply becoming more frequent.

<comment><AUTHOR> This probably does explain a lot of it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Welcome to the age where people only think about writing software and releasing fast, and frameworks allowing to do just that. Then you see people trying to solve problems like N+1 query. I look 10 years back where there were not many frameworks and you would laugh if you talked about resolving N+1. Everyone tried to touch DB once and fetch everything in 1 query. It seems many people are doing things when they don't know how the underlying technology is working. This is bound to happen. And many new devs are picking up on bad practices and think they know too much..quite depressing actually.

</comment><comment><USER75> I was refactoring some legacy academic code recently. It came with a GUI which, if the user did something wrong, fail with the message "Error N" (N being some number) without any further information or logging. The only way to figure out what happened was to grep the source code to see precisely what triggered the alert box.

There's also the bizarre policy university has about passwords. Your password is reset every six months (fine), it can't be similar to your old one (fine) and it's truncated to 8 characters (what?).

<comment><USER63> I saw something similar when I used a German government agency's website last week to fill out some forms. Their password policy was:

      - minimum 8 chars
      - contains at least 3 of 4 of the following types of chars:
        - small letters
        - capital letters
        - <USER3>
        - <USER4>

I usually use random-generated passwords that are dumped as hex, i.e. [0-9a-f]{64}, so I just added "A+" at the end. Turns out that didn't work.

What did work was to _prepend_ "A+" instead of appending it. So apparently they silently truncate long passwords somewhere before the 64th character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Given up? No. Prioritized development speed over bug prevention? Yes,

<comment><AUTHOR> It's disappointing, whatever we call it :(

<comment><USER76> I'm enjoying it. There's a lot still to be to learned about DevOps and massive codebases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Or has the QA department given up?

<comment><USER23> You're assuming that places _have_ QA departments. Those, in my experience, are the first thing to vanish.

<comment><USER78> This reminds me of the content editors vanishing for the newspapers and the drop in the quality of articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> While it seems like developers don't care, as many comments mention it is about the trade-off between resources like money, time to ship. Recently, in our project architecture group meeting a senior architect said that the approach we have taken on our project is not architecturally 'pure' but it is 'pragmatic'.

</comment><comment><USER80> How often did the Model T break down compared to the cars of today? (hopefully the stats backup that conceptual point)

Mistaks happen all the time. My great grandfather lost three fingers in a printing press accident. That is this kind of accident:

"I once switched a production SQL database to Simple recovery mode and Truncated an important table causing a ton of work for my colleagues."

How does that even happen...

<comment><AUTHOR> Long story ;)

I was setting up a staging database for some testing. Our DBs are big so we truncate a bunch of data we don't need on the staging server so we can have more DBs without wasting tens of GB per database.

I ended up executing this against the wrong server.

Needless to say, we've learned from this. Luckily nothing critical was lost, but I felt like a complete spanner :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I think that we need to implement a new layer between software and users to solve this problem (like antiviruses do this nowadays but they solve very narrow problem). It should be like Wikipedia so everyone can fix bugs. There should be also smth like Wikipedia bots that automatically fix bugs.

</comment><comment><USER82> Software is always bad at the top of the market, when hype and get-it-out wins over quality and measured improvements. Javascript is also always hugely popular at the top of the market. (2000-DHTML, 2008-Web2.0, Now- Node/Ang/React.)

Eventually, the Developer Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.

</comment><comment><USER83> I think this has been constant. There are more mediocre programmers than great programmers. Since we are exposed to a lot more software we experience more bugs. That means there are more programmers but it does not mean that the ration between good and mediocre programmers has changed.

</comment><comment><USER84> Reminds me of a talk from Seth Godin: This is broken [https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_this_is_broken_1](https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_this_is_broken_1)

</comment><comment><USER85> I will be called a statist, but I think the software industry is really lacking regulations and quality standards.

I'm not a security guy, but I think most of the security flaws you find in software are caused by the lack of government approved security standards. I mean is there ISO stuff for software quality? And even if there is, I really don't think it's useful or that it tries hard enough.

Just look at healthcare.gov, I'm sure things would have been going much more smoothly if there was ISO rules.

Although it might be debatable if it's possible or wise to have such standards. But I would really appreciate it if important software like OS's had actual standards.

It seems that most of the stuff talked about in this article are just mistakes allowed by a permissive practices.

<comment><USER86> We have that, it is called formal verification. However, the process is time consuming and therefore expensive. The issue is not permissive practices or lack of standards, but the cost associated with quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Perhaps it's not economical to produce totally bug free software.

</comment><comment><USER88> "Over the last few years it feels like the quality of software and services across the industry is falling rather than climbing. "

hey guys, this guy just started working a couple of years ago..

</comment><comment><USER89> the mess we're in with joe armstrong: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4)

</comment><comment><USER90> i would spend a lot more time improving software i think is actually useful and beneficial to others if it didn't mean i'd lose my job and fall off the proletarian treadmill

</comment><comment><USER91> I note that most of these errors are web server misconfigurations.

</comment><comment><USER92> the difference between everyone here and technophobes is that these problems are benign to us.

when someone says "computers never work for me! technology hates me!" it isn't that there experience is drastically different, just the very first incongruence causes them to quit, whereas the very first incongruence is completely benign to us such that we don't even notice it as we march toward the entertainment or service we want.

</comment><comment><USER93> Anyone else wondering why the author was concerned about a random person not being able to activate an account using a random name with their email?

<comment><USER94> The frustration was that support kept greeting with the random name despite being asked not to. I'm sure that's just a "Hello $NAME" template, but it's still lazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original reason for contacting was this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579638)

But yeah, they're included here because of the repeated greetings like that. I suspect it was a template, though it only started after I told them that wasn't my name; first few emails (not shown) were "Hi Danny"!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> In terms of software quality, websites are usually the worst.

Easier to patch and people and errors are usually less scary.

</comment><comment><USER96> I like the "can't download ethernet adapter drivers" limbo I usually get with windows.

</comment><comment><USER97> Nowadays, companies care more on putting in new features than having high quality products.

</comment><comment><USER98> Writing software != Selling software

</comment><comment><USER99> Quality can be defined as : does what the customers expect.

If we can train them to accept crud, then we can call broken stuff quality.

</comment><comment><USER100> thats why I trust Artificial Intelligence

</comment><comment><USER101> nice article. I use OVO Energy they have a nice user interface for managing gas and electric. Although I did just check it and it's down for maintenance.

<comment><USER102> I did wonder why he would voluntarily move TO Npower. Even if you're saving money, it's not worth it. A single 'live chat' with them was more than enough to convince me of that.

<comment><USER103> I haven't had a gas bill from them in 5 months because their system wouldn't let me put in my gas readings. I had to go through a painful 40 day complaints process to get anyone to put them on the account. Never heard back from anyone. Eventually someone on their twitter feed was able to fix it over the course of a day, but of course it will be 3 months before their system generates a bill from the new figures. I've had plenty of ASP.NET "error occurred in the application" pages too so clearly they aren't building their site in Release mode. Overall, best described as a clusterfuck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> I need to blame a scapegoat for the world's problems. I blame offshoring.

<comment><USER36> Wrong. Eastern Europe is offshore, too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I am preparing launch of my social media site.Do i need T&C on my site? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There is basically 0% chance you will get in trouble for this. Worry about making your site good.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My question is whether at this early stage, do i need to break my head on creating terms and conditions, when i have nt even registered my startup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you decided what your terms and conditions are? even if they are only a couple sentences you will have them and can add to them later</comment>


TodoMVC - A common demo application for popular JavaScript MVC frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/addyosmani/todomvc

<comment><USER2> I built this thing as a learning experience.

Jeremy Ashkenas then proposed to make it open source as an example app so that people could learn from it too. I finally had a chance to contribute to open source (but I did not know it would be a significant contribution)

I'm just glad it's been picked up by so many frameworks along the way. I think this is in big part due to the fact that it had just the right amount of simplicity / complexity and is perhaps one of the most basic use case for a framework like that. The new "Hello World" first-timer experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's super work and a great Hello World+ or maybe a "Hello Solar System" example. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This lil' app really has some legs on it...

For the (historical) record, it was originally introduced by Nick Fitzgerald in this commit:

<https://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/pull/29>

... and then later styled up by Jérôme Gravel-Niquet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone experimented with this frameworks? I'm curious to know which one is the best in terms of how long will they be supported, adoption, features, and ease of use.

I'm currently experimenting with Backbone.js but I find it a bit hard to adjust to MVC in the browser. Tutorials on the web are also not very helpful and most of them incomplete; but I'm not giving up :)

<comment><USER5> I've just played with Backbone.js myself, though I have shared your frustration with getting the hang of it, and the quality of available tutorials and examples.

I've learned to mostly get the hang of it after repeated references to the official docs and the todo app. I think part of the difficulty is its lack of rigidity -- Backbone.js leaves quite a bit up to conventions, or the developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's interesting. I recently ported Todos to KnockoutJS[1] and straight jQuery(as a counter-example)[2] for a Knockout presentation I gave yesterday.

[1]: <https://github.com/statianzo/KnockoutListTested>

[2]: <https://github.com/statianzo/JQueryList>

</comment><comment><USER7> Lovely! Is there a site for comparing implementations of "things"/methods in different languages/frameoworks in similar fashion? That would have been really neat to learn new languages - instead of reading books (not the best noob move).

<comment><USER8> You seek the Rosetta Code. <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world/Text>

<comment><USER7> Thanks! :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be really good to get some Selenium tests written up for them as well so that we know they all, and all future ones, behave the same. I might do this if I get a bit of spare time.</comment>


Venezuela on Brink of Hyperinflation - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21659764-government-prints-money-hyperinflation-looms-crackers-caracas <comment><USER2> The United States has been working on a coup for Maduro, since its coup of Chavez hasn't worked out for it. This time it would really like to install Leonardo Lopez as he's willing to privatize Venezuelan oil to US companies. The US has been encouraging and organizing protests, gatherings and projecting anti-Maduro sentiment and news into the country. ([https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-06-18-08-canv...](https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-06-18-08-canvas- how-a-us-funded-group-trains-opposition.html))

It's possible that if their economy (amid new US sanctions) collapse that this could trigger the regime change we've been eyeing and the energy security we've been wanting to establish there.

We do have to be careful about CALEC and UNASUR, however. South American countries have been ever moving closer to isolating the US from its multilateral diplomatic plans and are regularly condemning the US for its interference, funding of death squads, war on drugs, and unilateral sanctions of various South American countries. If we take Venezuela we need to make sure that we don't isolate the rest of the continent.

<comment><USER3> I live in Venezuela and item's prices are raising horrible, let me tell you something I am electrical engineer and computer engineer, and my salary is only 10.3$/month, ridiculous, but his is how socialism works everyone are equalized but to poverty. To buy a car in Venezuela you need to save money for 50 years without buying food supplies, to buy a house it takes 200 years, to buy dollars you need to be a friend of Maduro, my most bright colleagues have left the country so I am.

<comment><USER4> seems to work just fine in scandinavia

<comment><USER5> It always works until it doesn't. Sweden will have a particularly tough time in coming years.

<comment><USER6> Why?

<comment><USER7> _Sweden will have a particularly tough time in coming years._

 _Why?_

Sweden is already in pretty bad shape due to immigration. But a large part of the govt, and dominant information channels are intent on concealing that fact as much as possible for some reason, hard for some people to admit they were wrong I guess.

Shockingly enough, Sweden leads the world in rape and school arson.

Informative report on the horrible rape numbers: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCGedOGCrnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCGedOGCrnQ)

 _Last year the cost for fires in Sweden's schools ended at about SEK one billion. 457 schools burned in 2009. About half of the fires were caused by arson. However, compared with 2008 fires in schools has decreased, that year 512 schools burned, also then half of them caused by arson._

[http://www.stockholmnews.com/more.aspx?NID=5029](http://www.stockholmnews.com/more.aspx?NID=5029)

(Saying in both years that only _half_ of that already large number were caused by arson seems a little suspect, that seems like a high rate for schools to be combusting from other factors. Well, maybe they are counting chemistry lab mishaps and the like, and the bulk of the cost is coming from schools actually being burned down in arson attacks.)

 _"I don't know why anybody would want to burn our school," Ms. Bromster said. "I can't understand it. Maybe they are not so happy with life."

The riots are not unprecedented here. In 2008 and 2010, immigrants clashed with the police in the southern port city of Malmo. But the past week's arson attacks in Stockholm, the capital, and the spectacle of teenagers hurling stones at firefighters have left many Swedes wondering what went wrong in a society that has invested so heavily in helping the underprivileged._

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/world/europe/swedens- riots...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/world/europe/swedens-riots-put- its-identity-in-question.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER6> I had heard of this when living in DK, but never thought it had gone so bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How to create hyperinflation in two easy steps:

1\. Build massive external debt in _foreigin_ currency.

2\. Have fixed exchange rate.

Its very hard to create hyperinflation using bad fiscal policy alone if you are not in debt in foreign currency and have floating exchange rates. Floating currency will balance exports and imports and printing money to pay debt in your own currency works.

<comment><USER9> (words from Venezuelan living in Venezuela)

Actually, external debt in foreing currency is not an important factor in what's happenig. Even with the oil price collapse in the last 12 months, Venezuela current account balance is positive, and it's debt to GDP ratio is a lot more manageable that US or EU (although of course that depends on which exchange rate you calculate the GDP).

The hyperinflation (which we are not on the brink of, we are already living through) is caused, IMHO, by three primary reasons (each one is composed or caused by several others). 1- The total dependency of external supply, well in finished goods or inputs for production. Last reliable numbers put us in order of 90% of everything we consume is either imported or requires imported material to produce. 2- The lack of enough cash to import either consumers goods or prime materials to produce 3- The irresponsible printing of inorganic Bolivares.

Any short of resetting the economy, which may or may not include dollarization (or eurozation), is useless at this point, but once we are done with that, it will take maybe 3 years or less to sort this mess.

<comment><USER10> Question for you - to what extent does the Venezuelan gov. interfere and control the means of production and distribution of everyday household products?

When I lived in Miami, we were fed incessant articles and anecdotes from Venezuelan emigrants about how the government meddled with the allocation of basic household goods.

<comment><USER9> Right now, interferes a lot, but as far as control goes, nobody is controlling anything.

Since middle of last year, they started meddling with how supermarkets sells to customers, for example, you can go to a supermarket only two days a week to buy "price regulated products" which are every simple thing like pasta, milk, flour, meat, cleansing products, soap, shampoo etc. Also they are trying to implement a biometric system so you can buy only certain number of such products once you are validated with your fingerprints. But of course they have botcheted that as well, so now you are fingerprinted but on the 2 days a week your are allowed to go, is a nightmare.

Probably the most of Venezuelan expats in Miami are antichavistas, but I tell you one thing, nothing like this happened while Chavez was alive. OTOH, it seems obvious that the problems of today are rooted in some of Chavez's policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder why there's inflation in Venezuela, and not e.g. in the EU or the US. In particular, how is the printing of money by Venezuela different from the printing that goes on in the West (Quantitative Easing).

I guess the only difference is that in the West, the money goes mostly to the banks, which distribute it to the companies or invest it in the stock market and real estate. Consequently, the rich get richer and the poor don't see any of this money.

But I can't see why the situation in Venezuela would be any different. I can't imagine the printed money reaches poor people - I mean, the recipients are most likely big companies and people close to the governments, the elite, exactly the same as in the US.

<comment><USER12> The Fed doesn't "give" money to anyone. They buy treasury bonds from the US government.

<comment><USER11> You mean, instead of giving the government money directly, there's an extra step whereby the government issues bonds and the central bank buys them?

<comment><USER13> Yes, eventually the central bank will be repaid the dollars it spent, the money spent and injected into the economy will be withdrawn as QE winds down.

Assuming QE ever ends of course.

<comment><USER14> US QE has ended as far as I know. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#US_QE1.2C_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#US_QE1.2C_QE2.2C_and_QE3))

The purchased assets (treasury bonds and so on) are idling on the Fed's balance sheet. Eventually as bonds mature the Fed just cancels the newly- created-debt it used to buy the bond, and the asset just disappears from the balance sheet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Add with it today's stock market collapse around the globe and we are possibly entering another recession.

Indexes are down 7% in Dubai/Saudi and 3% in USA.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean when you say prices are down? CPI, some other indicator(s)?

<comment><USER15> Indexes. Corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's an article from late may that disingenuously claims that the inflation rate is at 500% year over year.

[http://www.xe.com/currency/vef-venezuelan- bolivar](http://www.xe.com/currency/vef-venezuelan-bolivar)

So I guess the situation improved in June/July?

<comment><USER9> (words from Venezuelan living in Venezuela)

Easily, year to year (aug-14 to aug-15) is around 300%, maybe 400%.

Of course that depends on which items you calculate it. Maybe some industrial supply is been less affected (if you can find those) and of course any inflation number is artificially affected by the free gasoline, which not even in this catastrophic situation has been adjusted.

But if you are like me, a middle class salary dependant professional, anything you usually spend has been increased in 300-400%. A breakfast in a bakery (panaderia) on aug-14 was around 100 Bs, now is between 400 and 500 Bs. On aug-14 I averaged a weekly visit to the supermarket around 4.000 Bs, now is 12.000-15.000 Bs. I tire for your car was around 3.000 Bs, now is 20.000 Bs (and you can't find them). And so on...

Of courses salaries has been, in most cases, or freezed or marginally adjusted, so you can see where this is heading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Brink_ , you say?</comment>


F/A-18 Super Hornets Launch 103 Perdix Drone Swarm in Successful Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OixSNQp0S_k <comment><USER2> What happens to the swarm afterwards? Do they stay in the air forever? Self- land in a neat, organized fashion? Or do people have to go track them down?

Also, what is the purpose of this class of drone?

EDIT:

Searching "perdix drone" surfaced more information.

        Perdix drones are the
        main subject of an
        experimental project
        conducted by the Strategic
        Capabilities Office of the
        United States Department of
        Defense which aims to
        develop autonomous
        micro-drones to be used for
        unmanned aerial surveillance.</comment>


Amazon was Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/index.html <comment><USER2> A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people simply just come back later.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147461>

[Edit: That being said, there's also the statistic that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1%. Imagine what 20+ minutes of "latency" would do. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900>]

<comment><USER3> > _A while ago, someone claiming to have worked at Amazon said that downtime > doesn't really affect things as much as you'd think. He said most people > simply just come back later._

Brick and mortar stores found that out ages ago. They were closed for large parts of the day/night and the customers just came back the next day.

If people didn't leave Tumblr and Twitter, with their constant massive outages (at some point in their life), when why would the leave Amazon, a huge established player, for a few hours outage?

<comment><USER4> I doubt many would leave Amazon permanently because of a service outage, but it probably does cost them something in impulse purchases, if the impulsive desire for the item passes during the downtime.

<comment><USER5> No, you would think that, but actually if you read the comment referenced above, what they actually found is that outages seem to have little effect on revenues. That's why it's so surprising, really. The implication seems to be that their customers don't actually spend a whole lot on impulse buys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is just a small complaint coming many hours after this link was posted. You linked to perhaps the most top-level URL amazon has available for a temporary outage. This means a couple things. 1) Hours later, the outage is over and I'm just hitting the home page. No specific information about what you were reporting. 2) This specific link is, as far as I know, now no linger available for other stories. That may not matter I the long run but it bares mentioning.

</comment><comment><USER7> At an estimated loss of $31,000 per minute [http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html?tag=nefd.to...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html?tag=nefd.top) I'm blown away that I see Amazon goes down so often. That certainly, in my mind, doesn't bode well for the brand of AWS.

<comment><USER8> Heroku is up: <http://cl.ly/image/0B0U1K3Z342R>.

Conversely, when AWS had issues, Amazon.com was not impacted.

Amazon.com != AWS. I'm curious to know when AWS or Amazon.com innovations impact each other, or which one leads. I'd rather it be Amazon.com.

<comment><USER9> I think the gp was saying that the _brand_ — as in, the perception of AWS— will suffer, not the actual services.

Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep a website up for 100% of the time, so downtime at Amazon is understandable, but maybe the average Joe Manager is deciding between Rackspace and AWS and happens to visit amazon.com during this downtime. "If Amazon can't even keep their bread-and-butter running, how can I trust them with something like AWS?" he might say.

<comment><USER10> > Anyone with an ounce of server knowledge would know it's impossible to keep > a website up for 100% of the time

As far as I know Google has 100% uptime, so it's not impossible. May not be 100% for every geographical location but that's partly because of things Google cannot control nor make redundant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat off-topic: my (limited) experience with Amazon Prime video suggests it's significantly less reliable than Netflix or iTunes (neither of which are stupendously reliable, but I'd say Netflix is by far the most reliable of the three). Hulu might actually be worse than Amazon Prime.

<comment><USER12> I don't know if you saw this posted on HN, but Netflix test their system really well. They use so-called chaos monkey [1] that shuts down random servers on a whim. This allows them to detect and get rid of dependencies, i.e. tolerate failures in other parts of the system.

[1] <http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html>

<comment><USER13> Isn't Netflix hosted on AWS?

<comment><USER14> Netflix is indeed running on AWS. Some details about their back-end here:

[http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was- awesome...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/12/aws-reinvent-was-awesome.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. Something this big means I'll bet it's a networking issue.

I wonder if they lose money for a brief outage, or if people just delay their purchases. I seem to remember them graphing this somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER16> Do we really need a front-page post every time a well-known site has a hiccup? It's bad enough getting it every time github does. What are you hoping for here? A thread full of me-toos?

</comment><comment><USER17> Had downtime yesterdayevening (12 hours ago) as well in the Netherlands. People from Germany were able to load the website (the .com version; .de worked at all times), and after two hours I was able to as well. Upon trying to add something to my cart it returned the same error 500 though, so that was still down the last time I checked (about 10 hours ago). I'm not sure if or when this was resolved.

I didn't submit this as story because I didn't think anyone would care, given the recent call not to post downtimes. Given the #1 spot the story has now, it seems I should have. So do people care or not?

</comment><comment><USER18> <http://www.amazon.ca/> is OK.

I get Http/1.1 Service Unavailable on first two requests.

I got 500 with the message "We're very sorry, but we're having trouble doing what you just asked us to do. Please give us another chance--click the Back button on your browser and try your request again. Or start from the beginning on our homepage. "

</comment><comment><USER19> Comes up for me <http://www.amazon.com/gp/cart/view.html>

</comment><comment><USER20> <http://i.imgur.com/E8vAzKp.jpg>

<comment><USER21> I doubt that works when the site is up either. Many servers these days reject pings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doing fine here, both amazon.com and the AWS console.

<comment><USER23> here=where?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I got a 500 error on amazon.com. Now just a timeout.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can't get into AWS management console either.

<comment><USER26> I can't get to the management console or status.aws.amazon.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like someone that is oncall is going to have a bad night. Amazon.de and .co.uk are up.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are two types of websites, those that have suffered downtime, and those that will.

</comment><comment><USER29> Seems like Only US market got goosebumps. UK looks fine and up.

</comment><comment><USER30> And it's back up for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> aws console seems fine to me. the amazon.com is down for sure.

<comment><USER32> Yeah same here. Amazon is throwing a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" but AWS console is fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Amazon.com is back up

</comment><comment><USER34> Use Windows Azure!

</comment><comment><USER35> Back online

</comment><comment><USER36> Browsing the site is nearly impossible at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's a lesson in overengineering. At this point my $5 Pentium 3 server has a greater uptime than Amazon.

<comment><USER38> Your $5 Pentium 3 server isn't the largest retail website on the internet making $61 billion a year.

Having _seen_ a lot of the code that Amazon runs on, and having seen first- hand the scale that it runs on, I'll say this: it's not perfect, but it's remarkably well-engineered, and a hell of a lot better than most snarky HNers could do.

<comment><USER39> But that's the point. Most people don't need anything that well-engineered. Compared to more traditional hosting solutions from quality providers, AWS has terrible uptime and at a much higher cost for the same amount of resources. Two VPS'es from two different providers in a simple failover configuration with an anycast DNS solution would be simpler, cheaper, and much more reliable.

<comment><USER39> Wow, apparently that last comment really hit a nerve, as several people decided to downvote it, but not a single person actually refuted any of what I said. I was under the impression that downvotes were more to be used against trolling or flamebaiting, and not just opinions that people disagreed with. Considering everything I said is quite easy to verify as being true, this downvoting just strikes me as kind of intellectually dishonest. I expected better from HN.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere. Some people think I believe a $5 computer could handle amazon.com's traffic, which is clearly preposterous.

I know that almost all of my downtime comes from when I overengineer things. And I don't need to "patch my kernel" because my OS doesn't have kernel holes once a week. Linux isn't the only Unix OS out there.

Today, a lot of sysadmins believe that "LAMP" is a synonym for webserver, and consequently there are a bunch of webservers serving static content on a machine with way too many moving parts. Complexity is bad.

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." -- Albert Einstein</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adolescence is ruff for dogs too - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-05-adolescence-ruff-dogs.html <comment><AUTHOR> Also written up in The Guardian:

[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/may/13/dogs- en...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/may/13/dogs-endure- emotional-difficulties-puberty-like-humans-says-study)</comment>


The 14 points of Fascism - <AUTHOR> http://www.favreau.info/misc/14-points-fascism.php <comment> vezzy-fnord Actually what separates fascism from other kinds of authoritarianism is what Roger Griffin dubbed "palingenetic ultranationalism" \- where the fascist regime strongly pushes a myth of national rebirth/reawakening from the prior "decadence", and usually lifts lot of historical motifs. Italy under Mussolini was crazed with promoting an image of the Roman Empire, for instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fascism does indeed embrace irrationalism and the romanticized notion of some prior era deemed more favorable than the current one.

As an American listening to the Presidential debates, all this talk of "Making America great again," and the recent waves of xenophobia sweeping the nation among other things, is a bit scary,.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Error 403: Forbidden.

Anybody have a fixed URL?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://bit.ly/1I8QZxG](http://bit.ly/1I8QZxG)</comment></comment>


Gun control: in the US, toddlers kill more people than terrorists do - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/13/the-macabre-truth-of-gun-control-in-the-us-is-that-toddlers-kill-more-people-than-terrorists-do <comment><USER2> Negligent shootings have nothing to do with gun control. When a toddler manages to get their hands on a firearm it's a gun safety issue, but leave it to the guardian to make this point and also bring up Syrian refugees into the mix.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say nothing. Obviously if she wouldn't have had a gun due to a gun control law she wouldn't have been shot. Would this specific instance of been stopped by most gun control laws proposed probably not. But, still not zero.

<comment><USER2> Yeah but no proposed gun control law, not even the most extreme ones from the "gun ban" lobby would've prevented her from owning a handgun or in this case shoot by a toddler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ban toddlers now, think of the children! ;)

<comment><USER4> (Also, as far as comparing statistics go: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11253500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11253500) )</comment></comment>