undefined | Better HN

0 pointsfivea4y ago0 comments

> Imagining boatloads of complexity involved with the blinking cursors according to markets, profiles and geographic locations and whatever else really doesn't make it sound any better at all.

These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.

However, just because you're oblivious or unfamiliar to these requirements, they don't mean they aren't requirements.

Think about it for a second. If it's necessary to target a service to specific geographical markets to comply with legal and/or business requirents, and given it's considerably more profitable to target a shop to a customer based on their personal interests, why would you ignore that and naively presume that the hypothetical "blinking cursor" is straight-forward to implement? And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.

There is a widespread problem in software development which is this this tendency to be very opinionated over all problems in spite of being totally ignorant and oblivious to the underlying problem domain. Everyone is an idiot except themselves, who always hold the answer in spite of not even knowingwhat the problem is, let alone understanding it.

0 comments

modo_mario4y ago

>These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.

Could you paint me a realistic scenario for such multifaceted complexity revolving around this blinking cursor in a particular field? I can see how this might depend on a language/writing system but kind of get lost beyond that.

I do have experience with such "professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements" btw but they tend to be more related to desktop and factory software each used by hundreds which is probably a few zeroes less than what we're talking about here.

>And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.

I know more than most that software can behave in weird ways but don't you think if there's a reasonable worry that altering this blinking cursor affects security that something is off?

TheOtherHobbes4y ago

If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial, because most of the process should be automated. Even in multiple territories and/or different user demos.

Unless you're reinventing the wheel for each modification.

fiveaOP4y ago

> If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial (...)

What leads you to believe in that? I mean, you have zero insight or understanding how things work or were designed. You have zero idea of where that blinking cursor comes from, let alone who owns that particular bit of code.

Let's think things through for a moment. Let's imagine you're talking about a blinking cursor in a random page from Google or Amazon. These are organizations where you have teams owning small widgets that show off only in specific pages, and that the page that you see in your browser come from a lengthy page engine pipeline that has all sorts of tests and failsafes, not to mention regional and localized deployments managed by whatever deployment policy.

This doesn't even take into account the whole workflow from product managers, who often demand data on the impact of touching a button.

You don't just edit a HTML file and hit save, don't you?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse