7 ms·

Folk Interfaces

223 points by lysergia 4y ago

pradn 4y ago
There's also the Indian cultural concept of `jugaad`, which refers to folksy hacking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad
yuchi 4y ago
This argument is very similar to what I usually, probably inappropriately, refer to “malleability” of a software, interface or system in general: it’s ability to be used way beyond the initial use cases, and hopefully be good at it.
sgt 4y ago
On the etymology of "folk", saying that it the word comes from Old English folc is true, although a vast over-simplification. A lot of languages share this word. This is actually an ancient word, you can trace it back to proto-Germanic "fulka", and further to Proto-Indo-European "plh-gos" (presumably pronounced something like phulgos or pholgos, close enough to folk).
- talideon 4y ago
  If you want its direct ancestor, then it's perfectly true. The etymology further back than that would be irrelevant, and also unattested.
- thegabriele 4y ago
  ...and then from phulgos to the latin "vulgus"?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Where "vulgate" and "vulgar" come from, the common.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Folksy: people doing good or neutral stuff Vulgar, populist: people doing naughty or debased stuff
- Mappleton 4y ago
  OA here. Thanks for the expanded etymology. I was using https://www.etymonline.com/word/folk https://www.etymonline.com/word/folk as my source which goes into more historical detail. But didn't want to get too carried away in the opener on etymology.
benjaminjosephw 4y ago
> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user programmmable tools beyond spreadsheets for inspiration. Anyone have suggestions of some other places these kinds of "folk interfaces" show up?
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Minecraft comes to mind, if you want to think out of the box.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    In that case, I'd say Conway's Game of Life evolved into an unintended end-user programmable tool, or folk interface, where people figured out how to build logic circuits, Turing-complete programs, and eventually the Game of Life itself. These examples seem to show that there's a kind of wisdom and creativity of the crowd, the folk, collective behavior.
- account-5 4y ago
  MS Access databases.
- pbronez 4y ago
  The entire Low Code / No Code and RPA / IPA markets exist for this. Airtable, App Smith, etc are a modern, web-based take on Access. The more generic a tool is, the more creative people get with it. For example, emailing a file or note to yourself is a folk interface. Using a Facebook group to role play is a folk interface. Nothing has come close to matching spreadsheets though.
- nonoesp 4y ago
  Visual programming tools, such as Grasshopper 3d, have created a microworld of custom-made plugins and user interfaces, mostly to generate 2d and 3d geometry, but often used to achieve other programming feats. There are even explicit plugins that let users create UI components to control and visualize program inputs and outputs.
tikwidd 4y ago
Some random folk practices I've come across: * Blocking, stacking and pulling creep camps in DOTA. Unintended behaviours that became core game mechanics. * Comments in the tag section of Tumblr posts, to avoid the comments appearing in a reblog ("Why do people use tags on tumblr instead of comments?" [1]) * The appropriation of switching MOSFETs such as the IRF510, designed for low frequencies, in homebrew amateur radio QRP power amplifiers. "In talking to International Rectifier, they were floored to find out QRPers were using them at 7MHz or higher." [2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/nu4vpa/why_do_people_use_tags_on_tumblr_instead_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/nu4vpa/w... [2] http://www.iw3sgt.it/IW3SGT_PRJ/IW3SGT_AMP_LF/ClassDEF1.pdf http://www.iw3sgt.it/IW3SGT_PRJ/IW3SGT_AMP_LF/ClassDEF1.pdf
- pjc50 4y ago
  Twitter's "retweet" and "hashtag" were both folk innovations that became product features. People used to write 'RT @user "comment"' to retweet.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I found that a really interesting development, and they embraced it. Probably the best example of "go with where your users are going" I can think of. And it's silly as well, because anyone with a few weeks of software development knowledge could probably hack a Twitter-like together. Not that at that scale, admittedly, but still, prototype-twitter was nothing fancy.
    - pimlottc 4y ago
      There’s a term for this: “desire path” Like when you see a worn path in the grass where hundreds of people took the same shortcuts instead of using the proper planned-out pathways. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    The quote RT is another example. People used to take screenshots of tweets to quote RT.
bo0tzz 4y ago
Another article in a similar vein, that I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- Mappleton 4y ago
  OA here. Loved this piece as well, and it certainly got me thinking about a set of themes that led to this essay. Robin is an exceptional thinker in this space.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Your digital garden intro had a massive impact on me. It finally gave me the vocabulary to express how I build the website I live from, and spurred me into an impromptu redesign of my personal website. It also led to half a dozen hand-drawn illustrations on the commercial one, with more on the way.
- shanusmagnus 4y ago
  Thank you so much for surfacing this! I've never heard of Robin Sloan, but I loved this article to a disturbing degree. How beautiful, how true.
- nicbou 4y ago
  I frequently use this metaphor. This article had a profound impact on what I work on. It's well worth a read.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
The biggest issue that I come across, is users of my software, developing mental models of the software that I would never, in a million years, have developed, myself. They often work with the software, based on their "strange" mental model, and can have very weird workflows. In some cases, this is excellent, and it is worth it for me to learn the new model, and maybe add affordances for it.
- uhoh-itsmaciek 4y ago
  Could you talk about some concrete examples?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Gimme a bit. I’m going to have to come up with examples that don’t compromise any proprietary information. Most of the examples are from my work for a photography equipment manufacturer, and they wouldn’t want me to talk about it.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I'm not going to follow up on this. The examples I could come up with, outside that experience, would not be accurate recollections. That company considered exactly that kind of experience to be one of their "trade secrets," and they were fairly well-known for "leaning into" customer mental models. Even though I could legally discuss it, I won't. I feel they could use all the help they can get, right now, and I won't make things harder for them.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Git is a pile of patches!
  - ThePadawan 4y ago
    Not parent, but here's an example from a past project. Customer: "Could you make the 'name' field of this entity longer? We need to add longer names." Me: "Why?" Customer: "Well, we want to name the entity '2022 - Spring - $500k - Contoso Inc. - Presale stage' so we can find it more easily." Me: "So what you actually want is to be able to filter/search for entities by all those values, and you're just using the name as a workaround because it's all you have." Customer: "Well that's how we do it in Excel."
uhoh-itsmaciek 4y ago
Folk interfaces are a natural consequence of the focus on building applications for millions of users and the dearth of situated software [1]. They're also a clever way of claiming no-code or low-code platforms in unexpected places. [1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situ...
Joker_vD 4y ago
> chairs as doorstoppers, Wait, there are actual things, called "doorstoppers", that are designed to work exactly as door stoppers and have no other discernible function? Do they by any chance look anything like paperweights?
- jussion_zoonist 4y ago
  They are wedge shaped and usually made of rubber. You stick it under the door, hold it in place, then pull the door to get it stuck on the doorstop. Some doors also have built in door stops that are different- more like a kickstand on a bike.
  - dwringer 4y ago
    There's also the folk tradition of just cutting off an angled piece of scrap lumber to use.
- timw4mail 4y ago
  Generally they are just a wedge-shape that gives enough friction at the bottom of the door so that the weight of the door or strength of the closing mechanism can't overcome that friction.
- zach_garwood 4y ago
  I suppose another folk solution is removing the pin in the arm of the device that automatically pulls the door closed. I had a high school teacher who did that.
- al2o3cr 4y ago
  There are, and they'd make fairly poor paperweights because they aren't typically very heavy - the intent is to use friction with the ground to keep the door from moving, rather than just weight. For instance: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Heavy-Duty-Walnut-Brown-Doorstop-2-per-Pack-4214244EV/306757988 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Heavy-Duty-Walnut-Brown...
  - 4y ago
agentultra 4y ago
If this is an interesting idea to you, check out: https://screenl.es https://screenl.es
SamBam 4y ago
Orthogonal to the main point of the article, I was interested in the mention of Victor Papanek's tin can radio receiver, which apparently cost 9c to make (presumably the cost of the transistor, since everything else was recycled), and could be fueled by burning wax or dung. I haven't been able to find a simple guide for how to make one myself.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  Odds are that 9 cents is the production cost in massive quantity. A single unit might be days of work and a few dollars of parts. (Inflation)
- password4321 4y ago
  Not super useful without a tuner, receiving every frequency at once. Perhaps the next step up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio
  - SamBam 4y ago
    Apparently it would only receive one frequency (presumably tuned when made). The target was for developing countries that might have only a single state-run station.
    - password4321 4y ago
      "The radio is, of course, non-directional. This means that it receives all stations simultaneously. But in emerging countries, this is of no importance: only one broadcast (carried by relay towers 50 miles apart) is carried." Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change ©1971 pg. 162 https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/162/mode/2up?q=non-directional https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/16...
      - SamBam 4y ago
        Ah, misunderstood that. Ok, so fairly useless in a place with many stations.
jonahx 4y ago
This is like the interface version of Hyrum's law: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
rileyphone 4y ago
This is referred to in the literature as 'appropriation' [0], though perhaps that term has gained too much cultural baggage recently to be useful. [0] https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/cbe110a4-c761-4afe-9d3c-294066bfce36/ScienceOpen/001_Dix.pdf https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/cbe110a4-c761-4afe...
andrepd 4y ago
> Large California-based companies produce monolithic apps and interfaces for a global audience. They're designing for the broadest, generic use cases to make things work for the greatest number of people. Hah! If only! Actually they often (but not always) seem to design it for an SV audience with the latest-gen phone/computer, fast uninterrupted internet, familiarity with the latest "UX" fads, perfect eyesight, etc. Anybody that falls outside that narrow group can get shafted.
jessejjohnson 4y ago
The theme/presentation of this site is top tier. Nice work.
lrpe 4y ago
I build fictional worlds as a hobby, and sometimes I need to make a map of a globe and find myself in need of a program that can draw vector shapes onto a globe and project it onto a 2D map afterwards. The simplest way I've found to do that which fits my workflow is a program called GPlates. A program that simulates plate tectonics. I've never touched the simulation part, although it might be useful in my worldbuilding at some point. All I use it for is drawing colored shapes.
- a1369209993 4y ago
  Honestly, that seems to be a common use case for GPlates (see eg[0][from 1]), and might even be more common than actually using it for plate tectonics work. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvwgPFSN-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvwgPFSN-I 1: http://www.youtube.com/user/Artifexian http://www.youtube.com/user/Artifexian
hprotagonist 4y ago
and when you start from the premise that folk interfaces are not only good but should be actively encouraged, you get something like emacs.
dan-g 4y ago
One of my favorite creative uses of Excel comes from !!Con 2017, where Kevin Chen used spreadsheet to implement HDR imaging[1]. It’s also just an incredibly well-crafted presentation. [1] https://kevinchen.co/projects/excel-hdr/ https://kevinchen.co/projects/excel-hdr/
inasmuch 4y ago
Whenever I need to explain to laypeople what I do as a software designer, I tell them that most of my job is figuring out new ways to visualize and connect outlines and spreadsheets.
austinsharp 4y ago
I was surprised to see no mention of automation tools like IFTTT and Tasker. These sorts of overarching automation oriented tools let people solve a lot of problems by stitching together things that aren't designed to work together. I would actually put Excel in this original category. Part of Excel's utility is that it is really good at enabling building of dashboards, applications, whatever. While Excel's builders didn't have D&D character sheets in mind, they definitely expect users to do unanticipated things with the software, just as much as IFTTT or Tasker would. In some ways this is a "platform" type of perspective. "Here's a bunch of building blocks, go do whatever you think you need" is really powerful once the network effect of building blocks gets big enough. Any tool with a built-in DSL or workflow builder type of UI is probably in this category.
- ryanf 4y ago
  It's funny that you mention IFTTT because one of the inspirations for its creation was the book Thoughtless Acts?, which is full of photos like the ones in this post: https://ifttt.com/explore/ifttt-the-beginning https://ifttt.com/explore/ifttt-the-beginning They used to give a copy to new employees, but it seems to be out of print now.
nuc1e0n 4y ago
I approve of this, but its hardly novel. Web browsers were originally intended to view flat html documents with hyperlinks between them. The concept of a web app is itself a 'folk' repurposing of technology. Another might be the way blocks in minecraft are repurposed to make all sorts of elaborate redstone machines such as automatic farms.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  Also, Minecraft and other games have been used as covert communications channels.
mikewarot 4y ago
Random folk practice that drove me nuts, Outlook "Deleted Items Folder" as storage, never actually deleted, ever. 20+ Gigabyte mailboxes, which were actually a threaded, searchable, rich content database. (Exchange's superpower (when it works) is a almost perfect online/offline sync able database -- You can send an email in your offline client, when you go online it'll get sent, your calendar updates will sync, etc)
mikewarot 4y ago
Using Virtual Machines as capability based security is something I've come to accept. Windows and Linux are vulnerable to the confused deputy problem, so you separate your concerns into separate VMs and give each "machine" a set of resources (capabilities) IBM and Digital machines have done this since the 1960s.
- dannyobrien 4y ago
  Yep, I've been thinking the same thing. Thanks for conveying it so well!
amadeuspagel 4y ago
A lot of people use gmail or whatsapp for notes.
- cauefcr 4y ago
  I love the group with myself trick for whatsapp notes.
mikewarot 4y ago
I use Hugin[1] to manually align images and combine them into virtual focus.[2] I started doing this after learning of the Stanford Multi-Camera array[3], and wanting to replicate the ability to see through things[4]. I didn't have the budget, so I used one camera and a cluster of photos from slightly varying locations. I got there eventually.[5] [1] https://hugin.sourceforge.io/ https://hugin.sourceforge.io/ [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/72157718585123547/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/721577185851... [3] http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ [4] http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/videos/crowd0-sap.mpg http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/videos/crowd0-sa... [5] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51018992733/in/album-72157718585123547/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51018992733/in/albu...
ExtraE 4y ago
Please write concisely.
avg_dev 4y ago
I found the post interesting. It provoked me to think about the low-code, no-code movements, and of the concept of folk interfaces. It is a nice term and I will try keep it with me in my future thinking. I found the 9c radio particularly appealing. It also made me consider how I ended up where I am now, and one thing that struck me is that when I was learning to program, I tried learning from textbooks about programming and they intimidated me and felt impenetrable. I didn't know how to get into them at all. Then by stroke of fortune I came across the first programming book that really took me. It was called C for Dummies, by Dan Gookin. It was filled with humor and encouraged experimentation, and above all it was empowering. It made me feel good and it inspired me: I sent a couple of busted but well-intentioned input routines off to a friend who was further along in the process than I was and he introduced me to the off-by-one-error. I never became a good C programmer, but I learned how to make the computer do my bidding in small ways, and it wasn't long before I picked up another book, on Perl and CGI.pm, and I wrote my first "web applications". Eventually I went on to do a computer science degree. Today, by HN standards, I'm maybe nothing to write home about, but I make a very comfortable living and I enjoy writing code at work. I enjoy learning about tech in my spare time, even now. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I wish to see learning to code, per se, easily accessible for all. I'm not talking about cheap or even free boot camps that promise entry into a lucrative job market. I'm talking about a kid, or a parent, or an auntie or uncle or cousin or sister or brother, about whoever, who just sees something they want to make happen and they literally do because they can. I read through the comments and I re-read the wonderful article by Robin Sloan linked below ("An app can be a home-cooked meal" -- look through this comment thread, and you'll see it, alongside my first observation of the term "OA", one that took me some time to decipher -- another thing that will stick with me). I believe that programming is and always will be for the masses. I believe in development best practices when they are called for. But for learning, for discovering the beauty of computing and the joy of software, of writing one's first programs, I wish the barriers were less!
smegsicle 4y ago
prefixing filenames with a period to hide them from ls
zem 4y ago
along the lines of the d&d spreadsheet, I've developed an entire app for running scrabble tournaments as an elaborate google sheets script. it's a couple of thousand lines of javascript for the logic, but the user interface is entirely a bunch of spreadsheet tabs. I'm currently rewriting it as a standalone web app just to break the dependence on google, and have a more customisable user experience, but it's really hard to beat the spreadsheet UX, where settings are all done using editable tables and the output shows up in another table.

223 points by lysergia 4y ago

There's also the Indian cultural concept of `jugaad`, which refers to folksy hacking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

yuchi 4y ago

This argument is very similar to what I usually, probably inappropriately, refer to “malleability” of a software, interface or system in general: it’s ability to be used way beyond the initial use cases, and hopefully be good at it.

sgt 4y ago

On the etymology of "folk", saying that it the word comes from Old English folc is true, although a vast over-simplification. A lot of languages share this word. This is actually an ancient word, you can trace it back to proto-Germanic "fulka", and further to Proto-Indo-European "plh-gos" (presumably pronounced something like phulgos or pholgos, close enough to folk).

talideon 4y ago
If you want its direct ancestor, then it's perfectly true. The etymology further back than that would be irrelevant, and also unattested.
thegabriele 4y ago
...and then from phulgos to the latin "vulgus"?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Where "vulgate" and "vulgar" come from, the common.
avgcorrection 4y ago
Folksy: people doing good or neutral stuff Vulgar, populist: people doing naughty or debased stuff
Mappleton 4y ago
OA here. Thanks for the expanded etymology. I was using https://www.etymonline.com/word/folk https://www.etymonline.com/word/folk as my source which goes into more historical detail. But didn't want to get too carried away in the opener on etymology.

benjaminjosephw 4y ago

> No matter how much well-intentioned user research these companies invest in, they'll never be able to produce software that fully meets the needs of individual users and culturally distant communities. Domain experts being able to solve their own problems sounds is a worthwhile objective for software tools but innovation in this space has been surprisingly sparce. I've been searching for other examples of end-user programmmable tools beyond spreadsheets for inspiration. Anyone have suggestions of some other places these kinds of "folk interfaces" show up?

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
Minecraft comes to mind, if you want to think out of the box.
- lioeters 4y ago
  In that case, I'd say Conway's Game of Life evolved into an unintended end-user programmable tool, or folk interface, where people figured out how to build logic circuits, Turing-complete programs, and eventually the Game of Life itself. These examples seem to show that there's a kind of wisdom and creativity of the crowd, the folk, collective behavior.
account-5 4y ago
MS Access databases.
pbronez 4y ago
The entire Low Code / No Code and RPA / IPA markets exist for this. Airtable, App Smith, etc are a modern, web-based take on Access. The more generic a tool is, the more creative people get with it. For example, emailing a file or note to yourself is a folk interface. Using a Facebook group to role play is a folk interface. Nothing has come close to matching spreadsheets though.
nonoesp 4y ago
Visual programming tools, such as Grasshopper 3d, have created a microworld of custom-made plugins and user interfaces, mostly to generate 2d and 3d geometry, but often used to achieve other programming feats. There are even explicit plugins that let users create UI components to control and visualize program inputs and outputs.

tikwidd 4y ago

Some random folk practices I've come across: * Blocking, stacking and pulling creep camps in DOTA. Unintended behaviours that became core game mechanics. * Comments in the tag section of Tumblr posts, to avoid the comments appearing in a reblog ("Why do people use tags on tumblr instead of comments?" [1]) * The appropriation of switching MOSFETs such as the IRF510, designed for low frequencies, in homebrew amateur radio QRP power amplifiers. "In talking to International Rectifier, they were floored to find out QRPers were using them at 7MHz or higher." [2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/nu4vpa/why_do_people_use_tags_on_tumblr_instead_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/nu4vpa/w... [2] http://www.iw3sgt.it/IW3SGT_PRJ/IW3SGT_AMP_LF/ClassDEF1.pdf http://www.iw3sgt.it/IW3SGT_PRJ/IW3SGT_AMP_LF/ClassDEF1.pdf

pjc50 4y ago
Twitter's "retweet" and "hashtag" were both folk innovations that became product features. People used to write 'RT @user "comment"' to retweet.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I found that a really interesting development, and they embraced it. Probably the best example of "go with where your users are going" I can think of. And it's silly as well, because anyone with a few weeks of software development knowledge could probably hack a Twitter-like together. Not that at that scale, admittedly, but still, prototype-twitter was nothing fancy.
  - pimlottc 4y ago
    There’s a term for this: “desire path” Like when you see a worn path in the grass where hundreds of people took the same shortcuts instead of using the proper planned-out pathways. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  The quote RT is another example. People used to take screenshots of tweets to quote RT.

bo0tzz 4y ago

Another article in a similar vein, that I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Mappleton 4y ago
OA here. Loved this piece as well, and it certainly got me thinking about a set of themes that led to this essay. Robin is an exceptional thinker in this space.
- nicbou 4y ago
  Your digital garden intro had a massive impact on me. It finally gave me the vocabulary to express how I build the website I live from, and spurred me into an impromptu redesign of my personal website. It also led to half a dozen hand-drawn illustrations on the commercial one, with more on the way.
shanusmagnus 4y ago
Thank you so much for surfacing this! I've never heard of Robin Sloan, but I loved this article to a disturbing degree. How beautiful, how true.
nicbou 4y ago
I frequently use this metaphor. This article had a profound impact on what I work on. It's well worth a read.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

The biggest issue that I come across, is users of my software, developing mental models of the software that I would never, in a million years, have developed, myself. They often work with the software, based on their "strange" mental model, and can have very weird workflows. In some cases, this is excellent, and it is worth it for me to learn the new model, and maybe add affordances for it.

uhoh-itsmaciek 4y ago
Could you talk about some concrete examples?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Gimme a bit. I’m going to have to come up with examples that don’t compromise any proprietary information. Most of the examples are from my work for a photography equipment manufacturer, and they wouldn’t want me to talk about it.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I'm not going to follow up on this. The examples I could come up with, outside that experience, would not be accurate recollections. That company considered exactly that kind of experience to be one of their "trade secrets," and they were fairly well-known for "leaning into" customer mental models. Even though I could legally discuss it, I won't. I feel they could use all the help they can get, right now, and I won't make things harder for them.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Git is a pile of patches!
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  Not parent, but here's an example from a past project. Customer: "Could you make the 'name' field of this entity longer? We need to add longer names." Me: "Why?" Customer: "Well, we want to name the entity '2022 - Spring - $500k - Contoso Inc. - Presale stage' so we can find it more easily." Me: "So what you actually want is to be able to filter/search for entities by all those values, and you're just using the name as a workaround because it's all you have." Customer: "Well that's how we do it in Excel."

uhoh-itsmaciek 4y ago

Folk interfaces are a natural consequence of the focus on building applications for millions of users and the dearth of situated software [1]. They're also a clever way of claiming no-code or low-code platforms in unexpected places. [1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situ...

Joker_vD 4y ago

> chairs as doorstoppers, Wait, there are actual things, called "doorstoppers", that are designed to work exactly as door stoppers and have no other discernible function? Do they by any chance look anything like paperweights?

jussion_zoonist 4y ago
They are wedge shaped and usually made of rubber. You stick it under the door, hold it in place, then pull the door to get it stuck on the doorstop. Some doors also have built in door stops that are different- more like a kickstand on a bike.
- dwringer 4y ago
  There's also the folk tradition of just cutting off an angled piece of scrap lumber to use.
timw4mail 4y ago
Generally they are just a wedge-shape that gives enough friction at the bottom of the door so that the weight of the door or strength of the closing mechanism can't overcome that friction.
zach_garwood 4y ago
I suppose another folk solution is removing the pin in the arm of the device that automatically pulls the door closed. I had a high school teacher who did that.
al2o3cr 4y ago
There are, and they'd make fairly poor paperweights because they aren't typically very heavy - the intent is to use friction with the ground to keep the door from moving, rather than just weight. For instance: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Heavy-Duty-Walnut-Brown-Doorstop-2-per-Pack-4214244EV/306757988 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Heavy-Duty-Walnut-Brown...
- 4y ago

agentultra 4y ago

If this is an interesting idea to you, check out: https://screenl.es https://screenl.es

SamBam 4y ago

Orthogonal to the main point of the article, I was interested in the mention of Victor Papanek's tin can radio receiver, which apparently cost 9c to make (presumably the cost of the transistor, since everything else was recycled), and could be fueled by burning wax or dung. I haven't been able to find a simple guide for how to make one myself.

mikewarot 4y ago
Odds are that 9 cents is the production cost in massive quantity. A single unit might be days of work and a few dollars of parts. (Inflation)
password4321 4y ago
Not super useful without a tuner, receiving every frequency at once. Perhaps the next step up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio
- SamBam 4y ago
  Apparently it would only receive one frequency (presumably tuned when made). The target was for developing countries that might have only a single state-run station.
  - password4321 4y ago
    "The radio is, of course, non-directional. This means that it receives all stations simultaneously. But in emerging countries, this is of no importance: only one broadcast (carried by relay towers 50 miles apart) is carried." Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change ©1971 pg. 162 https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/162/mode/2up?q=non-directional https://archive.org/details/designforrealwor0000papa/page/16...
    - SamBam 4y ago
      Ah, misunderstood that. Ok, so fairly useless in a place with many stations.

jonahx 4y ago

This is like the interface version of Hyrum's law: With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

rileyphone 4y ago

This is referred to in the literature as 'appropriation' [0], though perhaps that term has gained too much cultural baggage recently to be useful. [0] https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/cbe110a4-c761-4afe-9d3c-294066bfce36/ScienceOpen/001_Dix.pdf https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/cbe110a4-c761-4afe...

andrepd 4y ago

> Large California-based companies produce monolithic apps and interfaces for a global audience. They're designing for the broadest, generic use cases to make things work for the greatest number of people. Hah! If only! Actually they often (but not always) seem to design it for an SV audience with the latest-gen phone/computer, fast uninterrupted internet, familiarity with the latest "UX" fads, perfect eyesight, etc. Anybody that falls outside that narrow group can get shafted.

jessejjohnson 4y ago

The theme/presentation of this site is top tier. Nice work.

lrpe 4y ago

I build fictional worlds as a hobby, and sometimes I need to make a map of a globe and find myself in need of a program that can draw vector shapes onto a globe and project it onto a 2D map afterwards. The simplest way I've found to do that which fits my workflow is a program called GPlates. A program that simulates plate tectonics. I've never touched the simulation part, although it might be useful in my worldbuilding at some point. All I use it for is drawing colored shapes.

a1369209993 4y ago
Honestly, that seems to be a common use case for GPlates (see eg[0][from 1]), and might even be more common than actually using it for plate tectonics work. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvwgPFSN-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvwgPFSN-I 1: http://www.youtube.com/user/Artifexian http://www.youtube.com/user/Artifexian

hprotagonist 4y ago

and when you start from the premise that folk interfaces are not only good but should be actively encouraged, you get something like emacs.

dan-g 4y ago

One of my favorite creative uses of Excel comes from !!Con 2017, where Kevin Chen used spreadsheet to implement HDR imaging[1]. It’s also just an incredibly well-crafted presentation. [1] https://kevinchen.co/projects/excel-hdr/ https://kevinchen.co/projects/excel-hdr/

inasmuch 4y ago

Whenever I need to explain to laypeople what I do as a software designer, I tell them that most of my job is figuring out new ways to visualize and connect outlines and spreadsheets.

austinsharp 4y ago

I was surprised to see no mention of automation tools like IFTTT and Tasker. These sorts of overarching automation oriented tools let people solve a lot of problems by stitching together things that aren't designed to work together. I would actually put Excel in this original category. Part of Excel's utility is that it is really good at enabling building of dashboards, applications, whatever. While Excel's builders didn't have D&D character sheets in mind, they definitely expect users to do unanticipated things with the software, just as much as IFTTT or Tasker would. In some ways this is a "platform" type of perspective. "Here's a bunch of building blocks, go do whatever you think you need" is really powerful once the network effect of building blocks gets big enough. Any tool with a built-in DSL or workflow builder type of UI is probably in this category.

ryanf 4y ago
It's funny that you mention IFTTT because one of the inspirations for its creation was the book Thoughtless Acts?, which is full of photos like the ones in this post: https://ifttt.com/explore/ifttt-the-beginning https://ifttt.com/explore/ifttt-the-beginning They used to give a copy to new employees, but it seems to be out of print now.

nuc1e0n 4y ago

I approve of this, but its hardly novel. Web browsers were originally intended to view flat html documents with hyperlinks between them. The concept of a web app is itself a 'folk' repurposing of technology. Another might be the way blocks in minecraft are repurposed to make all sorts of elaborate redstone machines such as automatic farms.

mikewarot 4y ago
Also, Minecraft and other games have been used as covert communications channels.

mikewarot 4y ago

Random folk practice that drove me nuts, Outlook "Deleted Items Folder" as storage, never actually deleted, ever. 20+ Gigabyte mailboxes, which were actually a threaded, searchable, rich content database. (Exchange's superpower (when it works) is a almost perfect online/offline sync able database -- You can send an email in your offline client, when you go online it'll get sent, your calendar updates will sync, etc)

mikewarot 4y ago

Using Virtual Machines as capability based security is something I've come to accept. Windows and Linux are vulnerable to the confused deputy problem, so you separate your concerns into separate VMs and give each "machine" a set of resources (capabilities) IBM and Digital machines have done this since the 1960s.

dannyobrien 4y ago
Yep, I've been thinking the same thing. Thanks for conveying it so well!

amadeuspagel 4y ago

A lot of people use gmail or whatsapp for notes.

cauefcr 4y ago
I love the group with myself trick for whatsapp notes.

mikewarot 4y ago

I use Hugin[1] to manually align images and combine them into virtual focus.[2] I started doing this after learning of the Stanford Multi-Camera array[3], and wanting to replicate the ability to see through things[4]. I didn't have the budget, so I used one camera and a cluster of photos from slightly varying locations. I got there eventually.[5] [1] https://hugin.sourceforge.io/ https://hugin.sourceforge.io/ [2] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/72157718585123547/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/albums/721577185851... [3] http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/ [4] http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/videos/crowd0-sap.mpg http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/videos/crowd0-sa... [5] https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51018992733/in/album-72157718585123547/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/---mike---/51018992733/in/albu...

ExtraE 4y ago

Please write concisely.

avg_dev 4y ago

I found the post interesting. It provoked me to think about the low-code, no-code movements, and of the concept of folk interfaces. It is a nice term and I will try keep it with me in my future thinking. I found the 9c radio particularly appealing. It also made me consider how I ended up where I am now, and one thing that struck me is that when I was learning to program, I tried learning from textbooks about programming and they intimidated me and felt impenetrable. I didn't know how to get into them at all. Then by stroke of fortune I came across the first programming book that really took me. It was called C for Dummies, by Dan Gookin. It was filled with humor and encouraged experimentation, and above all it was empowering. It made me feel good and it inspired me: I sent a couple of busted but well-intentioned input routines off to a friend who was further along in the process than I was and he introduced me to the off-by-one-error. I never became a good C programmer, but I learned how to make the computer do my bidding in small ways, and it wasn't long before I picked up another book, on Perl and CGI.pm, and I wrote my first "web applications". Eventually I went on to do a computer science degree. Today, by HN standards, I'm maybe nothing to write home about, but I make a very comfortable living and I enjoy writing code at work. I enjoy learning about tech in my spare time, even now. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I wish to see learning to code, per se, easily accessible for all. I'm not talking about cheap or even free boot camps that promise entry into a lucrative job market. I'm talking about a kid, or a parent, or an auntie or uncle or cousin or sister or brother, about whoever, who just sees something they want to make happen and they literally do because they can. I read through the comments and I re-read the wonderful article by Robin Sloan linked below ("An app can be a home-cooked meal" -- look through this comment thread, and you'll see it, alongside my first observation of the term "OA", one that took me some time to decipher -- another thing that will stick with me). I believe that programming is and always will be for the masses. I believe in development best practices when they are called for. But for learning, for discovering the beauty of computing and the joy of software, of writing one's first programs, I wish the barriers were less!

smegsicle 4y ago

prefixing filenames with a period to hide them from ls

zem 4y ago

along the lines of the d&d spreadsheet, I've developed an entire app for running scrabble tournaments as an elaborate google sheets script. it's a couple of thousand lines of javascript for the logic, but the user interface is entirely a bunch of spreadsheet tabs. I'm currently rewriting it as a standalone web app just to break the dependence on google, and have a more customisable user experience, but it's really hard to beat the spreadsheet UX, where settings are all done using editable tables and the output shows up in another table.