
Avoid Artificial Stupidity - henrik_w
https://www.mapflat.com/blog/artificial-stupidity/
======
beat
Some years ago, I worked for a big box retailer on their public-facing catalog
api. It was a pretty exotic thing when it came out, as that data was all
trade-secretive - which was dumb, because then they just had web scrapers
brutalizing their front end to get the data that was public anyway.

So on the back end, the api collected data from many different sources within
this very large company, and put it in nice api form. This was technically
cached data, and could get stale, but really, most of it was sufficiently up-
to-date most of the time.

Turned out the biggest customer for this data was _the company itself_. Lots
of individual projects, needing some obscure piece of data or another, could
get it from the api, rather than having to hunt for whatever department
actually owned the data, and working out access arrangements on a piecemeal
basis. I'm sure it saved countless thousands of hours of work, and greatly
improved both quality and time to market for projects.

Looks like maybe IKEA could use something like that...

~~~
RhodesianHunter
That's funny, for a few years I worked for an organization that did the front
end crawling / brutalizing of most of the major retailers for their data.
Afaik most still do not intentionally provide any data publicly and many spend
extravagant amounts on anti-crawling tech to prevent it, resulting in an
expensive arms race over ostensibly public data.

~~~
gregmac
If you put something on a public site it can be harvested, and there's really
no stopping that. It's like video DRM: you can spend billions on the tech, but
ultimately, if nothing else, anyone can still aim any camera at the screen and
make a copy.

There's only two reasons I can think of that companies would bother with this:

1) they are ignorant or delusional about it and think they can beat the
crawler (which could be a third party making money by convincing them they can
do it)

2) It forces the crawler to spend more money chasing their blocking

I'm not sure what the benefit of 2 would be, though, unless you could make
them spend so much money that their entire operation is unprofitable.

Aside, as a developer, it might actually be entertaining for a while to work
on (2) - constantly changing strategy to defeat scrapers - but I can also see
getting burned out pretty quickly.

~~~
leggomylibro
>Aside, as a developer, it might actually be entertaining for a while to work
on (2) - constantly changing strategy to defeat scrapers - but I can also see
getting burned out pretty quickly.

Well if you replace 'scrapers' with 'advertisements', there are plenty of
worthwhile OSS projects that might welcome help :)

Making that sort of business unprofitable might not be a super realistic goal,
though.

------
nathan_long
> My search for a bookcase starts on ikea.com, where I navigate to the
> bookcase section, in the hope to get an overview of the different series. I
> find instead a listing of all 257 bookcase products, including accesories,
> such as hinges and extra shelves.

This is a very common frustration I have. Eg, go search Amazon for "bike" and
sort by price "low to high". None of the top hits are bicycles; they are all
accessories.

ML seems to be about guessing what the user wants based on lots of data
analysis. But I think there are lots of cases where letting the user _tell_
you want they want, by providing a hierarchical menu or explicit filters,
would get much better results.

One "low tech" thing I wish someone would build: an online grocery store with
every product categorized by food restrictions (gluten-free, peanut-free,
sugar-free, low-sodium, etc, as well as kosher, halal, vegan, etc). Check the
boxes you care about in your profile and you'll only see things that match.
This would be AMAZING for folks with food allergies. The implementation would
be 99.9% up-front research and data entry; the actual filtering would be as
simple as WHERE clauses. But I don't know of a site that does this.

~~~
KingPrad
This type of "low tech" idea seems like the kind of thing Google, Yelp, and
all the other big companies should be doing a better job with.

I have celiac and presumably Google has figured that out by now (or could, if
they spent some time determining allergies for accounts). Yet in Google Maps I
have to type "restaurant gluten free" when looking for food options. Then I
have to poke around to see which might be legitimately gluten free. I've been
typing this in for a decade, and never has Maps learned this basic time-saving
assumption it should make.

Same with Yelp. It hasn't figured out that I always filter by gluten free and
search reviews for that. It never just makes gluten free restaurants
prominent, nor follows up with me the next day on whether it made me ill or
things like that.

As you say, it's baffling the simple filtering that could be done based on
known user information. Note that my story is about gluten free, but would
apply to any number of food allergies or dietary preferences, yet the "market
leaders" seem unable to innovate on this specificity.

~~~
perl4ever
This sort of comment just makes me despair, because you seem to be complaining
about Google not taking enough control of determining what you want, and I see
that as a tremendous problem ( _the_ problem) what with their attempts
already.

Here's an example of what I hate about Google. I searched for recipes "without
eggs". It gave me hundreds and hundreds of hits for "without eggs _or_
butter". Now that may be what most people want, sure, but it's eradicated the
possibility of other permutations. When you guess what people want to search
for, you remove the ability to search for nearly every other possibility
imaginable.

It makes me feel like Skynet has already won.

------
kareemm
I moved coasts and renovated an old house last year. And consequently I've
spent a LOT of time on Ikea's website and at our local store.

I'm stunned at how terrible their online experience is. The parent article
summarizes a bunch. But Ikea misses out on basic blocking and tackling
ecommerce items like product descriptions, dimensions, related products in the
collection, inventory levels (not always accurate), etc.

It makes me wonder how much money they're leaving on the table with that
experience.

~~~
onion2k
_But Ikea misses out on basic blocking and tackling ecommerce items like
product descriptions, dimensions, related products in the collection,
inventory levels (not always accurate), etc._

Ikea's site has all that product information and more for most of the products
in the search listing - but you do have to hover over things to see it.

What is quite interesting is the variation between the product pages between
different countries.

US -
[https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90394559/#/10394...](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/90394559/#/10394558)

Japan -
[https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/catalog/products/40375134/](https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/catalog/products/40375134/)

UK - [https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/songesand-wardrobe-
white-903473...](https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/songesand-wardrobe-
white-90347351/)

The Japanese site is much more 'rounded' than the US site, and the UK site has
most of the information hidden away in an accordion UI. Presumably they've
tested and found each variation works best in each region. I'd love to see
their metrics.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Presumably they 've tested and found each variation works best in each
> region. I'd love to see their metrics._

Yeah, me too. Things like these make me think a lot of those metric-based
decisions amount to reading tea leaves. I know there are differences between
regions, but you wouldn't expect that many of them in the case of efficiently
presenting information. Unless of course, efficiently presenting all necessary
information to customers isn't what's being optimized for.

------
dkarl
_My search for a bookcase starts on ikea.com, where I navigate to the bookcase
section, in the hope to get an overview of the different series. I find
instead a listing of all 257 bookcase products, including accesories, such as
hinges and extra shelves. The full listing not give me an overview, however,
and I do not find anything useful.

An impatient customer could have given up at this stage_

This is thinking from the perspective of someone who can take advantage of a
logically structured site. I can tell you that when engineers think this way,
the result is usually serviceable as a first pass, but product comes back with
requests that make you rethink everything. To play devil's advocate, I can
guess the goal with this first page of results might be to show enough
different kinds of results that users will keep pressing "Load More" until
they find what they want. Imagine somebody comes to the site for parts for
their bookshelf, searches for "bookshelf," and sees nothing but complete
bookshelves in the first page of search results. They aren't going to scan the
page for links to the product category they're looking for. They aren't going
to "Ctl-F parts" like an HN reader. They might not even search for "bookshelf
parts." They might give up right there. So product tells us we have to make
sure that the first page of search results contains some bookshelves, some
parts, some accessories, at least one result from each product category. That
way the users will be enticed to mash "Load More" again and again until they
see what they want.

Or maybe it's some other quirk of behavior that makes this design better. Or
maybe they've put no effort into the design at all. I wouldn't presume to
know, but on balance my money would be on engineers already having offered to
make changes like the author is requesting, and product/UX rejecting those
changes in favor of the current version.

~~~
eitland
> This is thinking from the perspective of someone who can take advantage of a
> logically structured site. I can tell you that when engineers think this
> way, the result is usually serviceable as a first pass, but product comes
> back with requests that make you rethink everything. To play devil's
> advocate, I can guess the goal with this first page of results might be to
> show enough different kinds of results that users will keep pressing "Load
> More" until they find what they want.

In my eyes this is a variation of the HN classic: my users are so stupid I
need to remove or break stuff that would be useful for 99% of my userbase.

~~~
dkarl
_my users are so stupid I need to remove or break stuff that would be useful
for 99% of my userbase_

Yes, that's what engineers often sound like when we try to interpret the
conclusions of usability professionals. We get frustrated because the features
that we would find easiest to work with are not necessarily the features the
product should have. I'm not saying I'm a UX professional who does know better
than engineers; I'm just saying that as engineers we should get used to the
fact that what is horrible design from our perspective is often the result of
careful work done with a more representative sample of users.

~~~
eitland
Still I suspect people are applying this out of context:

When people are designing business applications, ecommerce software etc using
ideas from Google and Twitter, companies that are trying to eke out the last
percent of usability, and in the process destroys their product for everyone
else I don't think it is smart.

Case in point: Google has lost me and I guess a number of other engineers as
users and evangelists because their software just doesn't cut it anymore after
10 yeas of dumbification as it now too often refuses to respect even double
quotes and verbatim setting.

~~~
perl4ever
Google will now take a three or four word search and remove _precisely_ the
critical phrase that makes it useful at all. Like, I was looking for "New York
XYZ" and it cheerfully spits out top hits with "New York" crossed out.

~~~
eitland
Given how many Googlers are here on the forums I assume Google is well aware
of the problem and we are just collateral in the quest to make Google usable
for cats and dogs ;-)

------
tatersolid
This seems like a common side-effect of an overly segmented microservice
architecture.

I’ve noticed this pattern numerous times, my guess is service/feature teams
want to avoid at all costs taking another service dependency (and all the
testing and coordination that entails) so they just punt.

Sometimes a big old RDBMS housing all of your data _which is actually already
related in reality_ makes the most sense.

~~~
alkonaut
This. A web shop with carts/checkout, inventory, search etc should be _one_
monolith service over one database - even if your operation is a global
megacorp. Do try to split it into microservices all you want, but if anyone
notices (such as having to enter something twice) you failed.

~~~
skrebbel
That will only work if the entire "global megacorp"'s database is the web shop
database that you describe. How else are you going to show availability of
products in a shop nearby you? How are you going to combine the webshop's
delivery logistics with the distribution centers of the entire brick&mortar
retail chain? How are you going to expose loyalty card benefits online? How
are you going to keep the product catalog in sync with what's in stores?

Like all retail bigcorps, I assume that IKEA has lots of internal systems,
half self-cooked, half based on SAP or Oracle or whatnot, that together form
the entireity of their operations. These formed long before "microservices"
were hip and trendy and will be around long after the hype has died away. The
webshop is a part of all that and it must be closely connected to the rest of
the IT in lots and lots of places.

So, what you're suggesting is "IKEA should just rebuild their entire product,
sales, supply&demand, logistics and finance IT from scratch in a single
monolith on a single database". That'd be a fine end-result indeed, but
unachievable on any timescale.

~~~
alkonaut
They don’t need all IT in one service but the web shop needs at least a view
of accounts, inventories and so on. That db can be a cached view which means
it behaves as a single db with staleness issues (changed passwords or
preferences may be stale, you may be able to add things to a cart that appears
to be in stock but really is out of stock in the true inventory etc.).

It’s better to have such a poorly working illusion of a single db than to have
no such illusion at all which means having to log in multiple times etc.

------
eitland
Can we restrict the term artificial stupidity to bad implementations of
artificial intelligence?

What is described here is more like plain old stupidity (edit: or something
I'm not smart enough to understand ;-)

~~~
vinceguidry
Most anybody is smart enough to understand anything, they just typically
aren't knowledgeable enough to grasp it quickly. Stupidity, in the other hand,
is misapplied intelligence. You willfully go the opposite direction from the
proper one. AI is ignorant if it hasn't been trained, stupid if it is trained
but has insufficient direction.

At least to my mind.

~~~
kypro
> Most anybody is smart enough to understand anything

I don't think this is true. At least for me it's not. In general I pick things
up pretty quickly, at least above average. But there are certain things I know
I've tried extremely hard with but I really struggle to even be competent. I
also know some people which I'd consider a little slow and not from a lack of
effort, but they have amazing abilities in other areas which I suck at.

~~~
vinceguidry
One of the more interesting things I've read recently is that there's a
certain strain in math where a concept isn't considered to be understood until
it can be taught to an undergrad math class. Most anybody can make it to an
undergrad level of academia.

Meaning the world as a whole doesn't understand something unless there exists
one person who can explain it at a level that anybody can reasonably attain.
Once this happens, it's only a matter of replication.

The domain of knowledge is far flatter and the role that intelligence plays is
way smaller. You need to be really smart if you want to make advances in the
knowledge of mankind. Not to understand what's already been discovered. If
it's already been discovered and understood, then you can't fault intelligence
for not providing you with the understanding.

You just didn't luck into taking the right class.

~~~
perl4ever
"You just didn't luck into taking the right class."

I disagree. A brilliant teacher is someone who can make almost everybody
_feel_ like they understand advanced concepts. For example, Richard Feynman
and his book on QED. That doesn't mean even a genius can get most of them to
actually understand.

Mainly because of Wikipedia and its frequent lack of pandering to a lay
audience for mathematical topics, I've come face to face with how impossible
it is for me to understand things at a certain level. I could do undergrad
calculus, but it's easy to find topics where I feel like I have a mental
disability, or I'm a different species from the people who understand it. It
doesn't seem like a difference of degree but of kind.

~~~
vinceguidry
I submit that the topics you feel you can't learn, you only think that way
because you don't have the proper insights. If someone could have given those
to you, then you'd be able to understand them.

And if someone truly understood those topics, then they could give you the
proper insights.

So either insight itself is broken, in that there are certain topics which are
immune to it, in that you or anyone could never learn them given the right
teacher and the right setting and the right approach, or, well, that's the
only option really. The power of insight fails because some minds are patently
immune to it.

------
noodlesUK
I think this ties nicely into the recent discussion about usability testing:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435669)

Many of these problems could be identified by simple corridor testing of the
whole purchasing life cycle. It’s not glamorous, but grabbing a few ordinary
people and asking them to run through a workflow will identify pain points
like this. Getting the low hanging fruit here would make the experience vastly
better than most online stores.

------
metalgearsolid
I think the author takes for granted the amount of _work_ involved in software
engineering. I work for a startup who's product has glaringly obvious flaws.
But _someone_ has to do the work of writing code to improve upon existing
features. And there are a zillion other things that a business can choose to
prioritize over improving an existing feature that gets the job done.

------
binarymax
Breaking news: e-commerce site's search is horrendously broken.

This is why folks like me have a job. Search is hard. Ikea adding ML here
would just cause more problems and add complexity. They just need a relevance
engineer.

------
CoderUberDriver
My latest complaint: I am driving down the highway. I want Starbucks. I open
Google Maps on the phone I have mounted on the dash. I tap "star" and get a
list of Starbucks location. What's this? The first one in the list is 15 miles
behind me. I'm pretty sure there is one a mile ahead, but I can't take my eyes
off the road long enough to find it. I try "Ok Google" but it also doesn't
take into account the direction I am heading.

------
cosmotic
The author indicates it would be good for data to flow around but sometimes
data pre-population is annoying or uncanny.

If I'm 1500 miles from my home visiting a friend, populating my home zip code
would be frustrating. The fact that LG knew my name when I went to register
even though I had not logged in, that is unsettling.

------
hellofunk
A word to the wise, don’t attempt to read this website on your phone.

------
phkahler
This problem has nothing to do with AI and the plot is as hard to find as the
bookshelf.

TLDR: The author wants better ways to filter available product options at
IKEA.

------
_bxg1
> Facebook: “Provocative racist bookcases that will make you angry.”

Pahaha

------
caiocaiocaio
Buried lead: Ikea sells a bookcase named 'Billy'.

~~~
kyberias
And that's the best bookcase in the world.

