
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Families - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/03/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-families/
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mikeash
> Why does Google have such a narrow conception of what a "family" is?

Because "Family" is a way to group some people together to sort-of share an
account, not intended to cover every single situation someone might use the
term for.

This is a pretty ridiculous article. If you can't join a new "Family" for a
year, that doesn't mean Google doesn't recognize your living situation, it
just means Google doesn't feel like extending their sharing whatnot to you.

~~~
glangdale
If Google (or whoever) decides to reinvent what the word "family" means in a
way that doesn't type-check with what the person understands a family means,
whose problem is that? The excess child in a 4-child family? Or Google's, when
people decide to either start violating ToS and/or move to "Channel
Bittorrent"? Maybe it's because I'm one of those Australians with our
notorious national tendency towards online piracy I'm a bit biased but it does
seem like Google might sensibly choose to err on the side on inclusiveness -
just as a pragmatic consideration.

The intent is pretty clear - I'm sure there would be a rather suspicious
number of "15 person families" that interlock, span 4 different countries,
etc. etc. the minute Google relaxed their ToS. And I can't help but wonder how
many really large families genuinely have members spanning an age range where
the oldest kid is still at home and little Timmy actually needs his own Google
account.

~~~
mikeash
It's pretty common to use words like this to indicate the approximate intent
rather than a precise alignment with every possible thing the word could mean.

Just toss "family plan" into Google and look at the results that come up. It's
a really common term and they pretty much all have arbitrary limits like this,
because "family plan" means "plan that might be more suitable for families"
not "plan that suits every single family ever."

It's common with other words too. Happy hour isn't limited to happy people,
nor is it guaranteed to produce happiness. Kids meals have an arbitrary age
cutoff even though "kid" is often more varied. Express lanes are sometimes
slower than the regular ones. Hacker News is rarely about cutting things with
rough or heavy blows, and often not about news.

You ask, "whose problem is that?" My answer would be, nobody's, because there
isn't a problem for anyone to have in the first place.

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slededit
These restrictions seem more about preventing people from using the feature to
share with friends/acquaintances rather than a misunderstanding that non-
traditional families exist. I guess this is why pretty much everything these
days needs an asterisk next to it.

I doubt the programmers had any say in what the restrictions would in the
first place.

~~~
porpoisemonkey
Agreed. Honestly from a feature implementation perspective there's more
business logic required to take this approach and I don't think it would
behoove any programmer to come up with these restrictions.

If I had to hazard a guess the arbitrary nature of these rules sound like they
come from someone in the legal department and was established as part of
contract negotiations for the price of the content.

------
cortesoft
This is silly... those restrictions are there because they don't want everyone
to just form one large family and share everything.

~~~
kuschku
So where’s the issue with that? Groups which share newspapers, DVDs, books,
etc between them, often counting hundreds of members, rotating them from
member to member every week have existed for centuries. Why shouldn’t they be
allowed anymore?

The only limit should be "only one device can consume the content at a time",
nothing more or less.

~~~
jerf
"So where’s the issue with that?"

Contractual. Not a moral issue, not an ethical issue, just that Google doesn't
want to deal with people that way.

One can fruitfully discuss the second-order issues of excessively-strong DRM
but I'd consider that, well, a second-order issue. The first-order issue of
Google not wanting to contract with an amorphous group of "family", a word
that has basically no agreed-upon meaning (even if there is a legal one it
won't match everybody's idea) isn't that horrifying.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Contractual. Not a moral issue, not an ethical issue, just that Google
> doesn't want to deal with people that way.

And, even if they did content owners would set pricing that would be
prohibitive for the first copy if it was likely that it could be purchased by
a giant sharing community.

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rabboRubble
Reason for some of these things...

Be 18 or older -> Minors can't enter into contracts to buy things.

Live in the same country -> Copyright is different in different countries.
Media X may not be licensed for location Y.

~~~
wink
> Be 18 or older -> Minors can't enter into contracts to buy things.

Totally not true in some (many?) jurisdictions.

~~~
rabboRubble
US contract law isn't global obviously. Most US states, minors do not have
capacity to contract, with some noted exceptions.

[http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lack-capacity-to-
cont...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lack-capacity-to-
contract-32647.html)

------
huebnerob
By the time I'm using a different credit card and living halfway across the
world in a different region, I would feel disqualified for the kind of "family
sharing" perks that this situation describes, even if I did have the blood
relationship. I think that a more technically appropriate way to describe
these things would be "household" plans, though I don't think there's anything
wrong with the word 'family' unless you're looking hard for a semantic
argument.

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wmil
They're using the term "family" but it's really loosely aimed at households.
The restrictions seem more reasonable if you look at them in that context.

~~~
cestith
"Google Household" sounds too much like "Google Home".

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twothamendment
These aren't falsehoods that programmers believe. They are restrictions put in
place by a business person and/or lawyer. What a horrible title.

~~~
nulagrithom
From TFA:

 _A number of people on Twitter have taken the title literally. "This is about
managers and lawyers!" they protest. But, of course!

All of the "Falsehoods" memes - including the original - are a shorthand for
"Constraints placed upon a complex system by a mixture of ignorance, apathy,
business requirements, or other legal constraints"._

~~~
mjw1007
If the article's author understands that it's often reasonable to use a
shorthand which isn't supposed to be taken literally, it's hard to see why
they're unhappy about Google's use of the term "Family" in this case.

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wnevets
What does this have to do with programmers? These are clearly restrictions for
DRM purposes.

------
shirro
At least some companies offer services aimed at families. In an industry that
seems to be driven by immature 20 something graduates, family oriented
accounts and services are rare. I have dropped use of several very promising
services because they don't allow easy sharing within the family. Companies
like Y-combinator that focus their efforts disproportionately on young single
males instead of people with life experience only contribute to the problem
IMO.

------
ehutch79
The lesson here is only offer individual plans, and not deal with crap like
this.

~~~
ronilan
Even better, don't offer any plans and don't deal with users at all.

\- _" But, yo, how are we gonna make money?"_

\- _" Hummm, advertising, maybe?"_

See, they've been down that road, we've been down that road. When you grow up
you deal with the so called _" crap"_.

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coldcode
Even better work on something involving families, names and times and dates
across the world. Prepare to go nuts. None of those concepts are easy to
define. For example, if you cross time zones on a mobile app and offer
services (such as a hotel room) wtf is tonight? How do you define a set of
name fields for any country?

~~~
acuozzo
> How do you define a set of name fields for any country?

Perhaps the solution is to provide two options: either (1) the common
(Western?) given|surname structure or (2) an Nx2 matrix in which the key is
what the name part is called on legal documents in the region and the value is
the corresponding name part.

An example…

Full name: "Hajji Halef Omar Ben Hajji Abul Abbas Ibn Hajji Dawud al-Gossarah"

Title: Hajji

Ism: Halef Omar

Nasab: Hajji Abul Abbas

Nasab: Hajji Dawud

Nisbah: al-Gossarah

A database for the keys can be maintained and suggestions can be offered to
the user at submission time in order to keep things tidy. Additionally, per-
region templates can be maintained in order to make the Nx2 approach less
burdensome.

Users submitting names under #2 would be additionally required to select two
name parts so that their name can be shoehorned into the Western model.

Continuing with our example…

Given Name: Halef Omar

Surname: al-Gossarah

(Here's a reward for putting up with my absurd example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3V-9Az5FUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3V-9Az5FUs))

------
draw_down
I wonder if there's a name for seeing a product with flaws and attributing the
flaws to dumb programmers. (e.g. a game has unrealistic female characters with
big ridiculous boobs -> programmers are horny idiots)

And of course, nobody enjoys using a product/service and then thinks, wow,
they must have amazing programmers!

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rlglwx
I would say that this is another example of poor product name choice. Instead
of calling the feature "Family Library" just call it something like digital
sharing. The name choice implies certain features that are hard to implement
or near impossible to restrict.

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CM30
We're seeing so many of these lists that I'm half expecting to read a
'falsehoods programmers believe about other programmers list soon'!

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ChristianGeek
You don't have to wait 12 months to change families; you have to wait 12
months before you can change again.

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jpiasetz
Most of these sound like Falsehoods the law believes about families rather
than programmers

~~~
rodgerd
I wasn't aware the law limited the number of children you have, or whether one
parent is out of country.

