Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Arainach 1116 days ago
In open source software where you can throw it over the fence and say "no warranty", perhaps.

In commercial software where your users will say "Y" even when they have 16MB of RAM, have an awful time, waste your money calling your support in that unsupported configuration (and forget to mention it), and leave negative reviews - no, hard blocks make a lot of sense.
1 comments
jojobas 1116 days ago
How does the hard block prevent wasted support time and negative reviews?
link
Arainach 1116 days ago
"The program won't start" is straightforward and a short script will quickly identify the real problem.

"On Tuesdays when I alt-tab to Backgammon, my save file is corrupted" is much tougher to immediately identify as out of memory.

Telling users no at the beginning yields far fewer negative feelings than letting them get invested and then experience a major problem, blocker, or just constant random irritations

link