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The Worst

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Re: The Worst

#191

Post by djacobs »

Schwolop wrote: post #130
zacharyvoase wrote: post #45

It's really quite something when an author manages to put down in words a thought or a feeling you were hitherto incapable of expressing. Bravo. The dichotomy of best/worst — or, as I often think of it, acceptable versus available — is a tricky one, and it's not one which I feel I've yet solved. But I can certainly see how areas of my life tend towards the latter. Take my dotfiles, for example. I spent ages writing a…

Your point about key bindings is very prescient. At my work, our book club is (re)reading The Pragmatic Programmer. There's a section which advocates picking one text editor, mastering its arcane secrets, customizing it until it's perfect, and never using anything else. All my colleagues happily agreed with this, and I couldn't quite express why I didn't. Then I did a bit of pair programming with a few different peop…

I don't agree that in pair programming you should succumb to your pair or take a least-common denominator philosophy. When I pair, I always use a (customized) Vi, swapping between two editors if my pair's is different. I'm intimately familiar with mine (and he with his), so we're much faster this way (and happier, to boot).

Re: The Worst

#192

Post by xianshou »

davidhollander wrote: post #109
xianshou wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, well, Mr. Galt: "There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." Much as absolutism makes for simple priorities, applying these general principles out of any context is going to make you wrong no matter what you choose. As in game theory, where mixed strategies often defeat any individual strategy, the best, the worst, and the middle all encounter th…

> I could buy one of the world's most powerful supercomputers if I were rich enough, but I'm fine with my MacBook Air. A world class supercomputer isn't the same category of good as a MacBook Air. Most laptop owners would feel worse off in some aspects of the trade, as they would no longer have a portable computer to travel with. If a Macbook Air nets you the most personal utility from a portable computer, as opposed…

True, I gave a suboptimal example, in that the Air may actually be the best tool for the job. However, as you said, we can easily adjust the example so that it demonstrates a suboptimal possession with diminishing returns on improvement. For instance, take my iPhone 4S. I could buy a 5 because it is "the best," and a solid improvement on my 4S, but I have no pressing need for it. While I would benefit from a usage perspective from upgrading, I can still place plenty of implicit trust (Dustin's term) in the 4S for the ways in which I value it. By not upgrading, I can take pride in the suitability of my choices to my needs, rather than in the shininess of my devices.

Of course, that doesn't cover the pressure of choice detailed above by the "satisficers". To paraphrase Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness), adding more perfect options makes maximizers more stressed and less happy about what they do choose. Again, I prefer to place implicit trust in the quality of my selection process - its capacity to find me something good enough - rather than always in the quality of what I own. That latter threshold changes with the circumstances.

Re: The Worst

#193

Post by kenjackson »

crazygringo wrote: post #50

I think the authors of "The Best" and "The Worst" are both right. In fact, pretty much everything I own is either "the best" or "the worst" -- no middle ground. I identify the very few things that really make a difference to me (my laptop, my stereo, my kitchen pots & pans & knives, my jeans) and buy the absolute best I can afford. And I identify the things I don't really care about (the rug, the chairs, most kitchen…

I'm the opposite. Almost everything I have is at the knee of the price curve. Typically that's where I find good value.

Re: The Worst

#195

Post by geekstrada »

robryan wrote: post #135
MattRogish wrote: post #40

"Any reasonable person wouldn’t feel liberated by a $50 fork, but constrained by it. One wouldn’t be able to help but worry: is it being cared for correctly, is my friend going to mess it up when absentmindedly tapping the table with it, is it going to get dropped or stepped on if a dance party erupts in the kitchen? After all, it is the perfect fork, what if something happened to it to make it… not perfect?" This is…

New carpet is a big one, with people that insist not wearing shoes on it. If I do put new carpet in a house one day I will be making an effort to treat it exactly the same as the old stuff I have been using.

Kind of depends on the use case doesn't it? If you buy new carpet for a house that you are going to own for another five years, sure, step in an oil puddle and walk all over it. But if you have replaced the carpet to sell the house then it might make sense to tread lightly.

Re: The Worst

#196

Post by Narretz »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #145

Halfway through reading this I closed it with two conclusions: 1. Thank God I didn't read "The Best". 2. Why the hell am I reading this. I don't have the energy to have such a trite opinion, let alone read a thousand words about it from someone else. I hate these pithy comments but this stuff feels like "Hacker Drama", not "Hacker News".

Now you made me wonder why I read almost the whole omment thread, additionally to two posts that both didn't really make a lot of sense to me.

Re: The Worst

#197

Post by geekstrada »

jaggederest wrote: post #159
ricardobeat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thus resulting in an endless stream of quick-decaying stuff from china to your home. And a hundred round-trips to the department store, if you apply that to everything in your life.

I hate to tell you this, but expensive spoons bend just as easily as inexpensive ones, and cost more to replace. Some things really are consumable items. There's no t-shirt on earth that is going to last beyond about 200 wash cycles.

You obviously haven't bought many different spoons, and price is irrelevant. I can buy a well-made spoon from the Salvation Army store for less than a spoon made from pressed sheet metal available at a retail store.

Re: The Worst

#198

Post by geekstrada »

debacle wrote: post #36
pooriaazimi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he spends an hour or so every day eating stuff with those. Every single day (presumably). If you divide the $500 those flatwares have cost him over that time period (a few thousand days, an hour each day), it turns out it's cost him about 10 cents per hour . And yet, he (again, presumably) has been enjoying it immensely. If you can be happier by spending 10 cents ( per hour ), why not? I'm not a fan of expensive…

It costs me less than ten cents per hour to power my entire house. You can do anything with simple math and look like an economist, but the reality is that the guy bought a $10 fork.

That literally made me chuckle out loud. Thank you.

Re: The Worst

#199

Post by ansgri »

jimbokun wrote: post #118
dkarl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the middle ground have to be so confusing? I mean, if you looked at your silverware and thought, "These forks are kind of ugly, and it's bothering me a little bit," so you went to Target and saw a $50 set of silverware that looked pretty okay and bought it, would that be confusing? I guess there's no way to spin it as being particularly awesome. You couldn't boast of being the most sophisticated and tasteful buy…

The problem is, if repeated often enough, this process leads to a house full of crap, most of which you no longer care about. With The Best philosophy, you have much less crap and clutter around you. With The Worst philosophy, you may have a lot of crap and clutter, but at least you didn't waste much money on it. Most of us in the rich world end up in an in between place that's not very satisfying.

There's the art of disposing of not the cheapest things when they bother you. Then you get self-regulating process: you find disposing of some kinds of things too often and end up not caring about these kinds of things and buying the 'worst'.

Re: The Worst

#200

Post by dagw »

kryptiskt wrote: post #8
cjensen wrote: post #2

The author of this linked article has made an error: he assumes dcurtis' flatware is inordinately expensive. It is not; traditional flatware really is absurdly expensive. Much of the author's article is based on this assumption. I'd suggest he familiarize himself with "wedding gift"-style flatware. Then do a rewrite because I think there is a good argument still to be had.

If you include the time he spent researching flatware in the bill it would be probably hard to find anything more expensive south of diamond-encrusted things for oligarchs without taste.

But if you're going to include the time he spent researching then you also have to subtract the value he created for himself by blogging about it and generating massive amounts of traffic to his blog.
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