“Just remove the duck” (2013) • Hacker News Board

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#111

Post by vidarh » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:51 PM UTC

mcmatterson wrote: post #54

This is also great parenting advice. Give your kid the feeling of having chosen to eat their vegetables, and they'll devour an entire plate of them.

Agreed. Our son always "decides" what he's having for dinner and what to do during the weekends, for example.

Only he decides by choosing between 2-3 options we've selected in advance to match what we want the outcome to be.

Similarly it's always bedtime before his actual intended bedtime so he can negotiate some extra time. It avoids so many conflicts when he smugly believes he has gotten exactly what he wanted out of us.

I think works on pretty much anyone, you can just be more blatant about it with some people than others.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#112

Post by blawson » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

I think a lot if this effect is just that people think differently from each other.

Eventually, someone is going to see something you did, where they would have done it a different way. If that person is your manager, not only do they see lots of things you are doing (and thus plenty of things they might have done differently) they also have the power to compel you to do it their way.

If you're the boss, presumable you think you are the boss because someone higher up still thinks you do a good job, which is a sort of implicit endorsement for you doing things your way, instead of your subordinates way.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#113

Post by throwawayaway » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #80

throwawayaway wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have the guilts reviewing work of non native english speakers and asking them to rename functions after review. hard to ask for it without it seeming completely petty, particularly when everything else is perfect. it does represent a minor improvement.

It definitely requires some tact and thought first. The angle I like to focus on is whether something will actively confuse future maintainers. If it's an internal method and the name is odd but not misleading, it's probably not worth raising at a code review or maybe even privately

yeah it's definitely not one for the rooftops with a megaphone anyway.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#114

Post by bitL » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

You'd be surprised how many standards are made like this. Companies adding useless stuff due to political reasons, appending obfuscating things so that somebody can claim credit for that part of the standard, hiding the real agenda they want to pass, proposing exact opposites to what they want so that others stop their (ridiculous) idea in order not to give them any advantage that sometimes backfires and ends up in the standard anyway (but they would do it even for reasonable idea as they don't want to make life easy for a competitor), other companies blocking anything they consider a strategic threat to the way they do their business, and you'll end up with a horrible standard full of ducks and hairy hands... Add to it occasional groupthink and dyslexia and then wonder why most software standards are so horrible...

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#115

Post by teddyuk » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

I wonder how much refactoring is done in this vein!

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#116

Post by bornon5 » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

leviathan wrote: post #107

madaxe_again wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like web development. If I had a penny for every time we're asked for more zazz, pop, pow, shazam, zing, shizzle, pizazz, "something", cowbell... I'd use them to bury the meddling fuckers who ask for this shit.

Back in the days I worked a while as a web designer, spent my days in Photoshop, learned all the shortcuts. So I was showing the design to this client who always wanted to modify things, and he said he doesn't like the orange a lot and if we can tweak it. I had a red layer, and a yellow layer over it with opacity, so I clicked on the yellow layer, and started pressing random numbers on the numpad (pressing numbers ch…

Similar thing happened to me - a client didn't like a shade of blue I was using, even though it was the exact shade she had told me to use. She then sent me a PowerPoint file with just a blue box in it and told me to use that blue instead. Of course it was the exact same blue as before. I re-sent her the file, and she immediately transmitted her enthusiastic approval.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#117

Post by LanceH » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

agarden wrote: post #81

TallGuyShort wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a huge Steve Jobs fan, but I had a professor who had worked as a designer under Steve Jobs and tried something similar. Steve insisted that a new mouse needed to be just a fraction of a millimetre slimmer so a person's palm was lower and closer to the work surface. They figured he was being an unreasonable "delicate genius" and returned a few days later with the identical mouse and claimed they had reworked it to…

I think this anecdote might help explain Jobs's success. There is a tendency when one is running or developing a product to convince yourself that your efforts are producing a genuinely good product that your customers will like. Frequently that isn't true, and the product is rightly trashed by the outsiders. The thing is, the people on the inside would have trashed it too if they had not been insiders. Jobs seems to…

He really nailed it with the mouse.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#118

Post by jlebar » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #66

JonnieCache wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countless fables about record company executives dropping by the mastering studio to hear the new hit in its finished form. They'd inevitably make some ill-posed request, of the familiar "it needs to pop more!" variety. The wily engineer directs them towards a large and important looking knob, telling them that they are free to dial in as much "pop" as they think the track needs. Of course, they screw up th…

That sounds like web development. If I had a penny for every time we're asked for more zazz, pop, pow, shazam, zing, shizzle, pizazz, "something", cowbell... I'd use them to bury the meddling fuckers who ask for this shit.

If you haven't read this before, I highly recommend: http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#119

Post by lotharbot » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

robmcm wrote: post #4

Dilbert has this covered: http://dilbert.com/strip/2007-02-02

An older Dilbert on the same theme: http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-07-12

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#120

Post by sxp » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

TallGuyShort wrote: post #42

mvdwoord wrote: post #8

A story from the time recounts that Piero Soderino, the head of the powerful Florentine Republic, even told the famously irascible Michelangelo that David's nose was much too large. Michelangelo then hid some marble dust in his hand, climbed back up his ladder and pretended to do some more "chiseling" on the offending proboscis. While he did so, he let some marble dust fall from his hand. The pompous Soderino was foo…

Not a huge Steve Jobs fan, but I had a professor who had worked as a designer under Steve Jobs and tried something similar. Steve insisted that a new mouse needed to be just a fraction of a millimetre slimmer so a person's palm was lower and closer to the work surface. They figured he was being an unreasonable "delicate genius" and returned a few days later with the identical mouse and claimed they had reworked it to…

There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed:

  Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to 
  Page’s open cubicle office for a review.

  As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.

  “It’s too slow,” Page said.

  Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted. 
  It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.

  “You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office, 
  he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds
  for Gmail to load.

http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2...

It is quite plausible for people who being to obsess over a certain aspect to become overly sensitive to it. In my case, a lifetime of playing high speed video games makes it possible to notice things that others miss when it comes to things like framerates and microstutter in computer graphics. I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.