Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

dreamsongs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 351 posts

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#121

Post by WalterBright »

hammock wrote: post #43

There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of…

> you might find better prices on individual items if you put a little more work into it

That extra work costs you money, too. Calculate how much your job pays you per hour, then you can deduce the $cost of spending more time to get a better deal.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#122

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
karel-3d wrote: post #29

I remember when I had a lesson about OSI layers, where the teacher has carefully described all the layers in detail and then said something like "most of this is not important, these layers don't really exist, TCP/IP got popular first because it's just much simpler than OSI was"

Oh, there's an entirely different feature-length article to be written/found about how packet switching beat circuit switching and the "Internet approach" beat the telco approach. The great innovation of being able to deploy devices at the edges without needing clearance from the center. I don't think very many people even remember X25. The one survivor from all the X standards seems to be X509?

[deleted]

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#123

Post by crabmusket »

busterarm wrote: post #72
djha-skin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually take this as evidence that Rust will always remain niche. It's just a very complicated language. Go or Zig is much easier to learn and reason about. In Go you can immediately tell what the fields are in a config yaml file just by looking at struct annotations. Try doing that with Rust's Serde. Super opaque in my opinion.

Exactly! Rust will only protect me from things my customers don't care about and don't understand. By not using Rust and just dealing with it, I'm making more money faster than if I started with Rust. Rust only matters in environments where that calculus comes out the other way.

I'm pretty sure your customers care that your software doesn't segfault!

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#124

Post by contagiousflow »

WalterBright wrote: post #121
hammock wrote: post #43

There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of…

> you might find better prices on individual items if you put a little more work into it That extra work costs you money, too. Calculate how much your job pays you per hour, then you can deduce the $cost of spending more time to get a better deal.

Are you removing paid working time in doing the extra work? If not it is just an opportunity cost

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#125

Post by ezekiel68 »

I'm always happy whenever this old article goes viral. For two reasons: First, learning to accept the fact that the better solutions doesn't always win has helped me keep may sanity over more than two decades in the tech industry. And second, I'm old enough to have a pretty good idea what the guy meant when he replied, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken."

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#126

Post by ezekiel68 »

gpderetta wrote: post #7

> The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++. And 30 years later they show few signs of letting go.

Yep. And nary a tear is shed these days over the death of the so-called superior Lisp machines.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#127

Post by rwmj »

pjc50 wrote: post #49
karel-3d wrote: post #29

I remember when I had a lesson about OSI layers, where the teacher has carefully described all the layers in detail and then said something like "most of this is not important, these layers don't really exist, TCP/IP got popular first because it's just much simpler than OSI was"

Oh, there's an entirely different feature-length article to be written/found about how packet switching beat circuit switching and the "Internet approach" beat the telco approach. The great innovation of being able to deploy devices at the edges without needing clearance from the center. I don't think very many people even remember X25. The one survivor from all the X standards seems to be X509?

https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/ Netheads vs Bellheads

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#128

Post by rwmj »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #126
gpderetta wrote: post #7

> The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++. And 30 years later they show few signs of letting go.

Yep. And nary a tear is shed these days over the death of the so-called superior Lisp machines.

Maybe not in any position to do anything about it, but I'm quite sad :-/

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#129

Post by chuckadams »

kragen wrote: post #78
pjc50 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, there's an entirely different feature-length article to be written/found about how packet switching beat circuit switching and the "Internet approach" beat the telco approach. The great innovation of being able to deploy devices at the edges without needing clearance from the center. I don't think very many people even remember X25. The one survivor from all the X standards seems to be X509?

The OSI stack was also designed using the packet-switching approach. Rob Graham's "OSI Deprogrammer" is a book -length article about how TCP/IP beat OSI, and how the OSI model is entirely worthless: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH... I'm not sure he's right, but I do think his point of view is important to understand.

Wow, you're not kidding about book-length: at 246 pages, that's an epic takedown. Learning all kinds of other things about networking along the way, though.

I do remember all nine layers of the OSI stack though: physical, data link, network, transport, session, presentation, application, financial, political.

Re: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

#130

Post by hinkley »

dkarl wrote: post #85
hammock wrote: post #43

There was an article posted on here[1] a while back that I only just found again, introducing the term "expedience." The idea was that we think we live in a world where people have to have "the best" sweater, be on "the best" social network, drive "the best" car, etc. But when you look at what really WINS, it's not the best, it's the most "expedient" - i.e. sufficiently good, with built-in social proof, inoculated of…

"Expedient" is a common (or at least not rare) English word that means something like "practical and effective even if not directly attending to higher or deeper considerations." For example, if two students in a class are having frequent confrontations that bring learning in the class to a halt, and attempts by teachers and counselors to address their conflict directly haven't been effective, the expedient solution…

See also: war crimes
Post reply on HN