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

Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

seated.ro

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 396 posts

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#191

Post by billllll »

xKingfisher wrote: post #146
billllll wrote: post #106

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage…

> Coding for others is not art. It absolutely is, and I think it's what separates good from bad and junior from senior devs. Most devs can produce an artifact that more or less works. But one that has an internal consistency others can understand and extend, one which accurately captures the problem as it exists and ways it will likely change, is much more of an art form. A big part of that is knowing which situation…

Nothing that you talked about pertains to art. Writing good code does not mean you're making art.

You shouldn't strive for internal consistency with yourself, you should strive for external consistency with the other developers in your team. If someone reads your code and immediately knows it was you, you probably aren't doing a good job.

And that's the difference. If you are doing a good job as a software engineer, no one should notice you. If you're making good art, everyone should see you. And that is the difference between devs who think they're good, and devs who are truly good.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#192

Post by locknitpicker »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

> That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.

Thank you for sharing this observation. It resonated with me in a surprising way. Finding something that's "good enough" is such a blessing.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#193

Post by andruby »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

I think that's mostly true above a certain threshold, but where that threshold lies, is probably different for different people.

The The $20 headphones my kids have are a good step up. For me headphones/speakers in the $100 range make me _feel_ more when listening to music. But I don't need to go more expensive. That's where my threshold is for music.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#194

Post by billllll »

teeray wrote: post #111
billllll wrote: post #106

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage…

> Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works. Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.

Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience).

Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic.

In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#195

Post by locknitpicker »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #127
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes. Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate. Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entire…

> Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.

I know what you mean, but it's important to be mindful of the fact that enjoying coffee is way more than the quality of the coffee in the cup. I think for most there's a whole ritual around having a coffee which renders the actual coffee a minor detail around everything. You can see this even in coffee brewing snobs, where they use extremely specialized tools and equipment to perform a coffee brewing cerimonies that rival religious ones. Sometimes the coffee itself is just the pretext, but the goal is different.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#196

Post by atoav »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

Not to criticize your friend, but it isn't as if things following his path is sn inevitable law of nature.

Coincidentally I went from being an Audio consumer to a person that developes audio hard- and software, and mixes music in my spare time and deals with live sound in acoustically challenging rooms in my work (to keep things short, I do/did even more).

While I certainly spent some money on audio equipment, I can't say that you need infinitly expensive stuff to enjoy it. For me it went exactly the opposite way. Where as a teenager I thought you need all that expensive stuff to make and listen to music on a high level, I now know what matters and what doesn't.

There is a point beyond which things don't matter factually, because they are beyond the limits of human perception. Audiophiles then trick themselves into hearing the atoms that make up the wire, when every measurement doesn't show anything.

One of my mics I prefer most on floor drums is a modified Pyle Karaoke mic I got from Amazon for 30 bucks and added a cheap transformer into. My headphones are maybe 200 bucks (and half of that was paid for reliability, not for sound quality). I got a second pair for closer to 1200 bicks, but thst is just for retouche work where I need to hear the faintest background noises, I actually prefer the sound of the cheaper ones.

I am still amazed by most recordings I was amazed by when I started on my journey. In fact more so now.

We don't need to inevitably turn everything into a stage to show off our own mental superiority. Especially in the audiophile realm these people claim to hear things that they wouldn't be able to pick out reliably in a properly conducted double-randomized blind test. And everything else is basically worthless since you then just measure a persons ability to fool themselves.

Recently my assistant who just started out in the field came for advice. She wanted to spend some money on a mic and audio interface. And I recommended her one for a quarter of the price she planned on spending since it basically had the same measurements and better software support. As for mics I told her to test my mics with that interface and she should use that test to figure out what she wants. Originally she wanted to spend good money on getting an expensive studio mic, in the test my old dynamic Sennheiser MD21 that I got from ebay won. She got the same for cheap from there as well.

Don't get me wrong, I will be the first to hear bad acoustics, missaligned speakers, a dying loudspeaker suspension, a overdriven amplification system, a missed buffer deadline, a bad mix, a bad recording, phase issues, etc. It is my job to notice. But that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the music running over such a system as much as I did before I knew all that. In fact I might even enjoy it more.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#197

Post by LogicHound »

joshdavham wrote: post #97

Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's becau…

If you like using VSCode and are productive in it, keep on using it.

The big advantage of vim/neovim is that you can do everything in the keyboard and it can be very efficient. It is also lightweight.

However the learning curve is massive IME. I don't like either and pay for Jetbrains tooling.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#198

Post by duskdozer »

stavros wrote: post #85
fylo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you with the TV - HD is usually enough, but audio needs to be at least reasonable. $20 headphones is too cheap, even from a longevity perspective.

I don't mind buying new $20 headphones every two years! I guess the latest SoundPeats I got were around $40, though.

If noise at all bothers you, decent ANC is a game-changer and worth spending more. I never tried it until I picked up a next cheap pair with it, and it's even better with a good pair.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#199

Post by ehnto »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

What I love about learning a topic thoroughly is that I can then pick apart the "expert wisdom" into what actually matters. That usually results in me getting better but very pragmatic results.

Coffee is a great example, I worked through the whole stack, tried everything I had access to until eventually I weeded out what matters most to me.

Good beans, good milk, and just enough prep. I tried no prep, all the prep, and then just enough prep. Good beans not perfect beans. Good milk but whatever is available.

I do the same with everything, cars, bicycles, sim racing equipment, computers, software etc.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#200

Post by slickytail »

bee_rider wrote: post #124
SchemaLoad wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point I think there's almost an inverse relationship with how much time you spend researching a product and how much you enjoy it. I fell in to this hole with gaming monitors. At the top end, no product has it all, no product is without flaws. So then you start getting frustrated that you can't find one that has the right HDMI version, freesync, 240hz, 4k, USB-C with decent power delivery, etc. And what you b…

Ah, but it can give you such fun projects. Go, hunt down your headphones’ frequency response, cancel it out in PulseEffects (if that’s what it is called this release…), then adjust to the Harman Curve…

[dead]
Post reply on HN