No Skill. No Taste • Hacker News Board

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#31

Post by embedding-shape » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #23

BoredPositron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture.

It's kind of useless if it can't be defined. Let's say I'm a software developer, and my product is criticized for "lacking taste." What can I possibly do to correct this, if we can't even agree on a definition? Let alone agree on what actions can be taken to "add taste" to the product.

> It's kind of useless if it can't be defined

That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :)

Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than another thing. Sometimes it's literally just "vibes" and that's OK.

If you're unable to train this feeling in yourself, maybe the best course of action is to find someone you can tell is able to better use that particular skill, and ask for their feedback.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#32

Post by gjvc » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

postalcoder wrote: post #15

Hmmmm, where on the taste scale would you put making text unreadable when selected?

next to dark blue text on a black background

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#33

Post by cjonas » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #10

cjonas wrote: post #2

There's been a lot of discussion around in the future how "taste" will be the only differentiation / moat (recently watched a good video about the gen-ai music industry), as everything will be trivially easy to recreate. But your vision and how well you execution it... and the nuance involved in getting every minor detail correct is much harder (and something the LLM is exactly average at). I recently experienced thi…

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy. No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;) Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter . If you actually…

Just to be clear, I don't feel this is actually the case in world of music and art, at least as an individual consumer. I would argue the industry & economy rewards it though.

In software it feels different though. If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#34

Post by ianbutler » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

retrac98 wrote: post #28

The site seems to be falling over. Is that a skill or taste issue?

It appears to still be up? It's also running on the server in my office lol

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#35

Post by brador » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

If only we had some kind of voting system that could uplift the good stuff...one can only dream...

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#36

Post by aytigra » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

markbao wrote: post #8

andsoitis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define taste (rough is fine)?

An intuition for what people like. Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.

I'd say it is quite opposite, a deep understanding of what you like and consequently understanding what will make a creation into exactly what you like. (Well I guess some people can create without understanding, just directly expressing their likes)

Since many of our likes are driven by our shared culture and physiology, many other people will appreciate such creation (even if they don't understand why exactly they like it). Others will appreciate depth of nuance and uniqueness of your creation.

Opposite to taste is approximated "good" average which is likeable but just never hits all the right notes, and at the same time already suffering from sameness fatigue.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#37

Post by bandrami » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

altmanaltman wrote: post #9

Kind of meaningless if you let "taste" be a vaguely-defined term. Like, what do you mean by "taste"? How is it a differentiator? Does Apple have taste? Is the reason one open source app is better than the other because the devs of the first one have more "taste"? Seems like a philosophical article, but rather than exploring it deeply, it kind of just abandons it at the "hey man, everyone can create apps, so you bette…

Taste is a key concept in aesthetics and has had some great thinkers write about it. There's always some tension on whether taste can be taught, but I think the broad consensus is that it can but it's hard to do.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#38

Post by bandrami » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

markbao wrote: post #8

andsoitis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define taste (rough is fine)?

An intuition for what people like. Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.

It's subjective in the philosophical sense (the subject of the predication is involved with the judgment itself) but that doesn't mean it can't be "right" (and probably more importantly, "wrong").

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#39

Post by James_K » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

altmanaltman wrote: post #9

Kind of meaningless if you let "taste" be a vaguely-defined term. Like, what do you mean by "taste"? How is it a differentiator? Does Apple have taste? Is the reason one open source app is better than the other because the devs of the first one have more "taste"? Seems like a philosophical article, but rather than exploring it deeply, it kind of just abandons it at the "hey man, everyone can create apps, so you bette…

Skill is your ability to achieve your objectives, taste is the ability to differentiate good from bad objectives.

Re: No Skill. No Taste

#40

Post by embedding-shape » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

cjonas wrote: post #33

mjr00 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy. No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;) Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter . If you actually…

Just to be clear, I don't feel this is actually the case in world of music and art, at least as an individual consumer. I would argue the industry & economy rewards it though. In software it feels different though. If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

> If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

It's the same argument people used to use against open sourcing your code for a SaaS: "If I can just clone the repository and run the service myself, why is there a hosted product?"

There is so much more going on though, from how you run something, to how you can react to changes and how you perpetually try to avoid the spaghetti ball from building, so improvements don't take longer and longer to implement and break other things.

Even if the original code is the same, two operators of that service can lead to two very different experiences, not to mention how the service will look like in a year.