3 ms·
This is the quintessential HN comment. Completely dismiss an entire region of the human experience and entire field of experts by assuming that your own unfamil
by munificent 6y ago
This is the quintessential HN comment. Completely dismiss an entire region of the human experience and entire field of experts by assuming that your own unfamiliarity means there must be nothing there worth learning.
An equivalent claim is, "Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can do already. Operating system programmers aren't worth admiring."
If I've learned anything in my life, it's that when a group of people take something very seriously that seems pointless to me, 99% of the time, it is my own ignorance preventing me from seeing what they see.
- routerl 6y agoWhat you've described is especially pernicious over multiple iterations. Windows 95 can do 90% of what Linux can. Windows 3.1 can do 90% of what Windows 95 can. DOS can do 90% of what Window 3.1 can. In this (contrived and counter-chronological) example, at each iteration we lost something that was only ever valuable to connoisseurs. In the case of software, we're talking about developers and power users. But yeah, let's all keep mocking Pollock, and the art history students who cherish the work, until we end up with nothing but the most commercial, easily-digestible, and trite art. Oh wait...
- virtue3 6y agoshhh, you'll wake up Andy Warhol from his grave lol.
- ResearchCode 6y agoAn equivalent claim could also be that some collection of 3-line Python scripts is among the most important accomplishments in computer science and engineering. Being clearly trivial, it probably isn't that great. So another possibility is that there indeed is such a thing as an emperor without clothes, and he might show up in abstract art.
- munificent 6y agoThe Y-combinator is an even smaller script in an even simpler programming language. It must be completely trivial and not worth admiring in the least.