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HN “Why Not Simply”
- rolph 5y ago"one does not simply" https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22one%20does%20not%20simply%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- 11235813213455 5y ago"why not just" could be aliased
- mkishi 5y agoWhat is the point being made here? That all the comments in the first six pages are from 7+ years ago?
- happytoexplain 5y agoThe examples, as I would expect of the phrase in context, have a dismissive tone that reframes the question as an assertion. It's usually a pretty innocent faux pas, and can feel natural to say, so it can be hard to catch oneself in it, but I try not to say things like "simply X" or "just X" when explaining or asking things, in an effort to keep a neutral tone. Is that the point being made here? I don't know.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- for_i_in_range 5y agoMy take: This is the second post I’ve come upon recently wherein it reminds you of the power of search; i.e. filtering on power phrases that may create combinations of thoughts and ideas otherwise never had. The other post of similar essence is this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060816 I’ve begun keeping a log of such power phrases. Does anyone know if there’s an open public repository for such phrases? That’d be useful. If not, I’m happy to set up a Google Doc or Github Repo or whatever is best (if there’s significant interest).
- dredmorbius 5y agoI'm not familiar with the, er, phrase "power phrase" in this context. I note you're the person using the phrase in both this thread and in the comment you link. What's your source of the phrase?
- for_i_in_range 5y agoMy source is self :) It’s inspired from books and concepts in the field of copywriting. For instance, this book (no affiliate link): https://www.amazon.com/Phrases-That-Sell-Ultimate-Products/dp/0809229773 https://www.amazon.com/Phrases-That-Sell-Ultimate-Products/d... And this article uses similar language: https://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/20-powerful-marketing-words-phrases-that-sell-or-repel/ https://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/20-powerful-marketing-... Is your point that I should have first defined “power phrase”? Or cited a source? I’m not familiar with appropriate convention.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThanks. My own usual practice when using a phrase I've coined (or think I've coined) is to reference it with "what I call", to indicate that this is a (possibly) non-standard or novel useage. That's a practice I've encountered by numerous others in writing, and serves both to claim credit and give notice to the reader that the usage may not be widespread. Some examples appear in my HN history: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20%22what%20I%20call%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... And if it's not clear what the phrase means, then yes, giving a brief definition or noting its inspiration can be quite useful. Now that you've clarified all of that .... I'm not sure "power phase" does much here. Or maybe that it doesn't do what you'd like it to do. You wrote: "This is the second post I’ve come upon recently wherein it reminds you of the power of search; i.e. filtering on power phrases that may create combinations of thoughts and ideas otherwise never had." The first part, "the power of search", doesn't rely on "power phrases" at all, but simply full-text search, a/k/a phrase search. (As opposed, say, to simply listing words which might be joined by AND or OR logic without respect to position within the string.) The second bit, "create combinations of thoughts and ideas otherwise never had", gives more potency, but: 1. All language creates thoughts and ideas in the mind of the reader or listener at the initiative of the writer or speaker. 2. "Power" carries strong implications of coercion or manipulation. Themselves common practices in sales and marketing. 3. There's a room for the notion of inspiring or motivating or unlocking new thoughts in a discussion, and some of the more productive uses of "why don't you just" might land in this region. (The less-productive uses tend to display lazy thinking or ignorance.) The classic example (mentioned by someone else in this thread) is of the Gordian Knot: solving a complex problem by shifting the solution domain entirely. Again, "power' seems to me a poor choice here as it suggests to me merely increasing the effort as opposed to seeking a different route. I'd look for a word with meaning more along the lines of "inspiration" or "muse" or "stimulating" or "unlocking". Just my view.
- dredmorbius 5y agoA question on the use of this phrase was made earlier today in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414444 (I didn't submit this item, but suspect jgrahamc may have also seen that comment.)
- gitgud 5y agoThey are sorted by popularity, but the API stopped revealing comment votes about 7 years ago, so no new comments will ever rank in popularity.
- drannex 5y agoI've always wondered why the Algolia search has always been so dependent/focused on older results, always had to sort by date. That makes a bit more sense, thanks.
- viraptor 5y ago> That all the comments in the first six pages are from 7+ years ago? Why not simply switch to the "past year" view or sort by time to see the more recent ones ;)
- goodpoint 5y agoThe point is that "why not simply" is pretty patronizing and dismissive. The use of "simply" implies that the counterpart failed to see a simple solution.
- dvh 5y agoI'm proud of both my contributions: Article: Should social networks tell you if you’ve been following a fake account? Me: Why not simply delete the fake account? Article: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice Me: Why not simply press Ctrl+p and print to PDF Edit: damn, now there are 3 contributions. I cannot post it here, it would cause infinite recursion.
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago> Article: Show HN: Webpage to PDF Microservice > Me: Why not simply press Ctrl+p and print to PDF It would be fun observing you do that with my bookmark collection.
- seoaeu 5y agoNot sure I follow your first comment. Why would deleting a fake account [edit: without also telling its followers] solve the issue? Most people probably would never notice that the account vanished and would go on believing whatever nonsense it was spreading.
- airstrike 5y agoMore effective to delete the account before it spreads said nonsense to even more people?
- sharms 5y agoThere are 935 results out of 2.14 million that match. This leaves us with only .00004% of comments, which doesn't appear to be very frequent given the perception.
- cblconfederate 5y agoWhy not simply link to the google result filtered by domain?
- sodality2 5y agoAlgolia is the preferred HN search engine by most users
- rkeene2 5y agoTBH, I usually end up having to use Google to find something I read in the past on HN; I try the search every time but usually it can't find what I want from what I can remember
- viraptor 5y agoBecause it's a worse experience 3 ways: you can't search for only comments or only stories, you get one result let page not per comment, it's ordered by Google not HN popularity.
- terminalserver 5y agoAlso try “yes, but”
- archildress 5y ago37k results... this lived up to my expectations.
- rolph 5y agowhen i read "why not simply", this suggest two things either I have made an overly complicated analysis and provided unessecarily complex solution, or someone else has made analysis based on incomplete or generalized information with respect to the problem. then comes the task of determining which is the actual case.
- a1369209993 5y agoBasically this. And then a lot of people forget that both of those possibilities are, well, possible.
- karmakaze 5y agoThe same reasoning should apply when someone says to 'just do' such and such, but more often it's not so simple.
- mam3 5y agoThis one is a bit funnier ("this is dumb", mostly starting on page 2): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=This%20is%20dumb&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- mbrd 5y agoI really like doing this kind of search on Twitter and seeing what comes up. One of my favs is searching “stunning x” to see the sad responses to attractive people posting selfies (NSFW if you choose to do it)
- willio58 5y agoThis site is broken on iOS Safari, the top area is overflowing and cashing the width of the container to increase wider than the rest of the site.
- vegancap 5y agoWhy are we like this
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- elliekelly 5y agoAnd why don’t we just stop?
- greenshackle2 5y agoI think you mean: why not simply not be like this?
- Nition 5y agoWhy not simply stop?
- greenshackle2 5y agoWhy not simply not be like this?
- sarsway 5y agoThe worst are always video game discussions. A studio releases a product they worked on for 5 years, with thousands of features and moving parts, and the comments are usually full of suggestions like: It's great, but I don't understand why they simply won't do X instead of Y, then it would be perfect!
- Jenk 5y agoThat is usually accompanied with "They need to spend more time optimising" or "Clearly they haven't optimised this yet" with a clear subtext that many believe game developers just have a dial or slider marked "Optimisation" and that the devs were just too lazy to crank it.
- aahortwwy 5y agoProbably my favorite comment of that genre, on a video which contained a pathing bug causing an NPC to walk in a circle endlessly, "Seriously, how hard is it to just check if a path is infinite and stop the NPC from moving if it is?"
- infogulch 5y agoI mean, we solved the problem in the context of reference cycles during garbage collection.
- Izkata 5y agoBesides the "infinite" part, another problem with this is that the NPC's path isn't necessarily created all at once, but updated as the NPC gets closer to its target / obstacles in it path move around / etc, so there isn't anything to actually check for cycles.
- ketralnis 5y agoWhy do you need to do garbage collection at all, why don't you just delete the garbage?
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- dredmorbius 5y agoMild horror at finding myself at the top of the results set. Mild relief on realising I was quoting someone else's use of the phrase. That said: Is there a word or term for this practice? I'm leaning to "oversimplification" or "trivialiisation".
- greyface- 5y agoIn the spirit of "whataboutism", I propose "whynotism".
- dredmorbius 5y agoWhy not?!
- diab0lic 5y agoI’ve always used the term trivialization to describe this. I once gave a manager feedback to stop doing it, granted theirs could be characterized as being overly optimistic in their report’s capabilities. In response they bought a shock bracelet to negatively reinforce the behavior. They adjusted really quickly. Haha. I really miss that manager.
- dredmorbius 5y agoTrivialisation is certainly one possible classification. Though occasionally such suggestions may serve a role in lifting one's mind out of a rut. Something of a mental reset. (The latter case is, in my experience, far rarer.)
- atdt 5y agoTo echo a comment I made a couple of months ago: "why not simply..." is a way of thinking out loud and providing an opening for someone more knowledgeable to explain what is being overlooked. It makes for interesting threads.
- buu700 5y agoAgreed. I like the use of "why not" as a good faith question for this reason; it's a good segue into an interesting discussion, and there's also the off chance you'll actually produce a novel idea that inspires someone.
- rpdillon 5y agoI've found that some interpret "Why not ..." in a way that puts them on the defensive, which is almost never my intent. To avoid this, I tend to use "Would it work to ..." instead.
- johnchristopher 5y ago"Would it work" sounds like you are on the same team as the other party and trying to concede something with them. I think that's why it's received better than "Why not" which sounds like you are surprised and don't understand why the other party doesn't want to use your solution or worse it suggests that you think the other party is stupid and it's not understandable why they use another solution but you are sill trying not to say it out loud in suggesting the good solution. Pretty sure there are subtle differences between speakers of different languages once English is translated/understood.
- infogulch 5y agoI found that "have you considered" is better at communicating a genuine intent. It avoids painting the original problem as trivial ("simply"), doesn't imply that it's a new idea, and in the case where it is new to them it gives them space to explore with it instead of being forced into a defensive position.
- splitstud 5y ago
- yosito 5y agoI recently quit a job and the reasons could be summed up as having a boss who asked "why not simply" too often.
- globular-toast 5y agoDid someone perhaps write "why not simply" to OP recently?
- chki 5y agoWhy not simply post this xkcd-Comic instead of linking to an overly complicated search engine result? https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/
- brassattax 5y ago"Why wouldn't you just" is a good one too
- retsibsi 5y agoWhy Not Simply, collective action edition: > If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now. (https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/post/163790039847/everyone-will-not-just https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/post/163790039847/everyon...)
- bisRepetita 5y agoThere is the negative equivalent, when people want to prevent you to do something. "Don't do this! Imagine if everybody would just do like you?". No, everyone is not going to just do like me, there's room for most people's actions.
- maest 5y agoBut absolute moral standards do make sense, in a Kantian way. In particular, imagine a world where everyone has to make some sort of sacrifice to avoid harming everyone (e.g. wearing a mask, not polluting, not overfishing etc). If _most_ people make the sacrifice, you can have freeloaders not follow the rules and the world would still survive: you can have a small number people not staying at home during the pandemic and still keep R<1. you can have a small number of people polluting as much as they want and still stop global warming. you can have a small number of boats fish where they shouldn't and still maintain not fully exhaust fish supplies. Criticising those actors for doing something that doesn't work if everyone would do is perfectly valid (and it's correctly pointing out the reason why their actions are wrong). "I'm not going to stay at home during the pandemic because I don't want to" "Don't do this! Imagine if everybody would just do like you?" "No, everyone is not going to just do like me, there's room for most people's actions"
- jmcqk6 5y agoThat's basically just a restatement of the problem of the commons, and it can definitely be extremely problematic. There are countless examples around us where problems are created because people think themselves to be special.
- hairofadog 5y agoOh man, this has been on my mind lately. I’ve been considering writing a thinkpiece on the word “just” in software tutorials, as in “just install Python” or the worst offender, “just NPM install --save-dev” as if that, with no other information, is enough, when what they’re really saying is “just do this and then all that other complicated stuff you should have learned already”. I think it’s fine to preface a tutorial with “this assumes you’ll know x, y, and z” but wow do I see a lot of “installation instructions: npm install --save-dev” where the reality is two days of troubleshooting to get a thing working.
- sandinmyjoints 5y agoI have thought of writing the same article! Someone needs to do it.
- pawurb 5y agoI actually did not a long while ago https://pawelurbanek.com/dangerous-word-slack https://pawelurbanek.com/dangerous-word-slack
- thih9 5y agoI’ve just read it; now I’m curious: are you still using your original solution? At some point you mention false positives; how annoying are these in practice?
- pawurb 5y agoHonestly, it was a theoretical idea I've had after having been a "just police" in my previous team. I can imagine that setting trigger to "just" would probably be an overkill in many cases. If I were to implement it now I'd start with "let's just" and "why not simply" is also a good candidate.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoAs someone who spent a day figuring out that I need to downgrade node to make node-scss work, ant that’s the only way forward to boot up a rails app,… yea.
- sandinmyjoints 5y agoThis brings to mind a Twitter bot I created years ago: https://mobile.twitter.com/ifeveryonewould https://mobile.twitter.com/ifeveryonewould
- UglyToad 5y agoI use this as something of a meme/joke myself when talking with friends. I think it was widely used on Twitter in the form "I would simply just". For example when a friend is complaining about their job "I would simply just choose from multiple high quality jobs available at the job market, selecting one that both pays more and is more fulfilling". It's usually a strong indicator the speaker lacks empathy or any real-world understanding of the constraints. Not all the time but it can be a good sign that the speaker has no ability to understand other viewpoints. A good one from here recently on the subject of poor teleconference connections was (paraphrasing) "I would simply just get faster working internet, it would be simple to me, I would just do it". Because people don't live in crappy shared accommodation or get fucked over repeatedly by local internet monopolies, or move houses and wait months for providers to connect them or live in rural areas or struggle for money for reason or, or, etc. I think it's also common in software because we have this need to solve issues rather than empathise and understand the struggles of people. Scott Hanselman writes about this with respect to relationships, how he has to disable "engineer mode" when his wife is venting about a problem. Sometimes stuff just sucks for people and trying to provide 'obvious' solutions, as if the recipient is incapable of that thought process themselves is demeaning and trivialises things.
- Agentlien 5y agoWe've joked a bit like this at work, too. I'm a game developer, currently working on our performance squad, and in a recent discussion about visual quality I, our graphics programmer, suggested we simply transition to ray tracing for everything.
- ehnto 5y agoTrying to get into game lighting was pretty hard because of the "Just simply" style of teaching. There is so much assumed knowledge, and it can be hard to figure out exactly what your missing knowledge is. Oh my mesh looks weird in engine, must be.. normal maps, materials, mesh isn't manifold, scene lighting isn't set up, global illumination.. skybox.. light not emitter.. you have to bake stuff? Oh but not in this mode.. Just light the damn cube!
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- infogulch 5y agoHm, it looks like you can see comment points only up through 7 years ago. 6 years ago they stop being shown. Was that a policy change at some point?
- Macha 5y agoYes. Scores used to be public, your profile even showed your average comment score
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThis is a recurring joke with my brother. One day he was giving me an advice that was technically true but absolutely impossible to follow. I told him: "You know how to win a race again Usain Bolt? Just run faster!". Now we regularly use "just run faster" as a punchline.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agosimpler HN search. why not. text-only, no Javascript required, no SNI, unnecessary HTTP headers, DNS, etc. json_reformat is from https://github.com/lloyd/yajl/ https://github.com/lloyd/yajl/ ^M is Ctrl-v+Ctrl-m example usage: 1.sh query > 1.json json_reformat < 1.json|sed 's/ *//;s/\\n/ /g'|less stunnel -fd 0 <<eof1 debug=debug pid=$HOME/1.pid foreground=no [ $$ ] accept=127.0.0.7:80 client=yes connect=54.217.76.129:443 options=NO_TICKET options=NO_RENEGOTIATION renegotiation=no sni= sslVersion=TLSv1.3 sslVersionMin=TLSv1.2 eof1 nc -vvn 127.7 80 <<eof2 POST /1/indexes/Item_production_ordered/query?x-algolia-agent=Algolia%20for%20JavaScript%20(4.0.2)%3B%20Browser%20(lite)&x-algolia-api-key=8ece23f8eb07cd25d40262a1764599b1&x-algolia-application-id=UJ5WYC0L7X HTTP/1.1^M Host: uj5wyc0l7x-dsn.algolia.net^M Connection: close^M Content-Type: x-www-form-urlencoded^M Content-Length: $((${#@}+393))^M ^M {"query":"$@","analyticsTags":["web"],"page":0,"hitsPerPage":30,"minWordSizefor1Typo":4,"minWordSizefor2Typos":8,"advancedSyntax":true,"ignorePlurals":false,"clickAnalytics":true,"minProximity":8,"numericFilters":[],"tagFilters":["story",[]],"typoTolerance":true,"queryType":"prefixNone","restrictSearchableAttributes":["title","comment_text","url","story_text","author"],"getRankingInfo":true} eof2 cd;kill $(cat 1.pid);
- pjc50 5y agoWhy not just use a web browser? (sorry)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agosmall correction example usage: sed -n '/{\"hits\":/p' 1.json|json_reformat|sed 's/ //;s/\\n/ /g'|less also instead of entering ^M, we can use something like djb's "addcr" from ucspi-tcp, a simple program that adds a carriage return ("\r") to each line here is a simple shell version of addcr that also removes indention x=$(echo x|tr x '\r'); exec sed "s/ *//;s/$/$x/"; example usage: stunnel -fd 0 <<eof1 pid=$HOME/1.pid foreground=no [ $$ ] accept=127.0.0.21:80 client=yes connect=graphql.example.com:443 sslVersion=TLSv1.3 eof1 addcr <<eof2|nc -vvn 127.21 80 POST /v1/api HTTP/1.1 Host: graphql.example.com Connection: close Content-Type: x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: $((${#@}+141)) {"query":"$@"} eof2 cd;kill $(cat 1.pid);**
- fblp 5y ago"it seems like" https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&query=%22it%20seems%20like%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...
- lostgame 5y agoThis is giving me ‘would you kindly’ vibes from Bioshock. :P
- 63 5y agoI find it interesting that so many of the results are very long. I suppose it makes sense, a post that contains a lot of words is more likely to contain any individual phrase than a post with fewer words. Or is it just the case that HN comments were longer on average 5-9 years ago?
- linker3000 5y ago"You'd think that.." is my pet peeve, as in... "Why did the user press delete? You'd think that they'd know that would erase the document" "You'd think that they'd put the 'clear form' button further away from the 'submit' button" ..it implies you're getting irritated by a perceived failing that's obvious to you. But the world isn't perfect, so chill, carry on and get it sorted!
- mro_name 5y agomy favourite: "intuitive" for "I'm unable to explain but you better feel stupid if not knowing upfront."
- devoutsalsa 5y agoWhy not simply use no adjectives at all? If you strip out all the fluff, it really makes you think about what you’re writing.
- simonh 5y agoWow, I literally just replied to a 'simply just' comment on another thread a moment ago and came straight to this. One good thing here though is, if you politely explain why it's not that simple you're actually quite likely to get a nice thank you and an upvote in return. That's useful to bear in mind before escalating the rhetoric any further. Sometimes people just genuinely don't know why it's not that simple.
- tlb 5y agoI wish we had 2 phrases, one for "you have overlooked this obvious thing, you idiot!" and one for "could someone explain what's wrong with the naive solution?"
- edanm 5y agoWell... your second phrase seems perfect for that job. (let me try it) Could you/someone explain what's wrong with simply using the second phrase? (To be fair, you probably meant that you wish one commonly used phrase wasn't doing both jobs, which I agree with completely.)
- naavis 5y agoWe do! They are: - "You have overlooked this obvious thing, you idiot!", and - "Could someone explain what's wrong with the naive solution?"
- dewey 5y agoAlso interesting: "Couldn't you just": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22couldn%27t%20you%20just%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- bassdropvroom 5y agoLast time I said "we can simply do x", x took is 3 times longer than expected.
- lsc36 5y agoThis reminds me of the Dropbox HN submission back in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863