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> Or they realise the hubris you need to have to think 150$ to be a meaningless amount of money. It's already quite a sum at the median American salary and the

> Or they realise the hubris you need to have to think 150$ to be a meaningless amount of money. It's already quite a sum at the median American salary and the USA is one of the most affluent countries from which HN readers hail. Ok, but I’m a software developer and this is a professional tool with which I do a job that makes me several hundred thousand dollars a year. I don’t know that it’s “hubris” to recognize that relative to the income this helps me create, its costs are a rounding error. Obviously $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people making a much lower income!… but those people likely aren’t in the market for a 3-way diff & merge tool, so I can’t imagine why you’d expect a discussion of this tool to have to add a disclaimer accounting for them? This is a professional tool whose costs exist relative to the income they create for the professional who wields them. My plumber brother-in-law certainly doesn’t refuse to spend tens of thousands of dollars on the equipment he uses for his job on the basis that this would be too expensive for someone working the counter at a fast food store. Nor should he – the costs make him money, and that’s what’s important. (indeed, compared to almost any trade you can think of, we're lucky that our tools cost so little)

stingraycharles 4y ago
> Obviously $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people making a much lower income!… but those people likely aren’t in the market for a 3-way diff & merge tool You’re forgetting that even in e.g. European countries, the average salary is much, much lower than in the US, most software devs don’t get 6-figure salaries. They would definitely be in the market for such a tool, but the price is prohibitive.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  Well that's fine, really – they should make decisions about what tools to buy based on how much it makes them, not how much it makes me, just the same as I don't base my decisions on what tools I buy based on a hypothetical Estonian contractor's salary. I'm not really "forgetting" anything so much as I was making a statement about myself – you'll notice the prominent "I" and "me" in "Eh, for how much use I get out of a merge tool, $150 is pretty meaningless for the right tool" and "Ok, but I’m a software developer and this is a professional tool with which I do a job that makes me several hundred thousand dollars a year." – which for some reason has prompted a bunch of "well, whatabout median American income making non-developers" and "well, whatabout underpaid European developers". I am neither of these things. Wasn't talking about them. North American saws probably aren't priced affordably for Estonian carpenters either, when it comes down to it.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Then why are you complaining about being downvoted? Because you are not writing for yourself but for the HN readership and the HN readership most definitely includes the people you pretend not to be "forgetting" but actually are.
    - msbarnett 4y ago
      > Then why are you complaining about being downvoted? Because downvoting isn’t discussion, it’s a lazy way of dismissing something instead of taking a real position around whatever it is you disagree with. > Because you are not writing for yourself but for the HN readership and the HN readership most definitely includes the people you pretend not to be "forgetting" but actually are. Do you honestly think that “every post must include and add a disclaimer accounting for every possible perspective of every possible reader anywhere on Planet Earth” is a reasonable expectation to have for this, or any, conversation forum? Should every discussion of, say, Spotify mostly focus on how unaffordable it is the population of Burundi, rather than trusting reasonable readers to understand that people are speaking to their own experiences rather than trying to make universal claims about the entire globe? I’m seriously asking, because it seems like an absurd expectation to me.
      - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        > I’m seriously asking, because it seems like an absurd expectation to me. If you purposefully push it to absurde length, obviously it becomes an absurd expectation. No one is asking you to disclaim everything you write. I am just pointing to you that if you can't be bothered to think about how what you write is going to be received, you shouldn't be surprised to be downvoted. You seem surprised that people don't care about what things mean to you when you communicate whereas it should be obvious. You are not writing for you after all but to be read.
        msbarnett 4y ago
        > No one is asking you to disclaim everything you write. Oh? No? Then why did you write: > Or they realise the hubris you need to have to think 150$ to be a meaningless amount of money. What is the hubris if not that there’s somebody, somewhere for whom it’s a lot of money that I failed to add enough disclaimers about for your tastes? I was clearing talking about $150’s value to me relative to my own personal income, so you clearly felt like that needed to come with some disclaimer about Italian developers, for some reason, despite me living half a planet away from Italy and never having said anything about anyone other than I, myself, and me. What seems like the real hubris here is yours — your insistence that everybody else’s personal opinion on what’s a lot of money to them personally MUST make space for the chip you have on your shoulder. > You seem surprised that people don't care about what things mean to you when you communicate whereas it should be obvious. You are not writing for you after all but to be read. While I am writing to be read, I am expecting an audience that speaks English well enough to understand that “I” and “me” refers to, well, me, and logical and mature enough to understand that a statement written by me and about me quite obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with the income of people halfway across the planet – it’s just spectacularly and completely irrelevant to anything I wrote about how much the cost of the tool impacts me personally. I seriously doubt that Italian developers consider less than 0.06% of their income “a lot of money” either, for what it’s worth. If you make $50,000, do you consider $30 “a lot of money”? Because that’s the scale of what I’m talking about here. And sure, $30 is probably still a lot of money to someone somewhere else; but do you also go shout at teenagers in GameStop the next time they refer to a $30 video game as “cheap”? Seems like foolish and irrelevant behaviour, to me. Somebody’s cheap will always be someone else’s expensive.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Lower wages don't make the developer's home and medical insurance any cheaper. The second the devs start adjusting prices, American devs with money to spare will turn on their VPN and pay a fraction of the price. The general public does this with stuff like Netflix and YouTube Premium all the time, it's not exactly uncommon. Companies that charge less according to average wages are being nice, but that's all just a choice to make sure they're at the top of their industry. Go to the supermarket and tell the cashier that you're entitled to a lower price because you only make minimum wage, see how that works out. If you can't afford this product then you can just not buy it. You're not entitled to every piece of professional kit, especially a tool that's basically Meld with support for pictures and Office files. It's a luxury product, hardly a necessity, just like high-end smartphones or brand soda. Furthermore, this is a piece of Mac-only kit so if you're in the market for this tool you're probably already using high-end hardware. If you can afford Apple, you can save up for Kaleidoscope.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "Go to the supermarket and tell the cashier that you're entitled to a lower price because you only make minimum wage, see how that works out." No one in this thread (except you) said anything about being entitled. You're fighting a straw man.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  > the price is prohibitive 150$ for a tool you use everyday for your job? Go ask a carpenter how much they spend on their tools, and they make a fraction of what a software developer makes.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    I’m rather thinking about regular employees that have to buy it with their own salary, or have to ask their employer to buy it for them. If you’re self employed and use it as a business expense it’s more reasonable an expense.
  - nicolapcweek94 4y ago
    In Italy, where I (and many other posters on HN) live, a self-employing carpenter makes _much_ more than a software developer, at least at "normal" salaries for the country. For reference, I've used Sublime Text for many, many years and was only able to justify the 79$ (now 99$) purchase price when ST4 came out last year, after a few months of unusually low expenses at home. I would 100% not be able to casually afford it now, in a normal month, even for a tool I use daily. And I'm not some kind of out-of-school trainee, I've been working as a dev for the past 9 years and I'm now doing devops in a somewhat well paying company.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    The avantage salary for a carpenter in Italy is 16.8$. 150$ is a day and half of work before taxes. You people are crazy. You are totally disconnected for reality. I don’t know nor care if it’s a reasonable price for a piece of software but if you think it’s a small sum of money you have no idea of what the life of an average person looks like.
    - msbarnett 4y ago
      > I don’t know nor care if it’s a reasonable price for a piece of software but if you think it’s a small sum of money you have no idea of what the life of an average person looks like. It’s a small sum of money for me. It is obviously not a small sum of money for a Bangladeshi beggar or a Peruvian cobbler. What, exactly, is the point of this complaint? It’s obvious that people are speaking about themselves. Some people in some nations have more money than other people in other nations — that’s the world we live in. We are all already aware of this. What is useful about bringing this up? Should every discussion of every price of everything in the world have to list how affordable it is in each and every country on earth? Is that your idea of a realistic approach to a discussion?
sangnoir 4y ago
> Obviously $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people making a much lower income!… but those people likely aren’t in the market for a 3-way diff & merge tool Are you suggesting students and other people earning much less than 7 figures aren't supposed to be using a basic dev tool? Unless you have a very specific meaning of "aren't in the market for a diff tool". It's not luck: our tools cost so little because we are tool makers - I don't imagine iron smiths had trouble with expensive anvils either.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  > Are you suggesting students and other people earning much less than 7 figures aren't supposed to be using a basic dev tool? Unless you have a very specific meaning of "aren't in the market for a diff tool". What? There are plenty of free options out there – that’s why they’re not likely to be in the market for a paid tool. It requires an incredibly uncharitable reading to somehow get “students aren’t allowed to merge things” from anything I wrote. I don’t think every tool needs to be free just because a price-sensitive part of the market exists, and I personally appreciate that there are, for what is a meaninglessly small amount of money for me, options in the market that invest in solving some of the jank that the free options bring with them. But some people aren’t doing this professionally and some people don’t notice the jank and that’s fine too – they aren’t shopping for anything better. I wasn’t either when I was a student. Free was fine enough. > I don't imagine iron smiths had trouble with expensive anvils either. I would suggest not looking at getting into blacksmithing, if you want to maintain this belief. Even if you don’t buy one, the raw material and fuel is a far far cry from free.

stingraycharles 4y ago

> Obviously $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people making a much lower income!… but those people likely aren’t in the market for a 3-way diff & merge tool You’re forgetting that even in e.g. European countries, the average salary is much, much lower than in the US, most software devs don’t get 6-figure salaries. They would definitely be in the market for such a tool, but the price is prohibitive.

msbarnett 4y ago
Well that's fine, really – they should make decisions about what tools to buy based on how much it makes them, not how much it makes me, just the same as I don't base my decisions on what tools I buy based on a hypothetical Estonian contractor's salary. I'm not really "forgetting" anything so much as I was making a statement about myself – you'll notice the prominent "I" and "me" in "Eh, for how much use I get out of a merge tool, $150 is pretty meaningless for the right tool" and "Ok, but I’m a software developer and this is a professional tool with which I do a job that makes me several hundred thousand dollars a year." – which for some reason has prompted a bunch of "well, whatabout median American income making non-developers" and "well, whatabout underpaid European developers". I am neither of these things. Wasn't talking about them. North American saws probably aren't priced affordably for Estonian carpenters either, when it comes down to it.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Then why are you complaining about being downvoted? Because you are not writing for yourself but for the HN readership and the HN readership most definitely includes the people you pretend not to be "forgetting" but actually are.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    > Then why are you complaining about being downvoted? Because downvoting isn’t discussion, it’s a lazy way of dismissing something instead of taking a real position around whatever it is you disagree with. > Because you are not writing for yourself but for the HN readership and the HN readership most definitely includes the people you pretend not to be "forgetting" but actually are. Do you honestly think that “every post must include and add a disclaimer accounting for every possible perspective of every possible reader anywhere on Planet Earth” is a reasonable expectation to have for this, or any, conversation forum? Should every discussion of, say, Spotify mostly focus on how unaffordable it is the population of Burundi, rather than trusting reasonable readers to understand that people are speaking to their own experiences rather than trying to make universal claims about the entire globe? I’m seriously asking, because it seems like an absurd expectation to me.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      > I’m seriously asking, because it seems like an absurd expectation to me. If you purposefully push it to absurde length, obviously it becomes an absurd expectation. No one is asking you to disclaim everything you write. I am just pointing to you that if you can't be bothered to think about how what you write is going to be received, you shouldn't be surprised to be downvoted. You seem surprised that people don't care about what things mean to you when you communicate whereas it should be obvious. You are not writing for you after all but to be read.
      - msbarnett 4y ago
        > No one is asking you to disclaim everything you write. Oh? No? Then why did you write: > Or they realise the hubris you need to have to think 150$ to be a meaningless amount of money. What is the hubris if not that there’s somebody, somewhere for whom it’s a lot of money that I failed to add enough disclaimers about for your tastes? I was clearing talking about $150’s value to me relative to my own personal income, so you clearly felt like that needed to come with some disclaimer about Italian developers, for some reason, despite me living half a planet away from Italy and never having said anything about anyone other than I, myself, and me. What seems like the real hubris here is yours — your insistence that everybody else’s personal opinion on what’s a lot of money to them personally MUST make space for the chip you have on your shoulder. > You seem surprised that people don't care about what things mean to you when you communicate whereas it should be obvious. You are not writing for you after all but to be read. While I am writing to be read, I am expecting an audience that speaks English well enough to understand that “I” and “me” refers to, well, me, and logical and mature enough to understand that a statement written by me and about me quite obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with the income of people halfway across the planet – it’s just spectacularly and completely irrelevant to anything I wrote about how much the cost of the tool impacts me personally. I seriously doubt that Italian developers consider less than 0.06% of their income “a lot of money” either, for what it’s worth. If you make $50,000, do you consider $30 “a lot of money”? Because that’s the scale of what I’m talking about here. And sure, $30 is probably still a lot of money to someone somewhere else; but do you also go shout at teenagers in GameStop the next time they refer to a $30 video game as “cheap”? Seems like foolish and irrelevant behaviour, to me. Somebody’s cheap will always be someone else’s expensive.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Lower wages don't make the developer's home and medical insurance any cheaper. The second the devs start adjusting prices, American devs with money to spare will turn on their VPN and pay a fraction of the price. The general public does this with stuff like Netflix and YouTube Premium all the time, it's not exactly uncommon. Companies that charge less according to average wages are being nice, but that's all just a choice to make sure they're at the top of their industry. Go to the supermarket and tell the cashier that you're entitled to a lower price because you only make minimum wage, see how that works out. If you can't afford this product then you can just not buy it. You're not entitled to every piece of professional kit, especially a tool that's basically Meld with support for pictures and Office files. It's a luxury product, hardly a necessity, just like high-end smartphones or brand soda. Furthermore, this is a piece of Mac-only kit so if you're in the market for this tool you're probably already using high-end hardware. If you can afford Apple, you can save up for Kaleidoscope.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "Go to the supermarket and tell the cashier that you're entitled to a lower price because you only make minimum wage, see how that works out." No one in this thread (except you) said anything about being entitled. You're fighting a straw man.
newaccount74 4y ago
> the price is prohibitive 150$ for a tool you use everyday for your job? Go ask a carpenter how much they spend on their tools, and they make a fraction of what a software developer makes.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  I’m rather thinking about regular employees that have to buy it with their own salary, or have to ask their employer to buy it for them. If you’re self employed and use it as a business expense it’s more reasonable an expense.
- nicolapcweek94 4y ago
  In Italy, where I (and many other posters on HN) live, a self-employing carpenter makes _much_ more than a software developer, at least at "normal" salaries for the country. For reference, I've used Sublime Text for many, many years and was only able to justify the 79$ (now 99$) purchase price when ST4 came out last year, after a few months of unusually low expenses at home. I would 100% not be able to casually afford it now, in a normal month, even for a tool I use daily. And I'm not some kind of out-of-school trainee, I've been working as a dev for the past 9 years and I'm now doing devops in a somewhat well paying company.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  The avantage salary for a carpenter in Italy is 16.8$. 150$ is a day and half of work before taxes. You people are crazy. You are totally disconnected for reality. I don’t know nor care if it’s a reasonable price for a piece of software but if you think it’s a small sum of money you have no idea of what the life of an average person looks like.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    > I don’t know nor care if it’s a reasonable price for a piece of software but if you think it’s a small sum of money you have no idea of what the life of an average person looks like. It’s a small sum of money for me. It is obviously not a small sum of money for a Bangladeshi beggar or a Peruvian cobbler. What, exactly, is the point of this complaint? It’s obvious that people are speaking about themselves. Some people in some nations have more money than other people in other nations — that’s the world we live in. We are all already aware of this. What is useful about bringing this up? Should every discussion of every price of everything in the world have to list how affordable it is in each and every country on earth? Is that your idea of a realistic approach to a discussion?

sangnoir 4y ago

> Obviously $150 is a lot of money for a lot of people making a much lower income!… but those people likely aren’t in the market for a 3-way diff & merge tool Are you suggesting students and other people earning much less than 7 figures aren't supposed to be using a basic dev tool? Unless you have a very specific meaning of "aren't in the market for a diff tool". It's not luck: our tools cost so little because we are tool makers - I don't imagine iron smiths had trouble with expensive anvils either.

msbarnett 4y ago
> Are you suggesting students and other people earning much less than 7 figures aren't supposed to be using a basic dev tool? Unless you have a very specific meaning of "aren't in the market for a diff tool". What? There are plenty of free options out there – that’s why they’re not likely to be in the market for a paid tool. It requires an incredibly uncharitable reading to somehow get “students aren’t allowed to merge things” from anything I wrote. I don’t think every tool needs to be free just because a price-sensitive part of the market exists, and I personally appreciate that there are, for what is a meaninglessly small amount of money for me, options in the market that invest in solving some of the jank that the free options bring with them. But some people aren’t doing this professionally and some people don’t notice the jank and that’s fine too – they aren’t shopping for anything better. I wasn’t either when I was a student. Free was fine enough. > I don't imagine iron smiths had trouble with expensive anvils either. I would suggest not looking at getting into blacksmithing, if you want to maintain this belief. Even if you don’t buy one, the raw material and fuel is a far far cry from free.