> Yet we are what, 5 messages down a thread where people vehemently deny you can't have reason to believe anything. No, nobody's denied that at all. https://ne

> Yet we are what, 5 messages down a thread where people vehemently deny you can't have reason to believe anything. No, nobody's denied that at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." The argument made by eschneider and reenforced by myself is "People usually guess wrong when they try to add performance optimization at the design phase," not "epistemology is dead." It's a soft rule from experience, not a black-and-white hard rule; most everyone who's been programming for years has a story about the time they built a complicated gadget that ended up being a waste of time because it either wasn't on the critical path where the bottleneck showed up or users didn't choose to use the software in a way that aggravated that bottleneck anyway. I'll share my own. Way back in the day I hammered for weeks on getting the physics model right for a nascent game engine. Started from an open-source option and then beat the hell out of it because I knew physics was likely to scale badly, was easy for developers to "hold wrong," and needed to be plug-simple to use and understand. In the end, 95% of our users only used the game engine as a rendering architecture and never turned the physics engine on. All of that optimization time was zero-business-value.