16 ms·

Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

470 points by jxmorris12 1y ago

constantcrying 1y ago
I despise the word "taste" for preferring specific software and workflows. Why are you selecting for aesthetic experience over usefulness? I do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.
- supportengineer 1y ago
  Not only that but a tool is only useful in a specific context
- waynesonfire 1y ago
  Good for you, some people enjoy the journey.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  Can the aesthetic experience improve usefulness? A million years ago I had an MP3 player with all of my mp3s on it. I listened to it every now and then. But when the iPod came out, and I put my same MP3 library on there, I listened to it all the time because it was super nice to use and interact with
- 30minAdayHN 1y ago
  Is the author doing that over usefulness or doing that in addition to usefulness? Some people would also enjoy the journey with the tool, along with the results. Just because someone enjoys the 'taste' of the tool doesn't mean that they don't care about usefulness. Also usefulness is very subjective too depending on the context and scope.
- PantaloonFlames 1y ago
  > And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, … It is not about aesthetics , from my reading. You brought that connotation into the conversation.
paulcole 1y ago
> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game? Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  Maybe tinkering is a necessary but insufficient condition for taste
  - paulcole 1y ago
    Do you think it is?
    - IncreasePosts 1y ago
      No. But I also don't think tinkering is required to have taste.
      - paulcole 1y ago
        Why did you say, “Maybe tinkering is a necessary…” If you think tinkering isn’t necessary?
        IncreasePosts 1y ago
        I was presenting what may be the OPs opinion
        paulcole 1y ago
        Thank you for your service
- imp0cat 1y ago
  That's just OCD, not taste.
supportengineer 1y ago
[flagged]
- andy99 1y ago
  How about the Reddit style feigned offence?
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  Taste is real and a question of subjective alignment with objective reality. Hence, we can speak of the objectivity of beauty, but the bad taste of an person. That is only possible if both exist and an misalignment exists between them. Whether the author knows what he's talking about is another matter. And that font of his could use a few treatments from the taste bat.
deleted 1y ago
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andy99 1y ago
I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?
- jasonthorsness 1y ago
  the entire page has horizontal lines washed over it
  - doubled112 1y ago
    At the wrong refresh rate so did my monitor at one point.
- jLaForest 1y ago
  I imagine the intent is to simulate the look of an old CRT monitor
- zzzeek 1y ago
  i am fascinated with that effect and turned off every CSS rule on the page I could find but did not identify how you make that effect
  - qiqitori 1y ago
    body::after { content: ""; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px); background-size: 2px 2px; background-repeat: repeat; ...
  - evnp 1y ago
    I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the <body> tag in browser devtools: body::after { content: ""; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px); background-size: 2px 2px; background-repeat: repeat; pointer-events: none; z-index: 9999; }
CuriouslyC 1y ago
The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.
- scuff3d 1y ago
  Funny part is he points out at the end that it's highly subjective... I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.
- adamddev1 1y ago
  I just came here to say I think the blog design had a really cool look, it brought me back to my early days plugging away on old Apple IIes and IBMs.
- 30minAdayHN 1y ago
  The fact that the author went out his way and styled it very uniquely displays that he does have taste :) It is just that your taste is different. Like another commenter pointed out, I liked the style (though I hated the pixelated font to begin with)
  - uncletoxa 1y ago
    I don't mind any color palette or font or anything as long as it keeps text readable. But this choice is just user unfriendly. These horizontal black lines across the display just render text unreadable. Not to mention that sans serif for a longread is also a bad taste
- grugagag 1y ago
  Once one gets over the infatuation phase one realizes how subjective taste really is. I thihk there are some common points though that one can tell someone has refined taste without necessarily liking it
killerstorm 1y ago
I don't think "taste" in UI-adjacent things is important. Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.
ambicapter 1y ago
If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection. edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
- johnfn 1y ago
  Ah yes, time for the daily article of the form "If you don't do <thing I frequently do>, you aren't <a good person>"
kayodelycaon 1y ago
What exactly does "taste" mean in this context? Taste is about artistic quality. Aesthetics is generally a tertiary concern when it comes to software or hardware tinkering. That assumes it's a concern at all. And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
- PantaloonFlames 1y ago
  I know everyone is busy but the author provides the definition explicitly: > And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Concisely, discernment. So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
  - kayodelycaon 1y ago
    That's on me, I missed that. If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :) In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.
    - deleted 1y ago
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saxelsen 1y ago
I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it: "Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things. When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities. The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.
- andy99 1y ago
  I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. It’s not “good taste” it’s just “some taste”. IMO there are many ways to express taste that are not tinkering, such as preferentially selecting things and my personal favourite, complaining :) Nevertheless I think he means opinions rather than some universally good taste.
  - chrisweekly 1y ago
    Haha, "complaining" reminded me of someth that made me laugh a few years back, along the lines of: Things I HATE: 1. complaints 2. lists 3. strong opinions 4. hypocrisy
    - ElevenLathe 1y ago
      Always loved this Michael Caine line from the third Austin Powers movie: "There's two things I can't stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other peoples' cultures, and the Dutch."
  - kingkongjaffa 1y ago
    I'd like to refine this a bit because I agree, but in a slightly different way. > I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. Good taste is the ability to have nuanced and specific opinions. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 said it well: > 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things. Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners. In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past. In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.
SoftTalker 1y ago
I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.
- Loughla 1y ago
  And from an accessibility standpoint, default fonts and colors are very safe as well. They tend to be easier to see and process.
- aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  Or in this case, tinkering with fonts simply reduces legibility.
  - Brian_K_White 1y ago
    Tinkering with fonts is the only way to get fonts that improve legibility by replacing ambiguous glyphs with unabiguoius. ie programmer fonts. Every day it boggles my mind that password managers use fonts that don't distinguish 1Il| 0O etc. cut & paste does not help when you need to speak them into a phone or type them into some other device. Same applies to simple part numbers, serial numbers etc, just all data. Something I say about complainers applies here: In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is. Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.
- jonplackett 1y ago
  I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!
  - mediumdeviation 1y ago
    It's the scanline effect, here's three lines of JS to disable it from the developer console s=document.createElement('style'); s.textContent='body::after{display: none !important}'; document.body.appendChild(s)
imiric 1y ago
It's hard to take seriously anyone who unironically says "there are two kinds of people". That, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.
brailsafe 1y ago
Agreed, although I'd characterize it as more closely related to curiosity. Some people can select particular items that make themselves look good or are high-quality for example, but are surprisingly some of the least curious people, whereas I don't think the same can be said of tinkerers. People lacking this type of curiosity get frustrated easily if you want to discuss ideas or hypotheticals, nebulous intangible problem solving etc..; they want the right answer and an authority to point to. People with this type of curiosity want to discover why it might or might not be true regardless of whether it's a solved problem for others. The former type of person wants to look up what the viewpoints are like before they agree to go on a hike, getting frustrated when they're not there yet, and the latter just wants to hike and see what it's all about, enjoying the process. Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss. Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation. Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.
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Herring 1y ago
If you're going to make changes, make big changes. Learn to squat 100kg. Finish a triathlon. Learn intermediate Chinese. These are all impactful goals you can hit in a year, worth way more than colors and fonts.
- kridsdale3 1y ago
  Nobody who is raising children is able to do those things in a year.
  - Herring 1y ago
    Increasingly many aren't raising children either. I'm trying to move to a saner country.
    - deleted 1y ago
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  - stavros 1y ago
    Raising a child well is also an impactful goal.
  - ungreased0675 1y ago
    Millions of people with children do those things every year.
- porphyra 1y ago
  Web designers with good taste in colors and fonts often make more money than weightlifters, triathletes, and the average Chinese speaker.
dvsgaevsvsgavsv 1y ago
If you have to wtite blog post about how you have taste and other don't, you clearly haven't got it either.
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jongjong 1y ago
I love tinkering but I'm very minimalist as far as tooling is concerned. I don't like to use too many tools. I only use tools to automate activities that I do frequently. I don't try to micromanage and automate every aspect of my existence. Some stuff is better left uncounted and unplanned. A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.
KalMann 1y ago
As a person who doesn't do much tinkering the thing I dislike about this article is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either. Not saying that the article is bad but I was curious about the author's mindset and felt he didn't talk more about the appeal of tinkering.
- bakugo 1y ago
  > is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either It's literally stated in the second paragraph: "It’s how I learn." You can learn how the things around you work by tinkering with them. Of course, you can then ask why someone would want to learn things, or why they enjoy learning, and I honestly don't know how to explain that, but I feel like it's the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be asked.
bakugo 1y ago
> GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least) I keep hearing this same "GitHub Desktop bad, git cli good" take, but I just don't see how the cli can compete terms of things like being able to go through each changed file, see a clean visual representation of all my changes, and to choose exactly what lines I want to commit just by clicking on them.
citruscomputing 1y ago
This applies to fashion as well. Hackers should tinker with their clothes and jewelry more.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  My coworkers are shocked and confused that I own/use a sewing machine and see at as some legacy old timey thing. It's true that you certainly don't need to own one anymore and you won't save any money making your own clothes. But you can modify and make loads of custom cool stuff that are impossible to buy new. I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.
BoorishBears 1y ago
You don't have interesting taste if you write articles like this. People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.
stavros 1y ago
Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee." That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun. I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about. Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
  - grugagag 1y ago
    Lucky you! You didn’t fall into that trap and just enjoy the best experience you could get without overoptimizing for it. I fell into the musical instruments trap for a bit but luckily I got out of it and play with what I have.
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      I messed up in that domain when it comes to music software, it's tweaks all the way down, amazing that it works at all. I make do with cheap MIDI controllers, but spend hours cracking VSTs I already bought so I can run them in Linux. Typing this out makes me realize its not even about the music anymore, but the tweaks. Let this be a warning
  - 1y ago
gnarlouse 1y ago
Reminds me of the Steve Jobs biography. He was a notorious tinkerer. He obsessed over the design of Macintosh, the NeXT step cube, and a bunch of other products.
- al_borland 1y ago
  He also valued taste a lot. It seemed like the worst insult Jobs could have for someone was to say they had no taste. Other insults may have used stronger language, but it always felt that him saying someone had no taste was to say they were worthless and he had no respect for them as a human being.
- layer8 1y ago
  I don’t think he tinkered much himself. He let others tinker until their output met his vision.
  - gnarlouse 1y ago
    No he definitely tinkered. Yes, his primary tinkering mechanism was "having others execute his vision," but like if that's not tinkering then neither is editing config files like the article author mentions, because you're directing other peoples code into configuration. There's one story from Macintosh era where he spent weeks harassing one engineer over the calculator app: "it looks too bloated, it looks afwul, these lines are terrible.." until the engineer got fed up and said "here this is the Macintosh Calculator App: Steve Edition. You get to pick your font, your layout, your color theme." And Steve sat there for hours literally tinkering on a calculator app until he got what he wanted. He tried to get Paul Rand to change the colors on the NeXT logo--who promptly directed Steve to go have s*x with himself. There was one point in the Apple Store's inception where they had basically reached done, and Steve decides that he didn't like a certain aspect of it, which was essentially going to require them to redo the entire thing. So he did, and they started from scratch. I think it might have been the Carrara marble floors but I can't remember for certain. I'm not saying I have immense respect for the guy as a human being, but he was absolutely a notorious tinkerer--a complete menace of one.
tambourine_man 1y ago
> In fact, the last meaningful change to my config was 6 months ago. I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.
CharlieDigital 1y ago
> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. I think in this age of vibe coding where anyone can code anything, the discriminating factor between two developers, at a technical level, just comes down to "good taste" (lots of other more important factors, too, like a good human to work with). And like the author, I agree that taste is acquired through tinkering and trying to be able to discern the qualities of one approach or one design over another. You can't have good taste in anything without having tried lots of variants in that domain -- wine, sushi, furniture, color, style, etc. Having this quality now is more important than ever for senior devs and mid-level devs that want to reach the next level. When anyone can vibe code, it is the ones with "good taste" in the design of systems that will thrive. Anyone can use an agent and code fast; few will be able to do it fast and well and build systems that do not eventually collapse under the weight of their own tangled mess. How to acquire it? Have a folder called `sandbox` and just build small projects in there and try new ideas, new techniques, new libraries you come across. Used a particularly interesting package? Go check out the GitHub repo and see how they did it; learn something new. Good taste can be acquired; it just surprises me how few devs actually care to seek it.
- mberning 1y ago
  Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or interest in deep understanding. As a concrete example I just reviewed a PR for a feature that someone wanted to add to a flask app. It had a ton of terraform code, an aws api gateway, a lambda, etc. then on the flask app frontend they added a page with a call to this new API. I asked why they didn’t just add a route to the flask app. Blank stare response.
  - tdeck 1y ago
    The Daily WTF is going to enter a new era soon. (For those not familiar https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/)
joshdavham 1y ago
Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine? Please enlighten me!
- DauntingPear7 1y ago
  If you dislike the terminal or aren’t comfortable there, you should try using the vim keybinds for VSCode. They’ll get you most of the way there, and the rest is a lot of customization to get things how you like. The vim motions are the best part! They take a while to get used to, but they’re incredibly convenient.
  - joshdavham 1y ago
    Thanks! I've also heard this advice before elsewhere. Also question: is there much of a reason to switch to neovim after learning vim motions in vscode?
- bavent 1y ago
  Most of the things I do with Neovim I could probably also do with VS Code (not sure about autocommands and macros though, I haven't used Code in years). I don't use a mouse much, I have a very keyboard-centric workflow. I was a Code user for years, but did most everything else in the terminal. I figured I would give it a try and I ended up just liking it. I like to tinker. I like to tweak my configuration. I like how I can set autocommands for things, pipe text into Vim and manipulate it, or record a quick macro for some repetitive task. I like that there are "Vim keymap" plugins for things like Firefox, so learning basic Vim keys has helped me outside of Vim. I like that I keep discovering new things Vim can do (and then promptly forgetting them most of the time, but still). I also like to spend 2 hours writing something to automate something that saves me two seconds. It's absolutely not for everyone, though it looks like some of the pre-built configs (NvChad, LaZyVim, etc.) are decent enough of the box now that you don't need to go on the endless-customization journey if you don't want to. To me though, that's the appeal: tinkering, tweaking, refining. Generally when people ask if they should use Vim, I tell them probably not but try it for a few weeks and see if it clicks in your brain. I had a great VSCode setup, everything worked great, I was productive, but something about Vim just made more sense to me once I got over the hump of modes and all the keymaps you need to turn into muscle memory. Edit: I also like that I can do abominations like: ("def" @keyword (#set! conceal "ƒ")) ("if" @keyword (#set! conceal "?")) ("unless" @keyword (#set! conceal "¿")) ("else" @keyword (#set! conceal "∶")) ("elsif" @keyword (#set! conceal "⁇")) ("case" @keyword (#set! conceal "⟨?")) ("when" @keyword (#set! conceal "→")) ("begin" @keyword (#set! conceal "⌊")) to make Ruby look absolutely insane. Is it useful? No. Do people hate it when I share my screen? Yes.
bbminner 1y ago
I'd make a weaker statement - tinkering helps aquire (your personal) taste - not necessarily a good one.
- gandalfgreybeer 1y ago
  In what’s becoming a monoculture world because of the internet, that seems like a good thing.
billllll 1y ago
Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works. In a world like that where you have to work in a team, why you ever wear your inflexibility as a badge of pride? The ones who are the most useful are the ones who can code any way, any how, and can plugin anywhere - "taste" be damned. If you want to be a net positive on the teams you work on, stop thinking it's about you, because it's not.
- teeray 1y ago
  > Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works. Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.
  - billllll 1y ago
    Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience). Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic. In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.
- liamcsail 1y ago
  Spot on! The real difference between having great taste and just thinking you do lies in understanding the user's needs deeply. Good design isn’t just about looking pretty; it’s about nailing that value. And yeah, it’s no walk in the park!
- 1y ago
sowbug 1y ago
In my day, we'd say that as kids we'd take apart all our toys to see how they worked. We didn't necessarily call the end goal "taste"; it was to understand how things work, and to learn which results require which trade-offs.
- adastrapa 1y ago
  agreed, tinkering in my experience is either understanding how something works, or fixing something that is broken, or, building something new entirely (and in my mind all of these are hardware based) and usually involves disassembling things into their constituent components, whether or not you're supposed to. I also don't think tinkering is required for taste, I think being exposed to things, exploring things you're interested in, and questioning things is how you develop taste, which is also highly subjective.
Rileyen 1y ago
I’m starting to believe that taste in code isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build after getting burned by your own mistakes again and again. I used to think some code just looked nice, but now I can explain why it works. How did you develop your sense of taste in code? Any stories or lessons worth sharing?
creer 1y ago
Except "taste before skill" is a well known issue and source of frustration for starting artists: They can already see what's good and they know what they want to do, but they don't yet have skill in measure with their taste and get locked in a feeling of inadequacy. They resolve that if they stick with it. So, taste looong before skill. So... > If you don't tinker, you don't have taste > Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste. No. That's not how it works.
strix_varius 1y ago
The examples given are not what I would consider "tinkering." Changing editor configs? Tuning mouse sensitivity? Really?
r_lee 1y ago
I feel like this is true as ever, yet the current environment seems to be going towards the opposite, I.e. not about taste but just doing as much as possible, as much hours, as many responsibilities, just shipping out slop as fast as you can, don't waste time on stuff, all about being a 1000x AI engineer etc.. I'm tired boss
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
God I hate how much this reads like I wrote it about me
Kinrany 1y ago
> This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.
- hooskerdu 1y ago
  Wrong. ;P
deleted 1y ago
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jamiejquinn 1y ago
I don't know if taste is the correct word here but I agree with the spirit of the article, especially the parts on tinkering being a form of practice. Play (in the form of enjoyable tinkering) is such a powerful motivator in learning. In saying that I've found two big limitations with this style of play-based learning: 1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...
spectraldrift 1y ago
This is the second article I've seen on taste here. It seems to me the author's definition of "tinkering" is primarily describing hyperfocused, repetitive behaviors found in neurodivergent individuals, potentially even a complex form of stimming. I think this is unrelated to taste. I think good taste in engineering comes down to a mix of skill and knowledge. It isn't just about how you can reach a goal, but rather about having a solid internal map of the world and an understanding of which parts of the map you are unfamiliar with. To those lacking knowledge, the map can deceptively appear much smaller. Skill allows you to effectively find your way to the places you know you can go. With knowledge and skill, taste comes naturally. Those with bad taste, I've found, are those with limited knowledge of the vast universe of tools available and/or the lack of skill needed to utilize those tools effectively.
burner420042 1y ago
The best object for comparison you all are missing here are camera lenses.
itissid 1y ago
I've spent an inordinate time tuning my home nas to what I want to do. e.g. NPM reverse proxy with all kinds of docker apps and configuring it securely made me appreciate how tough cyber security is. My latest venture was to create several docker images for whatever environment I want: VsCode Remote SSH server, a docker image with a custom LLM, sync thing for obsidian notes across all devices My goal is to de Google with home nas hosting a bunch of services. I want to take all my Dropbox photos and recreate what Google memories does using off the shelf AI tools on my nas. Then email and finally maps with great PoI data. Probably not all of what I did is a differentiator that put my learning beyond mediocrity. But a good yard stick is if what I built is useful to someone and even better if one would pay me for something.
mads_quist 1y ago
Unpopular opinion here probably but: Tinkering is also a great habit to be disappointed and unhappy. I love software and programming, but the apologetic requirements that can come from users mean adding a lot of complexity to software, that leads to many bugs and very slow programs. Everything has a cost attached.
leobg 1y ago
[deleted]
Theofrastus 1y ago
I moved away from tinkering, ever since I had to juggle family, job, chores, and social contacts. I don't want to spend the little free time I have fixing broken configs. Instead of rolling my own self-build NAS / home server like I used to, I just have a Synology now. I moved back to Windows after I fcked my graphics driver on linux and didn't have enough time to fix it in a day or two. Still, I love the tinkering spirit, and it still is a part of me, but it's not very pragmatic to implement in my life nowadays.
- nonethewiser 1y ago
  For many things, tinkering is a hobby. Obsidian note keeping strategy is another one I see a lot. No thanks. I'll just brain dump into files in a flat directory and use search if I ever need to. Do whatever works for you but I'm not going to take notes in a way where my ability to take notes requires maintenance.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    You can literally use Obsidian as a plain text dump with search, nobody is forcing you to use advanced features.
    - nonethewiser 1y ago
      Sure. But that's specifically not what I'm talking about.
submeta 1y ago
Tinkering is the ultimate satisfaction of a hacker. When you love perfecting your tools, shaping your terminal, your Emacs, your Neovim, or whatever tool you use, exactly the way you want it. You spend hours doing it and feel enormous satisfaction from every small improvement. That is exactly what a Japanese swordsmith, a chef, or a craftsman does. Perfecting their work, finding joy in refinement, and taking pride in the process itself. I used to see tinkering as a form of procrastination. But not anymore. What does that even mean? That we should be doing something else, and devalue this activity? What if this very activity, and the results it produces, bring me deep satisfaction? In that case, it is not procrastination. It is the perfection of the art.
- Johanx64 1y ago
  This is not what a Japanese swordsmith or any craftman does, they obsess over the end result, polishing it until it reaches perfection. Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough, cough "craftsmen" - that obsess about everything else, but the actual end product.
  - submeta 1y ago
    Well, very valid points you made. I must admit. Edit: But why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? :) Which value has a perfectly made sword in a world today? Which value has a perfecly made machs tea? And other things only the maker or a few select people value?
    - Johanx64 1y ago
      > why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? Because people are willing to pay roughly 0$ for your riced terminal and dot files. A polished japanese sword made by a master craftsmen on the other hand - people are willing to pay good money for.
newsuser 1y ago
> ...there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. The ideal, of course, is to be a mix of both. This is related to what Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls the romantic (subjective, "artistic") and the classical (objective, "scientific") understanding. He, too, points that the ideal is to enjoy both. Not because there are both useful and have their place and time, but because this is a false dichotomy to begin with and, ideally, one should refrain from defining the splitting and abandon both concepts (after all, the Zen in the title is there for a reason).
mold_aid 1y ago
the dabbler's expertise
hmans 1y ago
[dead]
ambicapter 1y ago
Why was the title of this changed?
- nchmy 1y ago
  Just noticed that as well. Isn't this strictly against the rules here? It has a completely different meaning from the original title and actual article content.
doodaddy 1y ago
I think there is too much associating taste with quality. We can see it in many of these comments and in the post as well: > And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. And I say, maybe. But more than quality I think taste is a way to discern what’s unique and novel. In my mind it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be “excellent” because, as the post mentions, everyone’s “excellent” may be different. Why do I think this distinction is important? Because if taste is about seeing the nuances that make something interesting instead of what makes it “good” then getting to good taste promotes open minded exploration (healthy exploration) over status seeking.
bfkwlfkjf 1y ago
I think the author has a point, but his examples are bad. He talks about mouse sensitivity, windows manager, keyboard switches, and vscode. All those things were made to be tweaked. He's not so much exploring as he is playing with a toy the way it was intended. The stickiest learning comes from getting things wrong, and that happens when you're using things the way you're not supposed to. For example disassembling a microwave. Not the keyboard switches. The world has become so comfy that even tweaking has been packaged and monetized by some company. That's right, I'm gatekeeping tweaking, sue me.
- feoren 1y ago
  > For example disassembling a microwave Getting this wrong will not be a learning experience, because it will kill you. This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and should only be done by people who already know what they're doing. That's not just a tangential tidbit -- you don't learn well when you are completely out of your depth. You learn well when you are right at the edge of your ability and understanding. That involves risk of failure, but the failure isn't the important part, operating on the boundary is.
  - maldie 1y ago
    Yes, disassembling and tinkering with microwave is almost the only easily available thing I would not recommend at all because it seems so ordinary but actual danger is way too high and hidden. Even if you know exactly the dangers, it takes only one distracted move, just being tired or too complacent to end really badly. Like even some medium time disconnected and expectedly safe units can have real nasty shock in them when discharge resistor is faulty, that failure mode does not usually kill but not recommended.
gilbetron 1y ago
> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. There are two kinds of people, those that think it is clever to split people into just two groups, and everyone else.
nonethewiser 1y ago
The author gives several examples of tinkering. Tweaking mouse sensitivity in FPS, installing a linux distro, experimenting with windows managers, changing mechanical keyboard caps etc. Then he looks at one specific example of tinkering, the IDE, and sorts people as tinkerers based on that. >There are plenty of people who still use the VSCode terminal as their default terminal, do not know what vim bindings are, GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least). I’m not saying these are bad things necessarily, just that this should be the minimum, not the median. Couldn't someone not tinker with an IDE and still tinker with other things? I mean clearly you dont have to tinker with everything that can possibly be tinkered with, right? What is it about the IDE that makes it necessary to tinker with? It seems like this was the main motivation for the article and then it got a bit over-abstracted.
chankstein38 1y ago
I think the problem, for me, is that people turn tinkering on something INTO the hobby. People will spend years tweaking their 3d printer to have the perfect settings and have a bunch of weird plastic things attached that make it look like something from Tron but will never design and print anything useful. Same with so many things, the guy mentioned neovim and it's the same there. I am not here to judge people's hobbies but I think a lot of people have too much taste these days based on discussion on reddit. It's annoying, you can barely find a community that isn't just overly toxic about each aspect of their hobby. Try going to any random hobby subreddit. Browse for a little while and try to not find like "The community favorite" (which is actually just the most expensive, well-marketed option) that everyone swears by and will make others feel like, if they don't have that, they don't have anything.
- neogodless 1y ago
  This has sometimes been my problem. Most notably, for example, instead of having fun playing video games, I spent time benchmarking my hardware, making charts and graphs comparing the different hardware I owned. (There's a place for that, but I was no Anandtech!) And then I'd buy a new video card, run benchmarks for a week, and then forget to play any games. I also spent a LOT of time making a French cleat wall in my workshop. And building a workbench. And making a mobile table for my miter saw. The tools all saw more use making the workshop than they did building the things. On the other hand... when my spouse said "could you build a bed frame for our mastiff?" I made a beautiful, very functional, perfectly fitted bed frame with a latching gate over the course of a few hours, assembled and in use. I was ready. I had tinkered so much I was pretty good at the final pursuit. (For deeper context for those that care, we would totally let our mastiff sleep in our bed, but she kicks while she dreams. Without the fencing / gate on her personal Twin XL bed, she would just hop in the bed as soon as we fell asleep, and we'd wake up to her sitting on us or kicking us. She happily goes into her personal bed space at night when she's ready to move from sleeping somewhere else to sleeping in her bed for the night.)
lolive 1y ago
Tinkering is a very demanding activity, especially when you are total newbie at a new domain. The first steps are very intellectual-draining. [and that is probably why so few people learn new things, when adults]. Having good mentors [on Youtube, among your friends, or a vendor at a localshop] can really help you figure out things much faster, that will have taken forever to discover by yourself. So don’t fear to ask !
___POTATOES___ 1y ago
This sounds nice, but I'm busy trying to escape the permanent underclass. Perhaps I messed up by not tinkering more earlier in my life.
outlore 1y ago
can one really formulate a consistent philosophy of whether to get the mass market thing that "just works" or the power user thing that the author of this article describes as the path to good taste? (and by "just works" - i mean about 80% of the time) some of these are even represented in the hacker news front page: iphone vs fairphone, tesla vs corolla, macbook vs framework, vscode or helix, sora vs comfyui etc etc

470 points by jxmorris12 1y ago

I despise the word "taste" for preferring specific software and workflows. Why are you selecting for aesthetic experience over usefulness? I do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.

supportengineer 1y ago
Not only that but a tool is only useful in a specific context
waynesonfire 1y ago
Good for you, some people enjoy the journey.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
Can the aesthetic experience improve usefulness? A million years ago I had an MP3 player with all of my mp3s on it. I listened to it every now and then. But when the iPod came out, and I put my same MP3 library on there, I listened to it all the time because it was super nice to use and interact with
30minAdayHN 1y ago
Is the author doing that over usefulness or doing that in addition to usefulness? Some people would also enjoy the journey with the tool, along with the results. Just because someone enjoys the 'taste' of the tool doesn't mean that they don't care about usefulness. Also usefulness is very subjective too depending on the context and scope.
PantaloonFlames 1y ago
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, … It is not about aesthetics , from my reading. You brought that connotation into the conversation.

paulcole 1y ago

> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game? Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.

IncreasePosts 1y ago
Maybe tinkering is a necessary but insufficient condition for taste
- paulcole 1y ago
  Do you think it is?
  - IncreasePosts 1y ago
    No. But I also don't think tinkering is required to have taste.
    - paulcole 1y ago
      Why did you say, “Maybe tinkering is a necessary…” If you think tinkering isn’t necessary?
      - IncreasePosts 1y ago
        I was presenting what may be the OPs opinion
        paulcole 1y ago
        Thank you for your service
imp0cat 1y ago
That's just OCD, not taste.

supportengineer 1y ago

[flagged]

andy99 1y ago
How about the Reddit style feigned offence?
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
Taste is real and a question of subjective alignment with objective reality. Hence, we can speak of the objectivity of beauty, but the bad taste of an person. That is only possible if both exist and an misalignment exists between them. Whether the author knows what he's talking about is another matter. And that font of his could use a few treatments from the taste bat.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

andy99 1y ago

I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?

jasonthorsness 1y ago
the entire page has horizontal lines washed over it
- doubled112 1y ago
  At the wrong refresh rate so did my monitor at one point.
jLaForest 1y ago
I imagine the intent is to simulate the look of an old CRT monitor
zzzeek 1y ago
i am fascinated with that effect and turned off every CSS rule on the page I could find but did not identify how you make that effect
- qiqitori 1y ago
  body::after { content: ""; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px); background-size: 2px 2px; background-repeat: repeat; ...
- evnp 1y ago
  I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the <body> tag in browser devtools: body::after { content: ""; position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px); background-size: 2px 2px; background-repeat: repeat; pointer-events: none; z-index: 9999; }

CuriouslyC 1y ago

The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.

scuff3d 1y ago
Funny part is he points out at the end that it's highly subjective... I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.
adamddev1 1y ago
I just came here to say I think the blog design had a really cool look, it brought me back to my early days plugging away on old Apple IIes and IBMs.
30minAdayHN 1y ago
The fact that the author went out his way and styled it very uniquely displays that he does have taste :) It is just that your taste is different. Like another commenter pointed out, I liked the style (though I hated the pixelated font to begin with)
- uncletoxa 1y ago
  I don't mind any color palette or font or anything as long as it keeps text readable. But this choice is just user unfriendly. These horizontal black lines across the display just render text unreadable. Not to mention that sans serif for a longread is also a bad taste
grugagag 1y ago
Once one gets over the infatuation phase one realizes how subjective taste really is. I thihk there are some common points though that one can tell someone has refined taste without necessarily liking it

killerstorm 1y ago

I don't think "taste" in UI-adjacent things is important. Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.

ambicapter 1y ago

If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection. edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.

johnfn 1y ago
Ah yes, time for the daily article of the form "If you don't do <thing I frequently do>, you aren't <a good person>"

kayodelycaon 1y ago

What exactly does "taste" mean in this context? Taste is about artistic quality. Aesthetics is generally a tertiary concern when it comes to software or hardware tinkering. That assumes it's a concern at all. And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.

PantaloonFlames 1y ago
I know everyone is busy but the author provides the definition explicitly: > And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Concisely, discernment. So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  That's on me, I missed that. If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :) In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

saxelsen 1y ago

I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it: "Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things. When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities. The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.

andy99 1y ago
I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. It’s not “good taste” it’s just “some taste”. IMO there are many ways to express taste that are not tinkering, such as preferentially selecting things and my personal favourite, complaining :) Nevertheless I think he means opinions rather than some universally good taste.
- chrisweekly 1y ago
  Haha, "complaining" reminded me of someth that made me laugh a few years back, along the lines of: Things I HATE: 1. complaints 2. lists 3. strong opinions 4. hypocrisy
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    Always loved this Michael Caine line from the third Austin Powers movie: "There's two things I can't stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other peoples' cultures, and the Dutch."
- kingkongjaffa 1y ago
  I'd like to refine this a bit because I agree, but in a slightly different way. > I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. Good taste is the ability to have nuanced and specific opinions. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 said it well: > 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things. Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners. In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past. In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.

SoftTalker 1y ago

I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.

Loughla 1y ago
And from an accessibility standpoint, default fonts and colors are very safe as well. They tend to be easier to see and process.
aaronbrethorst 1y ago
Or in this case, tinkering with fonts simply reduces legibility.
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  Tinkering with fonts is the only way to get fonts that improve legibility by replacing ambiguous glyphs with unabiguoius. ie programmer fonts. Every day it boggles my mind that password managers use fonts that don't distinguish 1Il| 0O etc. cut & paste does not help when you need to speak them into a phone or type them into some other device. Same applies to simple part numbers, serial numbers etc, just all data. Something I say about complainers applies here: In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is. Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.
jonplackett 1y ago
I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!
- mediumdeviation 1y ago
  It's the scanline effect, here's three lines of JS to disable it from the developer console s=document.createElement('style'); s.textContent='body::after{display: none !important}'; document.body.appendChild(s)

imiric 1y ago

It's hard to take seriously anyone who unironically says "there are two kinds of people". That, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.

brailsafe 1y ago

Agreed, although I'd characterize it as more closely related to curiosity. Some people can select particular items that make themselves look good or are high-quality for example, but are surprisingly some of the least curious people, whereas I don't think the same can be said of tinkerers. People lacking this type of curiosity get frustrated easily if you want to discuss ideas or hypotheticals, nebulous intangible problem solving etc..; they want the right answer and an authority to point to. People with this type of curiosity want to discover why it might or might not be true regardless of whether it's a solved problem for others. The former type of person wants to look up what the viewpoints are like before they agree to go on a hike, getting frustrated when they're not there yet, and the latter just wants to hike and see what it's all about, enjoying the process. Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss. Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation. Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Herring 1y ago

If you're going to make changes, make big changes. Learn to squat 100kg. Finish a triathlon. Learn intermediate Chinese. These are all impactful goals you can hit in a year, worth way more than colors and fonts.

kridsdale3 1y ago
Nobody who is raising children is able to do those things in a year.
- Herring 1y ago
  Increasingly many aren't raising children either. I'm trying to move to a saner country.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- stavros 1y ago
  Raising a child well is also an impactful goal.
- ungreased0675 1y ago
  Millions of people with children do those things every year.
porphyra 1y ago
Web designers with good taste in colors and fonts often make more money than weightlifters, triathletes, and the average Chinese speaker.

dvsgaevsvsgavsv 1y ago

If you have to wtite blog post about how you have taste and other don't, you clearly haven't got it either.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jongjong 1y ago

I love tinkering but I'm very minimalist as far as tooling is concerned. I don't like to use too many tools. I only use tools to automate activities that I do frequently. I don't try to micromanage and automate every aspect of my existence. Some stuff is better left uncounted and unplanned. A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.

KalMann 1y ago

As a person who doesn't do much tinkering the thing I dislike about this article is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either. Not saying that the article is bad but I was curious about the author's mindset and felt he didn't talk more about the appeal of tinkering.

bakugo 1y ago
> is it doesn't really get across to me why the author likes tinkering so much or why I should either It's literally stated in the second paragraph: "It’s how I learn." You can learn how the things around you work by tinkering with them. Of course, you can then ask why someone would want to learn things, or why they enjoy learning, and I honestly don't know how to explain that, but I feel like it's the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be asked.

bakugo 1y ago

> GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least) I keep hearing this same "GitHub Desktop bad, git cli good" take, but I just don't see how the cli can compete terms of things like being able to go through each changed file, see a clean visual representation of all my changes, and to choose exactly what lines I want to commit just by clicking on them.

citruscomputing 1y ago

This applies to fashion as well. Hackers should tinker with their clothes and jewelry more.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
My coworkers are shocked and confused that I own/use a sewing machine and see at as some legacy old timey thing. It's true that you certainly don't need to own one anymore and you won't save any money making your own clothes. But you can modify and make loads of custom cool stuff that are impossible to buy new. I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.

BoorishBears 1y ago

You don't have interesting taste if you write articles like this. People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.

stavros 1y ago

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee." That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.

heavyset_go 1y ago
This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun. I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about. Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
- grugagag 1y ago
  Lucky you! You didn’t fall into that trap and just enjoy the best experience you could get without overoptimizing for it. I fell into the musical instruments trap for a bit but luckily I got out of it and play with what I have.
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    I messed up in that domain when it comes to music software, it's tweaks all the way down, amazing that it works at all. I make do with cheap MIDI controllers, but spend hours cracking VSTs I already bought so I can run them in Linux. Typing this out makes me realize its not even about the music anymore, but the tweaks. Let this be a warning
- 1y ago

gnarlouse 1y ago

Reminds me of the Steve Jobs biography. He was a notorious tinkerer. He obsessed over the design of Macintosh, the NeXT step cube, and a bunch of other products.

al_borland 1y ago
He also valued taste a lot. It seemed like the worst insult Jobs could have for someone was to say they had no taste. Other insults may have used stronger language, but it always felt that him saying someone had no taste was to say they were worthless and he had no respect for them as a human being.
layer8 1y ago
I don’t think he tinkered much himself. He let others tinker until their output met his vision.
- gnarlouse 1y ago
  No he definitely tinkered. Yes, his primary tinkering mechanism was "having others execute his vision," but like if that's not tinkering then neither is editing config files like the article author mentions, because you're directing other peoples code into configuration. There's one story from Macintosh era where he spent weeks harassing one engineer over the calculator app: "it looks too bloated, it looks afwul, these lines are terrible.." until the engineer got fed up and said "here this is the Macintosh Calculator App: Steve Edition. You get to pick your font, your layout, your color theme." And Steve sat there for hours literally tinkering on a calculator app until he got what he wanted. He tried to get Paul Rand to change the colors on the NeXT logo--who promptly directed Steve to go have s*x with himself. There was one point in the Apple Store's inception where they had basically reached done, and Steve decides that he didn't like a certain aspect of it, which was essentially going to require them to redo the entire thing. So he did, and they started from scratch. I think it might have been the Carrara marble floors but I can't remember for certain. I'm not saying I have immense respect for the guy as a human being, but he was absolutely a notorious tinkerer--a complete menace of one.

tambourine_man 1y ago

> In fact, the last meaningful change to my config was 6 months ago. I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.

CharlieDigital 1y ago

> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. I think in this age of vibe coding where anyone can code anything, the discriminating factor between two developers, at a technical level, just comes down to "good taste" (lots of other more important factors, too, like a good human to work with). And like the author, I agree that taste is acquired through tinkering and trying to be able to discern the qualities of one approach or one design over another. You can't have good taste in anything without having tried lots of variants in that domain -- wine, sushi, furniture, color, style, etc. Having this quality now is more important than ever for senior devs and mid-level devs that want to reach the next level. When anyone can vibe code, it is the ones with "good taste" in the design of systems that will thrive. Anyone can use an agent and code fast; few will be able to do it fast and well and build systems that do not eventually collapse under the weight of their own tangled mess. How to acquire it? Have a folder called `sandbox` and just build small projects in there and try new ideas, new techniques, new libraries you come across. Used a particularly interesting package? Go check out the GitHub repo and see how they did it; learn something new. Good taste can be acquired; it just surprises me how few devs actually care to seek it.

mberning 1y ago
Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or interest in deep understanding. As a concrete example I just reviewed a PR for a feature that someone wanted to add to a flask app. It had a ton of terraform code, an aws api gateway, a lambda, etc. then on the flask app frontend they added a page with a call to this new API. I asked why they didn’t just add a route to the flask app. Blank stare response.
- tdeck 1y ago
  The Daily WTF is going to enter a new era soon. (For those not familiar https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/)

joshdavham 1y ago

Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine? Please enlighten me!

DauntingPear7 1y ago
If you dislike the terminal or aren’t comfortable there, you should try using the vim keybinds for VSCode. They’ll get you most of the way there, and the rest is a lot of customization to get things how you like. The vim motions are the best part! They take a while to get used to, but they’re incredibly convenient.
- joshdavham 1y ago
  Thanks! I've also heard this advice before elsewhere. Also question: is there much of a reason to switch to neovim after learning vim motions in vscode?
bavent 1y ago
Most of the things I do with Neovim I could probably also do with VS Code (not sure about autocommands and macros though, I haven't used Code in years). I don't use a mouse much, I have a very keyboard-centric workflow. I was a Code user for years, but did most everything else in the terminal. I figured I would give it a try and I ended up just liking it. I like to tinker. I like to tweak my configuration. I like how I can set autocommands for things, pipe text into Vim and manipulate it, or record a quick macro for some repetitive task. I like that there are "Vim keymap" plugins for things like Firefox, so learning basic Vim keys has helped me outside of Vim. I like that I keep discovering new things Vim can do (and then promptly forgetting them most of the time, but still). I also like to spend 2 hours writing something to automate something that saves me two seconds. It's absolutely not for everyone, though it looks like some of the pre-built configs (NvChad, LaZyVim, etc.) are decent enough of the box now that you don't need to go on the endless-customization journey if you don't want to. To me though, that's the appeal: tinkering, tweaking, refining. Generally when people ask if they should use Vim, I tell them probably not but try it for a few weeks and see if it clicks in your brain. I had a great VSCode setup, everything worked great, I was productive, but something about Vim just made more sense to me once I got over the hump of modes and all the keymaps you need to turn into muscle memory. Edit: I also like that I can do abominations like: ("def" @keyword (#set! conceal "ƒ")) ("if" @keyword (#set! conceal "?")) ("unless" @keyword (#set! conceal "¿")) ("else" @keyword (#set! conceal "∶")) ("elsif" @keyword (#set! conceal "⁇")) ("case" @keyword (#set! conceal "⟨?")) ("when" @keyword (#set! conceal "→")) ("begin" @keyword (#set! conceal "⌊")) to make Ruby look absolutely insane. Is it useful? No. Do people hate it when I share my screen? Yes.

bbminner 1y ago

I'd make a weaker statement - tinkering helps aquire (your personal) taste - not necessarily a good one.

gandalfgreybeer 1y ago
In what’s becoming a monoculture world because of the internet, that seems like a good thing.

billllll 1y ago

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works. In a world like that where you have to work in a team, why you ever wear your inflexibility as a badge of pride? The ones who are the most useful are the ones who can code any way, any how, and can plugin anywhere - "taste" be damned. If you want to be a net positive on the teams you work on, stop thinking it's about you, because it's not.

teeray 1y ago
> Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works. Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.
- billllll 1y ago
  Unreadable slop and "tasteful" choices are independent of each other. You can make "tasteful choices" that makes code unreadable (I know from experience). Readability also has some level of objectiveness to it. There's only so many ways you can abstract a concept, and so many ways you can express logic. In that sense, readability has way more to do with skill in abstraction, than taste. In fact picking bad abstraction layers or expressing logic in odd manners because of taste is a great way to write unreadable slop.
liamcsail 1y ago
Spot on! The real difference between having great taste and just thinking you do lies in understanding the user's needs deeply. Good design isn’t just about looking pretty; it’s about nailing that value. And yeah, it’s no walk in the park!
1y ago

sowbug 1y ago

In my day, we'd say that as kids we'd take apart all our toys to see how they worked. We didn't necessarily call the end goal "taste"; it was to understand how things work, and to learn which results require which trade-offs.

adastrapa 1y ago
agreed, tinkering in my experience is either understanding how something works, or fixing something that is broken, or, building something new entirely (and in my mind all of these are hardware based) and usually involves disassembling things into their constituent components, whether or not you're supposed to. I also don't think tinkering is required for taste, I think being exposed to things, exploring things you're interested in, and questioning things is how you develop taste, which is also highly subjective.

Rileyen 1y ago

I’m starting to believe that taste in code isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build after getting burned by your own mistakes again and again. I used to think some code just looked nice, but now I can explain why it works. How did you develop your sense of taste in code? Any stories or lessons worth sharing?

creer 1y ago

Except "taste before skill" is a well known issue and source of frustration for starting artists: They can already see what's good and they know what they want to do, but they don't yet have skill in measure with their taste and get locked in a feeling of inadequacy. They resolve that if they stick with it. So, taste looong before skill. So... > If you don't tinker, you don't have taste > Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste. No. That's not how it works.

strix_varius 1y ago

The examples given are not what I would consider "tinkering." Changing editor configs? Tuning mouse sensitivity? Really?

r_lee 1y ago

I feel like this is true as ever, yet the current environment seems to be going towards the opposite, I.e. not about taste but just doing as much as possible, as much hours, as many responsibilities, just shipping out slop as fast as you can, don't waste time on stuff, all about being a 1000x AI engineer etc.. I'm tired boss

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

God I hate how much this reads like I wrote it about me

Kinrany 1y ago

> This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.

hooskerdu 1y ago
Wrong. ;P

deleted 1y ago

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jamiejquinn 1y ago

I don't know if taste is the correct word here but I agree with the spirit of the article, especially the parts on tinkering being a form of practice. Play (in the form of enjoyable tinkering) is such a powerful motivator in learning. In saying that I've found two big limitations with this style of play-based learning: 1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...

spectraldrift 1y ago

This is the second article I've seen on taste here. It seems to me the author's definition of "tinkering" is primarily describing hyperfocused, repetitive behaviors found in neurodivergent individuals, potentially even a complex form of stimming. I think this is unrelated to taste. I think good taste in engineering comes down to a mix of skill and knowledge. It isn't just about how you can reach a goal, but rather about having a solid internal map of the world and an understanding of which parts of the map you are unfamiliar with. To those lacking knowledge, the map can deceptively appear much smaller. Skill allows you to effectively find your way to the places you know you can go. With knowledge and skill, taste comes naturally. Those with bad taste, I've found, are those with limited knowledge of the vast universe of tools available and/or the lack of skill needed to utilize those tools effectively.

burner420042 1y ago

The best object for comparison you all are missing here are camera lenses.

itissid 1y ago

I've spent an inordinate time tuning my home nas to what I want to do. e.g. NPM reverse proxy with all kinds of docker apps and configuring it securely made me appreciate how tough cyber security is. My latest venture was to create several docker images for whatever environment I want: VsCode Remote SSH server, a docker image with a custom LLM, sync thing for obsidian notes across all devices My goal is to de Google with home nas hosting a bunch of services. I want to take all my Dropbox photos and recreate what Google memories does using off the shelf AI tools on my nas. Then email and finally maps with great PoI data. Probably not all of what I did is a differentiator that put my learning beyond mediocrity. But a good yard stick is if what I built is useful to someone and even better if one would pay me for something.

mads_quist 1y ago

Unpopular opinion here probably but: Tinkering is also a great habit to be disappointed and unhappy. I love software and programming, but the apologetic requirements that can come from users mean adding a lot of complexity to software, that leads to many bugs and very slow programs. Everything has a cost attached.

leobg 1y ago

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Theofrastus 1y ago

I moved away from tinkering, ever since I had to juggle family, job, chores, and social contacts. I don't want to spend the little free time I have fixing broken configs. Instead of rolling my own self-build NAS / home server like I used to, I just have a Synology now. I moved back to Windows after I fcked my graphics driver on linux and didn't have enough time to fix it in a day or two. Still, I love the tinkering spirit, and it still is a part of me, but it's not very pragmatic to implement in my life nowadays.

nonethewiser 1y ago
For many things, tinkering is a hobby. Obsidian note keeping strategy is another one I see a lot. No thanks. I'll just brain dump into files in a flat directory and use search if I ever need to. Do whatever works for you but I'm not going to take notes in a way where my ability to take notes requires maintenance.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  You can literally use Obsidian as a plain text dump with search, nobody is forcing you to use advanced features.
  - nonethewiser 1y ago
    Sure. But that's specifically not what I'm talking about.

submeta 1y ago

Tinkering is the ultimate satisfaction of a hacker. When you love perfecting your tools, shaping your terminal, your Emacs, your Neovim, or whatever tool you use, exactly the way you want it. You spend hours doing it and feel enormous satisfaction from every small improvement. That is exactly what a Japanese swordsmith, a chef, or a craftsman does. Perfecting their work, finding joy in refinement, and taking pride in the process itself. I used to see tinkering as a form of procrastination. But not anymore. What does that even mean? That we should be doing something else, and devalue this activity? What if this very activity, and the results it produces, bring me deep satisfaction? In that case, it is not procrastination. It is the perfection of the art.

Johanx64 1y ago
This is not what a Japanese swordsmith or any craftman does, they obsess over the end result, polishing it until it reaches perfection. Riced out Neovim/emacs setup doesn't and hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will. If it did, world would be full of polished, high quality software, what instead we have is endless sea of garbage produced by these cough, cough "craftsmen" - that obsess about everything else, but the actual end product.
- submeta 1y ago
  Well, very valid points you made. I must admit. Edit: But why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? :) Which value has a perfectly made sword in a world today? Which value has a perfecly made machs tea? And other things only the maker or a few select people value?
  - Johanx64 1y ago
    > why do you believe that my super polished and streamlined WezTerm is less worth than a japanese sword? Because people are willing to pay roughly 0$ for your riced terminal and dot files. A polished japanese sword made by a master craftsmen on the other hand - people are willing to pay good money for.

newsuser 1y ago

> ...there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. The ideal, of course, is to be a mix of both. This is related to what Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance calls the romantic (subjective, "artistic") and the classical (objective, "scientific") understanding. He, too, points that the ideal is to enjoy both. Not because there are both useful and have their place and time, but because this is a false dichotomy to begin with and, ideally, one should refrain from defining the splitting and abandon both concepts (after all, the Zen in the title is there for a reason).

mold_aid 1y ago

the dabbler's expertise

hmans 1y ago

[dead]

ambicapter 1y ago

Why was the title of this changed?

nchmy 1y ago
Just noticed that as well. Isn't this strictly against the rules here? It has a completely different meaning from the original title and actual article content.

doodaddy 1y ago

I think there is too much associating taste with quality. We can see it in many of these comments and in the post as well: > And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. And I say, maybe. But more than quality I think taste is a way to discern what’s unique and novel. In my mind it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be “excellent” because, as the post mentions, everyone’s “excellent” may be different. Why do I think this distinction is important? Because if taste is about seeing the nuances that make something interesting instead of what makes it “good” then getting to good taste promotes open minded exploration (healthy exploration) over status seeking.

bfkwlfkjf 1y ago

I think the author has a point, but his examples are bad. He talks about mouse sensitivity, windows manager, keyboard switches, and vscode. All those things were made to be tweaked. He's not so much exploring as he is playing with a toy the way it was intended. The stickiest learning comes from getting things wrong, and that happens when you're using things the way you're not supposed to. For example disassembling a microwave. Not the keyboard switches. The world has become so comfy that even tweaking has been packaged and monetized by some company. That's right, I'm gatekeeping tweaking, sue me.

feoren 1y ago
> For example disassembling a microwave Getting this wrong will not be a learning experience, because it will kill you. This is an incredibly dangerous thing to do and should only be done by people who already know what they're doing. That's not just a tangential tidbit -- you don't learn well when you are completely out of your depth. You learn well when you are right at the edge of your ability and understanding. That involves risk of failure, but the failure isn't the important part, operating on the boundary is.
- maldie 1y ago
  Yes, disassembling and tinkering with microwave is almost the only easily available thing I would not recommend at all because it seems so ordinary but actual danger is way too high and hidden. Even if you know exactly the dangers, it takes only one distracted move, just being tired or too complacent to end really badly. Like even some medium time disconnected and expectedly safe units can have real nasty shock in them when discharge resistor is faulty, that failure mode does not usually kill but not recommended.

gilbetron 1y ago

> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. There are two kinds of people, those that think it is clever to split people into just two groups, and everyone else.

nonethewiser 1y ago

The author gives several examples of tinkering. Tweaking mouse sensitivity in FPS, installing a linux distro, experimenting with windows managers, changing mechanical keyboard caps etc. Then he looks at one specific example of tinkering, the IDE, and sorts people as tinkerers based on that. >There are plenty of people who still use the VSCode terminal as their default terminal, do not know what vim bindings are, GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least). I’m not saying these are bad things necessarily, just that this should be the minimum, not the median. Couldn't someone not tinker with an IDE and still tinker with other things? I mean clearly you dont have to tinker with everything that can possibly be tinkered with, right? What is it about the IDE that makes it necessary to tinker with? It seems like this was the main motivation for the article and then it got a bit over-abstracted.

chankstein38 1y ago

I think the problem, for me, is that people turn tinkering on something INTO the hobby. People will spend years tweaking their 3d printer to have the perfect settings and have a bunch of weird plastic things attached that make it look like something from Tron but will never design and print anything useful. Same with so many things, the guy mentioned neovim and it's the same there. I am not here to judge people's hobbies but I think a lot of people have too much taste these days based on discussion on reddit. It's annoying, you can barely find a community that isn't just overly toxic about each aspect of their hobby. Try going to any random hobby subreddit. Browse for a little while and try to not find like "The community favorite" (which is actually just the most expensive, well-marketed option) that everyone swears by and will make others feel like, if they don't have that, they don't have anything.

neogodless 1y ago
This has sometimes been my problem. Most notably, for example, instead of having fun playing video games, I spent time benchmarking my hardware, making charts and graphs comparing the different hardware I owned. (There's a place for that, but I was no Anandtech!) And then I'd buy a new video card, run benchmarks for a week, and then forget to play any games. I also spent a LOT of time making a French cleat wall in my workshop. And building a workbench. And making a mobile table for my miter saw. The tools all saw more use making the workshop than they did building the things. On the other hand... when my spouse said "could you build a bed frame for our mastiff?" I made a beautiful, very functional, perfectly fitted bed frame with a latching gate over the course of a few hours, assembled and in use. I was ready. I had tinkered so much I was pretty good at the final pursuit. (For deeper context for those that care, we would totally let our mastiff sleep in our bed, but she kicks while she dreams. Without the fencing / gate on her personal Twin XL bed, she would just hop in the bed as soon as we fell asleep, and we'd wake up to her sitting on us or kicking us. She happily goes into her personal bed space at night when she's ready to move from sleeping somewhere else to sleeping in her bed for the night.)

lolive 1y ago

Tinkering is a very demanding activity, especially when you are total newbie at a new domain. The first steps are very intellectual-draining. [and that is probably why so few people learn new things, when adults]. Having good mentors [on Youtube, among your friends, or a vendor at a localshop] can really help you figure out things much faster, that will have taken forever to discover by yourself. So don’t fear to ask !

___POTATOES___ 1y ago

This sounds nice, but I'm busy trying to escape the permanent underclass. Perhaps I messed up by not tinkering more earlier in my life.

outlore 1y ago

can one really formulate a consistent philosophy of whether to get the mass market thing that "just works" or the power user thing that the author of this article describes as the path to good taste? (and by "just works" - i mean about 80% of the time) some of these are even represented in the hacker news front page: iphone vs fairphone, tesla vs corolla, macbook vs framework, vscode or helix, sora vs comfyui etc etc