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No, it's a designer with an interest in all design. I know Dustin sometimes alienates people, but it makes me sad to see such a mean comment in reply to a thou

• viviantan 14y ago
  > No, it's a designer with an interest in all design. Thank you. I've been trying to make the same point, but with far too many words!
• bambax 14y ago
  > Illegitimi non carborundum ... is a mock-Latin aphorism meaning "Don't let the bastards grind you down", and the first line of an unofficial school song Ten Thousand Men of Harvard, the most frequently played Fight song of the Harvard Marching Band (where presumably PG picked it up). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum
• Void_ 14y ago
  I don't understand what value do you see in Dustin's article. It doesn't deserve to be on the front-page.
  • joshuamerrill 14y ago
    If the Hacker News algorithm is surfacing the wrong items, or being gamed, then that's a question of relevancy. It "deserves" to be on page one because it received a substantial number of upvotes.
• BrandonM 14y ago
  I keep assuming that at some point you'll just shut it down, that your disappointment with it will reach the point that it doesn't really seem worth it anymore. The sad thing is that I (and perhaps a lot of the oldest members) just won't be that disappointed. It's not really Startup News anymore, and there's clearly no going back.
• Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
  > I know Dustin sometimes alienates people, but it makes me sad to see such a mean comment in reply to a thoughtful essay I agree that the comment has a mean tone, but i think the gist of it is quite thoughtful. > In fact I'll coin a term for it: strawmean (strawman + mean) because you've had to invent a position he didn't take in order to attack it. Maybe i'm missing something, but it seems to me that he didn't invent any position. Dustin Curtis is quite literally advocating that you use a lot of your time to choose the best possible objects to use in your daily life. OP is reacting to that, and the philosophical posture underneath (spend more time on people than you spend on objects) is quite an interesting one in my opinion, even if it probably didn't need to be phrased that way. Ideally, both postures would go hand in hand, and balance each other. > What makes me even sadder is the huge mob who upvoted this comment. Because that is the decline of HN embodied right there. I think you are reacting to the tone of the comment more than to it's content. But i also think you are being overdramatic here. OP is not attacking Dustin directly. He is attacking the idea developed in his post. At least that's how i understood it.
  • joshuamerrill 14y ago
    > Maybe i'm missing something... The original comment said that "What is ultimately important in life are people..." Dustin Curtis never said that people weren't important, just that choosing the best objects is. That's the straw man.
    • Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
      > Dustin Curtis never said that people weren't important Of course he didn't, and i think even original commenter wouldn't think he would. The way i understood it, OP position is that even spending that much time on objects is taking too much away. I don't even agree with this position. I think the things we build are as interresting as ourselves, and an extension of our minds in some way. But it made me think for a second, it did put the post in another perspective. So even if it was indeed mean-phrased, it was a worthy comment for me.
  • davej 14y ago
    I am utterly dumbfounded by some of the comments here. I feel like people have completely misunderstood his philosophy. To me, Dustin is advocating a very practical position of minimalism. It's about starting from scratch and thinking carefully about everything you own. There is a huge upfront investment involved but you will get that time back (and much more) because you trust your tools. They won't let you down, They won't break, They will work exactly as intended and you will understand why they work in that way. This frees you up to spend more time on the things that are important to you. I spent a few months travelling this year and I spent an awful lot of time thinking about what I wanted to bring with me. I bought almost everything from scratch and each item that went into the backpack was meticulously researched. I ended up with only 7.5kg (including backpack) of stuff but I had everything I needed and everything I needed was important. I was suddenly less anxious about setting off on my adventure. When others found that their backpacks were coming apart at the seams, mine was as strong as the day I bought it. When spending a month motorbiking through Vietnam, it took my friends 15 minutes to strap their 20KG+ of luggage to the bike every morning, it took me one minute. I always had the perfect clothing for whatever activity in whatever weather (despite the fact that I had about a third as much clothes as everybody else). While others were wondering around rural areas looking for a launderette, I had everything I needed to wash my own clothes (The liquid I used for washing clothes could also be used to wash my hair and shave, and I only needed a few ml of it). I got better sleep in dodgy areas because my fellow travellers were sleeping with one eye open while my bag was securely locked and tethered to something grounded. I could go on. The bottom line is that I spent less time worrying and more time enjoying the moments and being with the people I was lucky enough to spent those moments with.
• deleted 14y ago
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  • joshuamerrill 14y ago
    > People like me are annoyed at the celebrity culture in the Valley, and Dustin is a manifestation of it Take a look at http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html. Your argument is at DH1. :)
    • joshuaxls 14y ago
      Yeah, you're probably right. I'm removing my comment, though I stand by my point.
    • deleted 14y ago
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• esolyt 14y ago
  I think upvoting this comment was a reaction from people who were upset to see this blog post so high on the front page. Not necessarily because they taught this comment added value to the discussion, but because they strongly disliked the article.
• ynniv 14y ago
  To think that there is one absolute best, and that it is the only version of something worth having is, to put it nicely, inaccurate. Curtis did not explicitly say that every other flatware was inferior, or that people who purchased them were inferior, but there is an implicit superiority in his post that does not sit well with the community. It could be that readers feel offended that their choices are cast in a poor light, but there is also the deeper issue that Curtis is wrong. While there exists poorly designed or constructed things in this world, there is a diversity of application that leads to a variety of well designed things. Point me out the best car, the best socks, or the best apple, and I will tell you how it is not. A tale of how one should spend a year finding the "best" knife is absurd, unless one wants to be a knife historian and write a history on the field. The best knife in the wrong context is worse than the worst knife in the right context. Obviously the flatware is a parable, but spending all your time evaluating "the best" is poor advice. Life is messy: JFDI
• larrys 14y ago
  Ironic, that given the attention to detail he put into ordinary items for what was a 3 month journey, that he picked a non-standard and problematic spelling for his startup "Svbtle". Sure to cause problems in a few areas that could have easily been avoided with some research and attention to the details of properly naming your company.
• metaphorical 14y ago
  I fail to see why mapgrep's position is a strawman. Is it not valid to question the opportunity cost of a lifestyle, in which one is obsessed more about objects than about lives? His tone may be slightly mean, but that doesn't invalidate his argument. Dustin's article is more about lifestyle (his lifestyle), not so much about design. If it's about design, then I would think his analysis of flatware is fairly shallow. Or is it about how elite designer's lifestyle should be? If so, then I think you're right to say it alienates people.
• nadam 14y ago
  I agree that the comment was too mean. But in fact dcurtis was a bit arrogant too: "Reasonable people would probably not spend the time to read a book about the history of flatware, buy twenty sets, and test the feeling of each metal utensil against their teeth. That sounds completely insane. But who cares about reasonable people?" If he would say 'reasonable programmers don't buy books on set theory', then I would just say it's ok, he has an interesting obsession (set theory). If he would add "But who cares about reasonable people?" I would say it is getting a bit arrogant, but still ok, because he just values interesting hobbies... But in dcurtis's case 'reasonable people' are people who have absoultely no money to buy twenty sets of designer flatware, because they literally would not be able to feed their children. In my country even the (lower?)-middle class have problem with buying very healthy food or buying new (non-second hand) clothes for their children. Designer flatware? (Designer anything?) 20 sets? Not even one set, not 20. From this prespective the article boils down to: I am a rich single young guy, I have lots of free time, I think I am a wise man, I teach you on things in life: trust me it feels good. The more upvotes it gets, the more arrogant is seems... Of course a mean counter comment will be upvoted, and of course you call those people 'mob', wich is just oil on the fire.
• deleted 14y ago
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• jasim 14y ago
  I find the OP's argument to be a simple one: "It is not worth it" and I agree. It makes sense to buy things that doesn't break down when you are going on a long trip. But the amount of effort Dustin seems to have put in to select them, and advocating others to, doesn't seem to be worth the benefit. Take flatware for example - I think that level of attention to detail for something like that is not called for. How much can you scale it? Minimalist or not, we buy a lot of things in life - how much time can we spend for each and every one of them? The entire post seems to paint the idea that you have to be a connoisseur of everything in life. It is fine if you are an audiophile and spend a lot of time to find the best earphones out there. People have a couple of things in life they care deeply about. But I wouldn't extend that to everything in life as Dustin advocates. Not everybody has the time or means to do that. And even if there is, the cost IMO is just not worth it.
• wamatt 14y ago
  The GP's post doesn't feel mean to me personally, it just seems overly subjective and I struggle to find any new conceptual information. However, what is interesting (not a value judgement), is that a visceral and emotional laden post, is voted to the top of HN. I think that says something about the collective emotional state of the current readership. My interest however, is in concepts. One of the most fundamental ones, when providing social commentary, is that people are different, but usually not unique, along a preference axis. The data therefore is clumpy. People fall into clusters of preference, driven by genetic and environmental predispositions. So what is the point of arguing about which clump is better than another? I will keep beating this drum until, people realize the significance, to the point at which it becomes standard in social science studies and general discourse about society. To some, (eg the GP), Dustin's level of optimization meaningless. That's perfectly fine. Furthermore for the GP (and many others), their ultimate meaning is derived from their relationships with other people. That's also ok. Mine doesn't, and there are many others in my cluster too. (albeit smaller numbers). Neither is better. I started a path of minimalist and aesthetic obsessiveness as Dustin describes, since my earliest childhood memories. I was way more extreme in this regard than anyone I knew. I was a very weird kid, and my friends ridiculed my need for the best and my ridiculous research binges (weeks or even months at a time), to satisfy these goals. Even so, I still believe it played a part in making me successful. While those traits still lurk within, I've come to realize over the years through self analysis and introspection, that trying to maximize all things, (especially physical objects), at some point is irrational. Why? Because it becomes more about the pleasure of maximization, than about seeking a bigger goal, if one looks deeply and honestly within. Maximizing for the sake of maximizing. It's very easy to post-rationalize and fall into that trap, if you are type of person with a natural predisposition. So it doesn't matter which way you are approaching the subjective truth about a cluster of preference that works for you. Dustin is growing to appreciate it more, I'm growing to appreciate it less. Others will never appreciate it at all, since they don't find it useful or it's not matched to the way they operate. Others might have different cognitive skills altogether. For example, my best friend can multitask and add large numbers, I can't do either but am good at reading body language and my own internal states. We are both of similar IQ, but have very different intelligences. In case you suspect I'm advocating anyone position is more enlightened, I'm not. I think that's a magic word, and don't want any part of it. For a being that is capable of decision making, there are strategies and outcomes. The most rational goal of any sentience (biological or not), is maximizing the utility function defined by self preservation. Fortunately, it gives me pleasure to think about existence in these terms, and to act in accordance to this self-derived framework for about most of my day (about 2/3's by estimation). I don't advocate it for anyone else, or actually believe I could possibly know what anyone else should do. I suspect this will not resonate with many, simply because my own cluster of preferences, and the combination presented here, may not be representative. That's fine too, I'm like the GP, just being myself.
• brudgers 14y ago
  Bastards? Not the best kettle. Not the best pot.
• Myrmornis 14y ago
  I think you're wrong to criticize HN users for their negative reaction to this post and to associate their criticism with a decline in HN culture. The post will naturally be unattractive to many reasonable and pleasant people who would be good HN citizens. For one thing there's a political dimension here and you have effectively thrown your weight into the right-leaning region of the political space: people on the liberal/left side are much less likely to appreciate the post. The post is about a rich foreigner who goes travelling in a poor part of the world and cares deeply about the high quality (and therefore mostly expensive[1]) items he has brought with him. It completely fails to mention the people who live in those places. Why should we be interested in how a tourist's belongings are kept safe due to his high quality backpack, when the overwhelming majority of safety-of-belongings questions in that part of the world involve people who don't have access to his expensive first world backpack? Or even if we are interested in the rucksack quality from a technical point of view, surely we realize that it's insensitive to bluster about the quality of your possessions when travelling in poorer countries? Finally, we learn that he cares so deeply about the quality of his items, that when he returns to his super-expensive first-world abode, he develops it into a faux philosophy of life, patting himself on the back for its minimalism and the effort expended in researching quality. It really is consistent with the worst caricatures of rich first-world tourists in poorer parts of the world, and with the worst caricatures of materialism over humanism. And that view doesn't make me a bad HN citizen. [1] Yes, quality correlates with cost here. We're talking silverware, not software.
• Magenta 14y ago
  Poor Dustin - he has such a hard life. Don't let the bastards get you down... ... about your taste in cutlery.