HN Reader

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

    > 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.

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.

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.

> ...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).

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game?

Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.

the dabbler's expertise

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 !

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Why was the title of this changed?

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

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

[deleted]