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antonvsyesterday at 11:34 PM3 repliesview on HN

Ageism is definitely part of it, but most people just don't seem to care to learn in general, and of course the incentives are against it.

They'd rather treat the general version of Greenspun's 10th rule as a commandment, and create a new, ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of some fraction of whatever already addresses the requirement, than learn about how to use some existing tool that they don't already know.

One of my favorite examples is a company that home-rolled their own version of (a subset of) Kubernetes, ending up with a fabulously fragile monstrosity that none of the devs want to touch any more, and those who do quickly regret it.


Replies

8notetoday at 6:53 PM

i think there's two parts

1. there's too much to learn and know, and the cs courseware and interviews are all about algorithmic complexity, rather than business setup and operations. same with "how do you raise money" vs "how do you make a great customer experience"

2. the market rewards building the new functionality, not building all the standard chunks required to run a business

if anthropic had great customer support built out, but no model and no claude-code, theyd be much worse than they are now having stuff people want but lacking the ability to serve it

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clearly theres still plenty of b2b startup opportunities standardizing how all these things work, so that business can focus on their actual business rather than recreating all the basics

orbisvicistoday at 3:31 AM

I had to implement a subset of postfix because security wouldn't greenlight any MTAs (or third-party software for that matter)...