alt Hacker NewsThere's a pattern that I notice a lot on HN.
"To solve this problem, I engineered an entire system from scratch."
Response: "That's a cool solution. But, isn't it a lot more work than this straightforward solution?" (the user is right - the complicated solution is massively more work than the straightforward one)
Response: "Yes, but it's a cool project - it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time." (also right - there's nothing wrong with doing projects with zero utility just for the fun of it, and this one actually does have some use)
It seems like there's a bifurcation of expectations.
Some people want to do a project, and they take a thin justification as an excuse to do so.
Other people really do want to solve a problem, but they get mired in perfectionism and overengineering, or aren't even aware of the simpler solution.
Conflation between these two categories keeps many HN threads gainfully employed.
(worth noting that for people in the latter category, pointing out "there's this simpler solution" can be incredibly helpful, because they simply might not know that it exists, or maybe they need a little bit of pushing to realize that they're overengineering things and that they got stuck in a place that they don't actually want to be in. this has been me, many many times)
Replies
> it's OK to not be the most efficient all the time
is it ? it's a non-negligible reason for the absolutely unsufferable technological world we are currently living in
Forums are made up of many individual people who all have their own perspectives. It is not all black and white, zero sum, good or bad.
You didn't describe, but rather demonstrated, another aspect of the pattern which is that someone inevitably "goes meta" and remarks on the pattern - and usually someone points out that it's "not black and white" and the sub-thread decays into muttering obscurity with no real conclusion or insight. Personally I've come to see this as a niche form of "exuberance of the young" which is itself wasteful in the strictest sense, but is more generously characterized as a side-effect of other, hopefully more important personal maturation effects.