Comment by javawizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javawizard | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly.

I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.

Case in point, it still blows my mind that HN runs on a single process on a single server. Surely one of the tech world's most well known news aggregators would have many servers behind it, with advanced autoscaling for when different time zones come online, a database that's sharded by discussion thread, some super advanced caching solution, ...

But no. HN hums along just fine without any of that fancy stuff.

The truly enlightened, in my opinion, know how to look at the world through the eyes of those less experiences than themselves - and to see how much there is to see when one takes off one's expert glasses for a moment.

It’s not about whether or not you can accomplish the same tasks, but how much time and pain you can save. Can I do the many of the same things in freecad or inkscape as solidworks or illustrator? Yea, but it is quite unpleasant.

See I think the bigger problem there is that, having used both myself, FreeCAD and Inkscape both have really sucky UX (the former more than the latter, to be sure).

A better comparison would be Canva. Can I do everything in Canva that I can in Illustrator? Not by a long shot. Is it still good enough for 80% of the things I need to do? Absolutely. Is it a delight to work with despite its comparative simplicity? You bet.

So I agree that time and pain saved is hugely important, but that's an orthogonal axis to how advanced a tool is. The two only really correlate when you're doing things that need that advanced tooling in order to avoid a lot of manual work.

> I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.

And I feel it's a Dunning-Krueger effect that people who don't know more powerful tools can't understand why you might benefit from using them.

I assert that you've lost track of how much you can accomplish programming in Notepad and it would be enlightening to look at the lens of how people accomplish that. Now do you understand why you might want to use more powerful tools?

Or, perhaps in a more concrete sense, not every woodworking shop needs a $150K CNC machine--the $10K ones work great for 99% of the shops. However, the ones that do need that $150K CNC are producing a LOT of product.

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