Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I like the title. It seems to be clumsily conflating casino gambling with bad software practices. The first is not a good metaphor for the latter, especially since most of those premature abstractions come out of FUD and attempted risk aversion. (We won't be able to scale if we don't use design patterns!)

However, the insights into premature abstraction are good.

Here's a beautiful, and relevant, essay from Steve Yegge: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/08/business-requirement...

View on HN

I strongly, strongly disagree with the idea that you should only build products where you're the end user. There are many interesting problem domains where the end users aren't suited towards building the solution.

My company does Machine Learning for Sales. There aren't a huge number of people who can do both programming and statistics well. Add Sales to that skillset and there are, what, 5 people in the world who can do all 3? The odds of finding a sales person who wants a predictive sales tool and has the capability and interest to write it are vanishingly small.

For a consumer-oriented example look at Coursera or other MOOCs. Andrew Ng is not a Coursera user (i.e. student.) He understands students, and that's enough-MOOCs provides enormous value because they solve an important problem. Students would have had a much harder time creating Coursera than Ng.

I strongly, strongly disagree with the idea that you should only build products where you're the end user.

I as well. Most software sucks because the people building it aren't motivated. Building for oneself is one source of motivation, but it's myopic to assume that it's the only source of motivation that works.

Is this a metaphor?

It seems to me it isn't saying that casinos are like software development, but pointing out human psycology using the casino as an example.

The same reward system is there because the psycology (human) is the same.

TLDR; If I compared the performance of the same car on a road to a dirt track, I'm making a comparison, but not a metaphorical one.

Fair. I think the analogy goes this far: in gambling, there's "beginner's luck", which is actually selection bias in favor of people who have early luck. (Beginners with shitty luck stop playing and therefore don't "begin".) In software, there's the tyranny of past success: the tendency to fight the last war.

DHH admitted on twitter, it was a editing oversight, the title was supposed to be, 'Winning is the WORST thing that can happen in Vegas'

I was talking about the correct title.

He's comparing gambling (e.g. risk-seeking) with software development practices that are more often than not an incompetent expression of risk-aversion.

Also makes poor assumptions about behavioral science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com