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Comment by ysavir | Hacker News Reader

> It’s like walking into a restaurant and finding out that they have all your favorite dishes and every one of them is free and complaining about how long it’s going to take you to read over the menu and make up your mind about it.

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. For me, it's more like walking into used car lot. Most of the cars have lost (or voided) their warranties. Some are certified pre-owned. That one in the corner looks nice, but I don't know how to drive stick, and am not really interested in learning. At least it's not a custom gear box, like this other one.

I can look at the new car lot across the street, but I'm not sure I want to be the first to use one of those self-driving electric smart cars. It's neat, but I'd rather stick to proven standards, and gas stations are more common than charge stations, anyway.

And I could probably get to where I'm going with just a bicycle.

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Also, the problem with big chain restaurants with a thousand things on the menu is not reading the menu, it's that none of it is very good. Much rather eat at a small restaurant with 5 things on the menu that are all excellent.

And the other problem is there are 23 kinds of bespoke artisanal ravioli and maybe it was handmade by a Michelin chef or maybe it's from a bootcamp graduate that spent two weeks learning how to blog, star things on pinterest, and require('can-of-chef-boyardee')

You gave me false hope.

   npm ERR! 404 Registry returned 404 for GET on 
   https://registry.npmjs.org/can-of-chef-boyardee

I don't think comparing an over abundance of JavaScript libraries with a big chain restaurant.

It would be more like going to a huge open air market with hundreds of stalls each serving a few dishes. The dishes range from amazing to simply mediocre. You have simple three ingredient dishes to dishes that require weeks of preparation. Some are served modestly while other are delivered on a spinning plate by a server on roller skates singing the latest pop songs.

The downside is that most of the stalls are serving dishes that depend on dishes from other stalls. So when the maker of 'left-pad-thai' tears down his stall without warning, everybody at the market starves for a while.

no; everybody at the market gets food poisoning.

Yeah, except those five things have disgusting (to me at least) ingredients like seafood, mushrooms, kale, nuts, etc. so I go home hungry.

For me, anything based on JavaScript is a struggle plate...

That's because it's unflavored tofu.

And also a real effect in restaurants. Think it was like a study in supermarkets they used as an example where people were much more likely to buy a product from a free sample if there weren't too many different options to choose from.[0]

[0]i forget some business class i think

You're thinking of the 2000 supermarket study by Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar[1]. But it turns out that most attempts to replicate the result failed (but some succeed)[2], so there seem to be circumstances where too much choice is paralyzing, but they haven't been identified yet.

[1] http://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar...

[2] http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2012/0719/Th...

ty, that'll teach me to pay attention in school to their 'facts'

Note that there is no reason to think that the first study was flawed (as I mentioned, some careful reproduction attempts do succeed in producing similar results), only that there seems to be an unidentified additional factor that controls whether too many choices results in lower sales.

The mystery factor could be something as simple as whether shoppers routinely bought jams and jellies, or if the purchase of a product in the category would have been unusual for them.

Ya was actually trying to think some of it through. Maybe the 6 jams they narrowed it down to were the most popular so increased likelihood of noticing one they liked? Or does so many choices always cause angst, but if you were planning to buy anyway it won't stop you? Have actually done past work optimizing lineups of consumer goods products, and guys i worked with used to joke that it was a cycle where the product lineup would creep up over a few years, then every so often someone would come in and simplify the lineup down to 3 options, then would start creeping back up again.

Unfortunately, all cars come with a 10.000 page driver's manual since all levers, gadgets and gauges are completely different, and if you look carefully, they probably have spent a lot of time reinventing the wheels for no obvious reason.

Your car came with a manual?

I thought we were supposed to help write the manual by contributing copy edits to the sales flyer...

To addon, many developers are simple a drivers, not a repairman who may not know how to fixed bugs once things broken.

The restaurant comparison actually makes total sense. Whether you use web technology or whether you go out for food, it doesn't matter what you get, the end result is going to be shit.

If Javascript is the native implementation, Svelte - The magical disappearing UI framework (https://svelte.technology) bring back all the familiar native Javascript generating at build time, not runtime.

It give you a clear idea how it works like RISC V hardware being open source and allow you to see what going on down to the logic level.

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