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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

But RGB is simple code. I have run a site for years that converts photos into craft designs, and calculates with RGB. It might not be the best solution, and there are concerns with the color matching....but it is good enough to have now produced over 580K designs, gotten positive feedback, and has resulted in small side income for years. (And I recently sold the site.)

Sometimes "good enough" works.

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XYZ (or Yuv) is also simple, since it is a single 3x3 matrix conversion away from RGB and it is relevant to huuman perception rather than display capability. In some cases people may not notice, but it others RGB-NN is clearly not the best... so why not try a bit harder, when it's a few lines of code and opcodes.

You’re right to say that “good enough works”, but IMO wrong to use this as a criticism of the parent posts which did a good job of explaining why it’s best practice to avoid RGB in this context of image processing (vs YUV for example, which is incredibly easy to implement in a few dozen lines of code). Context is important, and we are discussing a situation in which RGB is demonstrably insufficient.

Even beyond that though, there is something to be said for seeking to approach perfection. Nobody is requiring or expecting perfection, but when someone offers an easy way to get closer to it, it will rub many the wrong way when someone rebukes the helpful suggestion with the excuse of “good enough is fine, so stop providing helpful product improvement advise!” This is how you achieve mediocrity.

Not sometimes! "Good enough" is ALWAYS... good enough! :)

That may be good enough for you, but it's not good enough for me.

If I can make enough money from people who pay me because it's good enough for them, that's good enough for me.

You've perfectly described the market force that drives quality away from every product.

Which shows that you have to lay bare what your values are before arguing about how to optimize them.

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