I feel like this comment must me a satire of HN?
Reminds me of one of my coworkers. Extremely intelligent software dev. Take him to an art museum and nothing will interest him. Put some music on that's not in his genre and he'll always put on his headphones instead of trying to listen to something new. But start talking about one of his interests, and he'll carry the conversation forever. He just has a hard time understanding why other humans do what they do and like what they like, because he doesn't.
It’s the same thing as that original response to Dropbox.
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
It's not about the artistry and never intended to be, it's about the end result (functionality wise) and whether you can get it for less effort. (In fact, I've less several other comments lauding the artistry aspect, e.g. notice my comment posted an hour before yours above:
"Sure. I prefer the uniqueness, and quirkiness myself. It's something different than the usual industrial approach. But I'm just responding to people who saying it couldn't be done in another way (have they ever been involved with sign making? of course it could) or that it wont save time to have it done another way, or that it would cost more...")
Insight is also about calibrating ones response to the audience.
This is how thousands of small businesses and organizations the world over produce signs. What seems bizarre to you?
The Dropbox comment was about a startup making cross platform desktop/mobile sync easy, and a facile dismissal about being able to hack something similar together with FOSS tools which missed both the complexity of the domain and the main point which was convenience for the average Joe.
This is about a guy making subway signs for route changes and other such situations with duct tape working for half a day or more to produce one, and a suggestion that the same job could be more easily have been done much faster (and at a similar cost) with some desktop software (even Word would do it) and a plotter or a simpler laser printer.
The second suggestion is not just not outlandish, but also how such signs are done in tons of businesses and organizations all around the world.
Dropbox case: Complex domain, difficult to simplify, main selling point being "works out of the box" -> Suggestion of a nerdy, ad-hoc process, that needs elaborate setup maintenance
This case: Trivial domain, done in a labor intensive personal manner with lots of needless manual labor -> Suggestion of a much simpler, most common way businesses/orgs do it
You could argue that doing it with printing misses the quirkiness, personal touch, uniqueness of the process, and I totally agree.
But not that this process can't be automated and replaced with a simple PC+printing for less manual labor and low cost.
I've done it for a couple organizations I've worked at, and it's trivial. You can print black and white A0 and larger signs for a dollar (and color for $10 depending on size, up to A0 which is 33.1 x 46.8 in).
In fact the whole point of the article about this Tokyo subway guy, is that it's a unique case because this (duct tape and hours of manual labour) is NOT the way such things are usually done.
But mentioning that such action exists in an article about craftsmanship comes out as discrediting their work. No matter how one says it.
He's using the wrong tools to poorly do a menial job slowly. If you can't see that, I don't know what's wrong with you
Maybe next week there'll be an article about a dedicated salaryman who masterfully scrubs trains with a toothbrush
Saying "but you can print signs for $50" is so wilfully blind to what makes this story charming that it seems like a parody of the literalness and complete lack of romance that one sometimes sees in HN comments.