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Comment by lukashrb | Hacker News Reader

>The best developers I've known wrote code with tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays.

I'm sorry to say this but that is not a real argument.

It's not meant as an argument, but as an illustration: people who I respect more than the author of TFA, and whose skill and accomplishments I've witnessed first hand, weren't eager to upgrade from tiny screens. It's not that they would've refused a better screen if given one, it's just that they didn't ask for it and it wasn't a pressing issue. Indeed, for them it was not "time to upgrade the monitor".

It taught me the valuable lesson that creating software, to them, was mostly about thinking, not about the gadgets you use to write it down.

Like another commenter said, it seems gadgets work as proxies for talent for some developers -- "you should use a mechanical keyboard and a 5K three-monitor setup, like real hackers do" -- because actual talent is harder to gain and demonstrate. A sort of cargo culting by accumulating tech gadgets.

Why are you talking about screen size when the article is talking about pixel density? You can have a lot of pixels but low pixel density because your screen is huge, while my first 200+ PPI display was on an iPhone 4, my watch has a 200+ PPI display as well. I don't think many would accept phones or watches with lower pixel densities these days, but somehow the display we use for work is different?

You are right that there is a cargo culting going on, but it is going on both sides. There are a lot of strawmen out there as well.

I'm talking about tiny screens and resolutions, so it's both. I don't see the strawmen.

Phones and watches are a different use case, so I'm not sure what you mean. I don't type code in either.

You are still conflating display size with pixel density, so I’m not sure what you are arguing against. You talked about in other post about how you had to scale your displays because your OS didn’t support resolution independence, is that what you mean by tiny?

I'm really baffled by your comment. I never said that about scaling or my OS not supporting resolution independence. I think you're confusing me with someone else, which might explain the disconnect between your posts and mine. (It's understandable because my initial post seems to have gathered a ton of responses, so it's easy to get confused about who said what. Probably my most successful (?) comment in all my years here.)

> I’m not sure what you are arguing against

Indeed.

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