90% of Everything Is Crap | Hacker News Reader

90% of Everything Is Crap

matt-rickard.com

85 points0x00838 comments

"Yet is it far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness." - William L. Watkinson

But you curse the darkness because you have no candle.

The Paretto principle, which the author views as being the same kind of statement, has nothing to do with Sturgeon's statement/law.

The only thing in common is that they both use percentages in their articulation.

From what I gather, what the author is trying to say is that things are not distributed as ones intuition may first lead you to believe. Could be a charitable interpretation but that's how I read it.

The interesting conclusion from this is that if you are a crap-identifier you are not very valuable. i.e. a machine that calls everything crap is going to true-positive 90% of the time. So if you're like "That thing is crap" you are very similar to that machine, and maybe with some handwaving you are in the 90% for identifiers.

The hard part is to be the kind of person who can identify the 10% thing. It's even harder to be the kind of person who can offer the 10% thing.

In this way, mistake identifiers are low grade contributors.

The conclusion is to use an appropriate classifier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity even gives an analogous example:

> Suppose a 'bogus' test kit is designed to always give a positive reading. When used on diseased patients, all patients test positive, giving the test 100% sensitivity. However, sensitivity does not take into account false positives. The bogus test also returns positive on all healthy patients, giving it a false positive rate of 100%, rendering it useless for detecting or "ruling in" the disease.

I still prefer the “everything is crap” machine to the “everything is great” machine.

Corollary: the only thing worse than a naysayer is a fanboy.

Interesting. I find them both of low utility since they provide zero information but I do prefer encountering the fanboy because they are easy to detect: low base rate of good means “always good” will rapidly be erroneous, lowering detection time.

Therefore, to me, fanboys are better. I quickly know I shouldn’t pay attention.

I was thinking in investment terms, if you think everything is great, you’ll be out of money soon.

1) Identifying the 10% is key

2) moving the crap line from 90% to 89% is a 10% increase is the supply of non-crap.

3) if you want more non-crap in your life, you need to increase your cross sectional area with your target universe and regress to the mean.

1/10 being non-crap is pretty good, go with it.

The "90% of everything is crap" dictum can be incredibly empowering. Read any book by successful comedy writers and they will say that 90% of the jokes they write are bad, and they know this will be the case every time they sit down to write. It's much easier to write every day if you embrace this. If you write every day for an hour, and 10% of what comes out is good... it adds up to a ton of good material over a year.

Pointing out crap is how lowbrow critics and socialites gain status, either not being capable or interested in building something themselves.

There is no such thing as building something yourself. When you make something, you use tools, materials and methods made by other people.

The most important part of building something that isn't crap is being able to recognize the crap in what you are considering for use. Then deciding if you can contain the crap, or find a less crappy alternative.

Well you can actually build something yourself. Sure, someone else built e.g. the code editor you‘re using, but if you come up with an algorithm yourself, you did, by definition, build it yourself.

If you create an algorithm, it is likely based on previous algorithms you learned, and millenia of mathametics.

To implement it in a computer, you likely rely on an operating system to run on, layers of userspace libraries, layers of firmware, many independent hardware components. An electrical supply.

I think the point was, simply pointing out flaws is an activity that requires very little effort. A more laudable activity is to provide a better way or work toward making an improvement.

There is such a thing as building by yourself. Otherwise you do end up with 90% crap, and there exist people which are annoyed by that.

Eg build systems without autotools, cmake or even more horrible bloatware (meson, bazel, conan, scons, nix, ...).

That's why e.g people ship header-only libs. That's why suckless exists. XML configs, YAML configs, SOAP, Java, ... oh my.

Is it? I'm looking around my house right now and virtually everything is shoddy craftsmanship from people who were either being underpaid or just didn't give a shit. The cabinetry isn't level with the floor, the doors don't quite fit the door frame, there are paint stains on the outside of the 4th-floor windows, some of my GFCI outlets were installed with the wires connected upside down and my electricity is blowing fuses all the time, LED bulbs that are supposed to last years last weeks instead, my roof had exposed nails that eventually rotted through and created leaks.

Am I just supposed to build everything I own myself from scratch? I have a full-time job. I was also coming off three spine surgeries in the span of 16 months when I moved in and wasn't exactly in shape to build my own house.

It would seem that your home fell within the 90% of homes that are supposedly crap.

"Crap" is largely a function of consumer preference. Even with a Consumer Reports subscription, people will ignore red flags and buy a car that's fun or cheap.

A good craftsman should be able to tell you how well a house is constructed before purchase. Not that I'm saying that would have been easy to fit into your schedule.

Not necessarily, when everything is standardized and mass market it become nearly impossible to find options that don’t follow the “norms”. New housing developers have little incentive to do anything beyond look like their competitors, which as also bland and standard and not designed for actual living. People don’t have any other options due to the housing shortages.

Maybe you’d appreciate the global supply chain that’s been built out so workers can manufacture goods for a tenth of the price it would be domestically, so other people halfway around the world can complain about shoddy craftsmanship.

You have the option to purchase beautifully created hand crafted doors but then you’d probably complain about the prices being unreasonable. That’s always been the trade off hasn’t it.

Dude. My next door neighbor had his furnace installed upside down. The only reason the builder was able to sell that place at all is because the code inspector was 84 and, as far as we can tell, wasn't willing to walk up four flights of stairs to get to the furnace. Thankfully, the city agreed to pay to get it fixed. I had a nail through my plex piping behind a third-floor washer/dryer hookup. When it rusted out 8 months after moving in and my house flooded, the plumber he'd been seeing this all over the place. As far as the roofer who fixed my roof could tell, the contractor just stopped work before getting to the edges of the roof, failing to cover the edging nails.

This isn't a matter of commodity parts. As far as we can tell, the builder (who has been late on upwards of 80% of HOA payments, by the way) is simply a grifter who pissed off all the contractors working for him to the point they either did shit work on purpose, or just refused to finish and he brought in some random unqualified handyman to get as much as he could past overworked, too old, don't give a shit city inspectors.

And yeah, each individual homeowner could be smarter and know what to look for to find these signs when buying a house. Yet very few of us do. I don't have that kind of expertise on everything I might ever have to purchase, and again, was taking 30 mg of oxycodone a day for two years while still trying to work.

I'd be glad to believe this is some isolated incident, except ever since moving here, every contractor I've ever had out to fix anything has told me they keeping seeing this kind of fly-by-night, has no clue what they're doing builder popping up and hiring lowest bid subs and then running out of money to actually pay them, constantly seeing work stop and people walking off the job, to the point that the only people willing to do urban work are largely unqualified, low grade tradesmen. It's endemic to the industry right now, seemingly a result of so much free money floating out there that anyone with a hundred grand in capital and no experience doing anything remotely related is now qualified to buy a bunch of land and become a homebuilder.

I wouldn't complain at all that a well built home is unreasonably priced. The problem is, whether I'm willing or not, I don't have the means to buy a two million dollar home.

It worked for Ongo Gablogian!

Keeping that 90% figure in mind in everyday life helps you avoid being distracted by that 90%.

They tell I only use 10% of my brain, must be only the good part I'm using. ;)

90% of the comments on HN are crap. I especially read the rest of the 10% usually in gray for being different than the rest. Of course, not counting the spam/rude comments.

Re-write your code. Re-do your projects. Start from scratch. Let a new team try on their own. Software has such tremendous leverage, it’s way more valuable to do one thing twice than to do two things once.

> Re-write your code. Re-do your projects. Start from scratch. Let a new team try on their own. Software has such tremendous leverage, it’s way more valuable to do one thing twice than to do two things once.

Well I guess creating a gajillion prototypes is actually worth something -- learning what works and what doesn't allowing you to create a proper base for what actually sees the light of day.

“Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction critic”

And an author as well. From his Wikipedia bio: “He wrote approximately 400 reviews and more than 120 short stories, 11 novels and several Star Trek scripts.”

And not only just an author. IMHO the very best SciFi author all time, and polled as the 2nd best of the golden age (pre-Lem/Strugatsky's/Dick and the modern 99.9% crap). He also wrote the preface to the Strugatsky's famous "Roadside Picnic" (known as Stalker).

Hence his 90% crap rule comes from a different mouth than just from a critic.

Which is why content aggregators are so valuable

Content aggregators are insufficient though. The problem we have is not one of curation which is what HN or Reddit does. The actual problem is the lack of strcture and searchability/discovery. Even on HN once something fades off of the front page, it is lost forever.

I haven't found an agg that fits the bill, but this is a problem of agency.

If I don't have the tools to curate the swaths of metadata, then results will only ever be mostly correct.

If you Immediately know the candle light is fire, then the meal was cooked along time ago.

And yet honesty is the best policy.

How to not be crap: filter out 90% of yourself.

Focus on the 10%. What an insight!

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