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Comment by honest-teorema | Hacker News Reader

Then why do you refer them as "best practice", can we use "common practice" instead?

In some circles of our buzz-word fuelled world what is considered “best practise” amongst risk-averse management is “what everyone else is already doing”. Anything else is too different: if it is such a good idea not to over-engineer, why is everyone else over-engineering?

With that pattern I always go with: I should be asking you that question.

How does one find the best tools for the job? I want to build something that is performant and maintainable, but I also don't want an over-engineered mess.

Read what others are doing, especially if it seems everyone is doing something similar, but, and this is the vital part, apply critical thinking & specific knowledge of your use case. And keep an eye on new ideas that are less common, and keep in mind old ideas that are out of fashion, and apply said critical thinking to them also (or use them & lessons learned using them in the past to judge against the other/newer ideas). Basically: avoid being part of the cargo cult, except on those occasions where it actually finds the right direction.

Thank you, this is good advice.

There's a Dilbert (rather than an xkcd for that).

When everything is described by a superlative, really, it's just 'average'.

Sites like Trip Advisor or Amazon, or anything with a rating system. The "average" person nearly always puts 4 or 5 stars for average products or establishments.

The actual ratings matter less than the relative percentile. that being said, Amazon ratings (or most other similarly dependent site's) are not a simple straight average.

I heard that on Uber and AirBnB, 4 (out of 5) stars is understood as bad.

When I worked at a large non-American internet company, I know there were some internal discussions on how to deal with different cultural interpretations of numerical ratings (still unresolved AFAIK).

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