Comment by fredsanford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredsanford | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe because a lot of choice has been removed from the system? I've worked with a bunch of people from different countries and find that the more strict the gov't, the less they like choice, in general. All anecdotal of course...

Giving one guy from the Ukraine the typical choices at a restaurant here in the US would freeze him in place.

    What would you like to drink?  Tea

    Sweetened or Unsweetened?  Sweet. frustration += 1

    Sugar or artificial sweetener.  Sugar.  frustration += 2

    Soup or Salad?  Soup.  frustration += 7

    Which soup?  Minestrone, Pasta Fagioli, Italian Wedding?  frustration += 14

and on and on... Ukraine started packing his lunch.

Then there was the guy from Iceland... He took 10+ minutes to decide what to order in a new place and once he figured out what he liked in a particular place, he never gave the waitstaff a chance to offer him a choice. This, well done, salad with x dressing, with unsweetened tea. Iceland liked making the choices but only a few times.

Some people like to be dictated to: Code will be formatted like this. Braces will be like this. etc. The author of the article thinks these are a feature while I find it obnoxious.

My brain requires braces to line up in the left column, anything else slows me down. Maybe I'm just old?

Off-topic on the subject of restaurants:

I use the ML approach of combining other people's algorithms. :)

My first time in a new place, I'm usually with friends, and I imitate their orders. On the rare times when I'm not, I ask the waiter what the favorite plates of he/the other people in the restaurant are, what they order when they eat there.

This way even my initial orders are lightning-fast and already judged as 'tasty' in comparison to other offerings. And over time, I can investigate other plates for myself.

It does not make sense to group peoples reaction to choice like this. As a counter example Apple products are very popular in the USA and other Western Countries, and Apple does not give you many choices.

I used a lot of weasel words in my comment to avoid follow up comments like this.

Maybe, anecdotal etc...

It was simply something I noticed from lots of years working with lots of people from lots of different countries. No offense was intended.

    > My brain requires braces to line up in the left column, 
    > anything else slows me down. Maybe I'm just old?

One amazing property of humans is our ability to re-shape ourselves in new environments; to literally learn new tricks. The handicap you identify here is only serving to diminish your potential.

I'm not sure it's a handicap...

I've been paid for work in roughly 12 different programming languages over a 28+ year career, among them python (no braces at all, significant white-space), Rexx (keywords as braces), C, C++, Perl, Pascal, Bourne shell, Awk, C#, (braces braces and more braces), x86 assembler and several employer specific scripting tools.

Guess which ones are most comfortable? Certainly not python though it is the most bang for the buck of the languages I use and I'd rather eat hospital food for the rest of my life than write (or, deity forbid read) one more line of x86 assembler.

What was it we were talking about again?

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