Comment by dap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dap | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I found this article confusing because the introduction -- the title, the SunOS history, the Longfellow quote, and Morton's quote -- all suggest a self-righteous position around technical integrity and engineering choices. (Such a position would be poorly-founded anyway, since economics are a crucial part of engineering, even engineering that starts from a principle of technical integrity above all else. Besides that, various sources peg the percentage of Linux kernel contributions coming from commercial entities upwards of 75% -- which is a great thing, but can hardly be said to be free of commercial influence.)

The meat outlines some good points about modern advertising, but I don't get what it has to do with Linux. (Which "Linux" is this? The system? The community? Something else?)

It's also wrong to say that software systems don't lie: that's what virtual memory is, for example. Obviously educated people know the truth, but there's a real sense in which the system is presenting one thing as though it's really another, when the system is actually just going through great pains to make things look that way. This is often a good thing in software, unless the system gets caught in the lie (e.g., when it has to page things out or deploy the OOM killer), at which point real people are often surprised at what was going on all along.

Yeah, the organization's a mess, but there are some gems in there, like:

> Trader Joe's [in avoiding loyalty programs, coupons, and retailer trade fairs] spares itself the cognitive overhead required to rationalize complicating the living shit out of everything

Should have maybe been broken into a series of two paragraph articles.

This was a really bad example. Trader Joe's repackages (almost) everything under their own brand so you can't recognize and buy the product elsewhere. So technically it's (almost) all BS.

You've got this backwards. TJ sells name brand products at a discount that can be fairly steep. The product manufacturers are incentivized to camouflage this (via the TJ label) so as not to cannibalize their higher margin brand name sales.

This is what Trade Joe's says, but our experience is that the bill is higher at TJ's than at, say, Walmart or Safeway, for the same shopping list.

Sorry, I'm not following, why is that BS? It sounds like you're saying it's BS since other stores are not Trader Joe's.

It's BS because you can't compare prices even though you're basically buying the same product.

Maybe you can't compare the exact same product, but you can certainly compare the type of product.

> This was a really bad example.

Yeah, fair point, I don't cut coupons or sign up for every loyalty program, but I've still always been sort of underwhelmed at TJs.

Maybe Aldi would have been a better example.

Spot on. I couldn't finish it to be honest. The author could have broken this article into at least two different essays to flesh out his ideas more. There was just so much going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com