q-big

> The average HN reader is highly overrated for other reasons.

Possibly ... ;-)

> Don’t show me the random code you built that makes a users like history load 500 milliseconds faster, talk to me about how to make the product better/more engaging/monetized!

Honestly, if I were the CEO, I would ask for the former if I were looking for the good programmers to keep since these are the things that make the technological base of the company run.

The answer is of course likely different if I were looking for the managers to keep ...

First: there is of course an incentive not to admit this.

Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics. On the other hand, the people that the article discuss are good at office politics/marketing themselves and often don't have such a deep knowledge about programming. Thus, I would indeed assume that the typical HN reader/writer less likely fits into the "highly overrated people" pattern of the article.

> I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.

> And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.

Perhaps I am underestimating the necessary effort, but the willingness and capability problem can in my opinion be solved by sufficiently streamlining and documenting the processes of running the test procedure.

If the testing procedure cannot be successfully run by a "somewhat experienced Linux nerd", this should be considered a usability bug of the testing procedure (and thus be fixed).

> Although some kernel driver developers have testing clusters with real hardware (like GPU drivers devs), there is no effin way Linux could be effectively tested without someone paying a lot of money to set up real hardware and people to keep it running.

Just crowdsource this testing: I am sure that there exist some people who own the piece of hardware and are willing to run a test script, say, every

* night

* week

* new testing version of the kernel

(depending on your level of passion for the hardware and/or Linux). I do believe that there do exist a lot of people who would join such a crowdsourcing effort if the necessary infrastructure existed (i.e. it is very easy to run and submit the results).

My experience differs.

Perhaps the reason is that the scientific textbooks that I love to buy are often "long-tail business", i.e. textbooks about very specialized topics.

The situation is even more biased towards Amazon if we are talking about used obscure textbooks in good condition for a fair price.

> Enough people say it wrong it eventually becomes right. There's nothing definitive about language except for usage...

This is a view that is common among English speakers. Among many German native speakers it is instead common to love to analyze words and tell why some word is wrong even if it is actually in common use sometimes for decades.

> Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers.

At least in Germany, using Amazon is often the easiest way to buy copies of foreign-language (often, but not always English) textbooks about scientific topics.

> Should I try to build my own car? Or my own CPU?

Become a hacker and learn how to crack this kind of DRM.

> This happens in other markets just fine, one that springs to mind is oscilloscopes. Often you will find that a the hardware in one model is the same as the hardware in scopes in the same "family", what differs is software / locks set.

There exist quite some makers who solve this "oscilloscope tiering" by installing a hacked or alternative open source firmware on the oscilloscope.

> and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?

You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)

Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.

He is influenced by multiple feedback loops: one that is encouraging this behavior (from the respective website) and one that does discourage it. In this case, the former one was stronger.

> Well, even from that perspective, "society" is giving him some strong feedback that this is not acceptable.

With the same reasoning, you can argue that people in this kind of internet forums gave him a strong feedback that the "society" is wrong here.

> If I search for flights from February 24 to February 24 I don’t expect the empty interval.

The expectation depends on how you define "from" and "to" :-D

Since the HN community is quite mathematically-minded, I'd expect there all four possible kinds of definitions in the inner minds of HN members. :-D

> You have the same predetermined behavior you'd have all along - the care is incidental, would have happened or not happened anyway.

This is correct, but this does not mean that, say, education is useless. It is just predetermined whether we give education or not.

> In a world without free will "care and education" don't matter.

The fact that care and education cause change in the behavior has nothing to do with any "freedom" as in "free will"