If you don't tinker, you don't have taste
45 comments
·October 28, 2025SoftTalker
dineol
^^^ this, with life coming more to the ending part you start to value your time that you got left
tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25
Loughla
And from an accessibility standpoint, default fonts and colors are very safe as well. They tend to be easier to see and process.
aaronbrethorst
Or in this case, tinkering with fonts simply reduces legibility.
saxelsen
I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it:
"Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things.
When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities.
The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.
cedws
I would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences.
A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song."
A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they like and dislike particular music.
One is a boneheaded consumer, one is a fanatic.
Similarly with wine, you can't claim you've got taste when you've been drinking only red your whole life.
kayodelycaon
There are two definitions of taste:
1. How good or bad something is relative to some standard.
2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
andy99
I understood “taste” here to mean opinions. It’s not “good taste” it’s just “some taste”. IMO there are many ways to express taste that are not tinkering, such as preferentially selecting things and my personal favourite, complaining :) Nevertheless I think he means opinions rather than some universally good taste.
kingkongjaffa
I'd like to refine this a bit because I agree, but in a slightly different way.
> I understood “taste” here to mean opinions.
Good taste is the ability to have nuanced and specific opinions.
This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 said it well:
> 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners.
In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past.
In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.
chrisweekly
Haha, "complaining" reminded me of someth that made me laugh a few years back, along the lines of:
Things I HATE:
1. complaints
2. lists
3. strong opinions
4. hypocrisybrailsafe
Agreed, although I'd characterize it as more closely related to curiosity. Some people can select particular items that make themselves look good or are high-quality for example, but are surprisingly some of the least curious people, whereas I don't think the same can be said of tinkerers. People lacking this type of curiosity get frustrated easily if you want to discuss ideas or hypotheticals, nebulous intangible problem solving etc..; they want the right answer and an authority to point to. People with this type of curiosity want to discover why it might or might not be true regardless of whether it's a solved problem for others. The former type of person wants to look up what the viewpoints are like before they agree to go on a hike, getting frustrated when they're not there yet, and the latter just wants to hike and see what it's all about, enjoying the process.
Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss.
Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation.
andy99
I’d like to tinker with that font, it burns my eyes to try and read the words styled like that, maybe that’s the intent?
Imustaskforhelp
Not gonna lie, but I liked the vibe, maybe that's what author meant by different tastes :p
jLaForest
I imagine the intent is to simulate the look of an old CRT monitor
jasonthorsness
the entire page has horizontal lines washed over it
zzzeek
i am fascinated with that effect and turned off every CSS rule on the page I could find but did not identify how you make that effect
evnp
I love it too. Appears to be accomplished with this CSS, which you can tinker with by finding the :after element at the bottom of the <body> tag in browser devtools:
body::after {
content: "";
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px);
background-size: 2px 2px;
background-repeat: repeat;
pointer-events: none;
z-index: 9999;
}qiqitori
body::after {
content: "";
position: fixed;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background-image: linear-gradient(rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 1px, transparent 1px);
background-size: 2px 2px;
background-repeat: repeat;
...Herring
If you're going to make changes, make big changes. Learn to squat 100kg. Finish a triathlon. Learn intermediate Chinese. These are all impactful goals you can hit in a year, worth way more than colors and fonts.
tspooner
It’s rare that I read an article on HN and wish it went on for another thousand lines.
CuriouslyC
The irony of an article about taste displaying little of it.
30minAdayHN
The fact that the author went out his way and styled it very uniquely displays that he does have taste :) It is just that your taste is different. Like another commenter pointed out, I liked the style (though I hated the pixelated font to begin with)
scuff3d
Funny part is he points out at the end that it's highly subjective...
I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.
adamddev1
I just came here to say I think the blog design had a really cool look, it brought me back to my early days plugging away on old Apple IIes and IBMs.
null
killerstorm
I don't think "taste" in UI-adjacent things is important.
Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.
kayodelycaon
What exactly does "taste" mean in this context? Taste is about artistic quality. Aesthetics is generally a tertiary concern when it comes to software or hardware tinkering. That assumes it's a concern at all.
And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
PantaloonFlames
I know everyone is busy but the author provides the definition explicitly:
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
Concisely, discernment.
So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
kayodelycaon
That's on me, I missed that.
If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :)
In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.
dvsgaevsvsgavsv
If you have to wtite blog post about how you have taste and other don't, you clearly haven't got it either.
ambicapter
If anyone's wondering, author makes no attempt to demonstrate the veracity of the title, he just talks about being a tinkerer and why it's important to have taste nowadays, and lets the reader make the connection.
edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
johnfn
Ah yes, time for the daily article of the form "If you don't do <thing I frequently do>, you aren't <a good person>"
I used to tinker with fonts, colors, etc but as I’ve gotten older I just accept the defaults in most things. You can waste any number of hours on that stuff and in the end it makes very little difference.