Yeah, that article makes fair arguments, there are a lot of (often inaccurate) assumptions that go into comparing subscription services to the price of coffee.
I still think the comparison can be a useful way to measure one's own willingness to spend money because it can highlight how the cost of something seemingly mundane adds up. My armchair theory is that people don't always think about their cup of coffee (or anything that, in the moment, seems like a one-off expense) in terms of the annual cost, but they do think of subscription services in those terms (rightly so). And contextualizing e.g. coffee-spending in terms of annual cost can be a helpful way to determine for oneself whether a product is worth it.
And yes, it depends on how that individual values things, and it may not be the right comparison to make for you, but broadly, I think the exercise of thinking about how habitual costs add up is helpful. And again yes, this depends on the individual, maybe this is something you already do and have been doing for a long time so isn't helpful for you.
I agree the comparison isn't accurate and should be examined in context, but I don't think it should be avoided completely.
I understand the sentiment, but disagree with the conclusion. If an information/continuing-education tool is exactly what I'm looking for and isn't prohibitively expensive for me, then it's worth it (note: recognizing that I'm assuming HN is such a tool for you). At $10/month, the tool is cheaper than what many folks pay for coffee.
Anecdotally, there are also lots of folks that say they can build something similar without having to spend the money, but how often do they actually build it? And how much time would they actually spend building it? If the existing tool works the way I want/need it to, I'm more likely to gain value by paying for that existing solution than building it myself.
I write JavaScript for my day job, but I only recently started learning how engines optimize it. I had a ton of fun reading this article: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/shapes-ics (which I discovered in another HN post somewhere)
It's an informal way of agreeing with/emphasizing the parent comment.
Your question isn't stupid. Using "this" in such a manner is non-standard English and I can see how the meaning would be unclear if English isn't your first language. It might be unclear even to native speakers if they don't spend much time on internet forums.
> Where everywhere is some subset of browsers in the wild and often not that consistently anywhere.
Yes, but it's easier to download a version of the browser that works. The alternative is for the developer to build native apps for each OS they want to support. In my experience, it's easier to build cross-browser than it is to build cross-platform.
A comment in the Medium article asked the same thing. The author's response:
> I agree that piping all logs to stdout would be the best solution in case of Dockerized microservices. It’s just that in our case we were porting an existing system, which a) already heavily relied on logging to files b) consisted of many microservices itself, which we couldn’t yet split into separate Docker containers but also couldn’t pipe all their logs to the same stdout.
I still think the comparison can be a useful way to measure one's own willingness to spend money because it can highlight how the cost of something seemingly mundane adds up. My armchair theory is that people don't always think about their cup of coffee (or anything that, in the moment, seems like a one-off expense) in terms of the annual cost, but they do think of subscription services in those terms (rightly so). And contextualizing e.g. coffee-spending in terms of annual cost can be a helpful way to determine for oneself whether a product is worth it.
And yes, it depends on how that individual values things, and it may not be the right comparison to make for you, but broadly, I think the exercise of thinking about how habitual costs add up is helpful. And again yes, this depends on the individual, maybe this is something you already do and have been doing for a long time so isn't helpful for you.
I agree the comparison isn't accurate and should be examined in context, but I don't think it should be avoided completely.