Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fwlr 1157 days ago
The actual triangle is much better when you don’t add in the common admonishment/instruction “pick two”. I have no idea why that’s added in.

The much better instruction is “pick a point on the triangle”. If you want it as good as possible, it’s neither cheap nor fast. You can have kinda good and kinda cheap, but it won’t be fast at all. And so on.

1 comments

True, and kind of useless in casual conversation.

When you're a plumber talking to a homeowner, or any human talking to any other human... seriously triangle diagrams and pick a point in 2d space along 3 axis...? It's a valid graph but it does not roll off the tongue and does not convey the point as simply and quickly. It just adds granularity and complication to the same essential concept.

That next level of refinement maybe comes later in the same conversation, but the shorter sound byte still comes first and is not wrong just because it's the outline rather than the full dissertation.