[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.

[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. hypocrisy

[ElevenLathe]

Always loved this Michael Caine line from the third Austin Powers movie: "There's two things I can't stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other peoples' cultures, and the Dutch."

[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.