[kwiens]

Agree. It's kind of like a chef's knife: a better tool makes you a better chef.

A sharp knife is also quite a bit safer than a dull knife. By heating to operating temperature in 5 seconds and rapidly pouring heat into the material, you don't have to hold the hot iron as long. As soon as you're done, pop on the safety cap and instantly shield the hot metal.

Soldering isn't remotely mainstream, and part of that is the quality of tools. We set out to streamline the entire process to make soldering as accessible as possible.

[mauvehaus]

For all edge tools be they for cooking, woodworking, forestry or something else: buy steel, not sharp. Henkels, Lie-Nielsen, Gransfors Bruk, Victorinox, or Stanley is only going to sharpen it for you once.

Corollary: learn to sharpen. The best steel in the world isn't going to cut anything if it's dull.

For the record, I sharpen chisels almost daily and I hate sharpening kitchen knives. The carbides set at the right angle in the handle you pull down the length of the blade will keep your knives a lot sharper than a set of Japanese water stones you never use.

[Kon-Peki]

If you live in a reasonably large metro area that has a lot of good restaurants, there is going to be a small handful of cooking knife sharpeners. A large percentage of professional chefs can't afford/justify good quality sharpening equipment for something that they use a couple times per year.

They'll take their knives to these services and pay $5 or $6 per knife, and it will get done to perfection in just a few minutes while they wait. You can use these same services, there is no membership card needed to get in the door.

[dpedu]

I am completely confused by your example. Buying a better knife doesn't make you a better chef. Buying a faster car doesn't make you a better driver. Buying a more powerful laptop doesn't make you a better developer.

[Larrikin]

Do you cook? There are dozens of obvious examples. A crappy knife will tear instead of cut. You'll ruin tomatoes, have uneven dices, crush and smear delicate herbs, have ripped apart meat and fish that you'll destroy more trying to get rid of the trim. That's not counting the downtime you'll have when the knife slips instead of cuts and you can't cook at all due to injury.

Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef, but their progress will be faster when they don't have the knife working against them.

[rsch]

That is a common fallacy, I suspect it comes from having enough budget to not having to think about being able to afford something decent.

It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago)

If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait.

I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.

[cthalupa]

The problem is that bad tools can be a limiting factor, regardless of skill level. The more skilled you are the more likely you are able to compensate for bad tools, but you'd still be more productive with good ones.

A knife that won't hold it's edge will mean you are explicitly going to perform worse as a chef - you will get ragged cuts, you will be more at risk for injuring yourself, etc.

A slow laptop will mean you learn more slowly - doubly so if you are working with compiled languages or anything where you spend significant processing time before determining the outcome of whatever you're working on. The quicker you can get feedback on your work, be it from compilation errors, manual review of the output, your tests running, etc., the more you get to iterate and the more you get to learn.

A cheap soldering iron explicitly can make soldering more difficult and result in worse outcomes, particularly for a beginner.

Be it cooking, soldering, photographing, programming, whatever, there is frequently a point where going from a cheaper tool to a more expensive one will make the life of a beginner easier and let them produce better outcomes. As you get more skilled you can learn how to more quickly and easily sharpen knives, or produce fewer bugs in your code, or how to better handle aperture vs. ISO or whatever. But in those cases there will still often be productivity/efficiency gains from using nicer tools

[jpalawaga]

no, but with a shitty laptop it can be hard to be a good developer. having dull knives will make cooking experience, slow, dangerous, and unpleasant. having a boat-car will make it difficult to practice any sort of skilled driving.

it's not that you can't overcome adversity and do the thing anyhow, but you're certainly not making it easy. In all cases, using the proper tool allows you to remove the extra difficulty factor and focus on that task at hand.

But also, cutting a tomato with a sharp knife is way, way easier than with a dull knife. Same with soldering. Ignores the rest of the parts of being a chef, but you get the comparison.

[belthesar]

"Better" is definitely the wrong word, but the jist is sound with the right framing. A better tool often allows you to do work safer, and that is what was attempted to be conveyed. Applying the approach to one of your examples, a faster car doesn't make you a better driver, but a car with more safety features makes your driving experience safer than one with less.

[lelandfe]

My dull chef's knife got caught when I chopping an onion and nearly lopped my fingertip off. I was not a very good chef that night.