Letter from the Carnation Company (1987)
This is both a very fun letter and a great introduction to how something that is “obvious” to the non-practitioner (“A square ratio can obviously uses less material so is obviously better!”) can be totally wrong.<p>So the next time you see an article on hacker news where the solution to some problem seems overly complicated, and you want to say, “Why not just do X?”  Think about the ratio between height and width of a cat food can and evaluate whether you might be missing something.