Weirdly, the word "content" for articles or other media seems to actually devalue the content of the piece in lieu of its marketing value. Great stuff. They’ll have to come up with a new word for this practice pretty soon, as more people realize that they’re reading fancy ads instead of actual content.
I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit.
I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.
Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.
I don't think all content marketing is bullshit. There are some companies that produce some pretty nice content, for example some of the in-depth Cloudflare stuff, but others as well.
It's useful and interesting, but also content marketing.
There was in fact content on the internet before the advertising craze. Sometimes people write things because it earnestly interests them, not to make a quick buck.
Or those fake how-to tutorial pages. Often when I’m looking up, say, error codes in Windows, I need to wade through pages of “Step 1: Download the MyNewFreeComputerCleaner.biz app”
after working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend.
* 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s
* fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?)
* 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.
About 5 years ago I attended a local code meetup and someone gave a presentation about this new TypeScript thing. He basically just explained the basic syntax, concepts. etc. A bit boring, but not the worst I've seen.
Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
So ... he basically just read the TypeScript "getting started" tutorial, transformed it to a presentation, and had no real knowledge of TypeScript.
The entire talk seemed pretty useless to me. I don't even know how accurate that presentation was, because there's much more to using a language effectively than the basic syntax learned from a glance at a tutorial page.
This is still something I really can't wrap my mind around. What is the key difference in early life between people who will speak authoritatively regardless of competence, across the spectrum to experts who can't or won't? I don't think Dunning-Kruger explains it because it's not like every shy expert used to be a gregarious beginner.
I have seen lots of talks by experts about the technology they're experts in, but I have seen lots of the other kind as well.
I think Dunning-Kruger is part of it, but also excitement.
If you are the expert you probably got that way by putting in a lot of time, you are at any rate older than when you started out and you may be in fact be quite older than the average developer, often older people do not have the same enthusiasm and excitement for things (although sure there are many that do) so that cuts down the number of people who have experience who also have enthusiasm for getting up and talking.
Getting up and Talking means doing work for it, if you have kids you may not want to do that work unless your job is one where you have to do it. So if you are an older expert with kids but not employed in an evangelist role you probably are not going to go out and do talks.
The expert in a subject may see so deeply into the subject that it is difficult for them to express the gee-whiz aspects that will attract other people. Those who know more are not necessarily able to express that knowledge in an interesting way.
The expert may have lost interest in the matter as they gain in expertise, or they may think things that others will find amazing and interesting to be so obvious and trivial as to not be worth expressing.
For these reasons it may be that talks on a subject are preponderantly given by those with less than expert mastery of the subject.
I think there is some personality difference, but also one of values.
Do you think or feel it is shameful for you to give introductory talk? Did you grew up in environment where such thing was mocked or did you grew up somewhere it was praised? Do you think it matters super much if someone in audiemce looks down on you or are you rather motivated by single person that likes you?
Do you think you need to be super awesome experienced speaker to make first public talk? Are you ok having public talk with primary purpose being to learn doing public talks?
These imo make the difference. It is not like there would be lines of experts wanting to talk.
To you. On the flip side, it provided an introductory level overview of a concept many watching/attending may not have looked into themselves, or were thinking of looking into. It also provided a different form of introduction, which could be valuable for attendees with a learning style preference different to that of look-at-a-how-to or check-out-the-docs.
>the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
Hey, at least he was honest and didn't try to bluff his way through an answer, as many in our industry will.
Overall, depending on the audience and context, it sounds like it may have been worthwhile for many attendees. Plus he got to work on his soft skills, and doing so with such vulnerability could inspire others to also.
I attended exactly because of those reasons. The problem is mostly that actually explaining a language (even from a high-level overview) well is a bit more involved than just explaining the syntax and the like.
For example I currently mostly work with Go, and if I would give a high-level presentation about Go I'd start with the "tour of Go" tutorial, but I'd also add some context to some things, explain where you need to be careful to avoid problems, and emphasize the usefulness of other things that may not be obvious at a glance. That kind of stuff. I think the presentation format is a great way for doing that.
A beginning JavaScript programmer might explain the "with" keyword, which would be a mistake. I have no idea if the presentation contained any mistakes like that.
I don't work much with JS, and I haven't looked much as TypeScript since, but I didn't really learn all that much more than what I already knew: "TypeScript is JavaScript with optional typing".
Was it useful for others? Maybe; I hope so. But for me personally I consider it a wasted hour in my life.
>Was it useful for others? Maybe; I hope so. But for me personally I consider it a wasted hour in my life.
Is this not true of most tech meetups / tech conferences though? I feel like they all carry an implicit YMMV with them, which attendees know when deciding to join.
If I go to a talk about a piece of technology, I expect the presenter to have enough experience with it to be able to provide me with a means of determining where I am situated in said technology's landscape, and what frame of reference is required to evaluate how to move about that landscape.
It doesn't matter how eloquent and thorough the introductory tutorial is, if the presenter has not experienced the technology sufficiently to have accumulated a few scars[1], they will not have the ability to convey the relative importance of the various aspects of the introduction, with which can be modified simply as a matter of taste, and which should be followed unless very careful consideration of global engineering context, and a full appreciation of the consequences.
If you are unable to meet that bar, at the very least, your abstract should make that abundantly clear out of respect for your audience.
[1] or at least have the experience to say that normally they would have expected to get bitten by something by their point in usage, but the technology meets their requirements so thoroughly that it has been particularly smooth sailing.
Well this talk was at a local Meetup so presumably the attendees got what they paid for. If you expect a high-quality talk I'm sure you would shell out an appropriate amount of money for it.
This seems very common in JS land, I once saw a talk in a conf which seemed very basic, later on I stumbled onto a tweet about how the speaker often submits abstracts to CFPs often not knowing much(or at all) about the subject, which serves as motivation to learn and talk about it, works well after having a track record of speaking at events some conferences you can get invited or not have to prove yourself so much to get accepted to speak.
Then I was looking at other conferences lineups and saw many repeat speakers from that same conf, often with the same talk, turned me off quite a bit from going to any more conferences, lots of the same, basic content, with not much expertise behind it.
In general I find presentations at conferences not all that interesting; I've been to conferences where I've not attended a single presentation. There are some good talks, but they're not common. Giving a good presentation requires a few different skill and some practice – I'm not good at it either.
The value is mostly in hanging out with various people. The best experience has generally been when I went alone and met loads of new people, instead of going with coworkers or friends and then just hang out with them. Not that's not fun either, but I can do that next weekend anyway.
Yeah, pretty much. At this one particular conference there were actually loads of stands in the hallway and I would hang out and chat with various people there.
The more professionally organised ones don't tend to have that many stands, except for paying sponsors. I understand why they do that, but I think there's good value in "community stands" too.
I mean, the talks themselves are just "shut up and listen", right? Not too much socializing happening there. I think that revolving the entire conference around presentations is probably not always the best format.
At the conferences I went to it looked like most (80%) shuffled from one talk to another. The hallways were for walking to different talks. You could potentially talk in the queue to get in or out of a talk but no one talked to me at all.
There was a big space for vendors to have stalls but if you talked to them it was like talking to a sales person. Sometimes they had a tech-oriented sales person but it was still selling you their product.
It takes quite a lot of time to prepare talk and it is not like they would pay all that impressively.
So I think that repeated talks and intro talks are to be expected. Through I did not mind them, I used them to get idea about new thing X while I have time set aside for learning.
>It takes quite a lot of time to prepare talk and it is not like they would pay all that impressively.
Most tech events don't in general pay for speakers or any travel. (Keynotes, scholarships, etc. are among the sometimes exceptions.)
I rarely literally re-use a presentation slide for slide but many presentations I give are based on an earlier presentation I gave. In most cases, a different conference is going to be a mostly different audience. In general, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just dump a presentation because I gave it once to a couple hundred peop,e.
That's content marketing. It's the poster child of bullshit. If the people from your examples actually wrote their pieces, it's already above average. In my experience, from working a desk away from a few social media marketers, the usual case is copy-pasting from other blogspam on the same topic.
And social media (including LinkedIn). There are many tech firms who hire marketers to write tech content for other marketers and potential clients as an advertising and brand-building strategy.
It is an even bigger problem when searching for advanced/niche concepts: try searching for Redis and Cloudwatch (not Elasticache, plain Redis) and you will get generic AWS docs and "How to get started with Redis" posts.
Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution.
Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts.
I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.
The truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling HN.
I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
Worrying development? HN has never been particularly enlightened in this respect, and has all of the same trends and superficial articles that emerge on the other networks. The illusion that it's some higher ground has never held true.
I’m ashamed to say that was me at some point. On top of that, those articles did nothing to further my career. All that mattered so far is my past experience, projects and how well I can (leet)code. Now if I start blogging again, it will have to be purely out of intellectual curiosity.
I think this is the same situation a lot of people find themselves in. I would say I'm the same. The further along I get in my career the more I find I'm interested in learning or exploring for my own good or interests, rather than some fake sense of credibility I got in the past.
I confirm this doesn't do anything for your career, or at least not as much as just focusing that time on actual, paid work. I find that in my career my resume and experience that's on it as opposed to any side-projects or attempts at writing.
Yes, however on helping the career I think the writing is like a nice little detail on the resume, a way to make it standout a bit more, I also found that in a recent interview for a project an article I had just written on SVG was naturally relevant. As a general rule talking about little articles you've written isn't going to naturally happen in the interview because the interview process is focused on past work and horrible trick questions.
It has also been somewhat useful in projects where a concern with documentation has been expressed because the writing is a better example of my ability to document things than having worked on a lot of projects where you may be able to go see what we shipped but not be able to see anything of the documentation.
I think of the writing as the equivalent of a side project:
* it allows me to focus on something I want to learn
* it helps to make what I learn stick in my head
* it gives me a deadline and people who will send me emails to say how's it going with that
* it works as documentation for what I've learned
* it gives me a trivial amount of money for having taken the time to learn something. Basically the last article I wrote is paying for an annual Dropbox account, and a couple days worth of food for my family. It was way too much work for that to be worthwhile, but I did learn some things that will help with later stuff.
Also me, but I did have one (on tolerance analysis) that helped my career.
It made rounds in the professional circles I traveled in and established myself as, while not necessarily a leader, someone at least very fluent in a particular process.
This was also in 2010 though, so the social landscape Was quite different
What's interesting is that this stuff works, which means there are idiot decision makers out there eating it up, which means the whole industry is ripe for disruption by someone who can see even an inch into the fog, so lets go do that
That's an interesting, albeit selfish, perspective.
Experienced developers usually aren't busy writing blog posts. Nor are they engaged on HN. As the old saying goes, those who can are out doing, those who can't `teach'.
This touched a nerve, but sorry it's spot on. The more faltering the career, the less certain the skills, the more likely the person has a vigorous social media and blog presence.
Given the great reception this has received, let me give an example, and one of HN's great "successes" - patio11.
Guy made a tiny, miserable little service that would have made more money if he worked at Walmart. He was the seer who provided day after day of front page content for this site, the "fake it till you make it" ruse in full effect. Because his product was so miserably unsuccessfully he instead put all of his effort into blog posts and "lessons" for people to follow, and the suckers lined up.
People with actually successful products were just off being successful.
As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations.
And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.
Gifs are great
Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.
It's not the jokes I'm against - it's that monetizable/SEO-style writing, where everything is repeated twice or thrice, and there's loads of filler text.
Actually, let me change my mind on the GIFs. Keep the best ones.
This drives me crazy! I hate searching for documentation and the top results are blogs containing outdated copy and paste of the official docs with some witty text and gifs.
I've recently started using Express.js for a project at work, and I've never before encountered a seemingly popular framework/language with such frustrating content churned out by the community. Express's official docs have all the technical specs you could ask for, but the framework is very light weight without any structure and feels more like a library, sort of like Flask. I wanted to see what a typical app structure looks like, but just about every single "article" I found was either a copy/paste of the same app with everything crammed into one index.js file (routing, logic, db queries, etc...), or they were walls of text filled with occasional code snippets and didn't even provide a repo for reference. The community feels like it's targeting complete beginners with its simple examples, lengthy explanations of trivial tasks and extremely little coverage of architecture. My experience with Express felt like PHP 10 years ago with w3schools.
In my experience this is particularly egregious when trying to compare frameworks and libraries in the JS ecosystem. The posts usually boil down to “I wrote a hello world with X and Y, here are my thoughts”, or worse, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks”, or worse still, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks, and I’ll pretend I have ten years of experience with each.”
And those exact posts bafflingly make it to the front page of Hacker News somehow -- doubly so if you can include [esoteric language] into your "My thoughts on" title.
I recall an especially egregious one on Clojure where the author had used the language for all of about a week before writing up his detailed hot takes on some "cons" of the language, like needing to know some complicated thing called `let` in order too assign variables.
Ugh. I cringe every time I have an actual, non-trivial, issue or fairly technical question about whatever I'm working on lately.
I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.
P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.
Hard same on the Kotin/Jackson sadness. Gson also has a bunch of issues. Really want to cut my code over to Moshi but haven't worked up the energy for it. Maybe we all just want to wait till Kotlin serialization is production ready?
In any case, this project kind of didn't need any auto-magical serialization library, but the promise was reduced boilerplate. Instead, we just got way more complex boilerplate and a damn dependency forcing me to change how I want to write my code.
Pretty much. I'm all about data classes so the code reads just fine. Definitely less boilerplate than something like JsonObject. But using Gson means non-nullable fields can still be null if the incoming JSON doesn't have them. So you get these "impossible" NPEs. Also, this is more a complaint about the JVM type system but Gson can encode things that it can't decode into which really messes with my mental model.
My experience has been that there might actually be MORE boilerplate now than when I did ad-hoc translation to/from JsonObject.
inline classes straight-up don't work with Jackson, and probably never will. So for every class that has a field that is an inline class, I have to write a "builder class" that's exactly the same except replacing the inline class with the class it wraps.
Also, @JsonUnwrapped doesn't work with Kotlin. And, of course, doing anything with generics is a complex nightmare with Jackson (because of JVM's type erasure).
Not to mention, all these failures happen at runtime, so you don't even know your class is going to be a problem until you run the code.
The whole thing just sucks and I actually miss the simplicity of translating by hand...
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.
...
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.
... and by quoting Schopenhauer's beautiful prose instead of using your own words you are following his wise advice. Montaigne said something similar when confronted as to why he quoted Plutarch so often, replying that if he believed someone had already said something in a way that he couldn't improve, why on earth would he say it in his own words? I would very much have preferred to quote the great man himself of course, for this very reason, but couldn't locate this particular passage.
This Schopenhauer essay resonates strongly with me, hitting on and unifying numerous concepts I'd been playing with. And saying it well.
Even in translation ;-)
I'm still upset that the University of Adelaide's book server was shut down, as it had a wonderfully-formatted set of the essays, shared recently to HN. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21386663
... As for the natural faculties within me, of which my writing is the proof, I feel them bending under the burden.
My ideas and my judgement merely grope their way forward,
faltering, tripping, and stumbling; and when I have advanced as far as I can, I am still not at all satisfied. I can see more country ahead, but with so disturbed and clouded a vision that I can distinguish nothing. And when I venture to write indifferently of whatever comes into my head, relying only on my own natural resources, I very often light upon the matter I am trying to deal with in some good author, as I did just now in Plutarch, in his discourse on the strength of the imagination. Then I realize how weak and poor, how heavy and lifeless I am, in comparison with them, and feel pity and contempt for myself.
Yet I take pleasure in the fact that my opinions have often the honour of coinciding with theirs and that I follow them, though far behind, proclaiming their virtues. I am glad too that I have the advantage, which many have not, of recognizing the great difference between them and myself. And yet I allow my own ideas to run their course, feeble and trivial as when I first conceived them, without plastering and patching the defects revealed to me by this comparison. A man must have strong legs if he intends to keep up with people like that. The injudicious writers of our century who scatter about their valueless works whole passages from old authors, in order to increase their own reputations, do just the reverse. For the infinitely greater brilliance of the ancients makes their own stuff look so pale, dull, and ugly that they lose much more than they gain.
Here are two contrary points of view. The philosoper Chrysippus dropped into his books not just passages but whole works by other authors, including in one instance the complete Medea of Euripides; and ApoUodorus said that if all that was not his own were to be cut out of his works the paper would be quite blank. Epicurus, on the other hand, did not introduce a single quotation into any of the three hundred volumes that he left behind him.
I happened the other day to light on such a passage. I had been languidly following a string of French words, so bloodless,
fleshless, and devoid of substance and meaning that they were just words of French and no more. Then at the end of this long and tiresome road I came upon a rich and lofty sentence which towered into the clouds. If I had found the slope gentle and the ascent somewhat gradual, it would have been excusable. But the rise was so sheer and precipitous that after the first six words I felt myself flying into another world, from which I recognized the depth of the abyss out of which I had come. So deep was it that I have never had the heart to plunge into it again. If I were to load one of my discourses with such rich spoils, it would throw too much light on the stupidity of the rest.
To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary. I know very well how boldly I myself attempt at every turn to rise to the level of my purloinings and to remain there, even rashly hoping that I can prevent the judicial eye from discovering them. In this endeavour my industry plays as great a part as my inventive powers. And then,
I do not contend with those ancient champions in the mass and hand to hand, but only in repeated brushes, in slight and trivial encounters. I do not press them hard; I merely try their strength and never go as far as I hesitatingly intend. If I could hold my own with them I should be doing well, for I only attack them at their strongest points.
To cover themselves, as I have seen some writers doing, so completely in other men's armour as not to leave even their finger-tips showing; to compose a work from pieces gathered here and there among the ancients - an easy task for a man of learning who is treating an ordinary subject - and then to attempt to conceal...
Thanks for reading, I was a bit worried about posting such a long quotation, but couldn't bring myself to butchering this marvel, would have felt like cutting a master painting. Just like Chrysippus.
> Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial...
It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.
To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..
When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.
By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.
At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.
I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.
Or when you want to compare two products and the top result(s) are just auto-generated pages that dump the stats/spec of each product side by side. I hate that so much. I want to read what a human who has tried both thinks.
There was a time when searching for "A vs B" produced useful results. Nowadays a search like this is completely useless. I wish those auto-generated sites would completely disappear from the search results.
IMHO the worst is that lot of young people actually consume, like and share that SEO/marketing stuff and spread it around without much thoughts. That’s the most popular dev content you will find on dev.to, medium, YouTube (for some reasons dev related videos became huge last year), and other publishing platforms. They don’t just generate useless content, they in fact have a public for it, thus little reason to stop.
My life became a lot better when I stopped reading towards data science (on Medium). It was just so much terrible tutorial content which was not only wrong, but actively misleading.
The internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids.
Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.
I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
Old school links might be a solution. I remember back in the day those blog websites which contained "links" page to the websites that owner likes and recommends. It's true P2P solution and does not require anything to invent. If you own a website and know some rare but valuable gems, just share them. Someone will find them. I think that's how Internet should really work.
As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.
Yes. Many website owners are too scared to link out because they're worried it'll penalise their rankings in Google. If you have hundreds of outbound links they can also be a pain to manage since so many domains get recycled into something else.
But I fully agree, people should be creating their own ecosystems with links, rather than keeping huge portals happy.
Yeah, I actually maintain such a list on my own site. I should update it more often though.
I think the biggest problem isn't so much find "hey, that's a cool article"-type of content, but typing in [programming concept] in Google. What I want to find is things like in-depth experiences and advice regarding this which complement the manual. What I actually find it loads of "howtos" with "copy this" which just rehash the manual.
Results vary a bit depending on [programming concept], and I don't think simple "getting started with"-articles are completely useless either. But generally speaking, there are too many of them, many of them are not of high quality, and it obscures more in-depth content.
I'm not sure if maintaining a list of links would really solve that. Perhaps community projects like "awesome-foo"-lists have some potential here, but in practice I've found many of them to be dumping grounds rather than carefully curated.
Honestly, I wish I could just remove commercial results from google as part of the query. Some terms are essentially now useless because the first N pages are just ecom sites. Google definitely knows which sites are commercial because they’ve been pushing product metadata for about a decade now and serve ads for the same clients....
I think the solution (or at least a big part of it) is the resurgence of real blogs. When real developers write deeply technical posts about their experiences, on their own sites, everybody wins. Discovery is an issue, but there have been a number of HN threads recently on ways to mitigate this. Webrings, blogrolls, RSS... there was never going to be a super-convenient or efficient way to generate a high-quality, high signal-to-noise ratio set of sources. But curating your own preferred set of such sites, and making a habit of taking and publishing dev notes on your projects, and participating in the blog revival, is a step in the right direction.
It feels like if you changed the nouns we could be talking about movies. We are, some of us at least, on our guard when a movie has a huge advertising spend because we have been burned by movies where, "all the best parts were in the preview".
Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
To paraphrase Gary Larson, "We know it is bullshit, but what kind of bullshit?"[1]
Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.
But this is about plagiarism.
The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.
Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?
His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.
However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.
[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
Of all the people who got all excited that the internet would "democratize information," most seemed to be thinking on the demand side. And it did come to pass, but very few seem to have anticipated that it would democratize the supply side too. Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.
> Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.
Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.
If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.
I don't get the reference. Worry less about "vibes," I guess would be my advice. And consider that if someone says "brown cows eat grass" they're not trying to describe the entire universe; they're actually taking it as a given that your brain will work hard enough to remember that non-brown cows, and non-grass-eating cows, and even brown, non-grass-eating cows exist and have their own stories that are outside the scope of this one.
"Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was going to go to..."
"NOT ALL RIDING HOODS ARE RED AND FRANKLY I OBJECT TO ANYONE WHO MONOLITHICALLY TRIES TO SAY SO AND I'M GETTING A VIBE... SEIZE HIM!"
To teach yourself programming in 1990 you would've gone to a bookstore or library, that employed a buyer/curator, who bought from a distributor, who bought from a publisher, who bought from an author, who probably also dealt with an agent and an editor. Other than the author and his/her own desire to produce something good, there were 3-5 other layers in the process, 3-5 other entities making the decision, should we submit this, should we publish this, should we distribute this, should we buy this and devote shelf space to selling it. Each of those steps is a gate through which only a limited quantity can pass, so whatever else it actually means, the book you pick up off the shelf in 1990 has passed through all those gates. Nowadays excellent and shitty writers alike are free of that.
It's hard for me to see society being able to self-critique via social media as a bad thing—newspaper headlines have certainly been exploiting the same linguistic tricks you point out for centuries. I don't see why it's bad to return the favor and build a culture that isn't represented by legacy/traditional/whatever media.
I'm not saying it's bad; there are good & bad aspects of everything. I don't even know if something can "be bad" or can "be good." Everything is both. It's the dual nature of reality. The tao symbol has light & dark, touching each other & wrapped around each other in a dance, and furthermore there's a dot of the light inside the dark and vice versa. One thing lives right in the center of its opposite. Feckin deep I know rite? A wheel carries loads and runs people over. Babies are cute and pains in the ass. Democratization of information means more democracy in information which means less aristocracy in information, I mean it's as simple as that. (And democracy and aristocracy each have good & bad aspects.)
The thing putting a negative spin on it is that at least in this author's opinion, "Most tech content is bullshit." I'm saying maybe that's because now we have access to the bottom 90% too along with the top 10% that we already had. (There was bullshit in the old days too of course, but it was usually found coming out of someone's mouth as opposed to in a book that someone bothered to spend money to print thousands of times. Although there are exceptions there too! It's death by a thousand disclaimers up in here!)
My solution for this problem:
1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago.
2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.
3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.
I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.
Unfortunately today a lot of the good content is hosted on the same domains as the terrible content. This is one of the many great downsides to content centralization.
If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).
The main reason books are better is because they are harder to write and produce. The person making the book actually has to invest a lot of their time in making it happen, unlike a blog post.
I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"
With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.
Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"
Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.
So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.
blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
And they often assume the reader is a complete novice, which means a lot of pages are wasted on obvious yada yada and then there's less space for genuinely interesting deep stuff that you'd only learn from an expert (or through a lot of practice and trial & error).
Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything...
Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality...
Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...
Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this.
If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.
For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)
Youtube is better, but over the last few years, I've noticed that it's getting harder to find decent reviews, because the algorithm recommends so many fake review channels. It's better than a google search, but there's still so many terrible results to sort through.
Youtube's algorithm encourages video farms that upload frequently even if they recycle content. Ann Reardon discusses this problem as it relates to recipe video's frequently on her cooking channel.
> Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews[..]
My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. Blog post end up bloated and thin on real information because it is considered good SEO and apparently Google really tends to rank longer articles higher. Same is true for tech books, which are often bloated because the author has to reach their target page count.
YouTube videos seem to be mostly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want to tell. This is not universally true for video content though. If you look at online learning platforms, like Udemy for example, you can find many courses that spread an hour worth of content over typically five or six hours. My fear is that Google will someday decide to make the length of a video a ranking factor and we will have the same bloated videos on YouTube too.
> Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately.
Producing decent video content is much more elaborate and expensive than written reviews. My suspicion is that on YouTube paid reviews are even more common than on blogs and the norm is just not to mention it. Doesn't mean they are useless of course, just as you wrote "judge their bias appropriately".
> My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. [...] YouTube videos seem to be mostly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want to tell.
I don't think this is an accident: YouTube apparently ranks based on watch time / retention, so if you make your video too long and people don't watch to the end it hurts you.
Any kind of machine maintenance video has so much preamble, when what I'm really after is like 25 seconds of silently accessing the part, pausing to circle stuff in red, and narrating stuff that's hard to see from the video
You can still get hoodwinked by youtubers[0] who (to the untrained eye) look like they know what they are talking about but are actually grifters[1] wasting your time
> Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.
Reads like it went through Google translate twice.
> _______ are not a common field where people would choose to ________ . However, _______ might be an interesting fact for most _____ or people looking for _____, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.
Some search hits are deeper than others. Specifically, forums. EEVblog comes to mind. Figure out the spectrum of specific brands/models, then read and watch some reviews.
That Medium page on is hilarious! I recommend it if you are into oscilloscopes and want a laugh. My favorite parts are the opening paragraphs and the list of Key Points for each scope, which include:
• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]
• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]
• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]
Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!
• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]
Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?
This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers.
Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile.
That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic.
Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1].
Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine.
[1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.
What I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for.
Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.
A lot of times I middle click any interesting links I find on Google, in which case it becomes hard for Google to know if I unvisited a site. It's not like they can track me clicking the Back button on my browser and arriving back to the search results
I've no idea whether they do this or not but it's easy enough to know when a tab or window is focussed or not. I have a games site and use this to pause/unpause games, music, etc.
They could hook this into Google Analytics and subtract the time you spent with that tab/window not focussed from your session duration.
I do fundamentally agree that session duration may not be the worst proxy for worthwhile content or, at least, engaging content, snd I think Google may use it as such.
Probably because both 'what the user was looking for' and 'why they left the page quickly' are complex issues.
For instance, quite a few times I'll open a page in Google's results, scan the content and go back to compare it to another result. That doesn't necessarily mean I hate the first page or think it's terrible, just that I wanted to see what it had to offer.
It can also mean I did find the answer there, and am returning to Google to search for something else instead.
It's tough to distinguish cases like those from 'the content was bad' and 'the content was not what I was looking for'.
There's also the worry that it might end up hurting user incentives too, or alter the way in which users browse the internet as a whole.
After all, since finding out that YouTube rewards/punishes creators based on watch time/how much of the video someone watches, I'm now hesitant to even watch many videos at all, since I know some guy's career might potentially be put on the line.
Perhaps Google worries other people will be the same, and stop clicking as many results knowing that Google might punish the affected websites for not staying long enough.
> Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has
I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily looking for something specific.
But that involves building up a ratings database of lots of different URLs. If it becomes really popular, I'd like to experiment with search. It could start with a "normal" search algorithm but then adjust the results based on rating data. E.g. "the top result for this query is X, but people with similar rating data to you always down vote that link, so we'll move that result down".
I've heard people complain about how Google gives you personalized search results sometimes, but I'm not sure if the approach is actually bad. Perhaps it could work if it was focused on from the start instead of bolted on.
Quick question about findka, Is the idea to only upvote/downvote things you have actually experienced and liked or dislike, or do you also upvote/downvote things you don't know but like or dislike?
I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without actually engaging with stuff.
Mainly the former. Ideally you've experienced the things you've rated, but in many cases you can probably judge fairly accurately if you're interested in something based on a short description.
That brings up a key point which I'm not sure is clear to users or not: voting on items specifically means "this is/is not a good recommendation for me". It's not a judgment on the goodness of the item in general. So if findka showed me e.g. an article on pottery that looked high quality, I'd probably still downvote it since I'm not into pottery.
I think that is not really communicated in the current design, reminds me of the ratings on Netflix where they are intended as "Our estimation of this contents rating for you based on your viewing history" while most people I talked about it just thought it was the rating of the thing in itself.
Good to know, any suggestions for making it clearer? Maybe thumbs up/down is the wrong labeling; perhaps something like "show me more like this" and "not interested"... though I have no idea what icons I would use for that.
Interesting. I'd thought about some sort of meta-search service running over Google, Bing, etc., and aggregating results, that was tied in with some way of rating recommending URLs.
I've never got around to doing it and one of the reasons (excuses) is that I haven't yet figured out a way to stop bad actors exploiting it by, e.g., mass downvoting URLs of competitors. I did think about some sort of moving average, or bias toward more recent votes, which would at least somewhat mitigate against transient actions of this kind, but it's harder to deal with a sustained attack like this.
I've thought about that a fair amount also. I think the key is personalization. If bad actors downvoted a bunch of items, it would only affect people who already shared a lot of similar votes with those actors.
That is still exploitable: if I know you like A, B, and C, (perhaps those are popular items), I could also upvote those items and then downvote another item D. I have an idea for countering this: keep track of history. So instead of just measuring ratings overlap ("of items you've both rated, 75% of items were rated the same"), you keep track of the performance of recommendations made from that user ("of Alice's items that we recommended to Bob, Bob upvoted them 25% of the time").
I haven't thought about this super deeply yet, but I think to beat that, you'd have to actually provide valuable data to the system in the first place.
To generalize that a bit, I guess I'm talking about a reputation network. You could visualize it with a directed graph that has edges weighted from -1 to 1 (0 default). Recommendation + rating history is used in some way to assign those weights, and then future recommendations are taken primarily from other users who have high weights from your perspective.
I think this problem expands to tech meetups. It is very difficult to find a quality meetup. Most people never used the tech and the presenters make gross errors. Most recent I remember was a person trying to explain why GraphQL is good for APIs, while showing code with crazy N+1s. Certainly didn't convince me.
I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
Meetups cater almost exclusively to younger people who want to learn something and socialize.
I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.
Confluent's marketing content for Kafka does an amazing job of making Kafka sound like the solution for every problem. I have a hard to understanding what it can actually do because the content is stuffed with so much selling and adjectives.
"Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots (of) back links."
That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.
"Those who can't do, teach". While I think this is usually a pretty offensive statement, I think it is an apt one in the world of tech blogs. The people who really know what they are doing are not writing blogs. That's why the content that the Netflix team releases really sticks out. If only they broke their 1h-long presentations into 500 word tech blogs.
Those who are doing, also teach, but are constrained in their audience and time with which they can disseminate their know-how by employment contracts.
This is a feature; not a bug given the way our quasi-free-market founded on protection of trade secrets over actual marketwide innovation that lifts everyone else.
I try guiding anyone who'll listen how to do things I'm well versed in; but there is only so much one can do in a day.
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.
Since we're arguing by aphorism, Brandolini's law a/k/a bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can help.
Well, part of the problem is that there are few detailed book reviews anymore. The Jolt Awards for books were at one time a good guide. Nonetheless, one place that has fairly in-depth Java book reviews of all places is Oracle's Java Magazine. [0]
It's a shame that it's now cool to hate on Java nowadays. It's still a great language to design web applications in, especially now with the newer releases and all the amazing features they put in. I will never understand why things like JavaScript are being used in the back end...
I think a surprising refined "meta" solution has come up in the last decade or so.
You can read an article, and figure out if it is crap for yourself.
But then you can check your work by reading the discussion around it (like HN comments). Look at the top (and bottom) comments. Match your thoughts against the opinions and comments of other critical thinkers.
A lot of critical thinking has already been done for you.
This doesn't always work, but a good comment/upvote/moderation system can be a surprising bullshit filter.
My comment does NOT apply to automated systems, or systems were money/seo/gaming have a payoff for someone. So please ignore this for facebook, for anything with sponsored results, for product reviews, or for wikipedia pages of wealthy or prominent individuals.
Has anyone else faced the raw existential horror of how many programming tutorials there are online for a single question? Look up how to concatenate arrays in JS, and there are just so many sites that it almost makes my head hurt. I guess complexity and competition are necessary tenets of capitalism, but I feel some sort of terror at people just churning these articles out when there are so many already.
What’s more, I think the incentives are not aligned. People who write content nowadays don’t usually have the reader in mind, but instead focus on promoting something (a tech, a tool, or their personal brand): https://angryscript.home.blog/2020/05/08/in-2020-all-content...
>...personal brand...
This. Unfortunately it appears that these days if you want to get ahead in your career is to publish content and develop that "personal brand".
Of course your work can speak for itself, but who can hear it? Advertising through technical writing seems to be a very good thing as long as its valuable and honest. Because if it isn’t we filter it out.
This resonates with me. I use caution now, as much security (and cryptography) advice on StackOverflow is wrong and Perpetuates harmful patterns, yet is never taken down. What’s worse? It often shows up at the top of Google. Many devs don’t show the same level of caution until something blows up
This is true for all types of content - the art is to develop a sense of smell for quality content. And to do that you have to first have been exposed to a lot of bullshit.
From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out unchecked opinions in hopes they may be right, because that would feel really good, and just let others tell us if they're wrong. When those opinions take the form of a blog post, rebuttal often doesn't exist in the same place as the content, making it seem more authoritative than it often deserves to be.
It's not just programmers. It's social activity on the web today. And to stand out, you need to say something edgier or something contrary to popular opinion.
We're also all driven to correct the things we see that aren't quite right.
This comment has been a little of column A and a little of column B.
The Letters to the Editor section of newspapers may be a useful example of aspects of this opinion-expressing behavior over time. At least in the US, we are taught that we have an obligation to participate in the public discourse.
IAAL, who also frequents many Magic: The Gathering subreddits, and it is used all the time there. Same with the home-repair subs I lurk on. It is ubiquitous shorthand.
When I first came across reddit (14 years ago?), it was almost a website for functional programming enthusiasts. Haskell was all the hype over there the way that rust seems to be all the hype over here. It felt more like a community of grad students with pseudo-academic blog posts hyping the latest ideas and research. At least that's how i remember it.
There was also a strong politics subreddit full of group-think but that wasn't what most people went there for I'd say. It was one of three subreddits if i recall.
The site definitely changed when users could create their own subreddits as that opened the board to just about every kind of person or group on the internet.
I believe sites would do best to specialize even at the cost of growth. I'm happy when hackernews sticks mostly to tech and doesn't silo us into specialized and moderated subreddits.
I joined HN during one of the earlyish Eternal Septembers. I seem to remember reading that there was an active campaign to flood the front page with posts about Erlang to deter the influx of dilution. That's what actually got me interested beyond it just being attached to an investment company.
No, in all seriousness I think this is one true factor. But I feel like this isn’t a bad thing on its own. The issue arises when authors don’t disclose their knowledge or competence. Saying stuff like: this is what I assume, this us what I don’t know etc. or just posing plain questions.
Right, but nobody's going to say any of those in a blog post. If you're going to the trouble to write a blog post you're probably making a statement. Even if it's ill-informed.
There's another dimension to this too, which is that writing blog posts and coming off as knowledgeable can directly translate into career opportunities. As long as you aren't too wrong, there's a material incentive to putting stuff out there.
I think there’s a huge population of people who prefer reading things that sound good rather than things that are true. So, if you have the ability to make a product sound good you might be able to provide more value to a company than a person who can write about the technical merits of the product. Engineers can see through the marketing BS but they’re not always the target customer.
Also have you seen a job posting for an entry level software engineering position? You have to say you’re knowledgeable about everything on the application or you will get filtered out in the first round. Publishing blog posts is the easiest way to come across as knowledgeable about a new tech.
I dunno. I'm pretty technical, in a data sciencey kind of way, and a lot of my career success has been explaining things relatively simply and accurately.
The combination of the two facets is much more useful than either alone.
I personally love discussions where I can throw out opinions, and get shot down without too much fuss when appropriate. I find that throwing opinions out helps discussion. This only works if people qualify their opinion, and there's an opportunity to actually shoot things down.
I don't think that's true of most people. People use IANAL defensively in an attempt to avoid embarrassment from being shown to be wrong in an ensuing discussion as opposed to a "free to present my opinion without scrutiny" statement. Most scientists have this too amongst a group of their peers (in conferences for example), they offer a lot of caveats in contributing to discussions that even though are primarily their realm of expertise, they may be out of their depth in the room.
If seeking validation is the prime motivation to contribute to a discussion, at the very least I think HN is the least guilty of this amongst most forums.
I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or lack of thereof).
In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g. politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much correlated with their knowledge of the subject.
The main thing I learned with covid-19 is that you can put too much faith in science/experts. Or put another way, we should not forget to apply skepticism to science just because the situation seems "urgent". And people should not be browbeaten for expressing skepticism of hot-off-the-press science. Science will arrive at the truth, but it takes much more time and rigor than people generally acknowledge.
Looking back, it seems Feburary/March/April covid-19 experts' expertise had the same (or worse) predictive power as random programmers on HN.
I don't know, talking about what is allowed and what isn't is pretty normal in most circles.
I think IANAL is a popular term on HN because HN originated in a country with a terribly litigious culture, and because HN is primarily populated by people who can at least afford lawyers.
If I'd "talk to a lawyer" as often as HN comments recommend people do then I'd have no money (or time) left to eat. The whole thing is about covering your ass.
I thought the IANAL thing was because people didn't want to get dragged into a potential court case, or (wrongly)* thought giving any form of legal advice as a non lawyer was illegal.
So less about being validated for our experience, more about trying to avoid being dragged into court/relied on for evidence in a future court case.
Speaking from my experience, I write about my opinions not for validation, but because you must write about your opinions to be seen as a "real" programmer. People who quietly do their work and create things generally do not flourish. You must sell yourself and your ideas.
I suppose that is validation in a way, but not to feed my ego.
I would say this is not unique to programmers, because i did it before i became a programmer. But then, i did eventually become a programmer, so maybe it is.
I disliked a lot of this article, as "there is bullshit everywhere" seems like something that should just be an axiom at this point.
However, I will expand on a specific pattern of bullshit that is common in the tech world: over-complication for the sake of some sort of "theoretical purity". I think Redux is a good example of this. I think Redux can be used well, but it became the "recommended way to do global state in React" and IMO way many more code bases have become an incomprehensible nightmare because of Redux than have been helped by it.
Similarly, and I'm probably dating myself, but anyone remember the original Enterprise Java Bean specs, and the laughably bad "Pet Store" demo app from the early 00s? It was as if you took a collection of "architects" with no real world experience, and certainly no regard for performance, and had them create the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machine possible.
Ironically, Dan and I have spent more time trying to convince people to _not_ use Redux all the time than we have trying to actually market it :( [0] [1]
We specifically have info in our docs on when it actually makes sense to use Redux [2] [3], but that doesn't change the flood of Medium blog posts out there.
I created the Redux Style Guide docs page [4] to try to give some clarification on our actual current recommended patterns and usage practices, and our Redux Toolkit package to simplify common Redux use cases [5]. Unfortunately, there's only so much we can do - a lot of people never even look at the actual docs.
Just like to chime in and say I'm really appreciative of these efforts. I get devs at my firm who are learning to do web dev for the first time and ask why we're not using Redux by default. I link them to Dan's article and the Redux FAQ as part of my explanation that Redux is a life-saver when you need it and aggressive overengineering when you don't.
Thanks :) I also should have linked my post "Redux - Not Dead Yet!" [0], which talks about how Redux compares to other tools like context, useReducer, and GraphQL, when it makes sense to use those, and reasons why Redux is still useful depending on what you're actually trying to do.
I basically realized this when I was at an internship talking to a buddy about a compilers course I could be taking and his language he was making for fun. He was talking about a couple topics I'd probably go over in the course.
Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've noticed that "I have no idea" as an answer is one of the boldest statements you can make in the workplace.
Most people are playing fake it till you make it most of the time (until shit hits the fan, then incompetence becomes dangerous and you get to see who's been swimming naked)
You and your senior coworker are allowed to not know things, and furthermore, allowed to talk about things that you don't know much about.
Was your role or the senior person's role related to compilers? You don't have to authoritatively know something to talk about it, and I never assume anyone knows anything authoritatively if they talk about it nonchalantly.
I once mentioned off-hand that I was a SIGPLAN member so that I could get the proceedings and learn about future tech in compilers and JITs and GC.
One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.
As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.
I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.
Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.
As a saying that used to be popular back in the day goes, Nobody has been fired for buying (from) IBM. This in my view is what explains much of the problem.
If tech is kinda full of bullshit, which on better or worse kinda need to rely on math, and most of the time can be reviewed - then wait until you go to socio science, like psychology. You need to see there how much bullshit it is, you won't believe it. But, just like tech, it's better with it rather then without it.
If most of it is bullshit, then the harm of bullshit mustn't be that high.
If it were, then none of this would exist.
But that there are some many tech companies taking so many different approaches (the majority bullshit) stands as evidence that there must be some acceptable amount of bullshit an organization can handle.
Textbook code is nice, but shipping and improving product is nicer.
The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.
Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read.
Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting.
Thumbs up for this. It is just a physical limitation of time, if you're writing you're not coding. I love when Aaron Patterson writes a post once in a blue moon, because they are so interesting.
Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.
I don't work 16 hours a day. Writing good content is a lot of effort, especially after 8 hours of coding. If you're churning out a post a week I would say that is already a lot.
Yes, sure there are good devs who write good content. But what I'm saying is that if you spend most of your time writing, you definitely don't have the same experience as someone who's mostly doing work with code.
> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.
Not only this, but the most accurate business advice tends to be too boring to attract views and clicks anyway.
Link-sharing sites favor controversial opinions and stances that make the reader feel superior to their peers, so that's what the content producers deliver.
>> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.
I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do it, even if it comes at the expense of greater levels of productivity.
It totally depends on the tutorial and the way it is written. I have personally learned a lot from "hey everyone, I just learned this neat thing and wanted to share!" type articles on the Internet, where the author discloses their level of experience upfront so you can have the appropriate expectations.
But the category of articles that I was criticizing here is when unemployed students pretend to be the authority on topic X to improve their chances of getting hired. Those articles typically do not disclose the lack of experience of the other. Quite the contrary, some of them even make up achievements and/or credentials.
I think this depends on what you're learning and how you've learned how to learn. As a beginner, I don't have any business going right to the master to ask about how I can improve my skills, so that I can "level up" and get the best results right away. Then again, we Western folk like pills and magic solutions for everything. We want results now, now, now.
If you're a white belt, go chat with a yellow or orange belt. If you're a blue belt, go chat with the purple belt. You don't walk up to a black belt and ask about the best way to tie your belt. No, you go ask the other white belts who have been at it for a little longer than you have, the people who have a couple of stripes on their belt. These people are closer to where you are in the given moment. They were in your shoes not too long ago, so they can help translate your mistakes, and help make sense of what you're thinking, asking, or learning.
When you see a really great photograph that touches you in ways you cannot describe, you're not seeing the product of an expensive camera, or a filter, you're seeing the result of someone who has taken hundreds of thousands of really shitty photographs over the course of their lifetime. You're seeing the results of maybe decades of practice. If this person writes a tutorial about taking photographs, can you learn from it? Sure. But they're not going to make you a better photographer by osmosis, you've got to go take a lot of pictures and read the beginners tutorials along the way.
So yeah, if I've been burning my bread rolls for months, I'd love to know that one thing you did to not set the house on fire every time you put rolls in the oven.
I believe there is a categorical difference between skills operating on a continuum and those operating in a binary fashion.
Pretty much all motor skills like like Karate can be performed okay, good, better, really good, etc. Similarly, I can take gradual baby steps from being a bad photographer towards becoming okay and then good.
But for most programming things, it either works correctly, or it doesn't. There's very little middle ground in an algorithm. Either it works to solve your problem, or it doesn't. Accordingly, I don't believe I can learn much from someone else's broken example in the way that I could learn from a (mediocre but slightly better than me) photographer.
This is not true. The code can be flawless, slightly buggy, maintennable with some effort, hardly maintennable or unfixable. And then there are personal preferences and opinions about what is good code.
The algorithm can be slow, slightly faster, fast.
The intro into framework can be in the middle too.
But within context of a tutorial, anything less than flawless is not worthy of inclusion (making it binary in this case). IMO, any content aimed for beginners should be flawless.
Beyond introductory material, it's a trade off of complexity and time as it's hard to compress the factors needed to demonstrate anything technical.
It depends on what the thing is you've just learned and your background. For example, this week I worked a bit on an article on the working with the Go "analysis" package for running and writing your own static analysis tools (not yet finished). I "just learned" this 2 weeks ago and wrote a few things in it.
I think it's useful to share my experience on this: there isn't a whole lot of content on it and I think people could benefit from it. It's also helpful for myself, because writing it down clearly means I understand it better too now.
My background here is that I've been programming in Go for over 4 years and have worked with the Go ast package before (though not the analysis framework). I'm hardly a renowned expert on it, but I'd like to think that I have enough background/experience to know what I'm doing and communicate that information others.
This might be true for some, but certainly not all.
There are plenty talented, productive people also writing articles and giving talks. Hell, most of what I watch/read (not just skim) is content either from the main drivers of a given tech or people who are experts.
Disagree. When I do work, I’m super excited and can’t help but want to share. I know lots of people that have a similar outlook to work that brings them joy. It lights you up and you want others to share in that light.
>>The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.
This is one of the most poisonous attitudes I have ever seen when it comes to tech content, and unfortunately it is really prevalent in the largest tech companies.
No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.
> No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.
A natural consequence of documentation being a "good beginner task" in open source or being assigned to whoever cannot get out of it on the project team.
This is definitely true - I have been told by many respected people over the years that I should start a blog since I have a lot of interesting thoughts on subjects, but a lot of the issue to me is that I have a tendency to want to shape the tech the way I want for a blog, which leads to endless bikeshedding, and it's not as rewarding for me for the effort compared to doing more higher value things for work such as creating unplanned projects to solve work pains, planning other projects, figuring out new solutions to problems encountered at work, or mentoring other developers.
I have a tendency to drop my nuggets of wisdom/analysis in chatrooms in Discord and Slack (and IRC prior) and let others adopt/evangelize them on their own if it makes sense for them to. I'm ok being in the background while my true value is appreciated by those who matter for my own career.
> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.
I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby.
That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing?
They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's not unreasonable to state that, in general and in practice, software engineering and (regular) technical writing are mutually exclusive.
If those engineers are working 40 hours a week and are awake for about 110, what are they doing with their other 70 hours? Sure some of that is commuting, showering, etc., but presumably they have other activities.
For some people, their hobby is technical writing.
Saying that they are mutually exclusive would be like saying that being an engineer and doing puzzles is mutually exclusive because they both require a lot of mental effort.
Or being an engineer and a musician are mutually exclusive. It's a silly thing to assume that technical writing is somehow different from any other hobby.
Writing great blog or having pet project after working full time is equivalent of working overtime or crunch. Had this been effective, persistent overtime would be effective too.
Which is why it is not happening. The actual rest time and hobby is when you do it whenever you feel like and stop how you feel like. Once you make it project and treat it seriously, it is work.
Also, other stuff that is done after work: cooking, cleaning, shopping, picking up kids and talking with them, sport to be healthy. These amount to not exactly small chunk of time.
I am in an odd position where I'm writing a book at the same time I'm writing a library the book uses.
It's a fascinating experience. How being a good writer and software engineer go hand in hand. If my library is not easy to understand, my book won't be succesful. I'm constantly going back to edit the library to make sure the book / related concepts can be grokked.
I feel this is a fairly general truism. Great software engineers are often technical writers. Both involve understanding what the 'reader' expects to see, needs to understand, and how the whole narrative/program fits together cohesively. I'd encourage anyone who wants to up their software engineering game to work on their writing skills first.
To be clear - I didn't mean that the two _roles_ are mutually exclusive. The opposite - I think that definitely, there are common quality required between software engineering and technical writing.
What I meant is that in real world, due to times constraints, they are. As a sibling poster commented, working as a hobby ends up being a work in itself, so doing both things ends up being, effectively, overtime.
And as a consequence, all the general considerations about overtime apply.
I assume company blogs have a process where you have approval over what you write, both before and after the article is written. To this end (more so if the author has "evangelist" in their job title) the writing is a function of their job, and not a hobby.
Function of their job or not, the point is that the people who are implementing the technology are the ones writing about it. The "doers" are also doing the writing.
The point is that many (not all, of course, so there will always be counterexamples) who are "doing" don't have the bandwidth to produce great content. If your employer pays you to do it inside of your regular work schedule, that changes the equation.
Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far from a programmer. That's not to disrespect any of their content. In fact i think its great that companies bother with it and that we have so many tech authors willing to put in the hours it takes to come up with something sellable. Arguably the people writing such things put their companies rep on the line so should be more trusted than the average grunt programmer who is still on the implementation level. But if these are the best counterexamples we can find, then I'd say OP has a point. That's not to say coders don't write blogs, I've written a few technical blogs myself and I am very much on the implementation level. But that's not something people will actually read because it's pretty low effort and not about work stuff (every work contract has a secrecy clause these days).
> Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work.
Not usually. Usually the way it works is the person who wrote the code and developed the technology decides to write a blog post about it and then writes it. Then they pass it around to their peers and other leadership for comments and edits.
Then, at least at Netflix, the next step was usually to publish it yourself on the tech blog. Sometimes if it was a big new tech it might get reviewed by PR or legal but not often.
At the other tech companies I don't know what their process is after that.
But what I do know is that I know a lot of those authors personally and they are definitely implementers.
He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer. I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it.
But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at all true.
Not sure if the blogs from tech companies can really count here. Those articles are made with the company's interest in mind, typically to boost recruiting. In my experience, they are always written on company time.
I know many people who do great work and talk about it. The work is hard and getting to speak about it at a conference or write a well-received blog post is their preferred kind of reward.
Software libraries, APIs, tools, dependencies have exploded exponentially since the early days of C language and a handful of Berkley/Bell libraries. I often use a dozen different things for my projects and the next project invariable needs a different roster.
Thus I want to voice my contrary opinion that it is okay to "consume" and not "create" for non-core parts of your project. Need to do dump an arcane data structure to a remote logging tool? Go ahead and copy paste that StackExchange snippet kings!
Sure, most tech articles are bullshit... but the question is, is the average developer going to do better figuring it out on their own? Are articles worse than the average developer?
I forget the exact numbers but half of all programmers have been doing it less than five years, and this has been true the whole time. Exponential growth, eh?
Also, IT is fashion-driven and largely ahistorical. I have worked with people who don't know who Alan Kay is, for example, or have never heard of Prolog.
I think we are in an alchemical phase and (hopefully) transitioning to a chemical phase of knowledge. (Alchemy was mostly bullshit too, but there was a hellofa bull in there, eh?)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadMaybe all blogs should say this lol
I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.
Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.
It's useful and interesting, but also content marketing.
"Hate the player for choosing to play the game."
* 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s
* fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?)
* 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.
Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
So ... he basically just read the TypeScript "getting started" tutorial, transformed it to a presentation, and had no real knowledge of TypeScript.
The entire talk seemed pretty useless to me. I don't even know how accurate that presentation was, because there's much more to using a language effectively than the basic syntax learned from a glance at a tutorial page.
I think Dunning-Kruger is part of it, but also excitement.
If you are the expert you probably got that way by putting in a lot of time, you are at any rate older than when you started out and you may be in fact be quite older than the average developer, often older people do not have the same enthusiasm and excitement for things (although sure there are many that do) so that cuts down the number of people who have experience who also have enthusiasm for getting up and talking.
Getting up and Talking means doing work for it, if you have kids you may not want to do that work unless your job is one where you have to do it. So if you are an older expert with kids but not employed in an evangelist role you probably are not going to go out and do talks.
The expert in a subject may see so deeply into the subject that it is difficult for them to express the gee-whiz aspects that will attract other people. Those who know more are not necessarily able to express that knowledge in an interesting way.
The expert may have lost interest in the matter as they gain in expertise, or they may think things that others will find amazing and interesting to be so obvious and trivial as to not be worth expressing.
For these reasons it may be that talks on a subject are preponderantly given by those with less than expert mastery of the subject.
Do you think or feel it is shameful for you to give introductory talk? Did you grew up in environment where such thing was mocked or did you grew up somewhere it was praised? Do you think it matters super much if someone in audiemce looks down on you or are you rather motivated by single person that likes you?
Do you think you need to be super awesome experienced speaker to make first public talk? Are you ok having public talk with primary purpose being to learn doing public talks?
These imo make the difference. It is not like there would be lines of experts wanting to talk.
To you. On the flip side, it provided an introductory level overview of a concept many watching/attending may not have looked into themselves, or were thinking of looking into. It also provided a different form of introduction, which could be valuable for attendees with a learning style preference different to that of look-at-a-how-to or check-out-the-docs.
>the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
Hey, at least he was honest and didn't try to bluff his way through an answer, as many in our industry will.
Overall, depending on the audience and context, it sounds like it may have been worthwhile for many attendees. Plus he got to work on his soft skills, and doing so with such vulnerability could inspire others to also.
For example I currently mostly work with Go, and if I would give a high-level presentation about Go I'd start with the "tour of Go" tutorial, but I'd also add some context to some things, explain where you need to be careful to avoid problems, and emphasize the usefulness of other things that may not be obvious at a glance. That kind of stuff. I think the presentation format is a great way for doing that.
A beginning JavaScript programmer might explain the "with" keyword, which would be a mistake. I have no idea if the presentation contained any mistakes like that.
I don't work much with JS, and I haven't looked much as TypeScript since, but I didn't really learn all that much more than what I already knew: "TypeScript is JavaScript with optional typing".
Was it useful for others? Maybe; I hope so. But for me personally I consider it a wasted hour in my life.
Is this not true of most tech meetups / tech conferences though? I feel like they all carry an implicit YMMV with them, which attendees know when deciding to join.
It doesn't matter how eloquent and thorough the introductory tutorial is, if the presenter has not experienced the technology sufficiently to have accumulated a few scars[1], they will not have the ability to convey the relative importance of the various aspects of the introduction, with which can be modified simply as a matter of taste, and which should be followed unless very careful consideration of global engineering context, and a full appreciation of the consequences.
If you are unable to meet that bar, at the very least, your abstract should make that abundantly clear out of respect for your audience.
[1] or at least have the experience to say that normally they would have expected to get bitten by something by their point in usage, but the technology meets their requirements so thoroughly that it has been particularly smooth sailing.
Then I was looking at other conferences lineups and saw many repeat speakers from that same conf, often with the same talk, turned me off quite a bit from going to any more conferences, lots of the same, basic content, with not much expertise behind it.
The value is mostly in hanging out with various people. The best experience has generally been when I went alone and met loads of new people, instead of going with coworkers or friends and then just hang out with them. Not that's not fun either, but I can do that next weekend anyway.
The more professionally organised ones don't tend to have that many stands, except for paying sponsors. I understand why they do that, but I think there's good value in "community stands" too.
I mean, the talks themselves are just "shut up and listen", right? Not too much socializing happening there. I think that revolving the entire conference around presentations is probably not always the best format.
There was a big space for vendors to have stalls but if you talked to them it was like talking to a sales person. Sometimes they had a tech-oriented sales person but it was still selling you their product.
So I think that repeated talks and intro talks are to be expected. Through I did not mind them, I used them to get idea about new thing X while I have time set aside for learning.
Most tech events don't in general pay for speakers or any travel. (Keynotes, scholarships, etc. are among the sometimes exceptions.)
I rarely literally re-use a presentation slide for slide but many presentations I give are based on an earlier presentation I gave. In most cases, a different conference is going to be a mostly different audience. In general, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just dump a presentation because I gave it once to a couple hundred peop,e.
Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts.
I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.
I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
It has also been somewhat useful in projects where a concern with documentation has been expressed because the writing is a better example of my ability to document things than having worked on a lot of projects where you may be able to go see what we shipped but not be able to see anything of the documentation.
I think of the writing as the equivalent of a side project:
* it allows me to focus on something I want to learn
* it helps to make what I learn stick in my head
* it gives me a deadline and people who will send me emails to say how's it going with that
* it works as documentation for what I've learned
* it gives me a trivial amount of money for having taken the time to learn something. Basically the last article I wrote is paying for an annual Dropbox account, and a couple days worth of food for my family. It was way too much work for that to be worthwhile, but I did learn some things that will help with later stuff.
It made rounds in the professional circles I traveled in and established myself as, while not necessarily a leader, someone at least very fluent in a particular process.
This was also in 2010 though, so the social landscape Was quite different
It shouldn't be this way, but it frequently is.
Experienced developers usually aren't busy writing blog posts. Nor are they engaged on HN. As the old saying goes, those who can are out doing, those who can't `teach'.
This touched a nerve, but sorry it's spot on. The more faltering the career, the less certain the skills, the more likely the person has a vigorous social media and blog presence.
Guy made a tiny, miserable little service that would have made more money if he worked at Walmart. He was the seer who provided day after day of front page content for this site, the "fake it till you make it" ruse in full effect. Because his product was so miserably unsuccessfully he instead put all of his effort into blog posts and "lessons" for people to follow, and the suckers lined up.
People with actually successful products were just off being successful.
And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.
Gifs are great
Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.
I sampled your work. It's exactly what we're talking about.
I'm sure this works for you, financially and SEO-wise.. but.. maybe use 500 words and no gifs instead?
My point is that this stuff doesn’t have to be boring and dry. It’s okay for content to reflect having fun when you’re having fun.
Even my college professors used jokes in their lectures.
Actually, let me change my mind on the GIFs. Keep the best ones.
Don't forget emojis! Such a waste of time! ⌛⌛⌛
I recall an especially egregious one on Clojure where the author had used the language for all of about a week before writing up his detailed hot takes on some "cons" of the language, like needing to know some complicated thing called `let` in order too assign variables.
I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.
P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.
In any case, this project kind of didn't need any auto-magical serialization library, but the promise was reduced boilerplate. Instead, we just got way more complex boilerplate and a damn dependency forcing me to change how I want to write my code.
inline classes straight-up don't work with Jackson, and probably never will. So for every class that has a field that is an inline class, I have to write a "builder class" that's exactly the same except replacing the inline class with the class it wraps.
Also, @JsonUnwrapped doesn't work with Kotlin. And, of course, doing anything with generics is a complex nightmare with Jackson (because of JVM's type erasure).
Not to mention, all these failures happen at runtime, so you don't even know your class is going to be a problem until you run the code.
The whole thing just sucks and I actually miss the simplicity of translating by hand...
...
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...
This Schopenhauer essay resonates strongly with me, hitting on and unifying numerous concepts I'd been playing with. And saying it well.
Even in translation ;-)
I'm still upset that the University of Adelaide's book server was shut down, as it had a wonderfully-formatted set of the essays, shared recently to HN. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21386663
Here are two contrary points of view. The philosoper Chrysippus dropped into his books not just passages but whole works by other authors, including in one instance the complete Medea of Euripides; and ApoUodorus said that if all that was not his own were to be cut out of his works the paper would be quite blank. Epicurus, on the other hand, did not introduce a single quotation into any of the three hundred volumes that he left behind him. I happened the other day to light on such a passage. I had been languidly following a string of French words, so bloodless, fleshless, and devoid of substance and meaning that they were just words of French and no more. Then at the end of this long and tiresome road I came upon a rich and lofty sentence which towered into the clouds. If I had found the slope gentle and the ascent somewhat gradual, it would have been excusable. But the rise was so sheer and precipitous that after the first six words I felt myself flying into another world, from which I recognized the depth of the abyss out of which I had come. So deep was it that I have never had the heart to plunge into it again. If I were to load one of my discourses with such rich spoils, it would throw too much light on the stupidity of the rest.
To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary. I know very well how boldly I myself attempt at every turn to rise to the level of my purloinings and to remain there, even rashly hoping that I can prevent the judicial eye from discovering them. In this endeavour my industry plays as great a part as my inventive powers. And then, I do not contend with those ancient champions in the mass and hand to hand, but only in repeated brushes, in slight and trivial encounters. I do not press them hard; I merely try their strength and never go as far as I hesitatingly intend. If I could hold my own with them I should be doing well, for I only attack them at their strongest points.
To cover themselves, as I have seen some writers doing, so completely in other men's armour as not to leave even their finger-tips showing; to compose a work from pieces gathered here and there among the ancients - an easy task for a man of learning who is treating an ordinary subject - and then to attempt to conceal...
Yes, that is beautiful, true, and illuminating.
It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.
To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..
When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.
By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.
At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.
I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.
Papers if you need to keep up with a topic.
I used to follow statsblogs, but that's dead now (the collection, most of the blogs still exist).
Anything that isn't covered in these forums probably isn't important enough to worry about.
Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.
I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.
But I fully agree, people should be creating their own ecosystems with links, rather than keeping huge portals happy.
I think the biggest problem isn't so much find "hey, that's a cool article"-type of content, but typing in [programming concept] in Google. What I want to find is things like in-depth experiences and advice regarding this which complement the manual. What I actually find it loads of "howtos" with "copy this" which just rehash the manual.
Results vary a bit depending on [programming concept], and I don't think simple "getting started with"-articles are completely useless either. But generally speaking, there are too many of them, many of them are not of high quality, and it obscures more in-depth content.
I'm not sure if maintaining a list of links would really solve that. Perhaps community projects like "awesome-foo"-lists have some potential here, but in practice I've found many of them to be dumping grounds rather than carefully curated.
Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.
But this is about plagiarism.
The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.
Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?
His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.
However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.
[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.
If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.
"Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was going to go to..."
"NOT ALL RIDING HOODS ARE RED AND FRANKLY I OBJECT TO ANYONE WHO MONOLITHICALLY TRIES TO SAY SO AND I'M GETTING A VIBE... SEIZE HIM!"
To teach yourself programming in 1990 you would've gone to a bookstore or library, that employed a buyer/curator, who bought from a distributor, who bought from a publisher, who bought from an author, who probably also dealt with an agent and an editor. Other than the author and his/her own desire to produce something good, there were 3-5 other layers in the process, 3-5 other entities making the decision, should we submit this, should we publish this, should we distribute this, should we buy this and devote shelf space to selling it. Each of those steps is a gate through which only a limited quantity can pass, so whatever else it actually means, the book you pick up off the shelf in 1990 has passed through all those gates. Nowadays excellent and shitty writers alike are free of that.
The thing putting a negative spin on it is that at least in this author's opinion, "Most tech content is bullshit." I'm saying maybe that's because now we have access to the bottom 90% too along with the top 10% that we already had. (There was bullshit in the old days too of course, but it was usually found coming out of someone's mouth as opposed to in a book that someone bothered to spend money to print thousands of times. Although there are exceptions there too! It's death by a thousand disclaimers up in here!)
2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.
3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.
I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.
If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).
I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"
With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.
Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"
Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.
So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.
blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.
Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything...
Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality...
https://medium.com/@Amyperlman/best-buying-oscilloscope-for-...
Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...
If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.
For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)
Youtube's algorithm encourages video farms that upload frequently even if they recycle content. Ann Reardon discusses this problem as it relates to recipe video's frequently on her cooking channel.
My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. Blog post end up bloated and thin on real information because it is considered good SEO and apparently Google really tends to rank longer articles higher. Same is true for tech books, which are often bloated because the author has to reach their target page count.
YouTube videos seem to be mostly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want to tell. This is not universally true for video content though. If you look at online learning platforms, like Udemy for example, you can find many courses that spread an hour worth of content over typically five or six hours. My fear is that Google will someday decide to make the length of a video a ranking factor and we will have the same bloated videos on YouTube too.
> Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately.
Producing decent video content is much more elaborate and expensive than written reviews. My suspicion is that on YouTube paid reviews are even more common than on blogs and the norm is just not to mention it. Doesn't mean they are useless of course, just as you wrote "judge their bias appropriately".
I don't think this is an accident: YouTube apparently ranks based on watch time / retention, so if you make your video too long and people don't watch to the end it hurts you.
Any kind of machine maintenance video has so much preamble, when what I'm really after is like 25 seconds of silently accessing the part, pausing to circle stuff in red, and narrating stuff that's hard to see from the video
[0]: Siraj Raval (700k subscribers!): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A
[1]: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/10/16/why-siraj-ravals-...
> Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.
Reads like it went through Google translate twice.
The king is naked!
• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]
• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]
• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]
Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!
• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]
Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?
This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers.
Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile.
That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic.
Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1].
Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine.
[1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.
Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.
They could hook this into Google Analytics and subtract the time you spent with that tab/window not focussed from your session duration.
I do fundamentally agree that session duration may not be the worst proxy for worthwhile content or, at least, engaging content, snd I think Google may use it as such.
For instance, quite a few times I'll open a page in Google's results, scan the content and go back to compare it to another result. That doesn't necessarily mean I hate the first page or think it's terrible, just that I wanted to see what it had to offer.
It can also mean I did find the answer there, and am returning to Google to search for something else instead.
It's tough to distinguish cases like those from 'the content was bad' and 'the content was not what I was looking for'.
There's also the worry that it might end up hurting user incentives too, or alter the way in which users browse the internet as a whole.
After all, since finding out that YouTube rewards/punishes creators based on watch time/how much of the video someone watches, I'm now hesitant to even watch many videos at all, since I know some guy's career might potentially be put on the line.
Perhaps Google worries other people will be the same, and stop clicking as many results knowing that Google might punish the affected websites for not staying long enough.
I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily looking for something specific.
But that involves building up a ratings database of lots of different URLs. If it becomes really popular, I'd like to experiment with search. It could start with a "normal" search algorithm but then adjust the results based on rating data. E.g. "the top result for this query is X, but people with similar rating data to you always down vote that link, so we'll move that result down".
I've heard people complain about how Google gives you personalized search results sometimes, but I'm not sure if the approach is actually bad. Perhaps it could work if it was focused on from the start instead of bolted on.
[1] https://findka.com
I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without actually engaging with stuff.
That brings up a key point which I'm not sure is clear to users or not: voting on items specifically means "this is/is not a good recommendation for me". It's not a judgment on the goodness of the item in general. So if findka showed me e.g. an article on pottery that looked high quality, I'd probably still downvote it since I'm not into pottery.
[I hated this] [I'm interested in this] [I liked this]
I've never got around to doing it and one of the reasons (excuses) is that I haven't yet figured out a way to stop bad actors exploiting it by, e.g., mass downvoting URLs of competitors. I did think about some sort of moving average, or bias toward more recent votes, which would at least somewhat mitigate against transient actions of this kind, but it's harder to deal with a sustained attack like this.
That is still exploitable: if I know you like A, B, and C, (perhaps those are popular items), I could also upvote those items and then downvote another item D. I have an idea for countering this: keep track of history. So instead of just measuring ratings overlap ("of items you've both rated, 75% of items were rated the same"), you keep track of the performance of recommendations made from that user ("of Alice's items that we recommended to Bob, Bob upvoted them 25% of the time").
I haven't thought about this super deeply yet, but I think to beat that, you'd have to actually provide valuable data to the system in the first place.
I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.
That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.
This is a feature; not a bug given the way our quasi-free-market founded on protection of trade secrets over actual marketwide innovation that lifts everyone else.
I try guiding anyone who'll listen how to do things I'm well versed in; but there is only so much one can do in a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790
The value of a healthy established pedagogy, curriculum, and canon is that these distribute the bullshit-sifting role and guard and promote the jems.
But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can help.
[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/book-review-archive
You can read an article, and figure out if it is crap for yourself.
But then you can check your work by reading the discussion around it (like HN comments). Look at the top (and bottom) comments. Match your thoughts against the opinions and comments of other critical thinkers.
A lot of critical thinking has already been done for you.
This doesn't always work, but a good comment/upvote/moderation system can be a surprising bullshit filter.
My comment does NOT apply to automated systems, or systems were money/seo/gaming have a payoff for someone. So please ignore this for facebook, for anything with sponsored results, for product reviews, or for wikipedia pages of wealthy or prominent individuals.
Of course your work can speak for itself, but who can hear it? Advertising through technical writing seems to be a very good thing as long as its valuable and honest. Because if it isn’t we filter it out.
We're also all driven to correct the things we see that aren't quite right.
This comment has been a little of column A and a little of column B.
It's a standard disclaimer because giving legal advice without being licensed to practice law is a crime in many jurisdictions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/03/technology/suddenly-every...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181018000000/https://www.nytim...
There was also a strong politics subreddit full of group-think but that wasn't what most people went there for I'd say. It was one of three subreddits if i recall.
The site definitely changed when users could create their own subreddits as that opened the board to just about every kind of person or group on the internet.
I believe sites would do best to specialize even at the cost of growth. I'm happy when hackernews sticks mostly to tech and doesn't silo us into specialized and moderated subreddits.
No, in all seriousness I think this is one true factor. But I feel like this isn’t a bad thing on its own. The issue arises when authors don’t disclose their knowledge or competence. Saying stuff like: this is what I assume, this us what I don’t know etc. or just posing plain questions.
There's another dimension to this too, which is that writing blog posts and coming off as knowledgeable can directly translate into career opportunities. As long as you aren't too wrong, there's a material incentive to putting stuff out there.
There is certainly value in that, also from a self-promotional perspective.
Also have you seen a job posting for an entry level software engineering position? You have to say you’re knowledgeable about everything on the application or you will get filtered out in the first round. Publishing blog posts is the easiest way to come across as knowledgeable about a new tech.
The combination of the two facets is much more useful than either alone.
In some places, throwing out opinions to stimulate discussion is perfectly reasonable. In others, it's simply noise and misinformation.
If seeking validation is the prime motivation to contribute to a discussion, at the very least I think HN is the least guilty of this amongst most forums.
In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g. politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much correlated with their knowledge of the subject.
Looking back, it seems Feburary/March/April covid-19 experts' expertise had the same (or worse) predictive power as random programmers on HN.
Please tell me you did this on purpose.
I think IANAL is a popular term on HN because HN originated in a country with a terribly litigious culture, and because HN is primarily populated by people who can at least afford lawyers.
If I'd "talk to a lawyer" as often as HN comments recommend people do then I'd have no money (or time) left to eat. The whole thing is about covering your ass.
So less about being validated for our experience, more about trying to avoid being dragged into court/relied on for evidence in a future court case.
I suppose that is validation in a way, but not to feed my ego.
However, I will expand on a specific pattern of bullshit that is common in the tech world: over-complication for the sake of some sort of "theoretical purity". I think Redux is a good example of this. I think Redux can be used well, but it became the "recommended way to do global state in React" and IMO way many more code bases have become an incomprehensible nightmare because of Redux than have been helped by it.
Similarly, and I'm probably dating myself, but anyone remember the original Enterprise Java Bean specs, and the laughably bad "Pet Store" demo app from the early 00s? It was as if you took a collection of "architects" with no real world experience, and certainly no regard for performance, and had them create the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machine possible.
We specifically have info in our docs on when it actually makes sense to use Redux [2] [3], but that doesn't change the flood of Medium blog posts out there.
I created the Redux Style Guide docs page [4] to try to give some clarification on our actual current recommended patterns and usage practices, and our Redux Toolkit package to simplify common Redux use cases [5]. Unfortunately, there's only so much we can do - a lot of people never even look at the actual docs.
[0] https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be4...
[1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-ta...
[2] https://redux.js.org/introduction/getting-started#should-you...
[3] https://redux.js.org/faq/general#when-should-i-use-redux
[4] https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide
[5] https://redux-toolkit.js.org
[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-yet...
On one side there are blogs that just post content to keep momentum, say csstricks.com, and don’t care to fix their errors even after you report them.
On the other side there are absolute noobs that post unresearched content just because some VIP tweeted that you don’t need to be an expert to blog.
Well, that’s what you get: Bullshit everywhere.
Then of course you get awful StackOverflow “top” solutions that are straight up “worst practice”
Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Most people are playing fake it till you make it most of the time (until shit hits the fan, then incompetence becomes dangerous and you get to see who's been swimming naked)
Was your role or the senior person's role related to compilers? You don't have to authoritatively know something to talk about it, and I never assume anyone knows anything authoritatively if they talk about it nonchalantly.
One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.
As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.
I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.
Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.
I often check documentation of even well-known functions like printf() to remind me of details that I might have forgotten or remember inaccurately.
If it were, then none of this would exist.
But that there are some many tech companies taking so many different approaches (the majority bullshit) stands as evidence that there must be some acceptable amount of bullshit an organization can handle.
Textbook code is nice, but shipping and improving product is nicer.
The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.
Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read.
Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting.
Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.
Exactly. You probably spend at least some time on a hobby. For some people their hobby is technical writing.
Not only this, but the most accurate business advice tends to be too boring to attract views and clicks anyway.
Link-sharing sites favor controversial opinions and stances that make the reader feel superior to their peers, so that's what the content producers deliver.
I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do it, even if it comes at the expense of greater levels of productivity.
How would you feel if I write a cookbook the first time my bread rolls didn't catch fire? ... to solicit feedback?
But the category of articles that I was criticizing here is when unemployed students pretend to be the authority on topic X to improve their chances of getting hired. Those articles typically do not disclose the lack of experience of the other. Quite the contrary, some of them even make up achievements and/or credentials.
I think this depends on what you're learning and how you've learned how to learn. As a beginner, I don't have any business going right to the master to ask about how I can improve my skills, so that I can "level up" and get the best results right away. Then again, we Western folk like pills and magic solutions for everything. We want results now, now, now.
If you're a white belt, go chat with a yellow or orange belt. If you're a blue belt, go chat with the purple belt. You don't walk up to a black belt and ask about the best way to tie your belt. No, you go ask the other white belts who have been at it for a little longer than you have, the people who have a couple of stripes on their belt. These people are closer to where you are in the given moment. They were in your shoes not too long ago, so they can help translate your mistakes, and help make sense of what you're thinking, asking, or learning.
When you see a really great photograph that touches you in ways you cannot describe, you're not seeing the product of an expensive camera, or a filter, you're seeing the result of someone who has taken hundreds of thousands of really shitty photographs over the course of their lifetime. You're seeing the results of maybe decades of practice. If this person writes a tutorial about taking photographs, can you learn from it? Sure. But they're not going to make you a better photographer by osmosis, you've got to go take a lot of pictures and read the beginners tutorials along the way.
So yeah, if I've been burning my bread rolls for months, I'd love to know that one thing you did to not set the house on fire every time you put rolls in the oven.
Pretty much all motor skills like like Karate can be performed okay, good, better, really good, etc. Similarly, I can take gradual baby steps from being a bad photographer towards becoming okay and then good.
But for most programming things, it either works correctly, or it doesn't. There's very little middle ground in an algorithm. Either it works to solve your problem, or it doesn't. Accordingly, I don't believe I can learn much from someone else's broken example in the way that I could learn from a (mediocre but slightly better than me) photographer.
The algorithm can be slow, slightly faster, fast.
The intro into framework can be in the middle too.
Beyond introductory material, it's a trade off of complexity and time as it's hard to compress the factors needed to demonstrate anything technical.
I think it's useful to share my experience on this: there isn't a whole lot of content on it and I think people could benefit from it. It's also helpful for myself, because writing it down clearly means I understand it better too now.
My background here is that I've been programming in Go for over 4 years and have worked with the Go ast package before (though not the analysis framework). I'm hardly a renowned expert on it, but I'd like to think that I have enough background/experience to know what I'm doing and communicate that information others.
There are plenty talented, productive people also writing articles and giving talks. Hell, most of what I watch/read (not just skim) is content either from the main drivers of a given tech or people who are experts.
It isn’t that hard to differentiate.
Paradoxically when NOT doing work I share less
This is one of the most poisonous attitudes I have ever seen when it comes to tech content, and unfortunately it is really prevalent in the largest tech companies.
No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.
A natural consequence of documentation being a "good beginner task" in open source or being assigned to whoever cannot get out of it on the project team.
I have a tendency to drop my nuggets of wisdom/analysis in chatrooms in Discord and Slack (and IRC prior) and let others adopt/evangelize them on their own if it makes sense for them to. I'm ok being in the background while my true value is appreciated by those who matter for my own career.
I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby.
Here are entire blogs by people who are "doing":
http://www.brendangregg.com
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com
https://netflixtechblog.com
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com
https://airbnb.io
https://engineering.fb.com
Those are just a few I can think of in one minute. If I went through my RSS feeds and bookmarks I could find more.
https://www.heavybit.com/library/
https://alestic.com
https://blog.deepracing.io
https://www.haproxy.com/blog/
Podcasts:
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/offerzen-podcast
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzo_FqWUbEH0AYs0NilUWpA
https://podbay.fm/podcast/996111298
It doesn't matter if it's sad and cynical, it matters if it's true.
That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing?
They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's not unreasonable to state that, in general and in practice, software engineering and (regular) technical writing are mutually exclusive.
For some people, their hobby is technical writing.
Saying that they are mutually exclusive would be like saying that being an engineer and doing puzzles is mutually exclusive because they both require a lot of mental effort.
Or being an engineer and a musician are mutually exclusive. It's a silly thing to assume that technical writing is somehow different from any other hobby.
Which is why it is not happening. The actual rest time and hobby is when you do it whenever you feel like and stop how you feel like. Once you make it project and treat it seriously, it is work.
Also, other stuff that is done after work: cooking, cleaning, shopping, picking up kids and talking with them, sport to be healthy. These amount to not exactly small chunk of time.
It's a fascinating experience. How being a good writer and software engineer go hand in hand. If my library is not easy to understand, my book won't be succesful. I'm constantly going back to edit the library to make sure the book / related concepts can be grokked.
I feel this is a fairly general truism. Great software engineers are often technical writers. Both involve understanding what the 'reader' expects to see, needs to understand, and how the whole narrative/program fits together cohesively. I'd encourage anyone who wants to up their software engineering game to work on their writing skills first.
What I meant is that in real world, due to times constraints, they are. As a sibling poster commented, working as a hobby ends up being a work in itself, so doing both things ends up being, effectively, overtime.
And as a consequence, all the general considerations about overtime apply.
Not usually. Usually the way it works is the person who wrote the code and developed the technology decides to write a blog post about it and then writes it. Then they pass it around to their peers and other leadership for comments and edits.
Then, at least at Netflix, the next step was usually to publish it yourself on the tech blog. Sometimes if it was a big new tech it might get reviewed by PR or legal but not often.
At the other tech companies I don't know what their process is after that.
But what I do know is that I know a lot of those authors personally and they are definitely implementers.
He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer. I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it.
But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at all true.
Thus I want to voice my contrary opinion that it is okay to "consume" and not "create" for non-core parts of your project. Need to do dump an arcane data structure to a remote logging tool? Go ahead and copy paste that StackExchange snippet kings!
Also, IT is fashion-driven and largely ahistorical. I have worked with people who don't know who Alan Kay is, for example, or have never heard of Prolog.
I think we are in an alchemical phase and (hopefully) transitioning to a chemical phase of knowledge. (Alchemy was mostly bullshit too, but there was a hellofa bull in there, eh?)