I hope that every HN poster that loves to complain about Atwood's blog articles here reads this article.
You can accurately say that the message of this article, like many of his articles, is completely obvious. However, the typical HN response to his articles also points out that sometimes the completely obvious points can go unheeded.
Jeff does not help his case by being completely wrong much of the time and lacking insight the rest of the time. Many of us just assume that he is trying to drive traffic to his blog while wasting his audience's time.
There is a difference though; those of us who complain about inane CodingHorror submissions don't submit CodingHorror links. We're trying to Just Not Look already. If the CodingHorror links disappeared from HN, I don't think you'd see CodingHorror discussion threads just so we could complain some more.
> "I am absolutely sick to death of hearing about Susan Boyle, both in the traditional media and online. Nothing personal, you understand, I'm sure she's a perfectly lovely person. But I don't talk about Susan Boyle, because talking about her gives Susan Boyle power and currency. I just ignore Susan Boyle. I wish I had two brains so I could ignore her twice as hard. I. Just. Don't. Look. And if we could convince enough people to ignore her, she .. disappears. Poof. Like magic."
I've been ignoring links to coding horror for a long time. I clicked on this one because it seemed to be targeted to people like me, and I wondered if he was showing some self-awareness, or perhaps planning to take the blog in a new direction. For those who don't want to waste their time, the answer is "no".
That's actually the exact opposite of what I usually do. If the article looks interesting, I read it. If I can see why the article could be interesting but I'm not personally interested I ignore it. If, however, the article looks pointless I click through to the comments to see if it has hidden value or not. If consensus seems to be that it's interesting then I'll read it. If it's full of comments like the grandfather then I don't.
Coding Horror initially attracted me as a reader because it had some interesting anecdotes. Since then, I've been growing more and more disappointed, but this post reached a new threshold.
Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I find it condescending to imply that Steve Yegge decided to stop blogging because he can't handle criticism. Furthermore, the whole Susan Boyle reference seems like sensationalist approach to criticizing sensationalism.
With this post, Coding Horror has just jumped the proverbial shark. Or maybe it did so a long time ago and I didn't notice...
Steve Yegge said this in the comments to his last blog post:
"The short answer for why I'm going into blog-retirement is: insufficient return on investment. It's nice that some people like it, but it's too much work for the stress it's given me over the past 5 years."
Coding Horror didn't jump the shark, it is the shark. Atwood has been dispensing profoundly bad development advice for years, leveraging interesting (but pointless) anecdote and provocative opinions to drive traffic and interest.
I have to give Jeff some serious props for directly linking to Joel's criticism of CodingHorror, which remains unrefuted: that Jeff a) gets things wrong which it is possible (nay, easy) to get right, that b) this happens due to his tendency to speak about things he doesn't know (such as reviewing books he hasn't read), and c) this isn't the way to move science forward.
If you think something sucks to the extent that it's actively harming the world and you want it to go away, leaving comments to that effect is not the way. I know, because I bear the psychic scars of a million online flamewars, dating all the way back to 300 baud dualup modems and BBSes. I've been doing this a very long time. I've seen what works, and what doesn't.
If you're giving developers terrible advice on, for instance, how to write secure code, with an audience the size of yours, you have transcended 'online flamewar'. It's not a game anymore. At some point, at some level of influence, you actually take on some kind of responsibility to be right, and when you're wrong, you should be called on it in no uncertain terms.
This reminds me of those threads calling to ban TechCrunch from HN - it just promotes TechCrunch (I have no opinion the issue - it's just an example.)
pg doesn't talk that much about this, but it's in the guidelines, and I think it's one of his cornerstones of HN. Actually, he does it instead of talking about doing it. I have something to learn from him in this.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I never get tired of Hacker News' hatred of Jeff Atwood combined with the fact that Stack Overflow is far more successful than any project the vast majority of folks on Hacker News will ever implement.
Wouldn't the truth of your beliefs about software development be best expressed by the success of your projects?
"Wouldn't the truth of your beliefs about software development be best expressed by the success of your projects?"
Well, your statement could have a bit of truth if Jeff only blogged about how to create a successfull business, wich is obviously not the case. But even then, since i believe the success of a business relies much more on the quality of your original idea than on anything else, for me this is just dead false.
I'm interested in your claim that "the success of a business relies much more on the quality of your original idea than on anything else". Naturally this is absurd, and in comment threads not targeted at a favorite villain, no one would agree with that. Indeed, in a successful business the "original idea" often gets contorted out of any resemblance to the original.
At any rate, success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, I seem to have heard somewhere. Or, as a soft core porn actress once said in The Jade Goddess, on Cinemax late one night, "Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's what you do with them that counts."
I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea. If only ideas count, doesn't that make them even MORE important? Or, are you claiming that success is just luck?
Well, i may have badly phrased that. The success of your business does indeed rely on a very big number of things, and it's multi factorial. Also, your business can fail for multiple reasons.
Also, "original" was certainly not accurate, the current idea and orientation of the business is well enough, you're totally right about that.
But there is still some truth in what i say, in that , if your original idea doesn't appeal to a lot of people, you're not gonna have any success. Your site concept is the foundation, and SO concept is a very good one.
>"I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea"
I never made that claim, implicitly or explicitly, that's just your paranoïa speaking. Quite the contrary, i believe Jeff deserves full credit for what he did, and for his ideas. I also truely believe Jeff to be a very intelligent human being.
This is unrelated to the fact that i really think his technical level is quite low on everything programming related, at least in what he shows on his blog. That combined with the very blunt displays he makes of his claims is probably the source of all the "hate" you see on technically oriented sites like HN.
This is not to say Jeff is a bad programmer. All you can deduce from his blog is that he likes to banter about things he doesn't truly know. The fact that he's ignorant of some things doesn't set him appart - we all ignore much more than we know - the fact that he talks about it like an expert does .
24 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 61.1 ms ] threadYou can accurately say that the message of this article, like many of his articles, is completely obvious. However, the typical HN response to his articles also points out that sometimes the completely obvious points can go unheeded.
http://github.com/zacharydanger/coding-horrible/tree/master
It's more of a joke than anything.
Unbelievable.
Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I find it condescending to imply that Steve Yegge decided to stop blogging because he can't handle criticism. Furthermore, the whole Susan Boyle reference seems like sensationalist approach to criticizing sensationalism.
With this post, Coding Horror has just jumped the proverbial shark. Or maybe it did so a long time ago and I didn't notice...
I am long past trying to figure when atwoods joking or completely missing something.
Except obviously he doesn't ;-)
Reminds me of that Zen story about the monks who help a woman across a river.
For anyone else: http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/obsessed.html
If you're giving developers terrible advice on, for instance, how to write secure code, with an audience the size of yours, you have transcended 'online flamewar'. It's not a game anymore. At some point, at some level of influence, you actually take on some kind of responsibility to be right, and when you're wrong, you should be called on it in no uncertain terms.
pg doesn't talk that much about this, but it's in the guidelines, and I think it's one of his cornerstones of HN. Actually, he does it instead of talking about doing it. I have something to learn from him in this.
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Wouldn't the truth of your beliefs about software development be best expressed by the success of your projects?
Well, your statement could have a bit of truth if Jeff only blogged about how to create a successfull business, wich is obviously not the case. But even then, since i believe the success of a business relies much more on the quality of your original idea than on anything else, for me this is just dead false.
At any rate, success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, I seem to have heard somewhere. Or, as a soft core porn actress once said in The Jade Goddess, on Cinemax late one night, "Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's what you do with them that counts."
I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea. If only ideas count, doesn't that make them even MORE important? Or, are you claiming that success is just luck?
Also, "original" was certainly not accurate, the current idea and orientation of the business is well enough, you're totally right about that.
But there is still some truth in what i say, in that , if your original idea doesn't appeal to a lot of people, you're not gonna have any success. Your site concept is the foundation, and SO concept is a very good one.
>"I'm also interested by your implicit claim that founders don't deserve credit for their original idea"
I never made that claim, implicitly or explicitly, that's just your paranoïa speaking. Quite the contrary, i believe Jeff deserves full credit for what he did, and for his ideas. I also truely believe Jeff to be a very intelligent human being.
This is unrelated to the fact that i really think his technical level is quite low on everything programming related, at least in what he shows on his blog. That combined with the very blunt displays he makes of his claims is probably the source of all the "hate" you see on technically oriented sites like HN.
This is not to say Jeff is a bad programmer. All you can deduce from his blog is that he likes to banter about things he doesn't truly know. The fact that he's ignorant of some things doesn't set him appart - we all ignore much more than we know - the fact that he talks about it like an expert does .