While I think all of OP's points are valid (loss of productivity, focus on things that are too positive or negative, unactionable items, etc.), I think there is a flipside. I'm not saying you should spend an exorbitant amount of time on HN, but I think many come for the community and shared purpose. It's like getting your Reddit fix without having to worry about cat photos and memes. There are many tech-related articles here that aren't about frameworks or success/failure.
Honestly, most of my HN reading is because I need a mind-break from whatever I'm focusing on. I find it's a great way to take a break, and still learn a few things while I'm at it.
I was working on such a reply, but you said it better. The only thing I would add is that it's up to you to be disciplined, and not run from work, procrastinating on HN. But this is not an issue inherent to HN.
There is definitely a flipside. I wouldn't be nearly as up to date with tech if it wasn't for HN, and last summer I managed to get an internship at a startup that I would have had zero chance of finding had I not seen them in a "Who's Hiring?" post on here.
Oh definitely. I would just argue that you had to dig through a lot of posts that were less-than-beneficial and that a filter for an "Ask HN" would have been more worth your time. And that is just one form of curated content that I was mentioning.
I can see how HN is bad for the author's well being, but certainly not for mine. I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories. I don't feel any need to switch languages/frameworks when reading about new/hyped stuff.
It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts and what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.
Exactly. Even a better reason to read curated content. You need to get awareness with what's going on in the tech community without sinking massive amounts of time. Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
This implies that the average reader is diving into every article. If my job (or interests or sideproject or...) happens to be Ruby or Lisp related, perhaps that's a useful article. Personally, I rarely-if-ever use either, so I tend to skip those.
And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.
HN doesn't have that much content, I never feel overwhelmed. The front-page turnover rate is really slow, to the point that I pretty quickly get my "fix" and then leave. Over the course of a day I might sink an hour into it, 2 if there's something interesting going on. However, I usually read maybe 3 articles per day at most.
>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.
Works the same way for me, a project manager. I dont want to know ghe finest details of everything that hits the front pahe here, I just want to know theif names, what they do, where their value are at and who is using it. Reading comments is also interesting when there are conflicting opinions on the topic.
Yes, awareness. I was reading 2+ hours a day of HN at my previous work. I was still more productive than most of my co-workers and was able to introduce useful tools, solutions and practices. One of my fellow developers asked, "How do you find out about all these stuff?"
So yeah, how do we find out about all these stuff otherwise?
If you read my article, then you'd know how. Curated content. It gives you the best of both worlds. Being able to dig through less news to find "good" content while still keeping up with today's news. With the added bonus that you can choose your content (wide categories / general tech or specific communities like Android, or HTML5).
Curated content still gives you what you want, but with less work. Additionally, you're reading will be consolidated (in theory) into a larger block of time on a less frequent basis, freeing up more time throughout your week.
This can be rephrased as, "What's the value to you of posting on HN?"
The value to tptacek can be denominated in units of "hundreds of thousands of dollars," for example.
I have to run -- I wish I could go into more detail with this comment. I'd talk about some other non-monetary benefits, like the ability to seek out a network, or to get feedback on weaknesses, or a bunch of other things.
Less time being a mindless drone, never leaving your lane? ;)
I personally have learned quite a bit on HN that has led me to being a better programmer. A discovered Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/), Javascript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge), and plenty of other things that have expanded my mind. The debate between promises, callbacks, and generators made me think critically about how I do asynchronous JS. The local love of functional programming has inspired me to dive in, and ultimately made me a better imperative programmer as well. And overhype of Edward Snowden's every movement aside, HN does a great job of surfacing stories about the intersection of policy and tech.
I also value a lot of the discourse that happens here. I think HN, even with its flaws, is a better community for discussion than Slashdot, Ars, or most of the rest of the sites covering tech.
I think everything you've said in your comment is correct, but when did the alternatives become "be a mindless drone" and "be a mindless drone who reads hacker news?"
My point is to criticize the implied argument that keeping your nose down working on the problems in front of you is inherently more productive than spending some time on HN to trying to gain some wider perspective.
That's probably a strawman attack, but the first line of my comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, which I tried to signal with the emoticon.
I generally agree that gaining a wider perspective is valuable, but it's not clear that HN is the best way to do that, and the OP outlines a number of reasons which make sense to me why it would be a bad way to do that.
At the least, HN exists in a thickly-walled bubble. There's not a very wide perspective here.
I definitely see the benefits here. But whenever I see a point like this I wonder: if you had replaced hacker news with a different activity, could you have formed a similar list of things you learned? Perhaps a longer list, or one of higher quality? Not trying to criticize you, just something I think about in these cases.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not arguing that HN is somehow optimal. I'm just saying that as a continual time investment, it's provided greater returns than the alternatives I've used in the past, with regards to staying on top of the scene in tech, startups, and tech-related policy.
Why not just for amusement? Or to just see what interesting things people have come up with? Why does everything have to be "only towards this goal", what happened to just doing things just for curiosity's sake?
"but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts"
Agree that the downside always has to be taken into account.
One thing that I have noticed over time is that at least some successful people tend to be highly focused and less interested in the types of things that, as they say on HN are "anything that piques one's curiosity". I'm amazed at how little curiosity they have actually.
What you are describing (that I think some people are missing here) is that sometimes you read things on HN, you then fork, and then you are going down the next shiny ball of opportunity because it is so much fun to do. And so easy to do. Only a click away. So it's rationalized in a way like "well what could be bad about learning learning is always valuable!!" without taking into account the opportunity cost of all that learning.
The key is as you say "less" and limits. There have been things over the past that I have forked to that have paid off in actual results and money. And things that have not. By devoting a set amount of time to satisfy curiosity you can gain much. But like with anything else you have to make sure you aren't shortchanging something else that is more important.
> Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts
No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.
> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.
All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.
I'm with you. I'm here as a consumer. I skim most articles. I waste little time. Instead, I get a humongous wealth of information on a great variety of topics.
Also, one quick skim of the article list gives you a good idea of what's hot in tech. Even that has great value, and helps you decide what you should and shouldn't read.
About 10% of the time I jump into comments straightaway because they give you a good idea of the topic/validity of the article.
So true!
HN comments on hot new tech also act like gyro stabilization for me. When I read an article on tomorrow's hot new framework I often go "wtf I can't go on using Ruby and Ember" (although Ember is pretty new itself, if we're being honest); comments then help me manage my expectations. A la "There's no silver bullet", "this aspect is suboptimal", "you could try optimization X for established tech Y to achieve the same"...
"I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories."
I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories either. What I hate is how some people reading those stories give super powers to those people who have succeeded as if there is no luck, timing or anything else and then those people, what they say, is oh so important even on subjects that they have little expertise in. The halo in other words.
Problem with some of the hyped stuff though is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy when a mass of early adopters decides to go down a particular path with the latest thing.
Plus, most of what I see on HN these days is really bad business, political, social, and legal analysis, not any of the things discussed in this article. (This article is a great example of the same.)
It is possible for this to be true in general (in other words, there will be someone whose comments are more accurate than 99% of other people), but that's not the case for me. I just try to withhold my opinion on stuff that's not obviously true.
HN isn't to blame for this, but the current Bay Area, VC-istan culture really is toxic. I don't know how people can stay motivated with their 0.03% equity slices when some completely unqualified idiot gets his IUsedThisToilet app acquired for $4 billion just because he went to the right schools going back to preschool. It's sick.
It's best to tune that shit out, but it's hard when people are young and impressionable, and given that the contemporary Silicon Valley culture is all about extending adolescence into the mid-30s (and then discarding people)... well it's easy see why people succumb to that nonsense.
The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
> The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
Still not nearly as bad as Reddit. Subreddits have value, but look at the front page of Reddit. Zero value. On any given day, of any week, month, or year. Reddit's front page is 100% wasted time. I demonstrate this by asking to myself: Ten years from now what will Reddit's front page look like? Answer: The exact nonsense memes and image macros posted today.
> This is mostly because Reddit's choice of default subreddits are poor
Presumably this isn't entirely a choice: I would expect a good subreddit to get worse if it was made default. (And I've heard that /r/atheism got better when it was made undefault, but I haven't actually looked.)
Ah, the Catch 22 of popular discussion based websites. You want to be popular, but you want to remain high in quality. It's shockingly difficult to do both.
Yep, /r/science is about the only default that is ok. And if you've seen a climate change discussion there, you'll realize how painful it is to keep discussion on topic on reddit.
I remember going to reddit and thinking, damn these comments are loads better than slashdot. I don't think I can contribute anything interesting, these people are sharp so I won't post at all.
Might have just been me but there is a marked difference in tone on the site.
Specifically, I think AdviceAnimals and Gaming are the most toxic defaults plaguing the front page. Reddit would have a substantially more intelligent front page if it got rid of those defaults.
I would almost suggest replacing /r/gaming with /r/games, which is a 100x more intelligent subreddit with actual discussion (due to proper moderating and disabling of thumbnails), but I would hate to see that subreddit become toxic because of front-page publicity. It really depends on how dedicated its moderators are up for the task.
The frontpage of reddit is what you make it. Get rid of the crap, subscribe to subreddits you actually like, and you're good to go. There are some decent subreddits...
I completely agree. I replaced (a good chunk of) my reddit browsing with HN browsing. I may burn excessive time here, but I feel like I'm at least learning/gaining something while I'm here. And the commenters here are actually intelligent and the top replies are generally decent and not "witty" one-liners.
But I don't work in the startup world. I don't get the stress of second guessing everything I do because in the same week opinions on all sides of an issue germane to startups have been heavily upvoted at different times. So perhaps that is key.
I don't think anyone has claimed reddit, or at least the default reddits, are a productive way to spend your time. All the default subreddits are pretty much just for entertainment.
To me, watching Reddit grow has been an interesting perspective on how population size affects democracy.
4-5 years ago, you would more often see long articles or self posts where someone would make a case for something on a topic. People would read the whole thing, try and understand the issue, and talk about it.
As reddit has grown, thoughtful posts have been replaced by one liners and memes. The front page is mostly just a dumping ground for whatever is viral at the moment.
I think this, interestingly, mirrors what happened to democracy in the United States. The democracy that the founding fathers imagined was one run mostly by the educated few, with everyone else also having the ability to voice their concerns.
What its turned into now is a chaotic mess of talking points and rhetoric, with two factions on opposite sides just screaming the same things at each other.
I think its because the more people you get involved in decision making, the simpler you have to make the case for each potential choice in order for the most people to be able to understand it. People will choose an inferior choice that they can understand over a superior one that they can't.
And the problem then is that oftentimes the most important things are the things that are hardest to understand.
I've noticed that a lot of writers in tech generalize their experience to everyone in the community. Several times a day I'm struck by someone who talks about his/her experience like it's a common experience, when it may or may not be. I think it would be safer and more relatable if the author had said "HN - Bad for My Well Being," but of course that doesn't sound as portentous.
Absolutely. There's a lot of "I don't like X, so X is bad" out there. It's quite disturbing the number of people who can't imagine that other developers might approach the world in a different way and with different values.
I get the impression this is a trait that seems more present in programmer types than many other people, and this fascinates me. I notice this in myself too. I almost always try to reduce/abstract my own problems or issues to 'general principles', and I tend to want to get to the root of things.
There are many plausible explanations for this (and obviously I've tried to get to the root of this phenomenon too), but at some point I started reflecting on whether this behavior is a good or bad thing.
I think it's both good and bad. It's good primarily because a lot of people look at their own problem in isolation, and share/address them as 'their unique problem', which keeps them from seeing underlying patterns or principles and from tapping into the experiences and observations of the countless others that have had pretty much the exact same problem. But it can also be bad, because not everyone likes being subjected or presented with this kind of generalization, and attempting to think about a problem in a general sense while you are suffering from it yourself complicates the search for solutions immensely (especially practical, direct solutions to implement).
Does anyone know if there has been research into this? I never really thought of diving in the the 'psychology' of programmers...
I noticed it in action recently when watching a David Lynch documentary about Transcendental Meditation where he describes his experience of meditation as "the cables of and elevator being cut and falling into oneness." My first thought was that Lynch has a very unique mind and probably doesn't realize that is not a very typical experience during meditation, but bless his heart, he wants everyone to have it.
I completely agree with you. Way too often to I read articles stating various truths based on their sole experiences. This is just one more thing that devalues HN and warrants curation.
In this particular case, this is not only my experience but the experience of some of my colleagues and friends. That doesn't mean that this applies to everyone and obviously it is an opinion article.
You said HN is bad for my well-being. I'm suggesting that you don't know how HN is for my well-being and my experience as a reader would have been more satisfying if I read your article to satifsy my curiousity about why HN is bad for your well-being. If you had put it as your problem I might have a couple more suggestions, but you instead tell me how I should solve this problem you think I have.
HN is an online community, where people go because they feel that it fulfills them in some way (maybe because they plan to do a startup of their own one day and reading about other startups makes them dream, because they like debating with others, etc.).
I suggest the ridiculous notion that you should do what makes you happy, and if going on HN fulfills some part of your being - no matter how irrationally - then go for it.
My girlfriend is reading the Daily Mail like I read Hacker News. I don't know which website is worse for our well being but I try to read the day best voted submissions and it is enough to keep me updated with everything else.
>>The solution is not to read absolutely no news at all.
A question: What makes you think so? I've gone months and years at a time without reading any news; it's a fantastic feeling, and if something is really important you'll hear about it from a friend.
Just as "read less HN" may not be applicable to everyone, "you should probably keep reading the news" may not apply to others, or at least others may have had positive experiences quitting the consumption of news media.
If you're that weak that you can't even read HN without properly filtering shit in your head, you shouldn't use the internet. What a terrible and pointless article.
I shall invoke Sturgeon's Law: ("ninety percent of everything is crap." )
Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap." It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.
The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art forms.
I think it goes without saying that it's all about your objectives and perceptions. Objectively, HN is a valuable resource to stay informed of micro-innovations in the tech industry.
I'm not someone that's insecure about what I don't know or how smart I am, as I'm constantly trying to improve all areas of my life; as a result, many of the posts here are inspiring and help set a fire under my ass to get out there start doing.
Is it weird that I read Hacker News for none of the reasons he lists? I'm rarely interested in reading about startups succeeding or failing, or new frameworks or languages, but I am interested in reading about cool things people have done with technology, or even non-tech related news. I guess I'd probably be more suited to slashdot's content, but I prefer Hacker News' format so much more.
I actually think the discussions on HN are pretty good, even the political ones. There are some well thought out people here, and then people who I would've empathized with years ago when I was younger and not more exposed to the way the world works. Both sides are helpful to read and be aware of.
But I mainly read HN for the tech news. I'm one of those people who will learn about Github/Twitter/Heroku being down from here. All the big hacks are posted here and thoroughly discussed. I probably would've never played around with CoffeeScript, Angular, Go, and Dart without them being endlessly discussed around here. I wish I had something like HN when I was in college.
Regarding the curated content option, I don't think that would be a good option for me. I come here to learn about the unusual and non-mainstream tech stuff. Of the 20 frameworks, it's true that I can only really learn one, but I probably am not going to want to learn whatever one the curator decided was best, because the curator is going to choose the most popular/hip/mainstream one, since that's the one that would be of interest to the most readers. I come here not to learn what's popular, but rather to learn about the things that aren't popular.
I've noticed a different bad thing that happens to me when I am active on HN. I become very argumentative IRL. On HN it's fun to engage other people, debating, disagreeing and arguing your point. It's constructive and usually we all get something from it.
I noticed that the more time I spend active on HN (in comments) the more I tend to correct friends when they make a mistake or vigorously argue a point of view on something not that important (these aren't bad things the but the frequency with which I was doing them annoyed me and my friends and it wasn't just the important stuff I was arguing, it was stupid things).
When I logged out of HN for a while this behaviour slowly started to improve. I couldn't stay away for ever though but I am much more aware of the effect and try to stop myself before I get too deep into a stupid debate/argument both on HN and IRL.
Yes! This and the need to explain things always in an exact and neutral way without actually knowing all to much about the issue at hand and thereby blatantly ignoring the reality and the knowledge and interest of the persons around you.
I don't blame HN. I've learned and still learn a lot of cool stuff here. It's the best source to stay up to date on internet drama and timely background information for security and hacking related incidents. Also a lot of programming and Unix related ideas I would hardly find anywhere else. But it's of little use to me. I'm not the security engineer of a start up. I'm not even really coding at the moment.
My reality is different. I should leave my room, work on my bicycle, solve the real and urgent issues around my life and sit in the library or hanging around with friends doing real stuff. Connecting with real people and learning something about other aspects of life. This may be different for others here.
Instead I'm here trapped in a strange click loop. I would do probably something similar without HN or even without internet. It's sad but the OPs post about is a good reminder to cut it down... it's irrational for me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadIt's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.
And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.
>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.
Another problem, and maybe one can call it FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is that sometimes the best knowledge is deep inside the comments.
They may or may not be there but you have to filter all the babble.
So yeah, how do we find out about all these stuff otherwise?
Curated content still gives you what you want, but with less work. Additionally, you're reading will be consolidated (in theory) into a larger block of time on a less frequent basis, freeing up more time throughout your week.
The value to tptacek can be denominated in units of "hundreds of thousands of dollars," for example.
I have to run -- I wish I could go into more detail with this comment. I'd talk about some other non-monetary benefits, like the ability to seek out a network, or to get feedback on weaknesses, or a bunch of other things.
I personally have learned quite a bit on HN that has led me to being a better programmer. A discovered Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/), Javascript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge), and plenty of other things that have expanded my mind. The debate between promises, callbacks, and generators made me think critically about how I do asynchronous JS. The local love of functional programming has inspired me to dive in, and ultimately made me a better imperative programmer as well. And overhype of Edward Snowden's every movement aside, HN does a great job of surfacing stories about the intersection of policy and tech.
I also value a lot of the discourse that happens here. I think HN, even with its flaws, is a better community for discussion than Slashdot, Ars, or most of the rest of the sites covering tech.
That's probably a strawman attack, but the first line of my comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, which I tried to signal with the emoticon.
At the least, HN exists in a thickly-walled bubble. There's not a very wide perspective here.
So the way avoid being a mindless drone is to read articles and comments telling you how to act and think?
Agree that the downside always has to be taken into account.
One thing that I have noticed over time is that at least some successful people tend to be highly focused and less interested in the types of things that, as they say on HN are "anything that piques one's curiosity". I'm amazed at how little curiosity they have actually.
What you are describing (that I think some people are missing here) is that sometimes you read things on HN, you then fork, and then you are going down the next shiny ball of opportunity because it is so much fun to do. And so easy to do. Only a click away. So it's rationalized in a way like "well what could be bad about learning learning is always valuable!!" without taking into account the opportunity cost of all that learning.
The key is as you say "less" and limits. There have been things over the past that I have forked to that have paid off in actual results and money. And things that have not. By devoting a set amount of time to satisfy curiosity you can gain much. But like with anything else you have to make sure you aren't shortchanging something else that is more important.
No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.
> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.
All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.
Also, one quick skim of the article list gives you a good idea of what's hot in tech. Even that has great value, and helps you decide what you should and shouldn't read.
About 10% of the time I jump into comments straightaway because they give you a good idea of the topic/validity of the article.
In short; consume, in moderation, with salt.
I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories either. What I hate is how some people reading those stories give super powers to those people who have succeeded as if there is no luck, timing or anything else and then those people, what they say, is oh so important even on subjects that they have little expertise in. The halo in other words.
Problem with some of the hyped stuff though is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy when a mass of early adopters decides to go down a particular path with the latest thing.
Yeah really bad. It's all crap except my own.
It's best to tune that shit out, but it's hard when people are young and impressionable, and given that the contemporary Silicon Valley culture is all about extending adolescence into the mid-30s (and then discarding people)... well it's easy see why people succumb to that nonsense.
The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
I wish I could upvote this more.
But I agree with the larger point -- HN is addictive and biased. Moderation is key.
You have manually curate the subreddits you want, unfortunately.
Presumably this isn't entirely a choice: I would expect a good subreddit to get worse if it was made default. (And I've heard that /r/atheism got better when it was made undefault, but I haven't actually looked.)
What we're seeing right now is the after effects of popularity.
I remember going to reddit and thinking, damn these comments are loads better than slashdot. I don't think I can contribute anything interesting, these people are sharp so I won't post at all.
Might have just been me but there is a marked difference in tone on the site.
I would almost suggest replacing /r/gaming with /r/games, which is a 100x more intelligent subreddit with actual discussion (due to proper moderating and disabling of thumbnails), but I would hate to see that subreddit become toxic because of front-page publicity. It really depends on how dedicated its moderators are up for the task.
On HN one can fool himself think that he's getting value, but that isn't always the case.
But I don't work in the startup world. I don't get the stress of second guessing everything I do because in the same week opinions on all sides of an issue germane to startups have been heavily upvoted at different times. So perhaps that is key.
4-5 years ago, you would more often see long articles or self posts where someone would make a case for something on a topic. People would read the whole thing, try and understand the issue, and talk about it.
As reddit has grown, thoughtful posts have been replaced by one liners and memes. The front page is mostly just a dumping ground for whatever is viral at the moment.
I think this, interestingly, mirrors what happened to democracy in the United States. The democracy that the founding fathers imagined was one run mostly by the educated few, with everyone else also having the ability to voice their concerns.
What its turned into now is a chaotic mess of talking points and rhetoric, with two factions on opposite sides just screaming the same things at each other.
I think its because the more people you get involved in decision making, the simpler you have to make the case for each potential choice in order for the most people to be able to understand it. People will choose an inferior choice that they can understand over a superior one that they can't.
And the problem then is that oftentimes the most important things are the things that are hardest to understand.
However, the content that I get from HackerNews is priceless, so quitting makes no sense.
There are many plausible explanations for this (and obviously I've tried to get to the root of this phenomenon too), but at some point I started reflecting on whether this behavior is a good or bad thing.
I think it's both good and bad. It's good primarily because a lot of people look at their own problem in isolation, and share/address them as 'their unique problem', which keeps them from seeing underlying patterns or principles and from tapping into the experiences and observations of the countless others that have had pretty much the exact same problem. But it can also be bad, because not everyone likes being subjected or presented with this kind of generalization, and attempting to think about a problem in a general sense while you are suffering from it yourself complicates the search for solutions immensely (especially practical, direct solutions to implement).
Does anyone know if there has been research into this? I never really thought of diving in the the 'psychology' of programmers...
I noticed it in action recently when watching a David Lynch documentary about Transcendental Meditation where he describes his experience of meditation as "the cables of and elevator being cut and falling into oneness." My first thought was that Lynch has a very unique mind and probably doesn't realize that is not a very typical experience during meditation, but bless his heart, he wants everyone to have it.
Edit: David Wants to Fly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0payvR--nM
In this particular case, this is not only my experience but the experience of some of my colleagues and friends. That doesn't mean that this applies to everyone and obviously it is an opinion article.
I suggest the ridiculous notion that you should do what makes you happy, and if going on HN fulfills some part of your being - no matter how irrationally - then go for it.
HN - Why It's Actually Good For Your Well Being (medium.com)
A question: What makes you think so? I've gone months and years at a time without reading any news; it's a fantastic feeling, and if something is really important you'll hear about it from a friend.
Just as "read less HN" may not be applicable to everyone, "you should probably keep reading the news" may not apply to others, or at least others may have had positive experiences quitting the consumption of news media.
Scary, I know ;-)
Very thin blogspam at the very least.
Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap." It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.
The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art forms.
I'm not someone that's insecure about what I don't know or how smart I am, as I'm constantly trying to improve all areas of my life; as a result, many of the posts here are inspiring and help set a fire under my ass to get out there start doing.
Though perhaps the authors intention is simply to raise a couple points, rather than actually get folks to visit less.
But I mainly read HN for the tech news. I'm one of those people who will learn about Github/Twitter/Heroku being down from here. All the big hacks are posted here and thoroughly discussed. I probably would've never played around with CoffeeScript, Angular, Go, and Dart without them being endlessly discussed around here. I wish I had something like HN when I was in college.
I noticed that the more time I spend active on HN (in comments) the more I tend to correct friends when they make a mistake or vigorously argue a point of view on something not that important (these aren't bad things the but the frequency with which I was doing them annoyed me and my friends and it wasn't just the important stuff I was arguing, it was stupid things).
When I logged out of HN for a while this behaviour slowly started to improve. I couldn't stay away for ever though but I am much more aware of the effect and try to stop myself before I get too deep into a stupid debate/argument both on HN and IRL.
I don't blame HN. I've learned and still learn a lot of cool stuff here. It's the best source to stay up to date on internet drama and timely background information for security and hacking related incidents. Also a lot of programming and Unix related ideas I would hardly find anywhere else. But it's of little use to me. I'm not the security engineer of a start up. I'm not even really coding at the moment.
My reality is different. I should leave my room, work on my bicycle, solve the real and urgent issues around my life and sit in the library or hanging around with friends doing real stuff. Connecting with real people and learning something about other aspects of life. This may be different for others here.
Instead I'm here trapped in a strange click loop. I would do probably something similar without HN or even without internet. It's sad but the OPs post about is a good reminder to cut it down... it's irrational for me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
There are also posts about failure but I'd say they are a bit less common than the ones about success.