61–70 of 110 posts
We are joking that people no longer are flying to the Moon because NASA have lost all of the videos of how to assemble a rocket. ;-)
As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accura…
That makes a lot of sense. I bet it holds true for most things. Though now I'm curious how well it holds up for video editing howto videos
Recently I have been watching a lot of blender tutorials and some people are much better than others at getting to the point and describing important details about what they are doing without losing the flow.
If the first30 seconds of the video consist of the person clicking seemingly randomly around in their UI while talking about what they are going to be talking about then I usually just stop watching and move onto something else.
I’ve been working on my YouTube educational channel html/css/design ( https://youtube.com/FollowAndrew ) for a bit now. Pickup is slow, but it’s been fun helping a greater audience learn new skills!
As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accura…
I have the same hard-learned rule of thumb wrt. websites in general. The cleaner looking, the more up to date with current web trends a website, the worse information on it. I've also spotted an inverse correlation between the amount of ads on page and trustworthiness of the information on it. I explain it to myself in a similar way: people with nice, clean, heavy websites, sprinkling ads in between the text, are con…
Quality significantly diminishes the moment you use your face in the video (because it's completely unnecessary when explaining how to do some series testing in calc for example)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have the same hard-learned rule of thumb wrt. websites in general. The cleaner looking, the more up to date with current web trends a website, the worse information on it. I've also spotted an inverse correlation between the amount of ads on page and trustworthiness of the information on it. I explain it to myself in a similar way: people with nice, clean, heavy websites, sprinkling ads in between the text, are con…
Similarly for math: When learning calc, websites from universities that were written in basic HTML with some latex/examples or on some pdf were far better than anything else. There are also some good YT videos where they do the problems which were good as well. Quality significantly diminishes the moment you use your face in the video (because it's completely unnecessary when explaining how to do some series testing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that's true of most information. The higher the craftsmanship of the video, the worse the actual information being presented. Lectures, for instance, that are just a professor talking with his PowerPoint slides are almost always better than videos that put on a production with fancy graphics, jump cuts, and narration. Look at the news. The news with more spectacle tends to be of lower quality on average. Or an…
The more I think about it and reflect on my (computer science) education I think more and more the lectures are awful. It is only the ease/ubiquity of creating them that has kept them around. Fancy graphics is by no means an indicator of good information, but neither are lectures. It blows my mind that I can be taught programming concepts, say data structures, on a PDF. That is insanity, it is a total divorce from th…
I think this is same with today's maps: it's very easy to find a road with a navigator, but it doesn't leave any lasting impression. Fine if it's a one-time task, but not that good if you want to become an expert on local roads.
With a PDF about data structures you do have the executable environment: the compiler or the interpreter the PDF uses to give examples. The compiler has no manual on data structures, but you have the PDF instead. This is the real thing, by the way, that compiler. An medium that combines both instructions and some interactive thingie that shows the data structure will be much farther from the actual compiler than that poor PDF.
I'm interested to know how other developers on HN prefer to learn. I really like just running into a problem and Googling my way to a solution. I read snippets of docs, blog articles, SO answers, etc. and then try to piece together an understanding. I have a hard time incorporating videos into my ad hoc learning. What is your preferred method of learning new tools, techniques, etc?
I watch Youtube mainly to relax. I watch more Youtube than Netflix at this point. A lot of the content I enjoy appears to be teaching about stuff.
Some of the stuff I watch sticks. E.g. I'm baking a sourdough bread right now. In recent months that has become a Sunday morning routine for me. I learned how to bake bread by stumbling on some people explaining how to do this on Youtube. Since I enjoy eating bread, my mind went from "hmm tasty" to "hmm, I could do this". And then I had a lot of fun doing it. In the same way my cooking has improved dramatically since I figured out that implementing a recipe is vastly simpler than implementing an algorithm and infinitely more tasty. I have dozens of youtube cooks in my subscription feed. Most of what I see I never cook but some of it I do try out.
I just gravitate to that kind of channels and I subscribe a lot of youtubers that inform me on a wide range of topics on a daily basis. E.g. I find it very relaxing to watch Adam Savage (of Myth Busters) go about doing some stuff in his workshop to build all sorts of wacky stuff. But I'm hardly a maker myself. I rarely use what little tools I have (i.e. non programmer tools). But when I do, I find I know that I seem to know what I'm doing.
I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it's one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills). The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidl…
But the internet completely destroyed information asymmetry, many people have access to lots of information now. I don’t need to take my car to a mechanic or pay someone to teach me, I can watch a YouTube video on how to change my oil.
The side effect of the destruction of information asymmetry is that a LOT of people depended on it, and they are all going to have to figure out where they stand in the new marketplace of information. I think we’re also seeing huge social movements because people are reading stuff online and reflecting about their city/state/government and saying “hold on, what you’re doing isn’t right, I’ve read about why you’re wrong”. The Arab spring, occupy wall st, the european refugee crisis, the Hong Kong protests, the Chilean protests, basically any major social movement in the last 20 years could be argued to have been triggered by the internet.
As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accura…
Any examples of great craftsmen with great video quality? I recently discovered the "Essential Craftsman" channel which seems to be pretty good all around. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzr30osBdTmuFUS8IfXtXmg
As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accura…