You can certainly get part of the big picture from reading Hacker News, but if you're going to learn anything in depth, I seriously suggest taking a class. That way someone else has already done all the hard work in collecting all the material in easily digestable chunks and even gives his or her valuable time in trying to make you understand it all.
Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#62Hey, this is good. And it inspired the guy to go deeper into some of the subjects! Sometimes, a problem is that people only go to sponge learning...and then stop. As a professor of my friend's said...people are getting better and better at being able to talk about something for five minutes...then that's it. Thanks to wikipedia, lots of people can seem smart, but not actually understand something in depth. I find XKC…
I agree to an extent - there is a lot of stuff that I know just enough about to be able to say "I know of it", but there are only so many hours in the day.
When it comes to starting a project all the stuff that I know of comes in useful, because I can fairly quickly determine which particular tools will be most useful in that circumstance and then start learning about them in more depth.
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just started LPTHW as well and would like to get in on the discussion too
Would you guys be interested in setting up a "study group", sort of a Procrastinators Anonymous for wanna-be developers? I can't begin to count the books I've skimmed over and not completed a single exercise. LPTHW was really nice in the way it gave you nothing else to do but exercises. Perhaps something as simple as a small, tight-knit forum (plenty of free forum providers) & IRC channel (something like freenode #py…
Sent you an e-mail.
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#64Best thing about HN that it filters out crap and produces quality stuff. Just because of HN I came across two entrepreneurs who are more than helpful to guide me offline whenever I need. Thanks PG and Team to give such a quality site. Now I don't visit TechCrunch etc to find out Information. HN does it for me and saves my time P.S: I am already a techie but a Biz noob and HN is helping me to become an entrepreneur.
That's a very subjective view. A year ago, Hacker News really was HACKER News. Today it's not. It's Startup News, and Popular Blogstar Gives His Lofty Opinion On Something News. I'm glad that it benefits and entertains someone, but I'm also a bit sad that it stopped doing the same for me and everyone else who used to visit this site for HACKER News.
It actually started out as Startup News.
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#65Great post. I have often thought about the way I learn, and it's very much 'sponge learning' (nice term BTW). I am on a journey to learn Clojure, and improve my JavaScript skills. Much like the author, I read blog-posts, books, the Google groups as well as take any code samples found there and play with them in the REPL. A lot of the posts (especially some on the Google Groups) don't always make sense to me - but I h…
Any sponge friendly links on clojure will be most porously appreciated
One of my favorite resources is the #clojure tag on Twitter. I use Tweetie and have bookmarked a search on that.
Here are a few sites from my GReader
http://www.bestinclass.dk/blog.html
https://groups.google.com/group/clojure
And here are a few tabs that I currently have open (Maybe this weekend I will get to them :D)
https://github.com/dbushenko/ClojureBlog
http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/talk-by-patrick-fredri...
http://brehaut.net/blog/2011/ring_introduction
http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ (Interview with Rich)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2682191
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2709319
Hope these help :)
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's great. I wish more people were as eager to learn new things as the OP. I do think it comes at a cost to the rest of the community, though, when so many people participating in a technical community don't really understand much of the discussion.
Because they're ... reading it?
It's not the reading or even the submitting and commenting that worries me. Reading affects no one but the reader, and HN has pretty effective self-regulatory mechanisms for maintaining the quality of submissions and comments.
What worries me is the voting, which is anonymous and hard to self-regulate. Take a recent, heavily-technical article that made the front-page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730286 How qualified is someone (who just learned that something like Coffeescript is even possible) to judge the technical content of a blog post about how GCC shuffles references between the stack and registers, or the discussion around said blog post?
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#67I like Alex's concept of "sponge learning" and reducing "unknown unknowns". I've actually been doing this unconsciously for quite a while.
Let's say there is a debate about the best VPS provider on the HN front page. I have no need for a VPS right now, and I sadly don't have the time to read the whole debate. Instead, I skim the discussion, bookmark it (on pinboard) with appropriate tags, and know it will be there when I do need to choose a web host.
This also applies to "unknown unknowns": a month ago, I saw the discussion on CloudFare ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2631019 ). I made a mental note that some services might actually help mitigate DDOS attacks, and made a bookmark for later use.
I could make an analogy with a database: I don't have enough time / memory to learn and remember everything I read on HN. Instead, I use my brain like an "index", the database being my Pinboard bookmarks. I think it's time to expand to other databases, too: I should try out EverNote or Workflowy to store free-form thoughts and other "non-bookmarkable" stuff.
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#68It is interesting how synonymous "hacking" and "programming" has become with "web programming" all of a sudden over the last few years...
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#69The most upvoted comment on the post (Martin Doms):
Everyone on hacker news is motivated by money. It gets old. There's a huge vibe of "I don't care about this technical mumbo jumbo any more than I have to to make a quick buck". It's VERY trendy/hipster culture there. They jump on all of the silly buzzword bandwagons and distrust tried and true technologies.
I'm not saying I don't read the site - some of the articles are very good. But I don't like to be around people primarily motivated by money. Those kinds of people make me very uncomfortable.
Re: Why I read Hacker News even though I understand very little of it
#70Alternative title: Why I read Startup/Popular Blogstar news even though I care for very little of it. Anyone else who has noticed how radically the news content on HN has changed since just last year? HN is dead, long live the new HN.
Not really, but I do remember people making this complaint in 2008, 2009, and 2010. :)