71–80 of 95 posts
It is interesting how synonymous "hacking" and "programming" has become with "web programming" all of a sudden over the last few years...
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So people who want to learn from HN should not? From what you two are saying a person like myself, who is just starting out and therefore not writing much in the way of code or blogposts, should not be reading HN because I can't join the discussion with anything but questions? What about likeminded people discussing a topic that interests them? Is there no room for that?
I think the idea they're trying to convey can be summarized thusly: lurk moar.
But since the point of HN seems to be "sponge learning" at large (of course, different levels of sponge learning), I don't see any sane way of moderating what should be worthy of HN from what should be asked or posted elsewhere, so long as it has the feel and common interests of the community, and "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
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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 q…
For instance, the case studies on starting a T-shirt company Snowpocalypse 2011 - bam! Knowledge of how to do that. Or the posts on business models in the music industry, links to Mixergy, et cetra, et cetra.
HN basically is extremely entertaining - and the most valuable business site I read.
I 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 w…
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2658818
Yesterday, there was this woman in a coffee shop (probably a PhD student) who had the smallest densest handwriting i've ever seen, doing this for a Physical Chemistry text. There must have been 3,000 words on each 8x11 page.
I have been the victim of sponge learning for many years now, HN being part of it for about a year. I can talk about a wide range of techy subjects but I've never really made or done anything to show for it. I learn bits from here and there without never going very deep. I've read through (and done most of the exercises from) K&R and Dive Into Python to name a couple, yet I haven't written a project over 500 LOC. I'v…
I just had to register to comment on this one. Wow, that struck a chord. Pretty much every sentence rings true, especially the peer encouragement one. For me it's the availability of easier entertainment - why write that python bookmark creation date histogram plotter, when I'm tired and can just waste the evening reading Reddit? Oh, and there's the procrastination habit I've been nursing for over a decade. On the ot…
Check out resources like scala-user, which is designated newbie-friendly, railsbridge.org and codereview.stackexchange.com.
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/199
Also relevant: remote pairing tools
http://blog.tridgell.net/?p=111
http://blog.coryfoy.com/2010/08/technically-distributed-tool...
http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/01/10/7-coolest-real-time-c...
Thanks HN
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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 http://nakkaya.com/ http://freegeek.in/blog/ 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://skillsm…
I'm right there with you. I have been an avid reader of HN for going on 2 years now. While I can't sit down and develop killer software from scratch, I am slowly learning more and more about technology and programming, and a lot of it is thanks to the great HN community. I just started ready the updated edition of Learn Python The Hard way, and really enjoy it. It's the first book on programming that I have read that…
"Feel free to send me a message or email me if you want to bounce and ideas off of each other with Python or anything else, I get the impression we are both starting off on the same page" Is that open to all?
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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.