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Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#141

Post by vba616 »

saulpw wrote: post #90
j_french wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago a friend of mine proposed a theory of his (I use the word "theory" in the loosest possible sense here, more student dorm than lab) that sounded a lot like this. In his version, most of everything is shit. Most music is shit, most movies are shit, most pizzas are shit. Only a minority of any given thing is actually of high quality. I haven't seen much over the years to convince me that he or you are wro…

90% of everything is crap. -- Sturgeon's Law

Based on a couple of his best known stories that I read when I was pretty young, I revered him as an author.

But a few years ago, I found out that his short stories had been collected in a multi-volume series, and I started reading them.

I was pretty crestfallen; I don't use the term "cringey" much, but that's how I would describe a lot of them. I intended to read the whole series, but haven't and probably won't.

Not all of them were terrible, but the famous short stories he wrote were presumably famous because they stood apart.

Also he seems to have flirted with Dianetics in its early days, even basing some of his fiction on it.

So, I guess when you look deeper, he himself proved the law. On an individual basis, you have to produce a lot of crap to generate a masterwork.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#142

Post by Scarlxd »

hirvi74 wrote: post #108
factorialboy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value talking about X more than performing/implementing X. This is true for most fields, including programming. Most teams have folks to do the heavy lifting, and a small percentage of folks who talk about it. The talkers are considered more valuable than the doers, within the organization or without. These are our thought leaders, influencers, architects, you na…

> The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value talking about X more than performing/implementing X. I am so guilty of this. I spend so much time on here and other platforms just mindlessly consuming and participating in discussions about software engineering, new technology, best practices, etc.. So much so that I basically barely program anymore (except for my job where none of this information is im…

This resonates with me to a great extent.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#143

Post by eternityforest »

thebigwinning wrote: post #132
eternityforest wrote: post #131

Tech blog: I hate almost all software. I hate the IoT. I have a loaded gun by the printer. I want to live in the woods. I only like software because it's kind of like doing math and there's interesting logic. Every extra feature is like killing a tree. Now let me tell you how to make software, which I hate, and assume you also hate. Like, are there any tech blogs by people who actually like the modern tech ecosystem?

This is cool and authentic content though. Got any recs for me?

Industrial Society and Its Future, and the various influences for it? The Golden Spruce?

I mostly only pay attention to anything tech-negative at all if it's got some kind of historical or human interest.

I've read a lot of the Suckless stuff though, and the Worse is Better stuff, because I always see it on places like this and thought I should probably at least know what it is.

But it always seems like people from less technical fields have clearer writing on why they like these things, tech people are always trying to fight an uphill battle to make tech simple and logical, meanwhile encapsulated complexity is a lot of why most people like it.

Wheras swiss watchmakers, mathematicians, and DIY woodworkers are working in a medium that naturally supports simplicity, and talking to an audience that appreciates it more, they don't have as much conflict happening to obscure things.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#144

Post by throwawee »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #126

This is so on-point. Nearly every single article I have read on HN that covers my own area of expertise has been bullshit. I come here mostly to call BS before people blindly believe it.

From one throwaway to another, this is a legitimately useful service and I hope you and others keep doing it. At this point I flip through the HN comments before the articles. The primary source links alone are a treasure.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#145

Post by ChainOfFools »

hirvi74 wrote: post #108
factorialboy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value talking about X more than performing/implementing X. This is true for most fields, including programming. Most teams have folks to do the heavy lifting, and a small percentage of folks who talk about it. The talkers are considered more valuable than the doers, within the organization or without. These are our thought leaders, influencers, architects, you na…

> The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value talking about X more than performing/implementing X. I am so guilty of this. I spend so much time on here and other platforms just mindlessly consuming and participating in discussions about software engineering, new technology, best practices, etc.. So much so that I basically barely program anymore (except for my job where none of this information is im…

I believe this is a very old problem, which resurfaces in different forms depending on the individual and the context in which they function. I'm weakly certain that CS Lewis even devoted one of his screwtape letters to exactly this problem, but couched in the context of taking action versus writing about taking action.

But since I can't find the money quote right now, and I'm not entirely sure that it was in the screwtape letters rather than some other Lewis book, here's one that addresses an oblique facet of the same paradox:

"the more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel"

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#146

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #88

I think HN is a madhouse. Any article I click on, there's things I've never heard of that sound like made up techno-jargon, like programming languages which I've never seen used in a real job, let alone met anyone who uses them But I go to the comments and there's 150 people who all know every intimate detail of this technology already. Experts in the subject. I think most of you all are faking it

> I think most of you all are faking it

Not here. I have finite fakery capacity, and I need 100% of it for my day job.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#147

Post by Foobar8568 »

spacemadness wrote: post #18

One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors…

Performance benchmark on ORM/framework/whatever is a funny matter on that specific point.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#148

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

The biggest issue I run into is that developers wanting to put some one liner hello world example into production. There is no monitoring or logging, nothing updates the operating system or the application environment that runs in it, the hello world invariably runs as root and fails as any non-privileged user, etc. Any sort of database access reads the entire database on every access and loops through them all performing its own query logic - until the database gets too big to fit into ram. It’s a huge surprise when data gets discarded from memcache or redis. Over and over again I see these same issues.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#149

Post by Foobar8568 »

samtho wrote: post #110
phkahler wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN ia is read by experts in any number of fields from biotech, to medicine, physics, farming, or nearly anything else. If there are 150 people programming in Zig, most of them likely read HN. The more niche the tech, I think the higher the odds the users are here. But to your point, I don't know why some of these things rise to the front page in the first place. My current frustration is links to blog posts. I'm star…

There is very little in the blogosphere of 2023 that isn’t just some rando’s hot takes or a regurgitated idea that consists of a few Wikipedia pages sent through a word spinner. The truly interesting blogs are those who are written by known subject matter experts with success in their field and something interesting to say such as original research or personal observation resulting from what they are an expert in.

I'd say the content became unreachable, I wanted to find some examples of piano piece programs students did to get in music bachelor/master, I couldn't find any.

So while I found a post there or there in a forum, generally speaking it was from kids who was projecting their next 3 years.

So we live in an era where everyone is sharing their life, experience and knowledge but nothing is reachable/discoverable, or so much gatekeeped that it's only shared to follower(s) and the platform.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#150

Post by Noumenon72 »

vrnvu wrote: post #61

I was in a meeting one day, explaining some tech decisions I had made. At one point, my manager interrupted me, looking pale and completely out of place. He asked, "I don't get this approach. Can you share with me the tech blog where you read about this?" (...) I couldn't help but think: would a random blog post from the internet have more respect and authority than my own decisions and explanations?

It would to me. When you are doing something no one has written about, it makes me think "We must be doing something impossible or we haven't identified the true problem to solve. It's unlikely we have a problem no one else has ever had." I've spent so much of my career gluing frameworks together that writing my own code feels like a code smell. Whenever my coworkers have written something new I spend 80% of my time fighting it and wishing it was a pattern or library.
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