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Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#161

Post by shortrounddev2 »

isaacremuant wrote: post #97
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. I think you're insecure about the extent of things you know nothing or so little about. It's normal but not an attractive trait to project.

I was joking dog chill

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#162

Post by [deleted] »

j_french wrote: post #157
vba616 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's it! Seems my pal may have been passing Sturgeon's law off as his own invention. Definitely agree that it holds true on an individual basis. I've made some music. Most of it's crap. Some of it's alright. Definitely no masterpiece.

[deleted]

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#163

Post by kazinator »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #19
kazinator wrote: post #13

Most of the time, you should not be inventing your own equivalents of off-the-shelf algorithms. (Let alone something like crypto.) How much you evaluate the borrowed alternatives (or whether you even evaluate alternatives) entirely depends on how much that choice matters in the situation. Situations in which the choice doesn't matter are very common, and in situations in which it doesn't matter. The scientist isn't c…

Counter point: writing things from scratch once in a while sharpens your skills and helps you make better decisions in the future about tradeoffs, and let’s you evaluate different implementations without having to resort to a search on hackernews, stack overflow, or GitHub to find out what the trendiest option is Take exercise for example: it’s all unnecessary work, but it makes you stronger so that you maintain your…

If you're not making something from scratch in every development assignment, probably, get another job.

The article isn't simply disparaging using existing code, but using an existing approach.

Using an existing approach might mean, say, reading a paper about it and writing your own implementation from scratch, using only the paper's description and pseudo-code as an example.

That goes a long way to keeping you on your toes as a programmer, and can exercise some computer science muscle as well.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#164

Post by jackfoxy »

Tehdasi wrote: post #84
jackfoxy wrote: post #80

> Tutorials show harmful patterns. Try to find a sample SQL database, for any vendor, that does not employ artificial table primary keys. This was a requirement in the 1980s so that your queries would execute before the heat death of the universe, but that has not been the case for decades. Microsoft is particularly guilty of this. Artificial keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a dearth of literature on why…

Never specifically heard about this terminology until now, but after looking, yeah, I can see why ppl prefer 'artificial' keys to natural ones. From the animal shelter example, for people it uses email as the 'natural' key, which immediately runs up against 1,2,3 and 7 in https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe...

"Natural Key" actually refers to column(s) already available in the dataset you are turning into a row that is unique by row, and thus a candidate for being the key. (Subject to all the normalization, etc.).

An artificial key is a column of made-up data added to the rest of the column. It has no use other than to provide uniqueness. In most cases there is already a unique candidate key in your data.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#165

Post by vba616 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #151
vba616 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That kinda prove the whole point: even for the same author, 90% is crap.

Yes, it does kind of prove the point, but you wouldn't really confirm it if you perceive an author, a genre, a category, whatever, through some sort of filtering mechanism.

I think you can turn this saying around and consider that if 90% of something does not appear to be crap, and you want to understand its true nature, and maybe find some things others have missed, you need to go to the raw data source.

I didn't end up thinking his short stories were as good as I expected, but I did feel like I understood the person better. And even maybe human nature, or how authors progress, a little better.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#166

Post by eternityforest »

thebigwinning wrote: post #160
eternityforest wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> mathematicians I see that differently. Mathemticians often come into a field that's complex and filled with fudge factors and layers of engineering and make it clear and simple. See the history of electrical engineering in the 20th century.

Mathematicians come in and see the possibilities for deep innovation and making stuff work that didn't before.

Engineers take their work and figure out how to make it last 100k hours and be made of cheap pot metal and plastic and be a drop-in replacement for the previous thing, and to be safe if someone misuses it, how to make it with existing production lines, what extra features could be added cheaply, etc.

Modern tech couldn't exist without both(Even if they can sometimes be the same person), but usually neither side is all that excited about the other's work, if everyone is getting along they seem to just recognize the value in it but be glad they get to stick to their side.

When they don't get along the mathematicians are like "Wow, why are you adding this useless stuff" because they don't realize the extra feature only costs 2 cents a unit and doesn't add much weight, and the engineers are like "Why do we even need those number poets" forgetting that their whole job is using their stuff.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#167

Post by MrVandemar »

mplanchard wrote: post #120
MrVandemar wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein, I'd love to see more articles about recursion that don't even mention, let alone demonstrate, solving factorials. There's gotta be something else.

Trees or graphs would be great! Or arbitrarily nested objects. Those things have probably represented 90% of the recursive functions I’ve actually written

Tree's would be great, and an actual example would be threaded comments in a forum, or just nested lists.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

#169

Post by chwa982 »

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

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