171–180 of 282 posts
Let me counter this with an age old adage that is simply true: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”
Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.
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I'd suggest going through https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and looking at their submission history.
Wow, I thought I had accumulated a pretty decent amount of karma with my 7800 over the past decade, but nope, those put me to shame. Interesting idea. I'll give it a shot.
Mine was just about 10K+ before the Pandemic. Then, I found the fun part, the rhythm, and then it has grown since then.
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I'd suggest going through https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and looking at their submission history.
Hmm... See a whole lot of experience, there. Maybe this isn't just "a young man's game," after all...
Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.
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That doesn’t imply it’s perfectly fine, it might just mean that the arbiters have lost their ability to detect quality. Which is exactly what I think has happened.
What you call signs of quality are cultural signifiers. My native language is French, a language that has an actual gatekeeping administration (English doesn’t). The french I grew up with(not in the country of France) may be considered lower quality by some people because they aren’t used to it, but really what they mean is that I express a different set of cultural signifiers they are used to. Unsurprisingly signs o…
A town is full of carpenters that make furniture. They understand the variety and quality of various woods, from oak to ash to ebony. These carpenters can easily discern the quality difference between one wood and another.
Over time, the carpenters die out and are replaced by people that can’t tell the difference. To them, an IKEA table made of compressed wood is the same as a handmade table made of high-quality wood. Ergo they have no ability to discern the quality difference and think they are all the same: wooden tables.
In terms of language: if language is merely becoming more simple and following its own rules less, then that seems like an analogous situation. It’s not simply becoming something else, it’s becoming dumber, less complex, less adherent to the rules that previously defined quality. It’s not doing this as a consequence of pursuing new levels of quality, but merely because the previous ones are decaying. I don’t think comparing two languages like French and English together is quite the same thing.
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If enough people are making the same mistake, won't it eventually stop being a mistake?
Not until my dying breath. The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries. Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet p…
No. Every language evolves, even those in countries with zero to very little immigration.
Usually towards simplification. I've lived enough to notice my native Romanian getting 'dumbed down' and we can count immigrants here on just a few hands.
However, in the 2000s I've ran across a collection of 1920s articles written by someone complaining romanian is changing and getting dumbed down. His examples of correct language felt overcomplicated and pointless, and his examples of 1920s dumbed down were academy style in the 2000s :)
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
Agree with that one though :)
I recommend against Grammarly because I like when I see peoples' idiosyncrasies and it's little fuckups that move language forward.
I use Grammarly, but seldomly. It's useful for longer piece of writing, esp. if I don't want to edit it later, over and over. Other than that, in normal conversations, these mistakes are part of our personal identity if you ask me.
I’m going to hard disagree with this. A lot of the enjoyment I get from creation is the process of others enjoying what I’ve built. Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.
I think you're agreeing with the article without knowing it. Because you're doing what you enjoy at the end of the day. For example, I design logos and small branding for my (mostly) CLI tools which I write for myself first. Seeing these projects at completion levels comparable with other, bigger projects brings a lot of joy to me. A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do,…
>A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.