Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Most tech content is bullshit

aleksandra.codes

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 470 posts

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#251

Post by monadic2 »

arp242 wrote: post #116
tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

The internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids. Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while. I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another…

Honestly, I wish I could just remove commercial results from google as part of the query. Some terms are essentially now useless because the first N pages are just ecom sites. Google definitely knows which sites are commercial because they’ve been pushing product metadata for about a decade now and serve ads for the same clients....

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#252

Post by maps7 »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #216
mrisoli wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems very common in JS land, I once saw a talk in a conf which seemed very basic, later on I stumbled onto a tweet about how the speaker often submits abstracts to CFPs often not knowing much(or at all) about the subject, which serves as motivation to learn and talk about it, works well after having a track record of speaking at events some conferences you can get invited or not have to prove yourself so much t…

In general I find presentations at conferences not all that interesting; I've been to conferences where I've not attended a single presentation. There are some good talks, but they're not common. Giving a good presentation requires a few different skill and some practice – I'm not good at it either. The value is mostly in hanging out with various people. The best experience has generally been when I went alone and me…

How did you meet people if you didn't go to the talks?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#253

Post by bdcravens »

A lot of times I want to share, and while I'm a pretty good writer, I really don't have the bandwidth to write a great article, but can usually throw it up on a screen. Example: https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-and-rail...

I'd probably share a lot more, but it's not about not having time to share, as much as not having the time to bring the quality up to a level I'm willing to attach my name to. I suspect many are in the same boat.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#254

Post by ragnese »

abhayb wrote: post #244
ragnese wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. I cringe every time I have an actual, non-trivial, issue or fairly technical question about whatever I'm working on lately. I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describe…

Hard same on the Kotin/Jackson sadness. Gson also has a bunch of issues. Really want to cut my code over to Moshi but haven't worked up the energy for it. Maybe we all just want to wait till Kotlin serialization is production ready?

Does Gson still force you to write "beans"?

In any case, this project kind of didn't need any auto-magical serialization library, but the promise was reduced boilerplate. Instead, we just got way more complex boilerplate and a damn dependency forcing me to change how I want to write my code.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#255

Post by monadic2 »

rdiddly wrote: post #169
tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

Of all the people who got all excited that the internet would "democratize information," most seemed to be thinking on the demand side. And it did come to pass, but very few seem to have anticipated that it would democratize the supply side too. Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported…

> Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.

Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.

If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#256

Post by weinzierl »

gregmac wrote: post #214
alibarber wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uggh - this! Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything... Take this top 10 result. It's o…

Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this. If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs),…

> Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews[..]

My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. Blog post end up bloated and thin on real information because it is considered good SEO and apparently Google really tends to rank longer articles higher. Same is true for tech books, which are often bloated because the author has to reach their target page count.

YouTube videos seem to be mostly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want to tell. This is not universally true for video content though. If you look at online learning platforms, like Udemy for example, you can find many courses that spread an hour worth of content over typically five or six hours. My fear is that Google will someday decide to make the length of a video a ranking factor and we will have the same bloated videos on YouTube too.

> Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately.

Producing decent video content is much more elaborate and expensive than written reviews. My suspicion is that on YouTube paid reviews are even more common than on blogs and the norm is just not to mention it. Doesn't mean they are useless of course, just as you wrote "judge their bias appropriately".

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#257

Post by abhayb »

ragnese wrote: post #254
abhayb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard same on the Kotin/Jackson sadness. Gson also has a bunch of issues. Really want to cut my code over to Moshi but haven't worked up the energy for it. Maybe we all just want to wait till Kotlin serialization is production ready?

Does Gson still force you to write "beans"? In any case, this project kind of didn't need any auto-magical serialization library, but the promise was reduced boilerplate. Instead, we just got way more complex boilerplate and a damn dependency forcing me to change how I want to write my code.

Pretty much. I'm all about data classes so the code reads just fine. Definitely less boilerplate than something like JsonObject. But using Gson means non-nullable fields can still be null if the incoming JSON doesn't have them. So you get these "impossible" NPEs. Also, this is more a complaint about the JVM type system but Gson can encode things that it can't decode into which really messes with my mental model.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#258

Post by monocularvision »

alibarber wrote: post #187
tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

Uggh - this! Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything... Take this top 10 result. It's o…

The first paragraph:

> Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.

Reads like it went through Google translate twice.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#259

Post by PopeDotNinja »

tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

Confluent's marketing content for Kafka does an amazing job of making Kafka sound like the solution for every problem. I have a hard to understanding what it can actually do because the content is stuffed with so much selling and adjectives.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#260

Post by acemarke »

ng12 wrote: post #201
acemarke wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, Dan and I have spent more time trying to convince people to _not_ use Redux all the time than we have trying to actually market it :( [0] [1] We specifically have info in our docs on when it actually makes sense to use Redux [2] [3], but that doesn't change the flood of Medium blog posts out there. I created the Redux Style Guide docs page [4] to try to give some clarification on our actual current recomm…

Just like to chime in and say I'm really appreciative of these efforts. I get devs at my firm who are learning to do web dev for the first time and ask why we're not using Redux by default. I link them to Dan's article and the Redux FAQ as part of my explanation that Redux is a life-saver when you need it and aggressive overengineering when you don't.

Thanks :) I also should have linked my post "Redux - Not Dead Yet!" [0], which talks about how Redux compares to other tools like context, useReducer, and GraphQL, when it makes sense to use those, and reasons why Redux is still useful depending on what you're actually trying to do.

[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-yet...

Post reply on HN