Blogging can just be stating the obvious • Hacker News Board

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#31

Post by throwaway219450 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

AndrewStephens wrote: post #23

nate wrote: post #4

A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me: 1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was. There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that n…

And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect.

(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)

Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#32

Post by cjbarber » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

This is often, but not always, also what stand up comedy is.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#33

Post by nate » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:14 AM UTC

throwaway219450 wrote: post #31

AndrewStephens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was. There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that n…

And link rot. A lot of sites from back when are straight up gone, sadly. Maybe you get lucky on archive.org. Or in your pan case, affiliate farming where the bias or technical expertise is suspect. (Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?) Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices…

ha. speaking of the devil. for the "curse of knowledge" mention i made above i had a link that google served me up to a post that was totally rotten now. so i went back in to include the wikipedia version.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#34

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:15 AM UTC

pkaler wrote: post #9

I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats. With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.

I would value any human writing, even if clumsy or in need of a good editor, more than anything an LLM produced.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#35

Post by daft_pink » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#36

Post by 0o_MrPatrick_o0 » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

Thank you for sharing this observation.

I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”

I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.

At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.

Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#37

Post by rglover » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.

[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#38

Post by unsungNovelty » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:46 AM UTC

daft_pink wrote: post #35

Commenting on Hacker News is often just stating the obvious, but people still upvote! ;)

Yes!!! This!!!

/s

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#39

Post by LunicLynx » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 2:58 AM UTC

Disclaimer; have not read the article.

My current feeling about blogging is, that it more then anything else is we’re certian knowledge of AI came from. The arguments for blogging being the thing again also started at the same time AI got traction.

Just identify the bloggers that know their craft, weight them height. And you got yourself a step change in LLM competency.

Paying no one.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#40

Post by rchowe » Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 3:05 AM UTC

My father, who worked as a market research analyst, said that the trick to the job was "point out the obvious before anyone else does".

Web sites and web content are trending towards being enshittified until it just barely becomes worth wading through all of the shit to get to what you actually wanted to consume.