Most tech content is bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#361

Post by ghufran_syed » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

donmcronald wrote: post #335

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was aroun…

I think it’s around 20/month now for O’Reilly learning (the new name for safari books). I’ve had it for around 5 years now, and I don’t ever recall having a limit on number of items. I feel like they have actually got better, with some really good video courses included as well. I’m just completing the second of two courses which are available elsewhere for $99 each, so I’ve almost paid for the year. I really like the idea of having this huge library I can dip into when I want to look something up, rather than getting lost in large amounts of low-quality blog posts online.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#362

Post by catalogia » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

nlitened wrote: post #25

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything goes to shit when marketing is involved. Or more like, everything goes to shit when money is involved.

Google incentivizes this. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Nobody is making the player play the game. There are plenty of other ways to spend your time than advertising on the internet.

"Hate the player for choosing to play the game."

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#363

Post by AmericanChopper » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #360

whack wrote: post #279

Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts. There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? F…

There are too many bullshitters in the software industry. Years of experience helps but it's not sufficient to be a good developer. There are many terrible developers with 20+ years of experience and there are some great developers with only 10 years of experience. The number one characteristic that makes a developer great is their critical thinking ability. These developers don't blindly adopt tools and business pro…

Median competency in most professions will typically be quite low. In software this is exacerbated by the high pay, which attracts a lot of charlatans, and the fact that our industry has almost no professional standards (unlike say structural engineering). I’ve never thought it was much of a problem though, because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#364

Post by bdcravens » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #301

bdcravens wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume company blogs have a process where you have approval over what you write, both before and after the article is written. To this end (more so if the author has "evangelist" in their job title) the writing is a function of their job, and not a hobby.

Function of their job or not, the point is that the people who are implementing the technology are the ones writing about it. The "doers" are also doing the writing.

The point is that many (not all, of course, so there will always be counterexamples) who are "doing" don't have the bandwidth to produce great content. If your employer pays you to do it inside of your regular work schedule, that changes the equation.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#365

Post by Swizec » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #356

Swizec wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations. And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.…

> Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read. I sampled your work. It's exactly what we're talking about. I'm sure this works for you, financially and SEO-wise.. but.. maybe use 500 words and no gifs instead?

I often do.

My point is that this stuff doesn’t have to be boring and dry. It’s okay for content to reflect having fun when you’re having fun.

Even my college professors used jokes in their lectures.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#366

Post by cryptica » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

RangerScience wrote: post #284

whack wrote: post #279

Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts. There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? F…

You're a cynic ;) Knowledge from experts should feed into "think critically and figure it out", rather than replacing either with the other. Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test, so it's easier to (in)validate the results of that thinking than, say, something on the scale of a planet and decades.

>> Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test,

This is true, but I think the new problem that our industry is facing now is "How much effort and how many resources are required to make this software work" - This leaves a lot of room for manipulation and people do exploit it in most companies (especially large corporations). These are many tech companies these days where it takes 20 developers to produce results which could in fact have been done by just 1 developer in the same amount of time. I'm not exaggerating the numbers here.

I think the problem lies in perverse corporate incentives (or rather, the absence of meaningful incentives) and the way in which it affects how people pick their battles. Most employees pick all the wrong battles for all the wrong reasons.

The more money a company has and the more solid their monopoly is, the more employees will be focused on internal politics rather than value production.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#367

Post by garyclarke27 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

I really appreciate good books, I recently bought Javascript The Definitive Guide, for a second time 2020 edition (O’Reilly) it’s expensive £40 but worth every penny, 10 times more valuable than umpteen books at £10 to £20, so actually great value.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#368

Post by Stratoscope » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 11:02 PM UTC

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…

That Medium page on is hilarious! I recommend it if you are into oscilloscopes and want a laugh. My favorite parts are the opening paragraphs and the list of Key Points for each scope, which include:

• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]

• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]

• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]

Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!

• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]

Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#369

Post by neutronicus » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 11:06 PM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #256

gregmac wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bloat…

Ha. I strongly disagree.

Any kind of machine maintenance video has so much preamble, when what I'm really after is like 25 seconds of silently accessing the part, pausing to circle stuff in red, and narrating stuff that's hard to see from the video

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#370

Post by monadic2 » Sun, Jun 07, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #288

monadic2 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't get the reference. Worry less about "vibes," I guess would be my advice. And consider that if someone says "brown cows eat grass" they're not trying to describe the entire universe; they're actually taking it as a given that your brain will work hard enough to remember that non-brown cows, and non-grass-eating cows, and even brown, non-grass-eating cows exist and have their own stories that are outside the sc…

It's hard for me to see society being able to self-critique via social media as a bad thing—newspaper headlines have certainly been exploiting the same linguistic tricks you point out for centuries. I don't see why it's bad to return the favor and build a culture that isn't represented by legacy/traditional/whatever media.