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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#421

Post by goatinaboat »

someguydave wrote: post #406
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…

Humans have only been writing software for less than a century, mostly the last 50 years. That's nothing like other professions like blacksmithing or writing. It will take centuries until people learn how to write software well.

Humans have only been writing software for less than a century, mostly the last 50 years

50 years ago was the beginning of Unix sure but programmable computers were already 25 years old by then, and the concepts were even older.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#422

Post by RangerScience »

cryptica wrote: post #366
RangerScience wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produ…

> the new problem that our industry is facing now is

Goddamn but that's a good observation. Upvotes to you!

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#423

Post by lispm »

a-nikolaev wrote: post #409
RNCTX wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not my age and knowledge, it has been this way since before I was born in the case of the derivatives of C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_... The most ubiquitous languages used in the most highly trafficked websites in the world are Javascript (1995), PHP (1995), Python (1990), C++ (1979), and Java (1994). No, I do not keep up with individuals' blogs and articles. I am very familiar…

Your argument is weak. Popularity of a language does not correlate well with the average knowledge of the users of the language. OCaml and Scheme are both very old languages. The original dialect of OCaml (Robin Milner's ML) was created in 1973. Scheme was also created around the same time in the 1970s, and Lisp even earlier, so the technology I refer to is hardly a novelty from aether. Rather, the opposite is true,…

Actually both ML and Scheme were at first implemented in Lisp.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#424

Post by a-nikolaev »

lispm wrote: post #423
a-nikolaev wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is weak. Popularity of a language does not correlate well with the average knowledge of the users of the language. OCaml and Scheme are both very old languages. The original dialect of OCaml (Robin Milner's ML) was created in 1973. Scheme was also created around the same time in the 1970s, and Lisp even earlier, so the technology I refer to is hardly a novelty from aether. Rather, the opposite is true,…

Actually both ML and Scheme were at first implemented in Lisp.

Yeah

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#425

Post by dredmorbius »

charlysl wrote: post #416
dredmorbius wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curs…

... and by quoting Schopenhauer's beautiful prose instead of using your own words you are following his wise advice. Montaigne said something similar when confronted as to why he quoted Plutarch so often, replying that if he believed someone had already said something in a way that he couldn't improve, why on earth would he say it in his own words? I would very much have preferred to quote the great man himself of co…

Very much.

This Schopenhauer essay resonates strongly with me, hitting on and unifying numerous concepts I'd been playing with. And saying it well.

Even in translation ;-)

I'm still upset that the University of Adelaide's book server was shut down, as it had a wonderfully-formatted set of the essays, shared recently to HN. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21386663

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#426

Post by moriturius »

This is not a tech problem. This applies to all the content on the internet.

I like your suggestion to motivate people to start thinking about what they are going to use and why.

When we have team refinements at work we learned to question everything. There are some senior developers that get most things right, but not every time. Sometimes some junior dev just throws an idea that turns out to be way better.

This is why I think the process of coming up with a solution is much more important than the solution itself.

With that being said - please remember that there is a fine line between valuable skepticism and just being annoying :)

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#427

Post by robocat »

amznthrowaway5 wrote: post #417
robocat wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I didn’t intend for my comment to advise moving “up” into management. It is about maintaining an open mind. How can you tell the difference between someone who has valuable 3_048 metre advice versus someone who has highly negative value at 3km? I have remained in a developers rôle for my working life so far. I wish I could find the anecdote where this guy recognised that this one woman was always on successful…

Here it is, from peopleware: > I was teaching an in-house design course some years ago, when one of the upper managers buttonholed me to request that I assess some of the people in the course (his project staff). He was particularly curious about one woman. It was obvious he had his doubts about her: “I don’t quite see what she adds to a project; she’s not a great developer or tester or much of anything.” With a litt…

> To get ahead things like unethical behavior, lying and corruption matter far more than competence, teamwork and making real contributions. A lot of people simply can't stand to admit this.

I am a cofounder of a successful small bootstrapped business where competence, teamwork and making real contributions absolutely matter. I suspect those positive traits matter for ycombinator startups too.

I must admit I have never worked for a large corporation, where perhaps unethical behavior, lying and corruption are effective. However I have seen many founders fail trying to use those negative traits.

Thank you for recalling the Peopleware reference: great book!

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#428

Post by Nextgrid »

hellisothers wrote: post #414
tmlee wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be Kindle Unlimited model, as far as I know they pay authors by pages read. But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term. Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.

“...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.

This could have a terrible incentive for authors to spread the information thin across a ton of pages to artificially increase their earnings, so we'll end up with books that are the equivalent of online recipes today where there are 3 pages of SEO garbage before the actual recipe.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#429

Post by CM30 »

tomxor wrote: post #215
bartread wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe part of problem is Google SEO. This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers. Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of…

What I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for. Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.

Probably because both 'what the user was looking for' and 'why they left the page quickly' are complex issues.

For instance, quite a few times I'll open a page in Google's results, scan the content and go back to compare it to another result. That doesn't necessarily mean I hate the first page or think it's terrible, just that I wanted to see what it had to offer.

It can also mean I did find the answer there, and am returning to Google to search for something else instead.

It's tough to distinguish cases like those from 'the content was bad' and 'the content was not what I was looking for'.

There's also the worry that it might end up hurting user incentives too, or alter the way in which users browse the internet as a whole.

After all, since finding out that YouTube rewards/punishes creators based on watch time/how much of the video someone watches, I'm now hesitant to even watch many videos at all, since I know some guy's career might potentially be put on the line.

Perhaps Google worries other people will be the same, and stop clicking as many results knowing that Google might punish the affected websites for not staying long enough.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#430

Post by e_proxus »

Nextgrid wrote: post #428
hellisothers wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.

This could have a terrible incentive for authors to spread the information thin across a ton of pages to artificially increase their earnings, so we'll end up with books that are the equivalent of online recipes today where there are 3 pages of SEO garbage before the actual recipe.

That both has and hasn't happened with Spotify.

On the one hand, there are no 10 hour songs with some great part spread out randomly throughout that listeners have to find (obvious, and I think such a book wouldn't be successful either).

On the other hand there are tons of generated crap on Spotify, than sometimes sneaks into your playlists (even things contained text-to-speech advertisement).

I think all such platforms would need some kind of spam filter functionality and a good rating / statistics system so that quality content could be surfaced.

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