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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#431

Post by kcorey »

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'd certainly pay for timely quality (I had at one time 4 packed bookshelves lining the walls of my office).

The problem is that "timely" bit.

A good book take 3-6 months to write, edit, review, and publish.

In that time we could have as many releases with the info in the book radically out of date.

Only solution is to go online, but that doesn't help the traditional write/edit/review cycle much.

Things change so fast, I don't see much option to Stack Overflow... Not really.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#432

Post by polytely »

jacobobryant wrote: post #344
polytely wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is not really communicated in the current design, reminds me of the ratings on Netflix where they are intended as "Our estimation of this contents rating for you based on your viewing history" while most people I talked about it just thought it was the rating of the thing in itself.

Good to know, any suggestions for making it clearer? Maybe thumbs up/down is the wrong labeling; perhaps something like "show me more like this" and "not interested"... though I have no idea what icons I would use for that.

Might even be a good idea to just have text labels, I think just icons are way overrated in design.

[I hated this] [I'm interested in this] [I liked this]

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#433

Post by pizza234 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #240
pizza234 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point, exactly? That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing? They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's n…

I am in an odd position where I'm writing a book at the same time I'm writing a library the book uses. It's a fascinating experience. How being a good writer and software engineer go hand in hand. If my library is not easy to understand, my book won't be succesful. I'm constantly going back to edit the library to make sure the book / related concepts can be grokked. I feel this is a fairly general truism. Great softw…

To be clear - I didn't mean that the two _roles_ are mutually exclusive. The opposite - I think that definitely, there are common quality required between software engineering and technical writing.

What I meant is that in real world, due to times constraints, they are. As a sibling poster commented, working as a hobby ends up being a work in itself, so doing both things ends up being, effectively, overtime.

And as a consequence, all the general considerations about overtime apply.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#434

Post by mcv »

I'm in a similar position as the author. I never thought I was expert enough to blog about how to code. I did rely on other people's blogs. Sometimes they were good, but quite often, as I developed my own expertise, I discovered better ways of doing things. At some point I started discovering that some people gave just bad advice. And not even just anonymous bloggers, but official documentation might present examples of things that seemed like a good idea at the time but the community eventually discovered better practices (I'm looking at Angular 1 in particular here).

Unfortunately, as I discovered better ways of doing things, I still didn't start blogging about them. I probably should.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#435

Post by quickthrower2 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #347
Veen wrote: post #6

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

Since we're arguing by aphorism, Brandolini's law a/k/a bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790 The value of a healthy established pedagogy, curriculum, and canon is that these distribute the bullshit-sifting role and guard and promot…

2 orders of it’s your boss!

But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can help.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#436

Post by quickthrower2 »

ori_b wrote: post #192
nippoo wrote: post #185

Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming. The reason we can build such complicated applications in such a small amount of time is partly because we're relying on other people to make default, sensible tradeoffs - a framework supporting a particular type of SQL database, or NoSQL, or PHP or Django or whatever it might be. The ment…

> Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming. You should really understand the problem you're trying to solve. Once you understand the problem, evaluating a solution is not so hard. And implementing a solution without understanding it is negligence that will bite you in prod sooner or later. https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-…

There just isn’t time for what I think you are saying. Analysis is a cost itself. Shortcuts have to be taken to get anything done. Judgment is required to navigate those shortcuts. Some might be unknown unknowns.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#437

Post by whack »

XelNika wrote: post #341
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…

> 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. I don't think that's true. Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics. Even subject…

> Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics

Yes, this is exactly why you should:

1. Consult more than one expert, until you've found a clear majority. And then trust in that majority

2. Pick either a couple experts who are the most highly regarded in their field. Or use random sampling to pick a couple experts from among a pool of equally qualified experts

As you yourself pointed out, people who fall for fallacies often form their own judgement first, and then cherry-pick experts to lend more support to their argument. This is precisely the danger in telling lay people to trust in their own judgement.

Cherry-picking of experts is the opposite of expert-guided decision making, because the cherry-picking part is being driven by lay judgement, not expert recommendation. A truly expert-driven approach would rely either on the most highly regarded experts, or random sampling from a pool of equally qualified experts. This leaves minimal room for cherry-picking and confirmation bias.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#438

Post by jason0597 »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #412
Veen wrote: post #6

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

Well, part of the problem is that there are few detailed book reviews anymore. The Jolt Awards for books were at one time a good guide. Nonetheless, one place that has fairly in-depth Java book reviews of all places is Oracle's Java Magazine. [0] [0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/book-review-archive

It's a shame that it's now cool to hate on Java nowadays. It's still a great language to design web applications in, especially now with the newer releases and all the amazing features they put in. I will never understand why things like JavaScript are being used in the back end...

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#439

Post by DeusExMachina »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #377
DeusExMachina wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem. I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks. The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content…

Do you have a link? I'd like to check them out.

My site is matteomanferdini.com

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#440

Post by klibertp »

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…

> with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the wider industry.

This is a tangent, but I'm currently in the situation where I really need to find these two doctors, after years of suffering from a rare (combination of) medical issues. I've been searching for a doctor who has experience with treating my (or similar) conditions, for decades now, and I just can't seem to find it. Meanwhile, my problems become more and more disturbing, with me being unable to work anymore in the near future.

So please, if you know how to find the "highly regarder medical specialists", please tell me. Especially if it would take "minimal effort", because I'm steadily losing strength and soon the minimal effort will be the most I can exert.

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