Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, IANAL is common across the entire know-it-all internet, which is basically everyone who can read at a college level and plenty who can't.
I've never seen it outside of HN personally
Most tech content is bullshit
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Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#62I 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,…
Or when you want to compare two products and the top result(s) are just auto-generated pages that dump the stats/spec of each product side by side. I hate that so much. I want to read what a human who has tried both thinks.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#63From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…
I personally love discussions where I can throw out opinions, and get shot down without too much fuss when appropriate. I find that throwing opinions out helps discussion. This only works if people qualify their opinion, and there's an opportunity to actually shoot things down.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#64From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…
I don't think that's true of most people. People use IANAL defensively in an attempt to avoid embarrassment from being shown to be wrong in an ensuing discussion as opposed to a "free to present my opinion without scrutiny" statement. Most scientists have this too amongst a group of their peers (in conferences for example), they offer a lot of caveats in contributing to discussions that even though are primarily their realm of expertise, they may be out of their depth in the room.
If seeking validation is the prime motivation to contribute to a discussion, at the very least I think HN is the least guilty of this amongst most forums.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, IANAL is common across the entire know-it-all internet, which is basically everyone who can read at a college level and plenty who can't.
I've never seen it outside of HN personally
It's ancient. It was being used on Usenet in the 90s.
It's a standard disclaimer because giving legal advice without being licensed to practice law is a crime in many jurisdictions.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#66From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…
I’m not a psychologist but... No, in all seriousness I think this is one true factor. But I feel like this isn’t a bad thing on its own. The issue arises when authors don’t disclose their knowledge or competence. Saying stuff like: this is what I assume, this us what I don’t know etc. or just posing plain questions.
Right, but nobody's going to say any of those in a blog post. If you're going to the trouble to write a blog post you're probably making a statement. Even if it's ill-informed.
There's another dimension to this too, which is that writing blog posts and coming off as knowledgeable can directly translate into career opportunities. As long as you aren't too wrong, there's a material incentive to putting stuff out there.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google incentivizes this. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Wall Street incentivizes Google to do this. Don't hate the game, hate the meta-game?
Google chose to be beholden to Wall Street. It could have chosen to remain private and had a better chance of not harming society.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#68I’ve said this for a long time: The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read. Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 20…
>> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do…
I wouldn't want to read a tutorial by someone who has just learned it. I want a tutorial by someone who has ample experience.
How would you feel if I write a cookbook the first time my bread rolls didn't catch fire? ... to solicit feedback?
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#69From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…
I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or lack of thereof).
In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g. politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much correlated with their knowledge of the subject.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#70From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…
I personally love discussions where I can throw out opinions, and get shot down without too much fuss when appropriate. I find that throwing opinions out helps discussion. This only works if people qualify their opinion, and there's an opportunity to actually shoot things down.
It depends on the forum and the context.
In some places, throwing out opinions to stimulate discussion is perfectly reasonable. In others, it's simply noise and misinformation.