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You've Probably Read Enough

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61–70 of 78 posts

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#61

Post by cityzen »

_delirium wrote: post #10

It depends strongly on the subject, I find. Sometimes this advice is right; sometimes it's very far off. I've made both mistakes, and it's hard to predict which is which. Sometimes you read forever when you should've just done something months ago. But other times you waste a lot of time badly reinventing a wheel and getting saddled with bad design decisions that should've been avoidable, because you didn't realize t…

Perhaps I'm wrong on what exactly he was getting at, but to apply it to myself I think it's more about wasting time in general. I know I look at HN for inspiration and to stay on top of what is new in my industry. Over time, though, that has turned into a lot of investment (reading/wasting time) with very little return (doing). It reminds me of the question someone asked here the other day about learning how to scale. The best answer was... you learn scaling when your site is over capacity. You can't read that on a site and understand it because the problem is never the same.

I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#62

Post by swah »

mtgentry wrote: post #11

I read HN and listen to podcasts like TWIST to expose myself to good ideas. My theory is the more you expose yourself to talented thought leaders, the more likely you are to think like them. Then when you come across a problem while building your product, you can say to yourself "Hey, this is what Mark Suster was talking about in that one blog post...how did he solve the problem?"

I wish that were true, but actually playing with SQL for the first hours can teach you much more than 20 articles about InnoDB vs MyISAM, MySQL tuning, Sql vs NoSql, etc...

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#64

Post by ethank »

Every time I think that I read too much I take a break and miss something that I know I would have liked, needed or benefitted from.

And then I end up in the other place where I have tabs of articles and kindle's of books, instapaper and reading list full.

Right now, since I'm in "startup" mode I'm both producing (code, writing, on-boarding docs) and consuming and I'm completely overwhelmed. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#65

Post by larrys »

dasil003 wrote: post #35

I think this is a relatively new phenomenon. 20 years ago you had to try hard to find an exhaustive amount of information on any specific topic, and what you did find tended to have been through a few gatekeepers. Now you can fritter away the days reading "useful" information because it's so prolific and readily available almost anywhere you are.

Absolutely. One of my first real programming books was "C" and also one on Unix. I had to drive for a half an hour to the Princeton Univ. bookstore. No such thing as computer books really at normal bookstores back then.

Ditto for gatekeepers. Have a legal issue you want to research? You went to the law library and sat there for hours and used the coin op copier.

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#67

Post by kolinko »

I think it's like saying "listen, you've learned enough as a programmer, that one additional technique won't change too much in your career".

Sure - there is a limit of healthy news consumption, but if you stop reading altogether (or limit yourself only to "worthy" content) you may wake up in a couple of years and discover that you're an ignorant fool.

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#68

Post by DefinitelyNbdy »

Re-posting a comment to the blog to get HN reaction:

Since this article doesn't obviously have an intended audience, you seem to be saying that everyone, everywhere should stop reading all articles once they posses the ability to read English well enough to comprehend this article. It is an interesting idea, but I suspect that this would lead to very uneducated people, so that people who ignore your advice are going to be better educated. If a senior citizen is told, "You've probably read enough" then, yes, maybe they will agree and proceed to purchase a plane ticket to the Bahamas. But if a teenager reads this article, the reaction will probably be, "sure, and by the same token, can you tell my teachers to stop assigning me homework?"

In any case, the core of the point is that by ignoring your advice, your readers can be better educated. Now, I am a Christian, but stupid priests who proclaim the creation myth until their vocal chords give way share something with you: if you ignore THEIR advice, you will be better educated, at least in science.

But really, you're right. The human race has reached the end of knowledge. There really isn't anything more anyone could possibly learn, so why try?

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#69

Post by freemarketteddy »

Our brains are much more complex data processing systems than we or even the latest neuroscience research can fathom...my advice would be to just keep reading whatever and whenever you feel like it...leave the analysis and processing to your brain!

That being said...I also think that going on information diets(vacation to a beautiful place) for a cpl weeks every few months can be very advantageous for very long term memory retention and also for letting the brain derive awesome conclusions from all that information...just like sleeping for 8 hours everyday has been proved to improve short term and near long term memory retention.

Re: You've Probably Read Enough

#70

Post by Apocryphon »

Hortinstein wrote: post #53

i have a huge problem with this, between HN, /r/programming, /r/netsec, /r/technology, fastcompany, I find myself not really "doing" that much with programming as a hobby. I studied computer science in college, and for the last 3 years have been working in the military outside the field, but my passion still lies with computer science. Unfortunately these days it seems I mostely read into the success of others. I gue…

That's what I'm grappling with right now myself, I've assembled a hefty doc's worth of links to useful resources I've found, and I've got a small library of programming books I've bought lately.

For the holidays, my current plan is to go through a chapter a day of the programming books. Not just read through it, but actually do the example projects, retyping out the code line by line, understanding both the big picture and seeing if there's any gaps in the code that I don't understand. Actually try to experiment afterwards, try to build on top of smaller projects and put them together.

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