81–90 of 470 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never seen it outside of HN personally
IAAL, who also frequents many Magic: The Gathering subreddits, and it is used all the time there. Same with the home-repair subs I lurk on. It is ubiquitous shorthand.
Agreed The "most popular" (and maybe click-bait like) the content, the more crap you'll get. Especially when people think they know the subject but they don't. Most common offender nowadays: ML and Data Science. I've found articles with glaring errors, techniques that don't make sense, very shallow tutorials, etc (Disclaimer: nobody is immune from making mistakes, not even me) And then you get "oh but you start train…
It’s human nature to focus on the more immediate, tangible outcomes - eg going through a pytorch tutorial - over spending time trying to really understand the problem they are trying to solve. Great teachers try to guide their students there, and great students are perpetually calling themselves out mentally to try and stay on the track of understanding rather than rote repetition. But it’s very hard.
[0]: http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06
Way to often I heard "Google uses Hadoop, so you need to use it to" for companies with data good for an old laptop.
Now I hear a bit of "appeal to authority" when it comes to monorepos.
From 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 wit…
Looking back, it seems Feburary/March/April covid-19 experts' expertise had the same (or worse) predictive power as random programmers on HN.
This is true for all types of content - the art is to develop a sense of smell for quality content. And to do that you have to first have been exposed to a lot of bullshit.
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,…
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.
As true as some of the comments might be, take a scroll through this very thread of comments and admire the finely curated homogeneity and repetition of popular trivia and opinion.
You want to see through the bullshit? Look at the source code for some repository that makes it to the top of hackernews, with only positive comments.
"somedumbguy: Sweet! I've been needing this!"
"silly_girl420: I've been thinking of doing something like this for years, and have detailed notes on the matter. Need contributors? > "original poster: Omg yes all contributions welcome!"
You: Looks at the source code. Wow. It's bullshit with no future and no useful value.
Weeps for humanity
I believe this all started with the advise to write blogs and books to market yourself as an authority. As a result, nowadays, most blog posts are written by people who are seeking a job in that area, not by people who have experience working in that area. I mean I'm sure that I would have experience about different topics. But I rarely have the time to write about it. Customers and their projects keep getting in the…
Ok, it might be true that a lot of inexperienced people are writing blogs now as a way to build a personal brand. But your reaction is an over-reaction. There are also lots of incredible experts writing, and writing its self is an incredibly rewarding and educational activity. It's not a waste of time, no matter how busy you are.
Also, if the internet is 95% articles by job seekers, then I'm better off distrusting everyone instead of expanding the trust that only 5% deserve to the other 95%.