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Really good points. IMO the web-surfing crowd's taste for news (as opposed to their capability when it comes to work) is deceiving. Their excitement for prospec
by themodelplumber 8y ago
Really good points. IMO the web-surfing crowd's taste for news (as opposed to their capability when it comes to work) is deceiving. Their excitement for prospective high-leverage information creates a demand that biases community sites like HN and Reddit toward novelty, and the result is this massive FOMO loop: "Read it, remember to try it, forget to try it, aw damn a new thing already came out and it's better because X! Read it..." I love that the author of the article really speaks to this situation.
I have a relative who got really into this mindset. In fact he picked the "HN's Choice" software framework of the day for one of our co-creative projects a couple years ago. Mostly a fun project, but it could have gone somewhere, maybe. He got as far as setting it up so that we had some scaffolding, then basically he flamed out. I don't blame him at all; he'd never even used it before and expected himself to be able to just run with it. And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P, but he was ashamed to use it. It made me so upset to see him feel all this pressure and then collapse.
Personally I feel that pressure myself sometimes but being aware of it helps a lot. As a hobby side project, I decided to go back and do some 1990s MS-DOS programming and experiencing this FOMO stuff was part of the motivation. I needed to be free to work deep instead of thinking broad, so to speak.
- finndark 8y agothemodelplumber says> "And this guy was a _master_ at a certain language starting with the letter P... Prolog? What a shame he couldn't use his best language! It has such nice web frameworks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages#P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages#...