3 ms·

So the fact that I start with the title and HN comments before reading the article is good?

• wenc 7y ago
  Sure. That's what I often do instinctively to quickly understand context. Articles are usually written with an expository focus rather than a didactic one. Sometimes an article is so abstract that I don't get it until I read comments on how people are applying it. (it all depends on the quality of comments of course. No comment on the quality of HN comments) Comments also give you a sense of the sociological context of something -- articles can sometimes make something sound grand and theoretical, but sometimes you discover in the comments that the author had much humbler motivations and was just trying to scratch an itch. Or that a piece of tech with a glossy front page actually has all these gaps because the author is a one-man shop who is working on it part-time. Social context really matters. In grad school, I realized there was a difference between what you read in a journal publication and what the author will tell you after 2 drinks at the bar. You can read influential and highly-cited journal papers about Algorithm Zeepordisdf which sounds really impressive, until you meet the author at a conference and they tell you no one really uses it because of this and that weakness. It's important to be able to read between the lines and to read around a subject than to just read the source.