13 ms·

Expertise in the Age of YouTube

189 points by zzaner 7y ago

jmkd 7y ago
A superb reflection on the accelerated potential technology affords learning. I would add an additional note that the choice of topics to dive into is now both more vast and accessible than it has ever been. Not only can you learn what you want to, but you can stumble across that which you'd never thought of or scarcely knew existed and discover more about yourself along the way. When you search for things to learn you're merely bolstering your predisposition, but when other things emerge before you and stick, something altogether more interesting is taking place.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I so often discard internet real educational value [0] but it might start to have an impact. Even if I'd think fablab/shop per city or neighborhood might be more efficient, it's still great. [0] to me the only good thing there was khan academy which was basically video tutorial you can rewind.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I have been starting the process of learning hand woodworking by watching the likes of Paul Sellers. It is amazing how much knowledge there is available on YouTube about craftsmanship. Combining YouTube with niche web forums multiplies the learning power. I'm already able to dimension boards with nothing but a hand plane, a combination square, a depth gauge, and winding sticks. I'm just at the start of my journey but I'm so thankful YouTube and all these creators are out there to introduce me to this new hobby!
- weaksauce 7y ago
  paul sellers is great! such a gem. check out wood work web, johnathan katz moses, pask makes, izzy swan and jackmanworks... as well as some of the older videos from William Ng. they are all quality!
  - michelpp 7y ago
    Thanks for the pointers, I like Essential Craftsman too, a bit of philosophy with some great technique and history thrown in.
- coldpie 7y ago
  Hey, welcome. It's a great fun hobby. Check out Chris Schwarz's books, The Anarchist's Toolchest and The Anarchist Design book (the titles make more sense after you read them). There's an essay in Toolchest called "Three Tables" that basically describes my theory on craft, it's uncanny.
jnellis 7y ago
As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accurate or useful information. These I've surmised are people that would rather be into video production or youtube stardom than they would being actually good at the subject they profess. Alternatively, some of the worst grainy, shaky cam videos I've seen, usually on the jobsite, are some of the best practices, tricks of the trade or just informational rich videos you can get. These are people that are not into being youtube stars and are just part of the 'sharing community' as it maybe was originally envisioned. But as Rumsfeld said, there's known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and when you're a homeowner watching how-to videos, its very difficult to know what you should know.... so most of them go by, instinctively, the quality of video production as their guide to what they should be doing. Sure there are great craftsmen with great video quality and there are some really poor craftsmen with poor video quality but these are not the bulk of what's out there. What rises to the top of search offerings seems to be equally what's been marketed (poor craftsmen, high quality, "please like,share, and subscribe") or what's been organically liked (poor quality, high craftsmanship). For the tradesmen out there dealing with homeowners, its now sometimes a bit of an uphill battle after homeowners have done their 'youtube' research and have determined how hard the job they've asked you to bid is going to be.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  I find that's true of most information. The higher the craftsmanship of the video, the worse the actual information being presented. Lectures, for instance, that are just a professor talking with his PowerPoint slides are almost always better than videos that put on a production with fancy graphics, jump cuts, and narration. Look at the news. The news with more spectacle tends to be of lower quality on average. Or anything that comes from Hollywood. Daytime and reality TV are extremely polished but mostly tripe from either an entertainment or informational perspective. The more time someone puts into a "production quality" video, the more they're trying to sell you something, even if it's just their brand awareness.
fuzzybear3965 7y ago
In college I met a friend who had a MacBook whose keyboard layout was assembled using the Dvorak layout (this was in 2009). Roll forward a couple of years and I had met another friend who used his OS to map QWERTY to Dvorak. Inspired, I spent a few days during Christmas break learning a new keyboard layout. It's still what I use today. Roll forward a couple of more years and I'm working on my Ph.d. and have the thought that someone must have done more optimization on keyboard layouts: Meet http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx. That inspired me to learn QFMLWY, something I have yet to do. Roll forward to a few months ago and I'm experiencing some slight wrist pain; a coworker uses a Kinesis Advantage and recommends it. In true punk style (and unhappy with the Kinesis' outdated appearence), I endeavor to find a superior product. I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal. This is a niche path involving one skill set: Improving the human-keyboard interface. And, it involved real-world interaction with people and the resources that people on the internet have provided. I'm convinced that either only in-real-life (IRL) or only online interactions would have inhibited my growth in this domain. I'm sure that this same concept applies to every web development framework or conlang or beauty style or any human endeavor. As an aside: These ideas are also related to why I'm confident that an artificial general intelligence developed in the vacuum of the internet will not succeed relative to a competing technology that is able to benefit from both offline, interactive experiences and also online information trawling.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  > I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal. I've been using the Dvorak layout since 2009. First on a TypeMatrix 2030 USB for a long time and currently with an ErgoDox EZ Shine that I bought like a year ago or something (wow, time flies! I thought it was only a year ago that I bought it but I looked it up in my e-mail archive and it was in fact December 2017 that I bought it) and have been using since then. Right now I am typing on the QWERTY keyboard of my MacBook Air, just because of where and how I am sitting at the moment. But I love my ErgoDox and use it a lot. Here is my custom Dvorak based layout for ErgoDox EZ that I created basically recreating the position of most of the keys that I was used to with the TypeMatrix 2030 USB that I had, and with a couple of minor but important modifications. https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/ergodox-ez/layouts/ENb6/latest/0 https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/ergodox-ez/layouts/ENb6/lat... This layout has been working perfectly for me and I am very happy with it. It's mostly looking the same now as when I first created it (that link is for the most recent version, the one I am using now). Some things to note about this configuration and about ErgoDox EZ in general (for the benefit of others ITT): - In the typical position of caps lock I have Escape when I tap it, but Control when I hold it. Awesome! - This whole layout resides on the keyboard itself. I have all my computers set to US standard layout and am able to have my layout work always on all of my computers across all operating systems with no configuration or anything. This alone is worth like a couple of hundred bucks at least, seriously! - The previous keyboard that I had, you know, the TypeMatrix, had hardware Dvorak support too, but I always had to press a button on it each time I unplugged and replugged it, or woke my computer from sleep, or turned my computer back on after having shut it down. It's actually surprising how annoying pressing that button each time where I needed to, which wasn't always (because back them I was remapping the keys to Dvorak in software on most of my personal computers), but often enough that it got annoying. None of that B.S. with the ErgoDox! :D Prior to purchasing the ErgoDox EZ those two years ago, I too had looked a bit at stenography tools and projects. My conclusion back then was that it seemed useful, and was interesting, but cost prohibitive and time consuming to learn, with the added factor of uncertainty that I have no idea if writing code with stenography methods would actually be faster or in other ways better than my current means of writing software. Anyway, if you do end up learning stenography and use it to write code I would love to hear about it and I hope you post about it to HN then.
nefitty 7y ago
I'm interested to know how other developers on HN prefer to learn. I really like just running into a problem and Googling my way to a solution. I read snippets of docs, blog articles, SO answers, etc. and then try to piece together an understanding. I have a hard time incorporating videos into my ad hoc learning. What is your preferred method of learning new tools, techniques, etc?
- omosubi 7y ago
  I'm the same way. I find that choosing a project that inspires me takes me much further than just saying "I want to learn X, let me follow a tutorial". On a related note, I just read nassim taleb's anti fragile which has a section arguing that most progress comes from people tinkering with things to get something they can sell or to solve some problem they have rather than academics trying to understand things from basic principles. I don't agree with it entirely but that and my way of learning has led me to value experiential learning much higher than society does currently
  - porknubbins 7y ago
    Tutorials on youtube are generally terrible for learning because they don’t show you any of the design decisions, mistakes, thought process etc. As if what stood between you and programming Tetris in Rust was not knowing the order of keystrokes. Udemy has (a few) authors with much better motivated examples I find.
  - shantly 7y ago
    > I'm the same way. I find that choosing a project that inspires me takes me much further than just saying "I want to learn X, let me follow a tutorial". To piggyback on that, I need either a real project or genuine curiosity. I'm terrible at making myself learn something that I'm not 1) immediately applying to real work—paid or personal—not a make-work learning project, or 2) just really dog-chasing-a-bone interested, and I cannot gin that up or fake myself into that mode, though sometimes I can start poking around a topic and find something that gets me going. Fortunately for me I'm fuckin' good at working that way. Unfortunately it made school a real pain in my ass.
benterris 7y ago
What "absurdly demanding online game" is the author referring to in the first paragraph ? He mentions Overwatch later in the article but in another context so I'm not sure that's the one he meant.
- Wordball 7y ago
  Probably Fortnite, though all the players surely haven't "internalized its mechanical nuances to Ph.D. level" Mexico Population: ~128 million Fortnite Peak monthly players: 78.3 million LoL peak montly players: 111 million Fortnite total accounts: 250 million you can say whatever you want if it's a blog article
  - jammygit 7y ago
    > you can say whatever you want if it's a blog article I just want to de-normalize that a bit: blogs should strive for high standards, even though some don’t. They are a major form of information these days!
CM30 7y ago
I think it's especially interesting to look at how quickly people master a brand new field too, since it seems the timespan between a new hobby getting started and people making professional quality works in said area has gone down significantly too. For instance, my go to example are video game mods and ROM hacks. In the olden days, these communities grew quite slowly, and it took a fair amount of time for people to get to understand the workings of a new game's engine and how it could be built upon. And you can see this if you look at Super Mario 64. In it early days, mods were really basic, and even the fanciest ones looked super primitive by today's standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U It then took years to go from stuff like that to more advanced original game mods like Super Mario 64 Star Road, and even longer before ASM coding became something many people understood and used for custom enemies, bosses, gimmicks, etc (like in Kaze Emanuar's current works). Now contrast to Super Mario Odyssey. It took just months for mods to get made for that game, and under a year for fancy looking ones like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg And even that's a slower example. Since then, we've gone from seeing modding scenes take years to develop, to seeing them a week or two after release, to in some cases seeing mods getting made BEFORE the game officially hit store shelves altogether. Seriously, Smash Bros Ultimate got mods before the game was available to buy, all based on leaked copies posted online. Outside of games, same thing happens in web development too. New framework pops up, professional looking sites/apps/whatever get made in the first week. It's gotten to the point that those jokes about looking for 'rockstar ninjas in [new programming language here]' may not be jokes anymore. But yeah, the quality baseline goes up significantly quicker now.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  But those examples seem to be the result of more frameworks and tooling and boilerplate code that is already available that people can just build upon rather than delve into the inner workings and figure stuff out - rather than people learning to become experts much faster.
  - Godel_unicode 7y ago
    0 to 1 is the hard part.
wilsmex 7y ago
I’ve been working on my YouTube educational channel html/css/design (https://youtube.com/FollowAndrew https://youtube.com/FollowAndrew) for a bit now. Pickup is slow, but it’s been fun helping a greater audience learn new skills!
- folkhack 7y ago
  I mean this in the kindest way possible, but do you think it's appropriate to teach such new CSS selectors? I just bounced around the slider on your featured video and I'm seeing stuff that only hits 85-90% on caniuse.com which is unacceptable for the apps I typically do. I still have a lot of IE11 that's used in large corps, etc. I'd LOVE to use things like grid-template but I can only imagine the fallout - I've only just been able to start utilizing basic flexbox. It may just be different audiences/userbases, idk.
  - wilsmex 7y ago
    That’s a pretty good question actually, and difficult to address. I try and push new concepts/tech as a way of education on what’s coming. For edu channels it seems it’s a balance of teaching core concepts and also teaching what’s “popular” to keep folks interested. You have to make a cutoff at some point with caniuse, as I suppose to get 100% coverage we’d still be doing table-based layouts or float hacks. The old adage of “know your audience” will eventually dictate the tech.
    - folkhack 7y ago
      > That’s a pretty good question actually, and difficult to address. I try and push new concepts/tech as a way of education on what’s coming. Thanks =) ... I'm always disparaged with HN when you say something that can be viewed as not supportive. (even -1 votes feels like "oh come on guys!") I think the thing that scared me the most out of that video was using things that are approx. 90% globally supported for layout. Totally agree with "know your audience". Specifically, I teach the habit of look it up on MDN, then caniuse, then have VMs/devices ready-to-go and test it even further. Simple rendering/functionality issues have turned into legal action against my past employers. Ex: if you cause even a 5-10% drop in ecommerce conversions due to what shoulda been a simple CSS fix, and that goes unnoticed for a month, that's a potential lawsuit/termination with very "black and white provable damages". Unfortunately, I've lived this =( It's worth noting that I work on conversion-based web solutions that are "mom and pops" small, all the way up to "if it's down for 1 minute we just lost thousands of dollars"... but really I've learned to be incredibly careful with both. Every solution I build online at some point means $ even if it's non-direct conversions (ie: purely informational, no sales online sales funnel, etc).
chewz 7y ago
Me and my friend are fixing, renovating old bikes as a hobby. A rule of thumb is that each repair requires watching 2-3 youtube videos first. We are joking that people no longer are flying to the Moon because NASA have lost all of the videos of how to assemble a rocket. ;-)
tempestn 7y ago
This speaks to me. I do a bunch of DIY work on my cars and various maintenance on my house, thanks to youtube videos, that I highly doubt I would have ever had the skill or confidence to tackle in a time before the internet. Many of these things are literally less work to do myself than the hassle of getting someone else to do it, let alone the cost. But in an earlier time, absent knowing someone who could teach you the skill, it just wouldn't have been an option. Despite the problems platforms like YouTube cause (or enable), I certainly wouldn't want to do without it.
JDiculous 7y ago
I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it's one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills). The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidly deteriorating due to this democratization of information. Credentials mean less today than they ever have in history. Specialists will have to be on top of the ever-expanding spigot of new information in order to remain competitive and justify their fees in a time when anybody can just search Google/Youtube for the answer. None of those would be problems if workers weren't financially dependent on their jobs, such as if we had a universal basic income. But since most of us our financially dependent on our jobs, we're basically in an arms race against each other to the bottom. Stay at the bleeding edge, or get replaced by a more financially desperate harder working 20 year old from an Asian country who learned everything you know from Youtube / the internet. Many will instinctively deny this now, but just watch how this continues to play out over the next 10-20 years.
- zanny 7y ago
  It used to be about the only thing you had going for you if you didn't have the political connections of wealth was the ability to become an expert through extreme effort to acquire cloistered information. This is also certainly a contributing factor to the flatline of median incomes for 40 years in the US - among the dozen other influencers including globalism, automation, deregulation, deunionization, etc. But we, as the labor class, are in a constant ongoing rat race to the bottom. The endgame is near total automation of production, near total availability of expertise on demand, and total capture of all resources by those own the robots. And this isn't like any other time - an able bodied man in any age before this one had intrinsic value to their community. They could be taken advantage of and thus provided for. We are going to see billions who cannot contribute meaningfully to economics. And I do not think those leading the charge towards automation are all that interested in seeing quarterlies dip to reduce suffering in the world.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  I call what you’re describing “information asymmetry”; a small amount of people holding all of the information. Much of our society’s modes of productivity depend on many people not having access to information. How can you repair your car if there is nobody to show you how? I guess you’ll have to take it to a mechanic! But the internet completely destroyed information asymmetry, many people have access to lots of information now. I don’t need to take my car to a mechanic or pay someone to teach me, I can watch a YouTube video on how to change my oil. The side effect of the destruction of information asymmetry is that a LOT of people depended on it, and they are all going to have to figure out where they stand in the new marketplace of information. I think we’re also seeing huge social movements because people are reading stuff online and reflecting about their city/state/government and saying “hold on, what you’re doing isn’t right, I’ve read about why you’re wrong”. The Arab spring, occupy wall st, the european refugee crisis, the Hong Kong protests, the Chilean protests, basically any major social movement in the last 20 years could be argued to have been triggered by the internet.
ezconnect 7y ago
I love imagining what Johnny5 would be if it had youtube.
bambax 7y ago
Skillful coaching is important, but a big part of it is simply accountability: knowing that someone will check on your progress at regular intervals and that you need to do some work in between interviews to not look like a fool. That's the concept behind the "accountability partner": someone who is not an expert into what you're trying to achieve, but who bugs you regularly to make sure you're moving forward. After searching for "accountability partner as a service" I couldn't find anything other than weird marketing websites that looked more than a little scammy, so I built a simple tool that sends me an email everyday for each task defined in the system, and that lets me record progress by responding to those emails. The concept is akin to Jerry Seinfeld's productivity hack: "don't break the chain", meaning you need to do something about your craft every day. If you skip a day, the chain breaks and restarts at zero. The effectiveness of this is surprising; the accountability system can't assess the quality of the work in any way and isn't even a person that I could disappoint, but having to respond to an automated email every day to log my progress and store ideas, etc., pushes me in ways I would never have expected.
- kfk 7y ago
  I do this with my team with github issues. They get a daily reminder of issues older than 5 days. We are not getting more done, but we are more aware of what needs to be done and close issues that are just a nice to have. Accountability works well with people, unfortunately most companies just say accountability is important but don't put any real process in place to make it happen.
Dowwie 7y ago
One project that anyone reading Hacker News ought to not be afraid of taking on is that which involves under-sink plumbing. There are so many valuable instructional videos on YouTube that will show you how to do the work correctly. If you mess up, the materials are inexpensive and easily replaceable. The risk of doing the work incorrectly is relatively low. The greatest cost is of personal time. You'll end up making several trips to a supply store if you aren't prepared. It's a valuable skill to have that will save you thousands of dollars over a lifetime. Give it a try next time you need work done.
- sgt101 7y ago
  pro tip: clear out under the sink and TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PIPE WORK before taking it apart. It is a fun and interesting puzzle project putting it back together blind. It's not impossible. But it is tedious.
djokkataja 7y ago
> And it feels like a category error to ask which accountant, or political pundit, is the Greatest of All Time, but the answers surely matter more for the human project than the ones for Scrabble or League of Legends—where data and answers are readily available. It feels like a category error because it is a category error. Competitive games have a finite set of explicitly defined rules and win conditions; jobs do not. > Even small changes along these lines would be a big deal. Imagine if each of us got as good at our jobs as the average teenager is at Fortnite. I think the average person is already probably better at their job than the average teenager is at Fortnite; it's just that the "win conditions" for an average person at a job are significantly more complex and can vary quite a bit between different people and situations. For example, besides whatever people themselves consider to be a "win" at their jobs, there's also things like this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-05-29 https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-05-29

189 points by zzaner 7y ago

jmkd 7y ago

A superb reflection on the accelerated potential technology affords learning. I would add an additional note that the choice of topics to dive into is now both more vast and accessible than it has ever been. Not only can you learn what you want to, but you can stumble across that which you'd never thought of or scarcely knew existed and discover more about yourself along the way. When you search for things to learn you're merely bolstering your predisposition, but when other things emerge before you and stick, something altogether more interesting is taking place.

agumonkey 7y ago
I so often discard internet real educational value [0] but it might start to have an impact. Even if I'd think fablab/shop per city or neighborhood might be more efficient, it's still great. [0] to me the only good thing there was khan academy which was basically video tutorial you can rewind.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

I have been starting the process of learning hand woodworking by watching the likes of Paul Sellers. It is amazing how much knowledge there is available on YouTube about craftsmanship. Combining YouTube with niche web forums multiplies the learning power. I'm already able to dimension boards with nothing but a hand plane, a combination square, a depth gauge, and winding sticks. I'm just at the start of my journey but I'm so thankful YouTube and all these creators are out there to introduce me to this new hobby!

weaksauce 7y ago
paul sellers is great! such a gem. check out wood work web, johnathan katz moses, pask makes, izzy swan and jackmanworks... as well as some of the older videos from William Ng. they are all quality!
- michelpp 7y ago
  Thanks for the pointers, I like Essential Craftsman too, a bit of philosophy with some great technique and history thrown in.
coldpie 7y ago
Hey, welcome. It's a great fun hobby. Check out Chris Schwarz's books, The Anarchist's Toolchest and The Anarchist Design book (the titles make more sense after you read them). There's an essay in Toolchest called "Three Tables" that basically describes my theory on craft, it's uncanny.

jnellis 7y ago

As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I've come to general law regarding expertise or 'how to' videos. There's an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.) The majority of good polished videos have the least accurate or useful information. These I've surmised are people that would rather be into video production or youtube stardom than they would being actually good at the subject they profess. Alternatively, some of the worst grainy, shaky cam videos I've seen, usually on the jobsite, are some of the best practices, tricks of the trade or just informational rich videos you can get. These are people that are not into being youtube stars and are just part of the 'sharing community' as it maybe was originally envisioned. But as Rumsfeld said, there's known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and when you're a homeowner watching how-to videos, its very difficult to know what you should know.... so most of them go by, instinctively, the quality of video production as their guide to what they should be doing. Sure there are great craftsmen with great video quality and there are some really poor craftsmen with poor video quality but these are not the bulk of what's out there. What rises to the top of search offerings seems to be equally what's been marketed (poor craftsmen, high quality, "please like,share, and subscribe") or what's been organically liked (poor quality, high craftsmanship). For the tradesmen out there dealing with homeowners, its now sometimes a bit of an uphill battle after homeowners have done their 'youtube' research and have determined how hard the job they've asked you to bid is going to be.

ravenstine 7y ago
I find that's true of most information. The higher the craftsmanship of the video, the worse the actual information being presented. Lectures, for instance, that are just a professor talking with his PowerPoint slides are almost always better than videos that put on a production with fancy graphics, jump cuts, and narration. Look at the news. The news with more spectacle tends to be of lower quality on average. Or anything that comes from Hollywood. Daytime and reality TV are extremely polished but mostly tripe from either an entertainment or informational perspective. The more time someone puts into a "production quality" video, the more they're trying to sell you something, even if it's just their brand awareness.

fuzzybear3965 7y ago

In college I met a friend who had a MacBook whose keyboard layout was assembled using the Dvorak layout (this was in 2009). Roll forward a couple of years and I had met another friend who used his OS to map QWERTY to Dvorak. Inspired, I spent a few days during Christmas break learning a new keyboard layout. It's still what I use today. Roll forward a couple of more years and I'm working on my Ph.d. and have the thought that someone must have done more optimization on keyboard layouts: Meet http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx. That inspired me to learn QFMLWY, something I have yet to do. Roll forward to a few months ago and I'm experiencing some slight wrist pain; a coworker uses a Kinesis Advantage and recommends it. In true punk style (and unhappy with the Kinesis' outdated appearence), I endeavor to find a superior product. I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal. This is a niche path involving one skill set: Improving the human-keyboard interface. And, it involved real-world interaction with people and the resources that people on the internet have provided. I'm convinced that either only in-real-life (IRL) or only online interactions would have inhibited my growth in this domain. I'm sure that this same concept applies to every web development framework or conlang or beauty style or any human endeavor. As an aside: These ideas are also related to why I'm confident that an artificial general intelligence developed in the vacuum of the internet will not succeed relative to a competing technology that is able to benefit from both offline, interactive experiences and also online information trawling.

codetrotter 7y ago
> I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal. I've been using the Dvorak layout since 2009. First on a TypeMatrix 2030 USB for a long time and currently with an ErgoDox EZ Shine that I bought like a year ago or something (wow, time flies! I thought it was only a year ago that I bought it but I looked it up in my e-mail archive and it was in fact December 2017 that I bought it) and have been using since then. Right now I am typing on the QWERTY keyboard of my MacBook Air, just because of where and how I am sitting at the moment. But I love my ErgoDox and use it a lot. Here is my custom Dvorak based layout for ErgoDox EZ that I created basically recreating the position of most of the keys that I was used to with the TypeMatrix 2030 USB that I had, and with a couple of minor but important modifications. https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/ergodox-ez/layouts/ENb6/latest/0 https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/ergodox-ez/layouts/ENb6/lat... This layout has been working perfectly for me and I am very happy with it. It's mostly looking the same now as when I first created it (that link is for the most recent version, the one I am using now). Some things to note about this configuration and about ErgoDox EZ in general (for the benefit of others ITT): - In the typical position of caps lock I have Escape when I tap it, but Control when I hold it. Awesome! - This whole layout resides on the keyboard itself. I have all my computers set to US standard layout and am able to have my layout work always on all of my computers across all operating systems with no configuration or anything. This alone is worth like a couple of hundred bucks at least, seriously! - The previous keyboard that I had, you know, the TypeMatrix, had hardware Dvorak support too, but I always had to press a button on it each time I unplugged and replugged it, or woke my computer from sleep, or turned my computer back on after having shut it down. It's actually surprising how annoying pressing that button each time where I needed to, which wasn't always (because back them I was remapping the keys to Dvorak in software on most of my personal computers), but often enough that it got annoying. None of that B.S. with the ErgoDox! :D Prior to purchasing the ErgoDox EZ those two years ago, I too had looked a bit at stenography tools and projects. My conclusion back then was that it seemed useful, and was interesting, but cost prohibitive and time consuming to learn, with the added factor of uncertainty that I have no idea if writing code with stenography methods would actually be faster or in other ways better than my current means of writing software. Anyway, if you do end up learning stenography and use it to write code I would love to hear about it and I hope you post about it to HN then.

nefitty 7y ago

I'm interested to know how other developers on HN prefer to learn. I really like just running into a problem and Googling my way to a solution. I read snippets of docs, blog articles, SO answers, etc. and then try to piece together an understanding. I have a hard time incorporating videos into my ad hoc learning. What is your preferred method of learning new tools, techniques, etc?

omosubi 7y ago
I'm the same way. I find that choosing a project that inspires me takes me much further than just saying "I want to learn X, let me follow a tutorial". On a related note, I just read nassim taleb's anti fragile which has a section arguing that most progress comes from people tinkering with things to get something they can sell or to solve some problem they have rather than academics trying to understand things from basic principles. I don't agree with it entirely but that and my way of learning has led me to value experiential learning much higher than society does currently
- porknubbins 7y ago
  Tutorials on youtube are generally terrible for learning because they don’t show you any of the design decisions, mistakes, thought process etc. As if what stood between you and programming Tetris in Rust was not knowing the order of keystrokes. Udemy has (a few) authors with much better motivated examples I find.
- shantly 7y ago
  > I'm the same way. I find that choosing a project that inspires me takes me much further than just saying "I want to learn X, let me follow a tutorial". To piggyback on that, I need either a real project or genuine curiosity. I'm terrible at making myself learn something that I'm not 1) immediately applying to real work—paid or personal—not a make-work learning project, or 2) just really dog-chasing-a-bone interested, and I cannot gin that up or fake myself into that mode, though sometimes I can start poking around a topic and find something that gets me going. Fortunately for me I'm fuckin' good at working that way. Unfortunately it made school a real pain in my ass.

benterris 7y ago

What "absurdly demanding online game" is the author referring to in the first paragraph ? He mentions Overwatch later in the article but in another context so I'm not sure that's the one he meant.

Wordball 7y ago
Probably Fortnite, though all the players surely haven't "internalized its mechanical nuances to Ph.D. level" Mexico Population: ~128 million Fortnite Peak monthly players: 78.3 million LoL peak montly players: 111 million Fortnite total accounts: 250 million you can say whatever you want if it's a blog article
- jammygit 7y ago
  > you can say whatever you want if it's a blog article I just want to de-normalize that a bit: blogs should strive for high standards, even though some don’t. They are a major form of information these days!

CM30 7y ago

I think it's especially interesting to look at how quickly people master a brand new field too, since it seems the timespan between a new hobby getting started and people making professional quality works in said area has gone down significantly too. For instance, my go to example are video game mods and ROM hacks. In the olden days, these communities grew quite slowly, and it took a fair amount of time for people to get to understand the workings of a new game's engine and how it could be built upon. And you can see this if you look at Super Mario 64. In it early days, mods were really basic, and even the fanciest ones looked super primitive by today's standards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgLc0rPRs3U It then took years to go from stuff like that to more advanced original game mods like Super Mario 64 Star Road, and even longer before ASM coding became something many people understood and used for custom enemies, bosses, gimmicks, etc (like in Kaze Emanuar's current works). Now contrast to Super Mario Odyssey. It took just months for mods to get made for that game, and under a year for fancy looking ones like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss7unbD4yHg And even that's a slower example. Since then, we've gone from seeing modding scenes take years to develop, to seeing them a week or two after release, to in some cases seeing mods getting made BEFORE the game officially hit store shelves altogether. Seriously, Smash Bros Ultimate got mods before the game was available to buy, all based on leaked copies posted online. Outside of games, same thing happens in web development too. New framework pops up, professional looking sites/apps/whatever get made in the first week. It's gotten to the point that those jokes about looking for 'rockstar ninjas in [new programming language here]' may not be jokes anymore. But yeah, the quality baseline goes up significantly quicker now.

jjeaff 7y ago
But those examples seem to be the result of more frameworks and tooling and boilerplate code that is already available that people can just build upon rather than delve into the inner workings and figure stuff out - rather than people learning to become experts much faster.
- Godel_unicode 7y ago
  0 to 1 is the hard part.

wilsmex 7y ago

I’ve been working on my YouTube educational channel html/css/design (https://youtube.com/FollowAndrew https://youtube.com/FollowAndrew) for a bit now. Pickup is slow, but it’s been fun helping a greater audience learn new skills!

folkhack 7y ago
I mean this in the kindest way possible, but do you think it's appropriate to teach such new CSS selectors? I just bounced around the slider on your featured video and I'm seeing stuff that only hits 85-90% on caniuse.com which is unacceptable for the apps I typically do. I still have a lot of IE11 that's used in large corps, etc. I'd LOVE to use things like grid-template but I can only imagine the fallout - I've only just been able to start utilizing basic flexbox. It may just be different audiences/userbases, idk.
- wilsmex 7y ago
  That’s a pretty good question actually, and difficult to address. I try and push new concepts/tech as a way of education on what’s coming. For edu channels it seems it’s a balance of teaching core concepts and also teaching what’s “popular” to keep folks interested. You have to make a cutoff at some point with caniuse, as I suppose to get 100% coverage we’d still be doing table-based layouts or float hacks. The old adage of “know your audience” will eventually dictate the tech.
  - folkhack 7y ago
    > That’s a pretty good question actually, and difficult to address. I try and push new concepts/tech as a way of education on what’s coming. Thanks =) ... I'm always disparaged with HN when you say something that can be viewed as not supportive. (even -1 votes feels like "oh come on guys!") I think the thing that scared me the most out of that video was using things that are approx. 90% globally supported for layout. Totally agree with "know your audience". Specifically, I teach the habit of look it up on MDN, then caniuse, then have VMs/devices ready-to-go and test it even further. Simple rendering/functionality issues have turned into legal action against my past employers. Ex: if you cause even a 5-10% drop in ecommerce conversions due to what shoulda been a simple CSS fix, and that goes unnoticed for a month, that's a potential lawsuit/termination with very "black and white provable damages". Unfortunately, I've lived this =( It's worth noting that I work on conversion-based web solutions that are "mom and pops" small, all the way up to "if it's down for 1 minute we just lost thousands of dollars"... but really I've learned to be incredibly careful with both. Every solution I build online at some point means $ even if it's non-direct conversions (ie: purely informational, no sales online sales funnel, etc).

chewz 7y ago

Me and my friend are fixing, renovating old bikes as a hobby. A rule of thumb is that each repair requires watching 2-3 youtube videos first. We are joking that people no longer are flying to the Moon because NASA have lost all of the videos of how to assemble a rocket. ;-)

tempestn 7y ago

This speaks to me. I do a bunch of DIY work on my cars and various maintenance on my house, thanks to youtube videos, that I highly doubt I would have ever had the skill or confidence to tackle in a time before the internet. Many of these things are literally less work to do myself than the hassle of getting someone else to do it, let alone the cost. But in an earlier time, absent knowing someone who could teach you the skill, it just wouldn't have been an option. Despite the problems platforms like YouTube cause (or enable), I certainly wouldn't want to do without it.

JDiculous 7y ago

I love that information is so freely and readily available, and it's one of the reasons why I genuinely believe younger people these days are growing up more intelligent than the older generation (except maybe when it comes to social skills). The downside is that this means keeping a steady job is becoming increasingly more difficult. The moat that protected the job security of highly advanced professionals is rapidly deteriorating due to this democratization of information. Credentials mean less today than they ever have in history. Specialists will have to be on top of the ever-expanding spigot of new information in order to remain competitive and justify their fees in a time when anybody can just search Google/Youtube for the answer. None of those would be problems if workers weren't financially dependent on their jobs, such as if we had a universal basic income. But since most of us our financially dependent on our jobs, we're basically in an arms race against each other to the bottom. Stay at the bleeding edge, or get replaced by a more financially desperate harder working 20 year old from an Asian country who learned everything you know from Youtube / the internet. Many will instinctively deny this now, but just watch how this continues to play out over the next 10-20 years.

zanny 7y ago
It used to be about the only thing you had going for you if you didn't have the political connections of wealth was the ability to become an expert through extreme effort to acquire cloistered information. This is also certainly a contributing factor to the flatline of median incomes for 40 years in the US - among the dozen other influencers including globalism, automation, deregulation, deunionization, etc. But we, as the labor class, are in a constant ongoing rat race to the bottom. The endgame is near total automation of production, near total availability of expertise on demand, and total capture of all resources by those own the robots. And this isn't like any other time - an able bodied man in any age before this one had intrinsic value to their community. They could be taken advantage of and thus provided for. We are going to see billions who cannot contribute meaningfully to economics. And I do not think those leading the charge towards automation are all that interested in seeing quarterlies dip to reduce suffering in the world.
jbob2000 7y ago
I call what you’re describing “information asymmetry”; a small amount of people holding all of the information. Much of our society’s modes of productivity depend on many people not having access to information. How can you repair your car if there is nobody to show you how? I guess you’ll have to take it to a mechanic! But the internet completely destroyed information asymmetry, many people have access to lots of information now. I don’t need to take my car to a mechanic or pay someone to teach me, I can watch a YouTube video on how to change my oil. The side effect of the destruction of information asymmetry is that a LOT of people depended on it, and they are all going to have to figure out where they stand in the new marketplace of information. I think we’re also seeing huge social movements because people are reading stuff online and reflecting about their city/state/government and saying “hold on, what you’re doing isn’t right, I’ve read about why you’re wrong”. The Arab spring, occupy wall st, the european refugee crisis, the Hong Kong protests, the Chilean protests, basically any major social movement in the last 20 years could be argued to have been triggered by the internet.

ezconnect 7y ago

I love imagining what Johnny5 would be if it had youtube.

bambax 7y ago

Skillful coaching is important, but a big part of it is simply accountability: knowing that someone will check on your progress at regular intervals and that you need to do some work in between interviews to not look like a fool. That's the concept behind the "accountability partner": someone who is not an expert into what you're trying to achieve, but who bugs you regularly to make sure you're moving forward. After searching for "accountability partner as a service" I couldn't find anything other than weird marketing websites that looked more than a little scammy, so I built a simple tool that sends me an email everyday for each task defined in the system, and that lets me record progress by responding to those emails. The concept is akin to Jerry Seinfeld's productivity hack: "don't break the chain", meaning you need to do something about your craft every day. If you skip a day, the chain breaks and restarts at zero. The effectiveness of this is surprising; the accountability system can't assess the quality of the work in any way and isn't even a person that I could disappoint, but having to respond to an automated email every day to log my progress and store ideas, etc., pushes me in ways I would never have expected.

kfk 7y ago
I do this with my team with github issues. They get a daily reminder of issues older than 5 days. We are not getting more done, but we are more aware of what needs to be done and close issues that are just a nice to have. Accountability works well with people, unfortunately most companies just say accountability is important but don't put any real process in place to make it happen.

Dowwie 7y ago

One project that anyone reading Hacker News ought to not be afraid of taking on is that which involves under-sink plumbing. There are so many valuable instructional videos on YouTube that will show you how to do the work correctly. If you mess up, the materials are inexpensive and easily replaceable. The risk of doing the work incorrectly is relatively low. The greatest cost is of personal time. You'll end up making several trips to a supply store if you aren't prepared. It's a valuable skill to have that will save you thousands of dollars over a lifetime. Give it a try next time you need work done.

sgt101 7y ago
pro tip: clear out under the sink and TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PIPE WORK before taking it apart. It is a fun and interesting puzzle project putting it back together blind. It's not impossible. But it is tedious.

djokkataja 7y ago

> And it feels like a category error to ask which accountant, or political pundit, is the Greatest of All Time, but the answers surely matter more for the human project than the ones for Scrabble or League of Legends—where data and answers are readily available. It feels like a category error because it is a category error. Competitive games have a finite set of explicitly defined rules and win conditions; jobs do not. > Even small changes along these lines would be a big deal. Imagine if each of us got as good at our jobs as the average teenager is at Fortnite. I think the average person is already probably better at their job than the average teenager is at Fortnite; it's just that the "win conditions" for an average person at a job are significantly more complex and can vary quite a bit between different people and situations. For example, besides whatever people themselves consider to be a "win" at their jobs, there's also things like this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-05-29 https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-05-29