8 ms·

Most tech content is bullshit (2020)

234 points by udev4096 3y ago

beardedwizard 3y ago
The irony is that this article is based on bs anecdotes.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Stay in the field long enough and the number of anecdotes will grow so much that you will notice the pattern, unless your pet rock’s intelligence can surpass your own. Also, hasn’t there been a link [0] just a couple days ago about how most of the “serious science research” done about software development estimation is based on datasets that are either smaller than the number of anecdotes a typical software developer will easily encounter in five years, or are right away made up? Just what kind of data would you expect, and from whom? [0] https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimation-is-mostly-fake-research/ https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimat...
- louwrentius 3y ago
  The real irony is that in this context they matter and do make a point.
- notfromhere 3y ago
  Its an opinion piece, not a study in Nature
29athrowaway 3y ago
Also known as cargo cult
revskill 3y ago
One example is, just use a monothlic framework, or just use Golang. It's not about right or wrong, they lacked contextual information on who you are and when to use it.
- aatd86 3y ago
  Just use Go is fine with me though :p Why singleing this little programming language? (I understand your point still)
lbriner 3y ago
I think this article glosses over quite a number of different things so the conclusion doesn't always follow. It says that people who copy stuff without thinking are consumers instead of creators. The implication is that this is wrong when many of us spend most of our time aggregating, not creating. Look at a load of game shows, how many are creative? Not many, most are simply aggregations but done in a way that makes the sum much better than its parts. However, if you then ignore that and look at what they say about this copying. Again, the tone is that it is wrong to copy without "a bit of skepticism" but you know what? Sometimes I don't care. I need to know how to extract something from a string, I find an example, it works, the need to analyze it might well be a waste of time. Might there be a faster/more efficient way? Probably but that will take even more time to find to save some CPU that is not worth the investigation. There is also an implication that most of this copying is related to appeal to authority e.g. I will copy this because person X is experience or highly regarded but again, I don't believe that at all. I can't remember the last time in my nearly 30 years in the game that I looked out for a specific person because I believed their authority, most of the time I suspect we try and find the easiest article that meets our needs and perhaps seems a bit up to date. I don't care that nobody is perfect because anyone worth their chops should know that the code you copy from somewhere else often lacks context and information about trade-offs but we are trusted to make the call as to whether the risk is high enough that we need to go back to first principles. In most cases, it is more annoying for me for someone to waste time reinventing something than it is for someone to get something a bit less than perfect and maybe having to revisit it later.
jimmywatersabc 3y ago
[flagged]
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
I’ve noticed this pattern happening on tech blogging pattern, dev-dot-to being not the least: “I’ve been through a web dev bootcamp 6 months ago and I’m three months on my first tech job ever, and here is my enormous trove of wisdom I’m about to bestow upon you.” What follows is, at best, very superficial, and at worst, just plain wrong and bad stuff. This is recent. Back when I’ve been more active in hackintosh communities, one would very often encounter tutorials clearly made by people with no clue who just cargo culted it through, pass their cargo culted thing on, and have the chutzpa to call themselves “experts”. Oh, and there are mediocre journalists (or sometimes even vloggers with no training) who start thinking about themselves as experts on something all of a sudden and start touring radios, podcasts, and TV shows, giving opinions left and right, these are probably the worst.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > mediocre journalists (or sometimes even vloggers with no training) who start thinking about themselves as experts on something all of a sudden and start touring radios, podcasts, and TV shows, giving opinions left and right, these are probably the worst. Us vendors pay for those and have some random journalism grad or ChatGPT ghostwrite it. B2B SaaS and Enterprise Sales absolutely depends on SEO from a brand and pipeline creation perspective due to legacy marketing leadership and perverse incentives. This is starting to change (a la Product Lead Growth, Persona Segmentation, Direct Sales, etc), but to paraphrase Max Planck, GTM Strategy only advances with every retirement.
bdw5204 3y ago
Most people have no desire to actually use their brain and think independently. For one thing, other people who've blindly accepted a point of view from some authority figure might be nasty to them. Also, they can't possibly imagine that somebody whom they really like/respect or who helped them get some code working might be wrong sometimes. There are very good evolutionary reasons why most humans are wired to conform rather than to think. If you thought too independently in a pre-modern society, you were liable to end up burned at the stake or otherwise executed in an especially brutal and inhumane manner for "heresy" or "witchcraft". While this is adaptive for living in a pre-modern society, this is maladaptive for living in a liberal democracy where being able to think independently and to respectfully disagree with others are among the most critical life skills. This tendency towards mindless conformity is also adaptive for an industrial assembly line but maladaptive for a modern knowledge economy where productivity depends upon creativity and critical thinking not following orders and repetitively doing the same thing.
- louwrentius 3y ago
  It’s funny to me that you write this down and not be reflective about your own claims. I don’t buy the quasi-scientific part about evolutionary reasons. Ad for that matter, I don’t even buy your first claim, that people don’t want to think independently. But it doesn’t matter in the end, the whole point of the article - to me at least - is that it’s a good thing to always take the time and at least understand the reasons for choices, and challenge them if it makes sense to do so. If I allow myself a wild stab at things, I think it’s more that people are “trusting” by nature and assume that things are well thought-out, which the article points out.
- CPLX 3y ago
  This is nonsense. Leveraging the collective wisdom of the society you’re in is probably the most adaptive thing a human can do in any given situation. Doing the same thing you observe others doing is going to be the safest choice most likely to preserve your life and allow you to reproduce, and it’s not a close contest at all.
- kazinator 3y ago
  > While this is adaptive for living in a pre-modern society, this is maladaptive for living in a liberal democracy where being able to think independently and to respectfully disagree with others are among the most critical life skills. That is utterly false when it comes to science and engineering, where you're standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants in order to do anything, and reinventing wheels is mainly the path to low productivity.
kazinator 3y ago
Most of the time, you should not be inventing your own equivalents of off-the-shelf algorithms. (Let alone something like crypto.) How much you evaluate the borrowed alternatives (or whether you even evaluate alternatives) entirely depends on how much that choice matters in the situation. Situations in which the choice doesn't matter are very common, and in situations in which it doesn't matter. The scientist isn't concerned with "does it matter" but with "does it make an observable difference". But the latter concern is often a luxury or idle preoccupation for the engineer. Writing code is mostly a kind of engineering; more rarely is it science. Engineers usually select existing materials and patterns of putting them together to put together a solution. Engineering isn't entirely creative in every detail, like painting or music. Even painters and musicians reuse from others. "Why did you resolve this G7 chord to a C?"
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Counter point: writing things from scratch once in a while sharpens your skills and helps you make better decisions in the future about tradeoffs, and let’s you evaluate different implementations without having to resort to a search on hackernews, stack overflow, or GitHub to find out what the trendiest option is Take exercise for example: it’s all unnecessary work, but it makes you stronger so that you maintain your fitness longer and so when you need to be strong for something, you’re ready
  - geophph 3y ago
    Agreed. I also like calculus as an example. First you gotta write out derivatives by hand, then you learn you can “drop the exponent then subtract one from it.” Doing it the long way without the shortcuts helps you understand it better inside and out I’d think for when you do use existing code. I find sometimes it’s fun to write out a program to do something without any (or at least very minimum) imports just to see how I’d solve it (for a reasonably real use case). Helps to better understand the concepts / tricks the “real” implementation might use. Some fun examples: building an animated UI spinner “by hand” or setting up a sub-pub implementation for passing data around my app.
  - kazinator 3y ago
spacemadness 3y ago
One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors rush to write their blog posts after every WWDC.
- raincom 3y ago
  You zeroed in on the core element of bullshitting: trivializing complexity into sound bites, simplest examples.
- jvans 3y ago
  The devil is always in the details and it's too easy to present a high level intelligent sounding argument that ignores all the important complexity.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  Uber's "RIBs" come to mind.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  I’ve learned to wait a couple of years for dubdub hype to subside, and “lessons learned” to be shared. I get tired of the “write an app in five minutes” demos. As someone that regularly works on ship apps, I can report that there is a world of difference between academic demos, and something that can be shipped.
  - jrott 3y ago
    At this point I’d rather see the how to fix it when things go wrong demo. Of course very few tools can show that either because it’s messy or it’s to hard to show all the pieces.
- ilyt 3y ago
  I feel like classic object oriented tutorials talking about fruits and apples with no connection to actual apps you'd build are ones to add to this pile
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Compared to most other people and industries techies are actually relatively good on this front, however I still agree with the article that there is a lot of cargo culting. The author mentions a few reasons why this occurs, but I think it's primarily due to time constraints. Not even "I have deadlines", but "I cannot physically audit everything". You simply don't have enough time to independently verify every decision that has made in the codebase, and even if you did by the time you were finished there would have been new edits and additions. Chesterton's fence also applies here. A decision made on a whim might take you hours to investigate, gather context and decide whether it was appropriate or not. --- Something the author doesn't mention which I think matters a lot here is the level of impact the decision has. Deciding what to name a variable? Unimportant and reversible. Low impact on other people. Deciding which framework to use? Important and irreversible. High impact on other people. Having the correct context and a good mental model for making decisions can help you a lot here. Outsourcing your thinking is useful and correct for a lot of things, but sometimes it can be terrible. Figure out which problems you cannot safely outsource and spend your brain power on them. They tend to be things which are core to your work, so investigating them almost always gives you valuable knowledge and context that you can share with the rest of your team!
mola 3y ago
In some respect being a software engineer today is really hard. OTOH you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent a solution yourself. So you look for available resources, you go online. There you're going to encounter either: 1. Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves. 2. Spam from SEO mills peddling junior level wisdome so they can get ad money. 3. Spam from software vendors that try and convince your that X is the best solution for everything. (Looking at you Confluent) 4. SEO Spam by software consultencies mainly interested in hitting the relevant buzzwords so the suits will find their site. 5. Spam from FAANG employees showcasing their google scale solutions made to attract talent. What is the engineer to do? Either cargo cult the FAANG engineers, you don't got their scale but atleast these are actual solutions. Or invent it yourself. Which maybe scary after you read all of these conflicting advices. We really are drowning in spam. Thanks heavens we we employed humanities best to create LLMs so we can now automate this. /s But seriously, seems like most useful information is siloed in the brains of battle worn engineers who are surrounded by an inflation of junior devs. I have a feeling this field grew too fast and we are losing a lot of wisdom and knowledge.
- packetlost 3y ago
  100% agree. All the best devs I know literally do not give a flying fuck about blogs at all (with a few exceptions). They read white papers and textbooks from 40 years ago (this is a bit of an exaggeration).
- OmarShehata 3y ago
  > Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves. I often find this is the most useful category out of the 5 you listed. Junior devs writing something like "How to setup webpack" often explain things in plain words and just spell out how to get the thing working. There's humility to the post like "I don't know what all these options do, but this is what worked for me". I find that a lot more honest/useful than say category 5 there where I have no idea if what they're talking about will actually work for me or how much effort it's going to take to integrate because the assumption there is you have big teams who can spend all their time maintaining these tools.
jlengrand 3y ago
" On est toujours le con de quelqu'un, et tant pis pour lui". -> "We are always someone's jerk, and so much the worse for him". Agree with the article, I just wished it wasn't conflating "bullshit / actual harmful content" as much with "stuff that is valid, but in a given context". 200% that nothing online, (nor IRL to be fair), should be taken as universal truth. I see that same at conferences, with certain topics/fads/trends being absolutely overrepresented compared to what's actually happening on the ground.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  I interpreted "bullshit" to mean fluff. Much of the content I encounter appears to be regurgitated trivial examples from tutorials. Entire websites are dedicated to this. The goal generally appears to generate some type of influencer status or get money from ads. Few people offer helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem. Probably because they can't.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    "helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem" is a lot if work to create, even if you know the solution or can solve the problem easily. I can empathize with people who dont spend their limited free time on explaining others how to solve problems out of the goodwill of their heart and I am eternally grateful for the tiny minority that does this.
    - strangattractor 3y ago
      I am also grateful to the people that do actually share exceptional content. The problem is that search engines don't know the difference and the trivial seems to drown out the useful more and more over time.
  - Little_Kitty 3y ago
    You get a lot more views for a video on how to index a column in MySQL than for how to approach evaluating your needs and choose a suitable database. The latter would be outdated in a few years as new technologies emerge, while the former can be padded with enough fluff to show two adverts. So we end up with the content you know today, rather than what you'd really like to see. It's good to remember this and interact with those who do publish the latter content, plus it makes the algorithm feed you more content that's worth your time.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. That’s usually a waste of time. It’s more efficient to try a couple things until something works and move on (“satisficing”). A key skill you learn over time is why decisions actually matter. But it’s not inherently bad that there’s no good reason for something, it really depends on the context. And sometimes things that had good reasons turn out bad anyway because the assumptions proved wrong or circumstances changed.
- jfengel 3y ago
  A good life lesson in general. My version of it: "most of the most important decisions you make in life will be made in the basis of insufficient information." As programmers we may be used to the notion that we can optimize if we know enough. We often can't. Decisions won't get better with more information because it's still insufficient. All you can do is use your best judgment -- of when to use your best judgment. And live with the consequences. That doesn't help you make the decision. But it can help you avoid spending too much time kicking yourself over it.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. I’ve been at a couple companies that wouldn’t take any proposal seriously unless you showed up with a list of citations to blog posts, books, or even podcasts. The root cause was a management structure that wanted to do everything with a maximum of evidence. It opened the door to a lot of terrible decisions winning for no reason other than someone found a blog post that Google does it this way, or Uber wrote a blog post about this, or Martin Fowler wrote a post about that. The most egregious abuse was when a team that had to deal with maybe 100 logins per day spent over 6 months researching how to build their auth system to match Big Tech. They could have picked any off the shelf solution and been done in a week, but instead it became an endless boondoggle of research, presentations, proposals, and committees. Several people were even planning conference talks around it, so it started to evolve into whatever would sound best for their talks. That was my cue that I was at the wrong type of company.
  - 3y ago
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Opinion pieces probably are, but honestly most tech content is tutorials which are generally pretty cool.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  Most tech tutorials are terrible. It's some junior engineer who has no idea what they're doing and barely got something to function. It's the blind teaching the blind.
spacemoon 3y ago
[flagged]
spacemoon 3y ago
[flagged]
082349872349872 3y ago
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
True, but most content in general is bullshit. Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of pumping your numbers. Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam. Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets, most books are BS. Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages are BS on top of BS. Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low quality authors trying to make it, agendas every where, and of course automated crap. Why do you think HN is so successful? The concept? The tech? Of course not. It's the quality of moderation, and the fact they used their ability to publish their BS to the front page with moderation. Just enough to help them, but not so much as to destroy the average HN quality. Dedication to quality on the long run, and restrain in milking the cow. This show visions, and it's hard.
- tensor 3y ago
  This is grossly reductive. There is a huge spectrum of quality in content. Most of what you describe, formal studies by experts, is on a much much higher tier than the 99% of content most people read. Comparing informed formal studies to the uninformed opinion pieces most of the tech crowd reads and implying they are somehow the same is borderline supporting disinformation. There is absolutely a big spectrum of quality in the higher tiers of content too. People in those domains spend countless evenings discussing it. But the vast majority of people are not reading anything at that level. The typical tech blog is closer to talking about what kind of sandwich you like for lunch than anything that will advance the field.
  - valval 3y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean by reductive in this case. 90% of kids’ plays are crap while 90% of Broadway shows are crap, with no need to compare those two domains.
- thefourthchime 3y ago
  I think you're going a little bit far, but I tend to agree. My reasoning for this is, to look back on experts from the past. Unless it's a hard scientific fact, a law of physics, most things are really just opinions that people tend to agree with. Remember Leaded gasoline? How about DDT or Asbestos? How about Freud? Of the thing the bible likes to talk about, slavery. Even in the 25 years, I've been in programming, it seems like all "Proper Way To Do It" have all aged about as well as milk on a hot day. The only thing I follow is keeping stuff simple.
hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
I’ve seen people eagerly suggest the use of GraphQL without being able to explain the idea behind REST or SOAP, what can be done, the shortcomings… People in the area, specially the fresh out of college, will get informed about technology by promoted content on social media, specially any technology out of MAANG, and automatically assume it’s an industry standard.
lohnjemon 3y ago
As I've been looking into freelance teaching and researching what kinds of services people provide, it's become astounding to me how poor most freelance teaching is. There's a bunch of people with the skills of a first year CS student offering "learn to code" education out there. But it sort of makes sense, those are exactly the kind of people who would want to make a quick buck on the side, not seasoned professionals who are making 6 figs already. It's just unfortunate, that people get sold this idea of "becoming a coder in a few weeks" and go nowhere because of it.
ellis0n 3y ago
Probably 20% of fake jobs generate fake content. Startups have long become the fashion of technology and not about tech itself, as it once was. Even PG does not post on this forum because of the unsolvable problem of the wrong/fake commentator. More and more politics and fashion in IT and less technologists. There are only 28 million programmers, and all the other billions of people do not even know how it works, but they have learned how to copy and sell. Market wins!
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  > Even PG does not post on this forum According to recent analysis, he does under pseudonyms. Also PG Twitter is probably 90% marketing his investments, so he is complicit in this way
vrnvu 3y ago
I was in a meeting one day, explaining some tech decisions I had made. At one point, my manager interrupted me, looking pale and completely out of place. He asked, "I don't get this approach. Can you share with me the tech blog where you read about this?" (...) I couldn't help but think: would a random blog post from the internet have more respect and authority than my own decisions and explanations?
- antod 3y ago
  Being as generous as possible and without other context, I would interpret that as a request for some background info you trust that they could use to catch up on those concepts in their own time without derailing the meeting by getting you to explain it. Especially if most others present probably already understand it. Or at least that is how I would've tried to convey it if I was your manager.
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  It would to me. When you are doing something no one has written about, it makes me think "We must be doing something impossible or we haven't identified the true problem to solve. It's unlikely we have a problem no one else has ever had." I've spent so much of my career gluing frameworks together that writing my own code feels like a code smell. Whenever my coworkers have written something new I spend 80% of my time fighting it and wishing it was a pattern or library.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Is there a market for quality technical content? Enough to generate some type of revenue? The lack of it makes me think there isn’t. Or maybe it’s all locked up in YT videos that are painful to watch.
nathants 3y ago
content creators gotta create content. same as it ever was.
l0b0 3y ago
> Don’t consume. Create. Ask questions. Stay curious. Like everything else, it's a balance. Nobody can build a modern system in finite time that will be maintainable, secure, fast, etc. without relying on their own and others' experience ("consuming").
nathants 3y ago
some always rebuild, others never do. the best of us pause and think hard, about which is advantageous in a particular time and place. in any given situation, it could easily go either way. tolerating and resolving ambiguity to the best of one’s abilities is the name of the game. i wonder, which bias is healthier? toward or away from rebuilding?
robomc 3y ago
This article is pretty ironic because it's just a low effort post that also happens to be giving terrible advice.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jackfoxy 3y ago
> Tutorials show harmful patterns. Try to find a sample SQL database, for any vendor, that does not employ artificial table primary keys. This was a requirement in the 1980s so that your queries would execute before the heat death of the universe, but that has not been the case for decades. Microsoft is particularly guilty of this. Artificial keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a dearth of literature on why artificial keys are an anti-pattern.) Here's the only sample database I know of that consistently uses natural keys across all tables, created by a SQL educator who knows his stuff. https://github.com/ami-levin/Animal_Shelter https://github.com/ami-levin/Animal_Shelter
- msla 3y ago
  > Artificial keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a dearth of literature on why artificial keys are an anti-pattern.) Why, in specific, are artificial keys an anti-pattern? Seems like they preemptively solve problems. For example, using an SSN as a "natural" primary key is both a potential security nightmare and a data normalization nightmare if someone shows up with two or more SSNs, which does happen. (Yes. Yes. My great uncle had at least two SSNs. You won't convince me it can't happen.) Similarly for other "natural" data which isn't bound to obey the properties DBAs need for primary keys.
- Tehdasi 3y ago
  Never specifically heard about this terminology until now, but after looking, yeah, I can see why ppl prefer 'artificial' keys to natural ones. From the animal shelter example, for people it uses email as the 'natural' key, which immediately runs up against 1,2,3 and 7 in https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-email https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe...
  - jackfoxy 3y ago
    "Natural Key" actually refers to column(s) already available in the dataset you are turning into a row that is unique by row, and thus a candidate for being the key. (Subject to all the normalization, etc.). An artificial key is a column of made-up data added to the rest of the column. It has no use other than to provide uniqueness. In most cases there is already a unique candidate key in your data.
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I think HN is a madhouse. Any article I click on, there's things I've never heard of that sound like made up techno-jargon, like programming languages which I've never seen used in a real job, let alone met anyone who uses them But I go to the comments and there's 150 people who all know every intimate detail of this technology already. Experts in the subject. I think most of you all are faking it
- rldjbpin 3y ago
  i thought that this was an open secret.
- chwa982 3y ago
  [dead]
- echelon 3y ago
  > I think most of you all are faking it The world is huge. We're all traversing different areas of interest and expertise. It makes sense that there are lots of different types of domain experts in our field. This is a great place where they tend to congregate together.
  - freetinker 3y ago
    My thoughts exactly. Unsure why your comment is being downvoted…
  - InexSquirrel 3y ago
    I honestly read that as a sarcastic comment, but maybe that's just my bent.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  > I think most of you all are faking it. I think you're insecure about the extent of things you know nothing or so little about. It's normal but not an attractive trait to project.
  - 3y ago
crtified 3y ago
A quasi- bell curve function, is it not? Could paraphrase "on average, content is average". Not trying to be facetious. But sifting out large quantities of general dross has been a common requirement 'in tech' since before the days of perusing CDROMs full of shareware on dial-up bulletin boards.
Havoc 3y ago
I'd say this is partially because creating something genuinely original and free standing is a rare occurrence. You're usually coding against some api or framework or whatever...and that interaction leads to common patterns so copy pasting makes sense. Perhaps that's the appeal people see in writing their own coding language? It's somewhat free standing
xoac 3y ago
She right.
langsoul-com 3y ago
Most algorithm driven tech content is bullshit. Especially YouTube tech content. They must produce or die, so, soon enough, it's bullshit coming out.
deleted 3y ago
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justincredible 3y ago
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throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
This is so on-point. Nearly every single article I have read on HN that covers my own area of expertise has been bullshit. I come here mostly to call BS before people blindly believe it.
- toni_bk 3y ago
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- throwawee 3y ago
  From one throwaway to another, this is a legitimately useful service and I hope you and others keep doing it. At this point I flip through the HN comments before the articles. The primary source links alone are a treasure.
eternityforest 3y ago
Tech blog: I hate almost all software. I hate the IoT. I have a loaded gun by the printer. I want to live in the woods. I only like software because it's kind of like doing math and there's interesting logic. Every extra feature is like killing a tree. Now let me tell you how to make software, which I hate, and assume you also hate. Like, are there any tech blogs by people who actually like the modern tech ecosystem?
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  This is cool and authentic content though. Got any recs for me?
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    Industrial Society and Its Future, and the various influences for it? The Golden Spruce? I mostly only pay attention to anything tech-negative at all if it's got some kind of historical or human interest. I've read a lot of the Suckless stuff though, and the Worse is Better stuff, because I always see it on places like this and thought I should probably at least know what it is. But it always seems like people from less technical fields have clearer writing on why they like these things, tech people are always trying to fight an uphill battle to make tech simple and logical, meanwhile encapsulated complexity is a lot of why most people like it. Wheras swiss watchmakers, mathematicians, and DIY woodworkers are working in a medium that naturally supports simplicity, and talking to an audience that appreciates it more, they don't have as much conflict happening to obscure things.
    - thebigwinning 3y ago
      > mathematicians I see that differently. Mathemticians often come into a field that's complex and filled with fudge factors and layers of engineering and make it clear and simple. See the history of electrical engineering in the 20th century.
      - eternityforest 3y ago
zxcvbn4038 3y ago
The biggest issue I run into is that developers wanting to put some one liner hello world example into production. There is no monitoring or logging, nothing updates the operating system or the application environment that runs in it, the hello world invariably runs as root and fails as any non-privileged user, etc. Any sort of database access reads the entire database on every access and loops through them all performing its own query logic - until the database gets too big to fit into ram. It’s a huge surprise when data gets discarded from memcache or redis. Over and over again I see these same issues.
samsquire 3y ago
Each architectural pattern produces its own fruit, which can be good or bad. I think the error that technical people do is assume that what they've settled on as the truth IS the ONLY truth and they are right and everybody else is wrong. I think the author makes this error too ("Everybody else's technical content is WRONG") One persons' beauty is another person' trash.
hjbolide 3y ago
OT but I had to wipe my screen a jillion times then realised the page has background image of tiny little dots...

234 points by udev4096 3y ago

beardedwizard 3y ago

The irony is that this article is based on bs anecdotes.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
Stay in the field long enough and the number of anecdotes will grow so much that you will notice the pattern, unless your pet rock’s intelligence can surpass your own. Also, hasn’t there been a link [0] just a couple days ago about how most of the “serious science research” done about software development estimation is based on datasets that are either smaller than the number of anecdotes a typical software developer will easily encounter in five years, or are right away made up? Just what kind of data would you expect, and from whom? [0] https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimation-is-mostly-fake-research/ https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-estimat...
louwrentius 3y ago
The real irony is that in this context they matter and do make a point.
notfromhere 3y ago
Its an opinion piece, not a study in Nature

29athrowaway 3y ago

Also known as cargo cult

revskill 3y ago

One example is, just use a monothlic framework, or just use Golang. It's not about right or wrong, they lacked contextual information on who you are and when to use it.

aatd86 3y ago
Just use Go is fine with me though :p Why singleing this little programming language? (I understand your point still)

lbriner 3y ago

I think this article glosses over quite a number of different things so the conclusion doesn't always follow. It says that people who copy stuff without thinking are consumers instead of creators. The implication is that this is wrong when many of us spend most of our time aggregating, not creating. Look at a load of game shows, how many are creative? Not many, most are simply aggregations but done in a way that makes the sum much better than its parts. However, if you then ignore that and look at what they say about this copying. Again, the tone is that it is wrong to copy without "a bit of skepticism" but you know what? Sometimes I don't care. I need to know how to extract something from a string, I find an example, it works, the need to analyze it might well be a waste of time. Might there be a faster/more efficient way? Probably but that will take even more time to find to save some CPU that is not worth the investigation. There is also an implication that most of this copying is related to appeal to authority e.g. I will copy this because person X is experience or highly regarded but again, I don't believe that at all. I can't remember the last time in my nearly 30 years in the game that I looked out for a specific person because I believed their authority, most of the time I suspect we try and find the easiest article that meets our needs and perhaps seems a bit up to date. I don't care that nobody is perfect because anyone worth their chops should know that the code you copy from somewhere else often lacks context and information about trade-offs but we are trusted to make the call as to whether the risk is high enough that we need to go back to first principles. In most cases, it is more annoying for me for someone to waste time reinventing something than it is for someone to get something a bit less than perfect and maybe having to revisit it later.

jimmywatersabc 3y ago

[flagged]

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

I’ve noticed this pattern happening on tech blogging pattern, dev-dot-to being not the least: “I’ve been through a web dev bootcamp 6 months ago and I’m three months on my first tech job ever, and here is my enormous trove of wisdom I’m about to bestow upon you.” What follows is, at best, very superficial, and at worst, just plain wrong and bad stuff. This is recent. Back when I’ve been more active in hackintosh communities, one would very often encounter tutorials clearly made by people with no clue who just cargo culted it through, pass their cargo culted thing on, and have the chutzpa to call themselves “experts”. Oh, and there are mediocre journalists (or sometimes even vloggers with no training) who start thinking about themselves as experts on something all of a sudden and start touring radios, podcasts, and TV shows, giving opinions left and right, these are probably the worst.

alephnerd 3y ago
> mediocre journalists (or sometimes even vloggers with no training) who start thinking about themselves as experts on something all of a sudden and start touring radios, podcasts, and TV shows, giving opinions left and right, these are probably the worst. Us vendors pay for those and have some random journalism grad or ChatGPT ghostwrite it. B2B SaaS and Enterprise Sales absolutely depends on SEO from a brand and pipeline creation perspective due to legacy marketing leadership and perverse incentives. This is starting to change (a la Product Lead Growth, Persona Segmentation, Direct Sales, etc), but to paraphrase Max Planck, GTM Strategy only advances with every retirement.

bdw5204 3y ago

Most people have no desire to actually use their brain and think independently. For one thing, other people who've blindly accepted a point of view from some authority figure might be nasty to them. Also, they can't possibly imagine that somebody whom they really like/respect or who helped them get some code working might be wrong sometimes. There are very good evolutionary reasons why most humans are wired to conform rather than to think. If you thought too independently in a pre-modern society, you were liable to end up burned at the stake or otherwise executed in an especially brutal and inhumane manner for "heresy" or "witchcraft". While this is adaptive for living in a pre-modern society, this is maladaptive for living in a liberal democracy where being able to think independently and to respectfully disagree with others are among the most critical life skills. This tendency towards mindless conformity is also adaptive for an industrial assembly line but maladaptive for a modern knowledge economy where productivity depends upon creativity and critical thinking not following orders and repetitively doing the same thing.

louwrentius 3y ago
It’s funny to me that you write this down and not be reflective about your own claims. I don’t buy the quasi-scientific part about evolutionary reasons. Ad for that matter, I don’t even buy your first claim, that people don’t want to think independently. But it doesn’t matter in the end, the whole point of the article - to me at least - is that it’s a good thing to always take the time and at least understand the reasons for choices, and challenge them if it makes sense to do so. If I allow myself a wild stab at things, I think it’s more that people are “trusting” by nature and assume that things are well thought-out, which the article points out.
CPLX 3y ago
This is nonsense. Leveraging the collective wisdom of the society you’re in is probably the most adaptive thing a human can do in any given situation. Doing the same thing you observe others doing is going to be the safest choice most likely to preserve your life and allow you to reproduce, and it’s not a close contest at all.
kazinator 3y ago
> While this is adaptive for living in a pre-modern society, this is maladaptive for living in a liberal democracy where being able to think independently and to respectfully disagree with others are among the most critical life skills. That is utterly false when it comes to science and engineering, where you're standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants in order to do anything, and reinventing wheels is mainly the path to low productivity.

kazinator 3y ago

Most of the time, you should not be inventing your own equivalents of off-the-shelf algorithms. (Let alone something like crypto.) How much you evaluate the borrowed alternatives (or whether you even evaluate alternatives) entirely depends on how much that choice matters in the situation. Situations in which the choice doesn't matter are very common, and in situations in which it doesn't matter. The scientist isn't concerned with "does it matter" but with "does it make an observable difference". But the latter concern is often a luxury or idle preoccupation for the engineer. Writing code is mostly a kind of engineering; more rarely is it science. Engineers usually select existing materials and patterns of putting them together to put together a solution. Engineering isn't entirely creative in every detail, like painting or music. Even painters and musicians reuse from others. "Why did you resolve this G7 chord to a C?"

barbariangrunge 3y ago
Counter point: writing things from scratch once in a while sharpens your skills and helps you make better decisions in the future about tradeoffs, and let’s you evaluate different implementations without having to resort to a search on hackernews, stack overflow, or GitHub to find out what the trendiest option is Take exercise for example: it’s all unnecessary work, but it makes you stronger so that you maintain your fitness longer and so when you need to be strong for something, you’re ready
- geophph 3y ago
  Agreed. I also like calculus as an example. First you gotta write out derivatives by hand, then you learn you can “drop the exponent then subtract one from it.” Doing it the long way without the shortcuts helps you understand it better inside and out I’d think for when you do use existing code. I find sometimes it’s fun to write out a program to do something without any (or at least very minimum) imports just to see how I’d solve it (for a reasonably real use case). Helps to better understand the concepts / tricks the “real” implementation might use. Some fun examples: building an animated UI spinner “by hand” or setting up a sub-pub implementation for passing data around my app.
- kazinator 3y ago

spacemadness 3y ago

One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors rush to write their blog posts after every WWDC.

raincom 3y ago
You zeroed in on the core element of bullshitting: trivializing complexity into sound bites, simplest examples.
jvans 3y ago
The devil is always in the details and it's too easy to present a high level intelligent sounding argument that ignores all the important complexity.
KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
Uber's "RIBs" come to mind.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I’ve learned to wait a couple of years for dubdub hype to subside, and “lessons learned” to be shared. I get tired of the “write an app in five minutes” demos. As someone that regularly works on ship apps, I can report that there is a world of difference between academic demos, and something that can be shipped.
- jrott 3y ago
  At this point I’d rather see the how to fix it when things go wrong demo. Of course very few tools can show that either because it’s messy or it’s to hard to show all the pieces.
ilyt 3y ago
I feel like classic object oriented tutorials talking about fruits and apples with no connection to actual apps you'd build are ones to add to this pile

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

Compared to most other people and industries techies are actually relatively good on this front, however I still agree with the article that there is a lot of cargo culting. The author mentions a few reasons why this occurs, but I think it's primarily due to time constraints. Not even "I have deadlines", but "I cannot physically audit everything". You simply don't have enough time to independently verify every decision that has made in the codebase, and even if you did by the time you were finished there would have been new edits and additions. Chesterton's fence also applies here. A decision made on a whim might take you hours to investigate, gather context and decide whether it was appropriate or not. --- Something the author doesn't mention which I think matters a lot here is the level of impact the decision has. Deciding what to name a variable? Unimportant and reversible. Low impact on other people. Deciding which framework to use? Important and irreversible. High impact on other people. Having the correct context and a good mental model for making decisions can help you a lot here. Outsourcing your thinking is useful and correct for a lot of things, but sometimes it can be terrible. Figure out which problems you cannot safely outsource and spend your brain power on them. They tend to be things which are core to your work, so investigating them almost always gives you valuable knowledge and context that you can share with the rest of your team!

mola 3y ago

In some respect being a software engineer today is really hard. OTOH you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent a solution yourself. So you look for available resources, you go online. There you're going to encounter either: 1. Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves. 2. Spam from SEO mills peddling junior level wisdome so they can get ad money. 3. Spam from software vendors that try and convince your that X is the best solution for everything. (Looking at you Confluent) 4. SEO Spam by software consultencies mainly interested in hitting the relevant buzzwords so the suits will find their site. 5. Spam from FAANG employees showcasing their google scale solutions made to attract talent. What is the engineer to do? Either cargo cult the FAANG engineers, you don't got their scale but atleast these are actual solutions. Or invent it yourself. Which maybe scary after you read all of these conflicting advices. We really are drowning in spam. Thanks heavens we we employed humanities best to create LLMs so we can now automate this. /s But seriously, seems like most useful information is siloed in the brains of battle worn engineers who are surrounded by an inflation of junior devs. I have a feeling this field grew too fast and we are losing a lot of wisdom and knowledge.

packetlost 3y ago
100% agree. All the best devs I know literally do not give a flying fuck about blogs at all (with a few exceptions). They read white papers and textbooks from 40 years ago (this is a bit of an exaggeration).
OmarShehata 3y ago
> Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves. I often find this is the most useful category out of the 5 you listed. Junior devs writing something like "How to setup webpack" often explain things in plain words and just spell out how to get the thing working. There's humility to the post like "I don't know what all these options do, but this is what worked for me". I find that a lot more honest/useful than say category 5 there where I have no idea if what they're talking about will actually work for me or how much effort it's going to take to integrate because the assumption there is you have big teams who can spend all their time maintaining these tools.

jlengrand 3y ago

" On est toujours le con de quelqu'un, et tant pis pour lui". -> "We are always someone's jerk, and so much the worse for him". Agree with the article, I just wished it wasn't conflating "bullshit / actual harmful content" as much with "stuff that is valid, but in a given context". 200% that nothing online, (nor IRL to be fair), should be taken as universal truth. I see that same at conferences, with certain topics/fads/trends being absolutely overrepresented compared to what's actually happening on the ground.

strangattractor 3y ago
I interpreted "bullshit" to mean fluff. Much of the content I encounter appears to be regurgitated trivial examples from tutorials. Entire websites are dedicated to this. The goal generally appears to generate some type of influencer status or get money from ads. Few people offer helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem. Probably because they can't.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  "helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem" is a lot if work to create, even if you know the solution or can solve the problem easily. I can empathize with people who dont spend their limited free time on explaining others how to solve problems out of the goodwill of their heart and I am eternally grateful for the tiny minority that does this.
  - strangattractor 3y ago
    I am also grateful to the people that do actually share exceptional content. The problem is that search engines don't know the difference and the trivial seems to drown out the useful more and more over time.
- Little_Kitty 3y ago
  You get a lot more views for a video on how to index a column in MySQL than for how to approach evaluating your needs and choose a suitable database. The latter would be outdated in a few years as new technologies emerge, while the former can be padded with enough fluff to show two adverts. So we end up with the content you know today, rather than what you'd really like to see. It's good to remember this and interact with those who do publish the latter content, plus it makes the algorithm feed you more content that's worth your time.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. That’s usually a waste of time. It’s more efficient to try a couple things until something works and move on (“satisficing”). A key skill you learn over time is why decisions actually matter. But it’s not inherently bad that there’s no good reason for something, it really depends on the context. And sometimes things that had good reasons turn out bad anyway because the assumptions proved wrong or circumstances changed.

jfengel 3y ago
A good life lesson in general. My version of it: "most of the most important decisions you make in life will be made in the basis of insufficient information." As programmers we may be used to the notion that we can optimize if we know enough. We often can't. Decisions won't get better with more information because it's still insufficient. All you can do is use your best judgment -- of when to use your best judgment. And live with the consequences. That doesn't help you make the decision. But it can help you avoid spending too much time kicking yourself over it.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. I’ve been at a couple companies that wouldn’t take any proposal seriously unless you showed up with a list of citations to blog posts, books, or even podcasts. The root cause was a management structure that wanted to do everything with a maximum of evidence. It opened the door to a lot of terrible decisions winning for no reason other than someone found a blog post that Google does it this way, or Uber wrote a blog post about this, or Martin Fowler wrote a post about that. The most egregious abuse was when a team that had to deal with maybe 100 logins per day spent over 6 months researching how to build their auth system to match Big Tech. They could have picked any off the shelf solution and been done in a week, but instead it became an endless boondoggle of research, presentations, proposals, and committees. Several people were even planning conference talks around it, so it started to evolve into whatever would sound best for their talks. That was my cue that I was at the wrong type of company.
- 3y ago

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Opinion pieces probably are, but honestly most tech content is tutorials which are generally pretty cool.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Most tech tutorials are terrible. It's some junior engineer who has no idea what they're doing and barely got something to function. It's the blind teaching the blind.

spacemoon 3y ago

[flagged]

spacemoon 3y ago

[flagged]

082349872349872 3y ago

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

True, but most content in general is bullshit. Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of pumping your numbers. Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam. Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets, most books are BS. Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages are BS on top of BS. Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low quality authors trying to make it, agendas every where, and of course automated crap. Why do you think HN is so successful? The concept? The tech? Of course not. It's the quality of moderation, and the fact they used their ability to publish their BS to the front page with moderation. Just enough to help them, but not so much as to destroy the average HN quality. Dedication to quality on the long run, and restrain in milking the cow. This show visions, and it's hard.

tensor 3y ago
This is grossly reductive. There is a huge spectrum of quality in content. Most of what you describe, formal studies by experts, is on a much much higher tier than the 99% of content most people read. Comparing informed formal studies to the uninformed opinion pieces most of the tech crowd reads and implying they are somehow the same is borderline supporting disinformation. There is absolutely a big spectrum of quality in the higher tiers of content too. People in those domains spend countless evenings discussing it. But the vast majority of people are not reading anything at that level. The typical tech blog is closer to talking about what kind of sandwich you like for lunch than anything that will advance the field.
- valval 3y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean by reductive in this case. 90% of kids’ plays are crap while 90% of Broadway shows are crap, with no need to compare those two domains.
thefourthchime 3y ago
I think you're going a little bit far, but I tend to agree. My reasoning for this is, to look back on experts from the past. Unless it's a hard scientific fact, a law of physics, most things are really just opinions that people tend to agree with. Remember Leaded gasoline? How about DDT or Asbestos? How about Freud? Of the thing the bible likes to talk about, slavery. Even in the 25 years, I've been in programming, it seems like all "Proper Way To Do It" have all aged about as well as milk on a hot day. The only thing I follow is keeping stuff simple.

hcarvalhoalves 3y ago

I’ve seen people eagerly suggest the use of GraphQL without being able to explain the idea behind REST or SOAP, what can be done, the shortcomings… People in the area, specially the fresh out of college, will get informed about technology by promoted content on social media, specially any technology out of MAANG, and automatically assume it’s an industry standard.

lohnjemon 3y ago

As I've been looking into freelance teaching and researching what kinds of services people provide, it's become astounding to me how poor most freelance teaching is. There's a bunch of people with the skills of a first year CS student offering "learn to code" education out there. But it sort of makes sense, those are exactly the kind of people who would want to make a quick buck on the side, not seasoned professionals who are making 6 figs already. It's just unfortunate, that people get sold this idea of "becoming a coder in a few weeks" and go nowhere because of it.

ellis0n 3y ago

Probably 20% of fake jobs generate fake content. Startups have long become the fashion of technology and not about tech itself, as it once was. Even PG does not post on this forum because of the unsolvable problem of the wrong/fake commentator. More and more politics and fashion in IT and less technologists. There are only 28 million programmers, and all the other billions of people do not even know how it works, but they have learned how to copy and sell. Market wins!

thebigwinning 3y ago
> Even PG does not post on this forum According to recent analysis, he does under pseudonyms. Also PG Twitter is probably 90% marketing his investments, so he is complicit in this way

vrnvu 3y ago

I was in a meeting one day, explaining some tech decisions I had made. At one point, my manager interrupted me, looking pale and completely out of place. He asked, "I don't get this approach. Can you share with me the tech blog where you read about this?" (...) I couldn't help but think: would a random blog post from the internet have more respect and authority than my own decisions and explanations?

antod 3y ago
Being as generous as possible and without other context, I would interpret that as a request for some background info you trust that they could use to catch up on those concepts in their own time without derailing the meeting by getting you to explain it. Especially if most others present probably already understand it. Or at least that is how I would've tried to convey it if I was your manager.
Noumenon72 3y ago
It would to me. When you are doing something no one has written about, it makes me think "We must be doing something impossible or we haven't identified the true problem to solve. It's unlikely we have a problem no one else has ever had." I've spent so much of my career gluing frameworks together that writing my own code feels like a code smell. Whenever my coworkers have written something new I spend 80% of my time fighting it and wishing it was a pattern or library.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

Is there a market for quality technical content? Enough to generate some type of revenue? The lack of it makes me think there isn’t. Or maybe it’s all locked up in YT videos that are painful to watch.

nathants 3y ago

content creators gotta create content. same as it ever was.

l0b0 3y ago

> Don’t consume. Create. Ask questions. Stay curious. Like everything else, it's a balance. Nobody can build a modern system in finite time that will be maintainable, secure, fast, etc. without relying on their own and others' experience ("consuming").

nathants 3y ago

some always rebuild, others never do. the best of us pause and think hard, about which is advantageous in a particular time and place. in any given situation, it could easily go either way. tolerating and resolving ambiguity to the best of one’s abilities is the name of the game. i wonder, which bias is healthier? toward or away from rebuilding?

robomc 3y ago

This article is pretty ironic because it's just a low effort post that also happens to be giving terrible advice.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jackfoxy 3y ago

> Tutorials show harmful patterns. Try to find a sample SQL database, for any vendor, that does not employ artificial table primary keys. This was a requirement in the 1980s so that your queries would execute before the heat death of the universe, but that has not been the case for decades. Microsoft is particularly guilty of this. Artificial keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a dearth of literature on why artificial keys are an anti-pattern.) Here's the only sample database I know of that consistently uses natural keys across all tables, created by a SQL educator who knows his stuff. https://github.com/ami-levin/Animal_Shelter https://github.com/ami-levin/Animal_Shelter

msla 3y ago
> Artificial keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a dearth of literature on why artificial keys are an anti-pattern.) Why, in specific, are artificial keys an anti-pattern? Seems like they preemptively solve problems. For example, using an SSN as a "natural" primary key is both a potential security nightmare and a data normalization nightmare if someone shows up with two or more SSNs, which does happen. (Yes. Yes. My great uncle had at least two SSNs. You won't convince me it can't happen.) Similarly for other "natural" data which isn't bound to obey the properties DBAs need for primary keys.
Tehdasi 3y ago
Never specifically heard about this terminology until now, but after looking, yeah, I can see why ppl prefer 'artificial' keys to natural ones. From the animal shelter example, for people it uses email as the 'natural' key, which immediately runs up against 1,2,3 and 7 in https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-email https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe...
- jackfoxy 3y ago
  "Natural Key" actually refers to column(s) already available in the dataset you are turning into a row that is unique by row, and thus a candidate for being the key. (Subject to all the normalization, etc.). An artificial key is a column of made-up data added to the rest of the column. It has no use other than to provide uniqueness. In most cases there is already a unique candidate key in your data.

shortrounddev2 3y ago

I think HN is a madhouse. Any article I click on, there's things I've never heard of that sound like made up techno-jargon, like programming languages which I've never seen used in a real job, let alone met anyone who uses them But I go to the comments and there's 150 people who all know every intimate detail of this technology already. Experts in the subject. I think most of you all are faking it

rldjbpin 3y ago
i thought that this was an open secret.
chwa982 3y ago
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echelon 3y ago
> I think most of you all are faking it The world is huge. We're all traversing different areas of interest and expertise. It makes sense that there are lots of different types of domain experts in our field. This is a great place where they tend to congregate together.
- freetinker 3y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Unsure why your comment is being downvoted…
- InexSquirrel 3y ago
  I honestly read that as a sarcastic comment, but maybe that's just my bent.
isaacremuant 3y ago
> I think most of you all are faking it. I think you're insecure about the extent of things you know nothing or so little about. It's normal but not an attractive trait to project.
- 3y ago

crtified 3y ago

A quasi- bell curve function, is it not? Could paraphrase "on average, content is average". Not trying to be facetious. But sifting out large quantities of general dross has been a common requirement 'in tech' since before the days of perusing CDROMs full of shareware on dial-up bulletin boards.

Havoc 3y ago

I'd say this is partially because creating something genuinely original and free standing is a rare occurrence. You're usually coding against some api or framework or whatever...and that interaction leads to common patterns so copy pasting makes sense. Perhaps that's the appeal people see in writing their own coding language? It's somewhat free standing

xoac 3y ago

She right.

langsoul-com 3y ago

Most algorithm driven tech content is bullshit. Especially YouTube tech content. They must produce or die, so, soon enough, it's bullshit coming out.

deleted 3y ago

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justincredible 3y ago

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throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

This is so on-point. Nearly every single article I have read on HN that covers my own area of expertise has been bullshit. I come here mostly to call BS before people blindly believe it.

toni_bk 3y ago
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throwawee 3y ago
From one throwaway to another, this is a legitimately useful service and I hope you and others keep doing it. At this point I flip through the HN comments before the articles. The primary source links alone are a treasure.

eternityforest 3y ago

Tech blog: I hate almost all software. I hate the IoT. I have a loaded gun by the printer. I want to live in the woods. I only like software because it's kind of like doing math and there's interesting logic. Every extra feature is like killing a tree. Now let me tell you how to make software, which I hate, and assume you also hate. Like, are there any tech blogs by people who actually like the modern tech ecosystem?

thebigwinning 3y ago
This is cool and authentic content though. Got any recs for me?
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Industrial Society and Its Future, and the various influences for it? The Golden Spruce? I mostly only pay attention to anything tech-negative at all if it's got some kind of historical or human interest. I've read a lot of the Suckless stuff though, and the Worse is Better stuff, because I always see it on places like this and thought I should probably at least know what it is. But it always seems like people from less technical fields have clearer writing on why they like these things, tech people are always trying to fight an uphill battle to make tech simple and logical, meanwhile encapsulated complexity is a lot of why most people like it. Wheras swiss watchmakers, mathematicians, and DIY woodworkers are working in a medium that naturally supports simplicity, and talking to an audience that appreciates it more, they don't have as much conflict happening to obscure things.
  - thebigwinning 3y ago
    > mathematicians I see that differently. Mathemticians often come into a field that's complex and filled with fudge factors and layers of engineering and make it clear and simple. See the history of electrical engineering in the 20th century.
    - eternityforest 3y ago

zxcvbn4038 3y ago

The biggest issue I run into is that developers wanting to put some one liner hello world example into production. There is no monitoring or logging, nothing updates the operating system or the application environment that runs in it, the hello world invariably runs as root and fails as any non-privileged user, etc. Any sort of database access reads the entire database on every access and loops through them all performing its own query logic - until the database gets too big to fit into ram. It’s a huge surprise when data gets discarded from memcache or redis. Over and over again I see these same issues.

samsquire 3y ago

Each architectural pattern produces its own fruit, which can be good or bad. I think the error that technical people do is assume that what they've settled on as the truth IS the ONLY truth and they are right and everybody else is wrong. I think the author makes this error too ("Everybody else's technical content is WRONG") One persons' beauty is another person' trash.

hjbolide 3y ago

OT but I had to wipe my screen a jillion times then realised the page has background image of tiny little dots...