3 ms·

As the article says, right at the top: "The plan is to demonstrate techniques that “everyone knows” because everyone, in fact, does not already know them."

by derdi 2y ago

mistercow 2y ago
This is actually something I find hard to resist in myself as an aging software engineer on HN. When I was young, articles would describe “obvious” things in excruciating detail, and I’d be grateful, because they were often things I didn’t know. Now when I see articles about things I find obvious on the front page — particularly if they’re topics I’ve seen hit the front page before (which, mind you, means “any time in the last 15 years or so”) — I have to resist an annoyed gut reaction. The fact that knowledge and skills seem obvious and boring once internalized is a kind of terrible quirk of the human condition.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  For whatever it's worth, I enjoy explaining things to others so each time a topic recurs I can do that where it seems appropriate. And hey I can pass on things I didn't know about and then learned here, for example that's why I tell people about WUFFS, can you do all the bounds checking at compile time? Sure, for a price. And that price (generality) might be easily affordable in which case using Rust, never mind C++ is very silly because WUFFS was offering you better performance and total safety if you can do without generality.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  My issue isn't with articles describing "obvious" things, it's with articles acting like this obvious thing is an amazing new discovery. This is especially funny when you see it in articles about relational database stuff, since most of the fundamentals have been discovered since the 70's.
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    Yes, but they were lost. We stored those discoveries in mongodb. Apparently it had failed in a web scale way and nobody has figured out how to restore from backup.

As the article says, right at the top: "The plan is to demonstrate techniques that “everyone knows” because everyone, in fact, does not already know them."

by derdi 2y ago

As the article says, right at the top: "The plan is to demonstrate techniques that “everyone knows” because everyone, in fact, does not already know them."

mistercow 2y ago

This is actually something I find hard to resist in myself as an aging software engineer on HN. When I was young, articles would describe “obvious” things in excruciating detail, and I’d be grateful, because they were often things I didn’t know. Now when I see articles about things I find obvious on the front page — particularly if they’re topics I’ve seen hit the front page before (which, mind you, means “any time in the last 15 years or so”) — I have to resist an annoyed gut reaction. The fact that knowledge and skills seem obvious and boring once internalized is a kind of terrible quirk of the human condition.

tialaramex 2y ago
For whatever it's worth, I enjoy explaining things to others so each time a topic recurs I can do that where it seems appropriate. And hey I can pass on things I didn't know about and then learned here, for example that's why I tell people about WUFFS, can you do all the bounds checking at compile time? Sure, for a price. And that price (generality) might be easily affordable in which case using Rust, never mind C++ is very silly because WUFFS was offering you better performance and total safety if you can do without generality.
HideousKojima 2y ago
My issue isn't with articles describing "obvious" things, it's with articles acting like this obvious thing is an amazing new discovery. This is especially funny when you see it in articles about relational database stuff, since most of the fundamentals have been discovered since the 70's.
- j16sdiz 2y ago
  Yes, but they were lost. We stored those discoveries in mongodb. Apparently it had failed in a web scale way and nobody has figured out how to restore from backup.