4 ms·

I think there are plenty of context clues in the first few sentences. > ... fascinated with BEAM, how it allowed easy spawning of processes ... > ... the appe

I think there are plenty of context clues in the first few sentences. > ... fascinated with BEAM, how it allowed easy spawning of processes ... > ... the appeal of BEAM languages ... > ... haven’t read The BEAM Book yet ... > ... examples are written in Elm ...

ohyoutravel 11mo ago
It’s poor writing.
jedmeyers 11mo ago
[flagged]
- Jtsummers 11mo ago
  Who would look at something called The BEAM Book with a link to [1] and think that it refers to a book with a completely different title? [1] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/ https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/
  - jedmeyers 11mo ago
    Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.
    - Jtsummers 11mo ago
      > Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is. This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.
      - jedmeyers 11mo ago
        > I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. Now instead of putting the details in the title, you have me reading paragraphs of text and clicking links to figure out what the author is talking about. Did I understand you correctly?
        rramadass 11mo ago
        You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake. We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains. People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever. Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.
- MeetingsBrowser 11mo ago
  This feels like willful ignorance. Can you really read the blog without realizing that there is a possibility this isn’t referring to Apache beam?
  - DrewADesign 11mo ago
    Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.
    - Jtsummers 11mo ago
      There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.
      - DrewADesign 11mo ago
        I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.
        Dylan16807 11mo ago
        I hope you're not accusing the original commenter here of "lashing out" for wanting one definition at the start.
        DrewADesign 11mo ago
        I was speaking more generally, but sure, I think the behavior fits. BEAM has a lot more surface area than Apache Beam does here — just do a site search for beam and see how far you have to go to see the Apache project. It’s ridiculous to expect the author of a blog post targeted at people interested in BEAM to disambiguate between them. Additionally, it’s a BEAM conference talk converted to a blog post and it says so right at the beginning of the article with a link to the conference. Thirdly, whoever submitted the link expecting a technical crowd to put in a modicum of effort to figure things out from context is completely reasonable. And how arbitrary is expecting the line to be drawn at your level of need? Shouldn’t project managers be able to read the article without having to look up VM meaning Virtual Machine? Or that functional programming isn’t any programming that uses a function? So yeah, I do not think it’s valid to criticize an author of a blog post aimed at people who already understand the subject for not putting a 1000’ overview at the top.
- DrewADesign 11mo ago
  That’s one reason Apache shouldn’t have used essentially the same name as a well-known VM released more than 20 years prior.

ohyoutravel 11mo ago

It’s poor writing.

jedmeyers 11mo ago

[flagged]

Jtsummers 11mo ago
Who would look at something called The BEAM Book with a link to [1] and think that it refers to a book with a completely different title? [1] https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/ https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/
- jedmeyers 11mo ago
  Because of you ask a person who works on Beam about “the Beam book” thats the one they are going to recommend. Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? There are many books like that, “the SRE book” is actually Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems, etc.
  - Jtsummers 11mo ago
    > Who knows that the BEAM book is literally called “the BEAM Book”? I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. This is why the WWW was invented, someone uses hypertext to create a link to something related to a reference. You click on the link, and you learn about what it is. This keeps web pages from having to all include a full encyclopedia and dictionary and translations in 100 languages in every page. You use the technology of last century to create and integrate into a web of related content, where the links (ideally, but not always) contain additional related and informative content without the need to copy the contents of every page into every other page.
    - jedmeyers 11mo ago
      > I mean, it's literally a link on a web page. You click the link, it takes you to The BEAM Book's page. Now instead of putting the details in the title, you have me reading paragraphs of text and clicking links to figure out what the author is talking about. Did I understand you correctly?
      - rramadass 11mo ago
        You are coming across as wilful, petulant and ignorant; hence stop digging the hole you are in. Don't argue for argument's sake. We are not here to makeup for your shortcomings nor spoon-feed you knowledge in various domains. People share whatever they want and if it is something i don't know anything about, i just do a quick Google search (eg. "what is BEAM in computer science") which immediately tells me what it is (especially the AI overview from Gemini at the beginning). You didn't even do this trivial step but are arguing that people should have anticipated your ignorance and handheld you; not going to happen ever. Everything on HN can be categorized as one of; 1) Pointers to stuff(useful/useless/junk knowledge) 2) Opinions (clueless/beginner/intermediate/expert) 3) News. That's it; what you do with it is up to you.
MeetingsBrowser 11mo ago
This feels like willful ignorance. Can you really read the blog without realizing that there is a possibility this isn’t referring to Apache beam?
- DrewADesign 11mo ago
  Nearly every personal blog post submitted here written for people that use a less-mainstream tool/environment/language draws aggressively obtuse comments by people mad that the author didn’t anticipate their lack of knowledge.
  - Jtsummers 11mo ago
    There have been math and CS paper submissions where people complained that the papers lacked a complete course on set theory or some CS theory concept the paper relied on. It's a weird thing to do, but apparently popular.
    - DrewADesign 11mo ago
      I think it’s an insecurity response— lashing out to distract themselves from feeling needlessly embarrassed for encountering something new or getting confused about something.
      - Dylan16807 11mo ago
        I hope you're not accusing the original commenter here of "lashing out" for wanting one definition at the start.
        DrewADesign 11mo ago
        I was speaking more generally, but sure, I think the behavior fits. BEAM has a lot more surface area than Apache Beam does here — just do a site search for beam and see how far you have to go to see the Apache project. It’s ridiculous to expect the author of a blog post targeted at people interested in BEAM to disambiguate between them. Additionally, it’s a BEAM conference talk converted to a blog post and it says so right at the beginning of the article with a link to the conference. Thirdly, whoever submitted the link expecting a technical crowd to put in a modicum of effort to figure things out from context is completely reasonable. And how arbitrary is expecting the line to be drawn at your level of need? Shouldn’t project managers be able to read the article without having to look up VM meaning Virtual Machine? Or that functional programming isn’t any programming that uses a function? So yeah, I do not think it’s valid to criticize an author of a blog post aimed at people who already understand the subject for not putting a 1000’ overview at the top.
DrewADesign 11mo ago
That’s one reason Apache shouldn’t have used essentially the same name as a well-known VM released more than 20 years prior.