5 ms·

downvoted. well, if I could.

• comatose_kid 19y ago
  Yeah, I think the recent quality of submissions to the site have suffered - at least if you measure them against the name of the site - 'Hacker News'. It seems that voting by itself doesn't weed out non-topical stuff. Perhaps this could be fixed by asking the submitter to reconsider if the link they are about to submit really has anything to do with hacking or entrepreneurship.
  • Alex3917 19y ago
    The problem is that too much of the stuff that gets submitted is "content." Good writers don't refer to their writing as content. Why? Good writing expresses ideas, and no one refers to their ideas as content. You'd never hear pg referring to his essays as content, which is probably why they're so popular. It's actually kind of funny. You'd think there would be lots of intelligent people who had interesting ideas and wrote them down, but really there aren't.
    • steve 19y ago
      > You'd think there would be lots of intelligent people who had interesting ideas and wrote them down, but really there aren't. There are a couple interesting problems here. What there is no lack of is intelligent people with ideas that they never share.
      • pg 19y ago
        Maybe more accurate to say there are a lot of intelligent people with half-formed ideas they never fully explore by writing them down. Writing is not like hitting print.
        • Alex3917 19y ago
          Certainly part of the problem is the time barrier. IIRC Guy Kawasaki said he averages seven hours per post. It's about the same for me for my posts that have made techmeme or reddit. I'd love to sit down and blog something about the social policy implications of pygmalion effect or whatever but it's hard justify blowing off an entire day more than a couple times a month. The other problem though is that there is very little theory surrounding what actually makes something insightful, informative, interesting, etc. There are hundreds of books or grammar and style, but try looking for a book on insightfulness. Google turns up literally zero useful results. If there were a book like Strunk/White but on substance, not style, it would greatly ameliorate the problem. I've been working on the problem for a while now myself, not from the perspective of a great writer but rather from the perspective of someone who knows what creates value for him as a reader. The problem is before you publish something like that it kind of has to be perfect.
  • maurycy 19y ago
    The recent quality of comments to the site suffered, too. Is it only my impression, or recently, instead of valuable on topic comments, we see overload of discussions why switching to "Hacker News" was a terrible idea, and endless threads how to improve the site?
• robg 19y ago
  I thought the article was just an interesting aside to the on-going discussion here of whether schooling matters for "success". As someone who was a pretty poor student for many, many years, the arguments/evidence is really only interesting to me as a way to inform that discussion. To me, this was a just another data point.
  • steve 19y ago
    no. What put me off is the speculation beyond the data that makes up most of the content of the article.