5 ms·

The title and the pitch on the actual site are kind of disingenuous. This is a collection of resources to learn web development. Its hardly a cheat sheet or "ev

by brd 13y ago

The title and the pitch on the actual site are kind of disingenuous. This is a collection of resources to learn web development. Its hardly a cheat sheet or "everything you need to know". A cheat sheet would be a succinct set of syntax/concepts/examples required to get by. Having said that, its a pretty website and its a worthy cause so please don't take my critique too critically.

jonhmchan 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback! Anything to add in terms of tech I'm missing or better links?
- brd 13y ago
  http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ As far as tech, you're covering a lot of different topics. My knee jerk reaction would be add more of the competitors (i.e. foundation since you have bootstrap) but there's value in maintaining a smaller list of technologies since this seems to be targeted at true beginners.
  - jonhmchan 13y ago
    Yeah I have this for ruby I think. Will add it in - or you can make the pull request and put it in there! https://github.com/JonHMChan/bento/tree/gh-pages https://github.com/JonHMChan/bento/tree/gh-pages
- hershel 13y ago
  For beginners, what about rad tools like Microsoft lightswitch or alpha everywhere/five or appcubator which offer much lighter learning curves and faster development, although for limited types of projects?
d23 13y ago
Especially since most of the links are just to the original projects' homepages...
cliveowen 13y ago
It pointed me to this [1] and I gotta say it's well worth it a read if you want a primer on JS, really good stuff, right to the point. [1] http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/
shawn-furyan 13y ago
> The title and the pitch on the actual site are kind of disingenuous [...] > please don't take my critique too critically. If you don't mean to critique harshly, then please choose a word other than "disingenuous". I see the word misused a lot to mean something like "misleading", but it actually means that the author intentionally, duplicitously was trying to mislead the user. It is an insult used to question the intentions of the person it is used toward. Here are some synonyms from Google: insincere, dishonest, untruthful, false, deceitful, duplicitous, lying. Clearly those words are not generally used politely.
- brd 13y ago
  You do realize that when you look up the synonyms to misleading you get many of the same results, right? I'm sorry that you feel the word disingenuous has too strong a negative connotation but I won't curb my speech because of your opinion. If I were to follow that line of thinking I'd have also used a word other than critique because many people foster the opinion that it too has a strictly negative connotation.
  - shawn-furyan 13y ago
    I'm not asking you to censor your speech. Your use of the word seemed to be at odds with the part of your comment that claimed that it was not a strong critique. The problem with synonyms is that synonyms are not perfectly equivalent, so you can use them to support a lot of false equivalencies. On the other hand, it's difficult to capture subtle connotations of words in a discussion, and synonyms are kind of the best tool available for getting across that shorthand. It's still a rather inadequate tool. I would say that "disingenuous" being a synonym of "misleading" is itself misleading, because the word "misleading" is neutral to intent where disingenuous is not. Regarding the word "critique" (especially that form of the word, as opposed to "criticism"), I would say that there's a broadly used academic usage of that word that contains no negative connotation. Honestly, I have no problem with the word disingenuous. If you were saying that the site developer was intentionally misleading people, then I agree with your usage of the word. But the way that I read your entire comment led me to a different interpretation, and thus my comment. I'm not asking you to censor your speech. Your use of the word seemed to be at odds with the part of your comment that claimed that it was not a strong critique. The problem with synonyms is that synonyms are not perfectly equivalent, so you can use them to support a lot of false equivalencies. On the other hand, it's difficult to capture subtle connotations of words in a discussion, and synonyms are kind of the best tool available for getting across that shorthand. It's still a rather inadequate tool. I would say that "disingenuous" being a synonym of "misleading" is itself misleading, because the word "misleading" is neutral to intent where disingenuous is not. Regarding the word "critique" (especially that form of the word, as opposed to "criticism"), I would say that there's a broadly used academic usage of that word that contains no negative connotation. Honestly, I have no problem with the word disingenuous. If you were saying that the site developer was intentionally misleading people, then I agree with your usage of the word. But the way that I read your entire comment led me to a different interpretation, and thus my comment. P.S. I've noticed that a lot of people on HN use disingenuous in this way that is more or less a direct synonym of "misleading", but outside of HN, I encounter the word much less frequently, and generally it is used in an accusatory tone. Of course language can mutate within communities and subcultures, and that's fine, but using the word disingenuous without implying negative intent carries the risk of offending someone accidentally. I liken the difference between the two words to that of the words "lie" and "misspeak". If you meant to tell someone that they misspoke, but used the word "lied" instead, they would tend to get offended and/or defensive, even though you clearly were not trying to hurl an accusation of ill intent at them. There would be some uncomfortableness created by the miscommunication that was completely unintended and unnecessary. That's the reason that I spoke up about it. I see the potential for unnecessary miscommunication.

by brd 13y ago

jonhmchan 13y ago

Thanks for the feedback! Anything to add in terms of tech I'm missing or better links?

brd 13y ago
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ As far as tech, you're covering a lot of different topics. My knee jerk reaction would be add more of the competitors (i.e. foundation since you have bootstrap) but there's value in maintaining a smaller list of technologies since this seems to be targeted at true beginners.
- jonhmchan 13y ago
  Yeah I have this for ruby I think. Will add it in - or you can make the pull request and put it in there! https://github.com/JonHMChan/bento/tree/gh-pages https://github.com/JonHMChan/bento/tree/gh-pages
hershel 13y ago
For beginners, what about rad tools like Microsoft lightswitch or alpha everywhere/five or appcubator which offer much lighter learning curves and faster development, although for limited types of projects?

d23 13y ago

Especially since most of the links are just to the original projects' homepages...

cliveowen 13y ago

It pointed me to this [1] and I gotta say it's well worth it a read if you want a primer on JS, really good stuff, right to the point. [1] http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/ http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/javascript/

shawn-furyan 13y ago

> The title and the pitch on the actual site are kind of disingenuous [...] > please don't take my critique too critically. If you don't mean to critique harshly, then please choose a word other than "disingenuous". I see the word misused a lot to mean something like "misleading", but it actually means that the author intentionally, duplicitously was trying to mislead the user. It is an insult used to question the intentions of the person it is used toward. Here are some synonyms from Google: insincere, dishonest, untruthful, false, deceitful, duplicitous, lying. Clearly those words are not generally used politely.

brd 13y ago
You do realize that when you look up the synonyms to misleading you get many of the same results, right? I'm sorry that you feel the word disingenuous has too strong a negative connotation but I won't curb my speech because of your opinion. If I were to follow that line of thinking I'd have also used a word other than critique because many people foster the opinion that it too has a strictly negative connotation.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  I'm not asking you to censor your speech. Your use of the word seemed to be at odds with the part of your comment that claimed that it was not a strong critique. The problem with synonyms is that synonyms are not perfectly equivalent, so you can use them to support a lot of false equivalencies. On the other hand, it's difficult to capture subtle connotations of words in a discussion, and synonyms are kind of the best tool available for getting across that shorthand. It's still a rather inadequate tool. I would say that "disingenuous" being a synonym of "misleading" is itself misleading, because the word "misleading" is neutral to intent where disingenuous is not. Regarding the word "critique" (especially that form of the word, as opposed to "criticism"), I would say that there's a broadly used academic usage of that word that contains no negative connotation. Honestly, I have no problem with the word disingenuous. If you were saying that the site developer was intentionally misleading people, then I agree with your usage of the word. But the way that I read your entire comment led me to a different interpretation, and thus my comment. I'm not asking you to censor your speech. Your use of the word seemed to be at odds with the part of your comment that claimed that it was not a strong critique. The problem with synonyms is that synonyms are not perfectly equivalent, so you can use them to support a lot of false equivalencies. On the other hand, it's difficult to capture subtle connotations of words in a discussion, and synonyms are kind of the best tool available for getting across that shorthand. It's still a rather inadequate tool. I would say that "disingenuous" being a synonym of "misleading" is itself misleading, because the word "misleading" is neutral to intent where disingenuous is not. Regarding the word "critique" (especially that form of the word, as opposed to "criticism"), I would say that there's a broadly used academic usage of that word that contains no negative connotation. Honestly, I have no problem with the word disingenuous. If you were saying that the site developer was intentionally misleading people, then I agree with your usage of the word. But the way that I read your entire comment led me to a different interpretation, and thus my comment. P.S. I've noticed that a lot of people on HN use disingenuous in this way that is more or less a direct synonym of "misleading", but outside of HN, I encounter the word much less frequently, and generally it is used in an accusatory tone. Of course language can mutate within communities and subcultures, and that's fine, but using the word disingenuous without implying negative intent carries the risk of offending someone accidentally. I liken the difference between the two words to that of the words "lie" and "misspeak". If you meant to tell someone that they misspoke, but used the word "lied" instead, they would tend to get offended and/or defensive, even though you clearly were not trying to hurl an accusation of ill intent at them. There would be some uncomfortableness created by the miscommunication that was completely unintended and unnecessary. That's the reason that I spoke up about it. I see the potential for unnecessary miscommunication.