He may be a bit interesting, but based on your assumption that he "hates" Scala seems to indicate that he is a very angry person (given that he still prefers Scala to other alternatives). I think he is emotionally invested in Scala and upset that it didn't turn out exactly how he would have like to see it, but "hate" seems like a strong (possibly incorrect) word to use.
I agree. However, I wouldn't say that this is entirely useless as it does offer some suggested alternatives to help build better habits. What I discuss in my post is something that I've seen friends and co-workers struggle with and the newsletters were something largely unknown to some.
I completely agree with you. Way too often to I read articles stating various truths based on their sole experiences. This is just one more thing that devalues HN and warrants curation.
In this particular case, this is not only my experience but the experience of some of my colleagues and friends. That doesn't mean that this applies to everyone and obviously it is an opinion article.
You said HN is bad for my well-being. I'm suggesting that you don't know how HN is for my well-being and my experience as a reader would have been more satisfying if I read your article to satifsy my curiousity about why HN is bad for your well-being. If you had put it as your problem I might have a couple more suggestions, but you instead tell me how I should solve this problem you think I have.
Oh definitely. I would just argue that you had to dig through a lot of posts that were less-than-beneficial and that a filter for an "Ask HN" would have been more worth your time. And that is just one form of curated content that I was mentioning.
Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts and what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
Less time being a mindless drone, never leaving your lane? ;)
I personally have learned quite a bit on HN that has led me to being a better programmer. A discovered Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/), Javascript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge), and plenty of other things that have expanded my mind. The debate between promises, callbacks, and generators made me think critically about how I do asynchronous JS. The local love of functional programming has inspired me to dive in, and ultimately made me a better imperative programmer as well. And overhype of Edward Snowden's every movement aside, HN does a great job of surfacing stories about the intersection of policy and tech.
I also value a lot of the discourse that happens here. I think HN, even with its flaws, is a better community for discussion than Slashdot, Ars, or most of the rest of the sites covering tech.
I definitely see the benefits here. But whenever I see a point like this I wonder: if you had replaced hacker news with a different activity, could you have formed a similar list of things you learned? Perhaps a longer list, or one of higher quality? Not trying to criticize you, just something I think about in these cases.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not arguing that HN is somehow optimal. I'm just saying that as a continual time investment, it's provided greater returns than the alternatives I've used in the past, with regards to staying on top of the scene in tech, startups, and tech-related policy.
I think everything you've said in your comment is correct, but when did the alternatives become "be a mindless drone" and "be a mindless drone who reads hacker news?"
My point is to criticize the implied argument that keeping your nose down working on the problems in front of you is inherently more productive than spending some time on HN to trying to gain some wider perspective.
That's probably a strawman attack, but the first line of my comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, which I tried to signal with the emoticon.
I generally agree that gaining a wider perspective is valuable, but it's not clear that HN is the best way to do that, and the OP outlines a number of reasons which make sense to me why it would be a bad way to do that.
At the least, HN exists in a thickly-walled bubble. There's not a very wide perspective here.
I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.
Exactly. Even a better reason to read curated content. You need to get awareness with what's going on in the tech community without sinking massive amounts of time. Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
This implies that the average reader is diving into every article. If my job (or interests or sideproject or...) happens to be Ruby or Lisp related, perhaps that's a useful article. Personally, I rarely-if-ever use either, so I tend to skip those.
And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.
HN doesn't have that much content, I never feel overwhelmed. The front-page turnover rate is really slow, to the point that I pretty quickly get my "fix" and then leave. Over the course of a day I might sink an hour into it, 2 if there's something interesting going on. However, I usually read maybe 3 articles per day at most.
>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.
Yes, awareness. I was reading 2+ hours a day of HN at my previous work. I was still more productive than most of my co-workers and was able to introduce useful tools, solutions and practices. One of my fellow developers asked, "How do you find out about all these stuff?"
So yeah, how do we find out about all these stuff otherwise?
If you read my article, then you'd know how. Curated content. It gives you the best of both worlds. Being able to dig through less news to find "good" content while still keeping up with today's news. With the added bonus that you can choose your content (wide categories / general tech or specific communities like Android, or HTML5).
Curated content still gives you what you want, but with less work. Additionally, you're reading will be consolidated (in theory) into a larger block of time on a less frequent basis, freeing up more time throughout your week.
Works the same way for me, a project manager. I dont want to know ghe finest details of everything that hits the front pahe here, I just want to know theif names, what they do, where their value are at and who is using it. Reading comments is also interesting when there are conflicting opinions on the topic.
Why not just for amusement? Or to just see what interesting things people have come up with? Why does everything have to be "only towards this goal", what happened to just doing things just for curiosity's sake?
"but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts"
Agree that the downside always has to be taken into account.
One thing that I have noticed over time is that at least some successful people tend to be highly focused and less interested in the types of things that, as they say on HN are "anything that piques one's curiosity". I'm amazed at how little curiosity they have actually.
What you are describing (that I think some people are missing here) is that sometimes you read things on HN, you then fork, and then you are going down the next shiny ball of opportunity because it is so much fun to do. And so easy to do. Only a click away. So it's rationalized in a way like "well what could be bad about learning learning is always valuable!!" without taking into account the opportunity cost of all that learning.
The key is as you say "less" and limits. There have been things over the past that I have forked to that have paid off in actual results and money. And things that have not. By devoting a set amount of time to satisfy curiosity you can gain much. But like with anything else you have to make sure you aren't shortchanging something else that is more important.
This can be rephrased as, "What's the value to you of posting on HN?"
The value to tptacek can be denominated in units of "hundreds of thousands of dollars," for example.
I have to run -- I wish I could go into more detail with this comment. I'd talk about some other non-monetary benefits, like the ability to seek out a network, or to get feedback on weaknesses, or a bunch of other things.
> Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts
No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.
> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.
All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.
We created an extension called "json-stream-encode" which doesn't encode JSON in a single large block, as the standard PHP code. For large JSONs this is a large memory improvement.
