Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts.
I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.
I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
It made rounds in the professional circles I traveled in and established myself as, while not necessarily a leader, someone at least very fluent in a particular process.
This was also in 2010 though, so the social landscape Was quite different
It has also been somewhat useful in projects where a concern with documentation has been expressed because the writing is a better example of my ability to document things than having worked on a lot of projects where you may be able to go see what we shipped but not be able to see anything of the documentation.
I think of the writing as the equivalent of a side project:
* it allows me to focus on something I want to learn
* it helps to make what I learn stick in my head
* it gives me a deadline and people who will send me emails to say how's it going with that
* it works as documentation for what I've learned
* it gives me a trivial amount of money for having taken the time to learn something. Basically the last article I wrote is paying for an annual Dropbox account, and a couple days worth of food for my family. It was way too much work for that to be worthwhile, but I did learn some things that will help with later stuff.
I recall an especially egregious one on Clojure where the author had used the language for all of about a week before writing up his detailed hot takes on some "cons" of the language, like needing to know some complicated thing called `let` in order too assign variables.
I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.
P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.
In any case, this project kind of didn't need any auto-magical serialization library, but the promise was reduced boilerplate. Instead, we just got way more complex boilerplate and a damn dependency forcing me to change how I want to write my code.
inline classes straight-up don't work with Jackson, and probably never will. So for every class that has a field that is an inline class, I have to write a "builder class" that's exactly the same except replacing the inline class with the class it wraps.
Also, @JsonUnwrapped doesn't work with Kotlin. And, of course, doing anything with generics is a complex nightmare with Jackson (because of JVM's type erasure).
Not to mention, all these failures happen at runtime, so you don't even know your class is going to be a problem until you run the code.
The whole thing just sucks and I actually miss the simplicity of translating by hand...
...
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...
This Schopenhauer essay resonates strongly with me, hitting on and unifying numerous concepts I'd been playing with. And saying it well.
Even in translation ;-)
I'm still upset that the University of Adelaide's book server was shut down, as it had a wonderfully-formatted set of the essays, shared recently to HN. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21386663
Here are two contrary points of view. The philosoper Chrysippus dropped into his books not just passages but whole works by other authors, including in one instance the complete Medea of Euripides; and ApoUodorus said that if all that was not his own were to be cut out of his works the paper would be quite blank. Epicurus, on the other hand, did not introduce a single quotation into any of the three hundred volumes that he left behind him. I happened the other day to light on such a passage. I had been languidly following a string of French words, so bloodless, fleshless, and devoid of substance and meaning that they were just words of French and no more. Then at the end of this long and tiresome road I came upon a rich and lofty sentence which towered into the clouds. If I had found the slope gentle and the ascent somewhat gradual, it would have been excusable. But the rise was so sheer and precipitous that after the first six words I felt myself flying into another world, from which I recognized the depth of the abyss out of which I had come. So deep was it that I have never had the heart to plunge into it again. If I were to load one of my discourses with such rich spoils, it would throw too much light on the stupidity of the rest.
To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary. I know very well how boldly I myself attempt at every turn to rise to the level of my purloinings and to remain there, even rashly hoping that I can prevent the judicial eye from discovering them. In this endeavour my industry plays as great a part as my inventive powers. And then, I do not contend with those ancient champions in the mass and hand to hand, but only in repeated brushes, in slight and trivial encounters. I do not press them hard; I merely try their strength and never go as far as I hesitatingly intend. If I could hold my own with them I should be doing well, for I only attack them at their strongest points.
To cover themselves, as I have seen some writers doing, so completely in other men's armour as not to leave even their finger-tips showing; to compose a work from pieces gathered here and there among the ancients - an easy task for a man of learning who is treating an ordinary subject - and then to attempt to conceal the theft and pass it all off as their own; this is in the first place criminal and cowardly, in that having no private resources with which to make a display, they try to boost themselves with other men's wealth; and secondly, it is very foolish to be satisfied by gaining the ignorant approbation of the vulgar through trickery, while discrediting oneself in the eyes of the intelligent. For their praise alone carries any weight, and they turn up their noses at all this borrowed decoration. For my part, I would do anything rather than that. I only quote others to make myself more explicit. ...
- Michel de Montaigne, "On the education of children" https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3585/3585.txt
Yes, that is beautiful, true, and illuminating.
Don't forget emojis! Such a waste of time! ⌛⌛⌛
And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.
Gifs are great
Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.
I sampled your work. It's exactly what we're talking about.
I'm sure this works for you, financially and SEO-wise.. but.. maybe use 500 words and no gifs instead?
My point is that this stuff doesn’t have to be boring and dry. It’s okay for content to reflect having fun when you’re having fun.
Even my college professors used jokes in their lectures.
Actually, let me change my mind on the GIFs. Keep the best ones.
It shouldn't be this way, but it frequently is.
It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.
To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..
When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.
By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.
At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.
I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.
Experienced developers usually aren't busy writing blog posts. Nor are they engaged on HN. As the old saying goes, those who can are out doing, those who can't `teach'.
This touched a nerve, but sorry it's spot on. The more faltering the career, the less certain the skills, the more likely the person has a vigorous social media and blog presence.
Guy made a tiny, miserable little service that would have made more money if he worked at Walmart. He was the seer who provided day after day of front page content for this site, the "fake it till you make it" ruse in full effect. Because his product was so miserably unsuccessfully he instead put all of his effort into blog posts and "lessons" for people to follow, and the suckers lined up.
People with actually successful products were just off being successful.
Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything...
Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality...
https://medium.com/@Amyperlman/best-buying-oscilloscope-for-...
Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...
If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.
For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)
Youtube's algorithm encourages video farms that upload frequently even if they recycle content. Ann Reardon discusses this problem as it relates to recipe video's frequently on her cooking channel.
[0]: Siraj Raval (700k subscribers!): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A
[1]: https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/10/16/why-siraj-ravals-...
My pet theory why YouTube is better is that there is no incentive to make videos longer. Blog post end up bloated and thin on real information because it is considered good SEO and apparently Google really tends to rank longer articles higher. Same is true for tech books, which are often bloated because the author has to reach their target page count.
YouTube videos seem to be mostly as long as they need to be to tell the story they want to tell. This is not universally true for video content though. If you look at online learning platforms, like Udemy for example, you can find many courses that spread an hour worth of content over typically five or six hours. My fear is that Google will someday decide to make the length of a video a ranking factor and we will have the same bloated videos on YouTube too.
> Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately.
Producing decent video content is much more elaborate and expensive than written reviews. My suspicion is that on YouTube paid reviews are even more common than on blogs and the norm is just not to mention it. Doesn't mean they are useless of course, just as you wrote "judge their bias appropriately".
I don't think this is an accident: YouTube apparently ranks based on watch time / retention, so if you make your video too long and people don't watch to the end it hurts you.
Any kind of machine maintenance video has so much preamble, when what I'm really after is like 25 seconds of silently accessing the part, pausing to circle stuff in red, and narrating stuff that's hard to see from the video
> Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.
Reads like it went through Google translate twice.
The king is naked!
• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]
• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]
• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]
Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!
• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]
Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?
This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers.
Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile.
That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic.
Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1].
Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine.
[1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.
I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily looking for something specific.
But that involves building up a ratings database of lots of different URLs. If it becomes really popular, I'd like to experiment with search. It could start with a "normal" search algorithm but then adjust the results based on rating data. E.g. "the top result for this query is X, but people with similar rating data to you always down vote that link, so we'll move that result down".
I've heard people complain about how Google gives you personalized search results sometimes, but I'm not sure if the approach is actually bad. Perhaps it could work if it was focused on from the start instead of bolted on.
I've never got around to doing it and one of the reasons (excuses) is that I haven't yet figured out a way to stop bad actors exploiting it by, e.g., mass downvoting URLs of competitors. I did think about some sort of moving average, or bias toward more recent votes, which would at least somewhat mitigate against transient actions of this kind, but it's harder to deal with a sustained attack like this.
That is still exploitable: if I know you like A, B, and C, (perhaps those are popular items), I could also upvote those items and then downvote another item D. I have an idea for countering this: keep track of history. So instead of just measuring ratings overlap ("of items you've both rated, 75% of items were rated the same"), you keep track of the performance of recommendations made from that user ("of Alice's items that we recommended to Bob, Bob upvoted them 25% of the time").
I haven't thought about this super deeply yet, but I think to beat that, you'd have to actually provide valuable data to the system in the first place.
I would think the first case would result in way better data (which is why (I think) last.fm recommendation system is so good), but the latter case seems to be the natural thing to do, humans love to judge shit without actually engaging with stuff.
That brings up a key point which I'm not sure is clear to users or not: voting on items specifically means "this is/is not a good recommendation for me". It's not a judgment on the goodness of the item in general. So if findka showed me e.g. an article on pottery that looked high quality, I'd probably still downvote it since I'm not into pottery.
[I hated this] [I'm interested in this] [I liked this]
Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.
For instance, quite a few times I'll open a page in Google's results, scan the content and go back to compare it to another result. That doesn't necessarily mean I hate the first page or think it's terrible, just that I wanted to see what it had to offer.
It can also mean I did find the answer there, and am returning to Google to search for something else instead.
It's tough to distinguish cases like those from 'the content was bad' and 'the content was not what I was looking for'.
There's also the worry that it might end up hurting user incentives too, or alter the way in which users browse the internet as a whole.
After all, since finding out that YouTube rewards/punishes creators based on watch time/how much of the video someone watches, I'm now hesitant to even watch many videos at all, since I know some guy's career might potentially be put on the line.
Perhaps Google worries other people will be the same, and stop clicking as many results knowing that Google might punish the affected websites for not staying long enough.
They could hook this into Google Analytics and subtract the time you spent with that tab/window not focussed from your session duration.
I do fundamentally agree that session duration may not be the worst proxy for worthwhile content or, at least, engaging content, snd I think Google may use it as such.
* 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s
* fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?)
* 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.
Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
So ... he basically just read the TypeScript "getting started" tutorial, transformed it to a presentation, and had no real knowledge of TypeScript.
The entire talk seemed pretty useless to me. I don't even know how accurate that presentation was, because there's much more to using a language effectively than the basic syntax learned from a glance at a tutorial page.
Then I was looking at other conferences lineups and saw many repeat speakers from that same conf, often with the same talk, turned me off quite a bit from going to any more conferences, lots of the same, basic content, with not much expertise behind it.
The value is mostly in hanging out with various people. The best experience has generally been when I went alone and met loads of new people, instead of going with coworkers or friends and then just hang out with them. Not that's not fun either, but I can do that next weekend anyway.
The more professionally organised ones don't tend to have that many stands, except for paying sponsors. I understand why they do that, but I think there's good value in "community stands" too.
I mean, the talks themselves are just "shut up and listen", right? Not too much socializing happening there. I think that revolving the entire conference around presentations is probably not always the best format.
There was a big space for vendors to have stalls but if you talked to them it was like talking to a sales person. Sometimes they had a tech-oriented sales person but it was still selling you their product.
So I think that repeated talks and intro talks are to be expected. Through I did not mind them, I used them to get idea about new thing X while I have time set aside for learning.
Most tech events don't in general pay for speakers or any travel. (Keynotes, scholarships, etc. are among the sometimes exceptions.)
I rarely literally re-use a presentation slide for slide but many presentations I give are based on an earlier presentation I gave. In most cases, a different conference is going to be a mostly different audience. In general, it doesn't make a lot of sense to just dump a presentation because I gave it once to a couple hundred peop,e.
To you. On the flip side, it provided an introductory level overview of a concept many watching/attending may not have looked into themselves, or were thinking of looking into. It also provided a different form of introduction, which could be valuable for attendees with a learning style preference different to that of look-at-a-how-to or check-out-the-docs.
>the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".
Hey, at least he was honest and didn't try to bluff his way through an answer, as many in our industry will.
Overall, depending on the audience and context, it sounds like it may have been worthwhile for many attendees. Plus he got to work on his soft skills, and doing so with such vulnerability could inspire others to also.
It doesn't matter how eloquent and thorough the introductory tutorial is, if the presenter has not experienced the technology sufficiently to have accumulated a few scars[1], they will not have the ability to convey the relative importance of the various aspects of the introduction, with which can be modified simply as a matter of taste, and which should be followed unless very careful consideration of global engineering context, and a full appreciation of the consequences.
If you are unable to meet that bar, at the very least, your abstract should make that abundantly clear out of respect for your audience.
[1] or at least have the experience to say that normally they would have expected to get bitten by something by their point in usage, but the technology meets their requirements so thoroughly that it has been particularly smooth sailing.
For example I currently mostly work with Go, and if I would give a high-level presentation about Go I'd start with the "tour of Go" tutorial, but I'd also add some context to some things, explain where you need to be careful to avoid problems, and emphasize the usefulness of other things that may not be obvious at a glance. That kind of stuff. I think the presentation format is a great way for doing that.
A beginning JavaScript programmer might explain the "with" keyword, which would be a mistake. I have no idea if the presentation contained any mistakes like that.
I don't work much with JS, and I haven't looked much as TypeScript since, but I didn't really learn all that much more than what I already knew: "TypeScript is JavaScript with optional typing".
Was it useful for others? Maybe; I hope so. But for me personally I consider it a wasted hour in my life.
Is this not true of most tech meetups / tech conferences though? I feel like they all carry an implicit YMMV with them, which attendees know when deciding to join.
I think Dunning-Kruger is part of it, but also excitement.
If you are the expert you probably got that way by putting in a lot of time, you are at any rate older than when you started out and you may be in fact be quite older than the average developer, often older people do not have the same enthusiasm and excitement for things (although sure there are many that do) so that cuts down the number of people who have experience who also have enthusiasm for getting up and talking.
Getting up and Talking means doing work for it, if you have kids you may not want to do that work unless your job is one where you have to do it. So if you are an older expert with kids but not employed in an evangelist role you probably are not going to go out and do talks.
The expert in a subject may see so deeply into the subject that it is difficult for them to express the gee-whiz aspects that will attract other people. Those who know more are not necessarily able to express that knowledge in an interesting way.
The expert may have lost interest in the matter as they gain in expertise, or they may think things that others will find amazing and interesting to be so obvious and trivial as to not be worth expressing.
For these reasons it may be that talks on a subject are preponderantly given by those with less than expert mastery of the subject.
Do you think or feel it is shameful for you to give introductory talk? Did you grew up in environment where such thing was mocked or did you grew up somewhere it was praised? Do you think it matters super much if someone in audiemce looks down on you or are you rather motivated by single person that likes you?
Do you think you need to be super awesome experienced speaker to make first public talk? Are you ok having public talk with primary purpose being to learn doing public talks?
These imo make the difference. It is not like there would be lines of experts wanting to talk.
Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.
I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.
I think the biggest problem isn't so much find "hey, that's a cool article"-type of content, but typing in [programming concept] in Google. What I want to find is things like in-depth experiences and advice regarding this which complement the manual. What I actually find it loads of "howtos" with "copy this" which just rehash the manual.
Results vary a bit depending on [programming concept], and I don't think simple "getting started with"-articles are completely useless either. But generally speaking, there are too many of them, many of them are not of high quality, and it obscures more in-depth content.
I'm not sure if maintaining a list of links would really solve that. Perhaps community projects like "awesome-foo"-lists have some potential here, but in practice I've found many of them to be dumping grounds rather than carefully curated.
But I fully agree, people should be creating their own ecosystems with links, rather than keeping huge portals happy.
Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.
If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.
"Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was going to go to..."
"NOT ALL RIDING HOODS ARE RED AND FRANKLY I OBJECT TO ANYONE WHO MONOLITHICALLY TRIES TO SAY SO AND I'M GETTING A VIBE... SEIZE HIM!"
To teach yourself programming in 1990 you would've gone to a bookstore or library, that employed a buyer/curator, who bought from a distributor, who bought from a publisher, who bought from an author, who probably also dealt with an agent and an editor. Other than the author and his/her own desire to produce something good, there were 3-5 other layers in the process, 3-5 other entities making the decision, should we submit this, should we publish this, should we distribute this, should we buy this and devote shelf space to selling it. Each of those steps is a gate through which only a limited quantity can pass, so whatever else it actually means, the book you pick up off the shelf in 1990 has passed through all those gates. Nowadays excellent and shitty writers alike are free of that.
The thing putting a negative spin on it is that at least in this author's opinion, "Most tech content is bullshit." I'm saying maybe that's because now we have access to the bottom 90% too along with the top 10% that we already had. (There was bullshit in the old days too of course, but it was usually found coming out of someone's mouth as opposed to in a book that someone bothered to spend money to print thousands of times. Although there are exceptions there too! It's death by a thousand disclaimers up in here!)
2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.
3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.
I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.
I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"
With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.
Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"
Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.
So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.
blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).
Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.
Papers if you need to keep up with a topic.
I used to follow statsblogs, but that's dead now (the collection, most of the blogs still exist).
Anything that isn't covered in these forums probably isn't important enough to worry about.
I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.
Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.
It's useful and interesting, but also content marketing.
Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.
But this is about plagiarism.
The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.
Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?
His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.
However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.
[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
"Hate the player for choosing to play the game."
I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.
Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.