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Comment by laplace2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad to have this pointed out to me. It's so "obvious" now that live butterflies don't look that way, I'll never not notice this now. It's similar to all the tricks video media uses for aesthetics and common familiarity: gun cocking noises, computer hacking images, punch sound effects, and the like. It also remind me of location specific tricks, such as how the pyramids of Giza, Egypt are shown in pictures, or how wildlife photographers sometimes do staged photoshoots.

I think it's a very good thing to be aware of this. So much of our information is received through indirect means, how many things do we watch on video without understanding how the image and sound has been enhanced? I've been surprised before to see something in person and realize the media representation is not accurate.

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> such as how the pyramids of Giza, Egypt are shown in pictures

I was totally on the same wavelength with Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad when he discovered they were right next to the city. It's such a weird censoring -- would people value them less if they knew how close they were to development?

For reference here[1] is a traditional shot of the pyramids, and here[2] is an aerial view of the adjoining urban area.

[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_Gizah_Pyramids.j...

[2] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giza-pyramids.JPG

> would people value them less

Yes. Also there's a road running right next one of the pyramids, a pizza hut overlooking it, and tons of trash in the sand.

Darn right! There's more mystery and magic if you have to go on a six hour journey through the desert to even get a glimpse of them.

I always figured these pyramids were in the middle of the desert... thanks for enlightening me.

Nah, you need them close to some work camps or else the limestone deliveries take months. And then the work camps need to be within 48 squares of a populated residence so the work-overseer can find workers.

Source: I played a lot of Pharaoh as a kid.

I was in San Antonio, Texas last week and while not exactly on the same scale as the pyramids, The Alamo has a similar middle-of-nowhere isolated feel to it when represented in the media, while in actuality it's smack dab in the middle of downtown -- surrounded by hotels and gift shops.

The Alamo was the most underwhelming historical anything I've ever visited. Not only is it in the middle of downtown San Antonio, it's also rather small, and San Antonio itself is a sticky tropical rainforest. Nothing like arid, lonely fort of the popular culture depictions of the Alamo.

You can actually go visit the sets used for the Alamo movies here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamo_Village. Stick hot and sticky though :-D

Isn't the fact that it's small a big part of the historical significance?

Not really. It housed 200 defenders, but it was undermanned at that capacity.

You're likely aware of this having visited, but all that remains of the original mission is the chapel and a few walls.

This is what it looked like at the time of the siege; the city ended up growing around it

http://saaal-apwu.org/history/alamo-6.jpg

That's hilarious. I've never been to Texas so I've always seen the Alamo depicted like this:

http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2015/05/ask-alamo-survivor-iS...

But it's actually this:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qNqogZ9sZJ0/maxresdefault.jpg

And often the Sphinx is shown in the foreground so it looks like it's on a similar scale. The Sphinx is tiny compared to the pyramids.

Consider the Great Pyramid complex was used as a stony quarry for the surrounding city for millennia. It makes their endurance all the more remarkable.

> So much of our information is received through indirect means...

I suspect it is worse than that. Much of the actionable information that our civilization relies upon seems effectively "binary-only" and behind "firewalls" of field practice. Take water sanitation, for example. Exactly how does one set up an industrial-scale water sanitation plant for say, 5,000 residential units? There are design books and guides aplenty. But that aeration pump they say you need on page 315, how are you to know who makes one that will last, and is supported well? It's not like McMaster-Carr shows reviews from customers like Amazon. If you are outside the field, or new to it, then you come down to blindly guessing, getting told what to do by corporate policy, or getting the scoop from the grizzled veterans.

This seems pervasive to me, everywhere I turn. There seems to be a Simplifying Assumptions Field (SAF) around not just how information is presented, but how we actually model the information we consume, and it take assiduous effort to turn off in most people. Unless you place yourself into the mindset of "okay, if civilization ended and I could turn to no one else to figure this out, what problems will I run into trying to reproduce what I'm being told here from scratch, by myself?", it is all too easy to blindly accept the kinds of tricks you see on media, and one of the most pernicious tricks is accepting that being told information about something is almost as good as doing it, and doing it well.

I suppose this is why I'm not a fan of even most Internet-delivered broadcast media like Netflix/Hulu/Amazon-Video (not to speak of conventional media, aside from books): actionable information, that is, information I can take and reproduce an action/insight/process/result/object/etc. to the same fidelity/quality level (given enough practice), is very sparse in that part of the world. Documentaries are a gray area for me: if I could read a transcript and get the information 2-5X faster, I'd like them more, but I grow restless with the slow presentation in most documentaries (documentaries at 2X speed on YouTube generally can get my attention, though). Maker and MOOC content for example, seems more actionable to me, though of course YMMV.

I sometimes wonder if we are too harsh on those presenting information to make the information easily-digestible, and too rigid to accept that sometimes we simply don't know pieces of information or can't get the perfect video shot, and settle for entertainment value instead of actionable value.

I mainly watch some of the fluffier informational content like semi-educational youtube videos and documentaries as a blend of relaxation and low efficiency passive learning.

I find that information density and technical depth are inversely proportional to my ability watch this content when I'm trying to relax or if I'm tired :)

Not a terribly surprising finding, but I'm glad some of this "more digestible" informative content is increasingly available. I'd usually rather watch that type of stuff than most fictional shows. I do like a good novel now and then though.

When I was a child I thought BBC science documentaries where amazing but at some point I realised I was just seeing the same material repeated over and over again at the same level with flashier graphics.

Same with documentaries on engineering, I've seen 5-6 on jet engines and none of them goes into proper detail.

I noticed when I was trying to learn how to program, everyone seemed to think it was trivial to just take a course online and learn it. Only once you've gone through a few tutorials do you realize how shallow most of them are. If you want to get beyond Hello World level, you need to pick up some thick textbooks or go to college, and there's precious little instruction available at the intermediate level. You have to learn everything on the job whether you like it or not.

Agreed.

I've just inherited a legacy software system and I've been hunting down every podcast episode I can related to handling legacy projects holistically and there is a dearth of material.

Lots of the real world things I've learnt over the years I haven't even seen in books, at best books are incomplete and at worst hopelessly naive.

I've considered writing a book called "The hitchikers guide to software development: Surviving the bosses, the deadlines, the insane team members, this weeks buzzword management style - Towel is optional", I want material on programming in the real world not the idealised "and of course you should allocate time for <insert thing your boss will never understand the benefit off>".

Also on a similar related topic, why the hell are software visualisation systems so bloody useless, everything is optimised for creation not maintenance, I know my IDE has the data since it has internal state for things like autocompletion/jump to definition but when I do a "find usages" it gives me a table with each line and the filename...which is a pretty horrible way of visualising it, why can't I see a neat graph and re-orientate it around things like "find usages in this class and it's descendants" or "show me the class with the most usages of <foo>".

Even the best IDE's (I use intellij which is generally wonderful) still approach the problem from the wrong side sometimes, even the limited diagramming tools it has are very useful but you can't do much to interact with them.

Seconding all your points, and especially the complaint about writing vs. maintenance. I complain about that a bit too, and spent a fair amount of time searching for tools facilitating efficient reading and exploring of code. I found nothing. The space seems to be almost empty. The closest I found to something useful was an old and probably completely abandoned Eclipse plugin that doesn't work with Java 8.

IntelliJ in particular should have such tools - the IDE has all the right information. Just no tools that would be particularly useful for exploring codebase structure.

Investigate the software archeology field [1]. There are offerings [2], but they tend to not be well-recognized because most software development management hasn't realized (or willfully denies) how big their technical debt has grown, in the form of poorly-understood code. There is a "map for the territory" cognitive bias working here, where the mere presence of documentation seems to lull most management teams into believing that conveys sufficient understanding. In light of that predominant situation, it is difficult to lobby for more structured and tool-assisted code meta-management.

I don't know if this phenomena you and I are talking about is just my emotion-based but factually-incorrect perception, or an actual trend. I like to think it is an actual trend, because I look at fields like truck driving, and the boundaries of what is required to be known today by even average drivers seems greater than say, the 1930's. But the more specialist drivers have to know far more. Same with nurses, farmers, pipefitters, etc. It seems that while the "table stakes" to get into the entry level of many fields have gone up, certain specialties and career development paths simply didn't exist in the past, and they're far more demanding than the field used to expect of the average entrant. It is like the complexity level exploded across many fields as technology moved us forward, and we're not preparing students for the complex reality of the fields they are entering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_archaeology

[2] https://www.embarcadero.com/solutions/software-archeology

"I've just inherited a legacy software system and I've been hunting down every podcast episode I can related to handling legacy projects holistically and there is a dearth of material."

Might I suggest the book "Working effectively with legacy code" from Michael Feathers.

Second person to recommend that to me in the last week, I moved it up the list, thank you.

I agree about the intro courses.

I also agree about "precious little instruction available at the intermediate level". Though some is out there, if you're willing to spend a lot of money and sift through a lot of dross.

But I definitely disagree about needing to pick up some thick textbooks or go to college to get from Hello World to employable junior. What you need to do is work. Textbooks or college (or bootcamp) are certainly a possibility, but there's no shortage of free material, if one has the grit to do the work.

I mean, shit. Entry into an upper-middle-class white collar job used to be a project of at least 4 years of full-time effort, with a cost (on top of cost of living) at least equal to a year of salary of that upper-middle-class job. Modern educational opportunities in the area of software engineering drop that by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4. But some people (the "everyone" in your "everyone seemed to think...") figure it has dropped by a factor of 100. It's preposterous. Would-be programmers have got it pretty damn good... that doesn't mean it's miraculous!

I think of them like movie trailers for the in-depth stuff. (Particularly Ted talks.) Nothing wrong with that, but the problem is when you try to go deeper and there's nothing there.

A while ago someone mentioned an author who had a series of books on starting a civilization from the ground up. If anyone remembers it, please let me know!

edit: a thread on this, although not exactly what I was thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9084466

Were they fiction?

I agree with you in general. But I suspect it is a little better than that.

For instance, you remark

> But that aeration pump they say you need on page 315, how are you to know who makes one that will last, and is supported well?

And to that I would say that first of all there are general strategies that can be applied to answering questions like this (systematically breaking down the problem). Second, with a very small amount of training in how to research and learn things it's often possible to track down that indirection. To pick on your specific example, I bet you that there is a textbook out there that college civil engineering majors use in their class when they study public works and it probably has a chapter on pumps that would at least help you figure out the specs necessary.

There is also an argument that by omitting facts that can change based on location and time (companies go out of business) the information becomes more timeless and easily propagated.

But like I said I agree with you in general. I think part of the problem is that the scope of human knowledge is becoming ever more complex and high level. In general people seem to accept that "getting the scoop from the grizzled veterans" is a necessary part of the process.

I think you may be underestimating the real-world messiness of this water sanitation example, and other types of problems where location-specific factors WILL make or break the project.

There's an enormous gap between knowing the specs of a pump and knowing which company will make one that won't break and will provide decent service for it. A water sanitation plant that would work in one part the US (or one part of a state) might fail in another due to any among hundreds of factors.

Any time you're doing something that involves silt, algae, microorganisms, weather, human factors... etc... those factors are likely to make a fool of you and your textbook. The "scoop from a grizzled veteran" suddenly becomes essential.

There's a well-known example of a sludge field that worked on a small scale but did not work when executed on a large scale. Total disaster. Hugely expensive project, requiring hugely expensive cleanup.

Sure, there are plenty of realms within tech where "grizzled veterans" aren't needed and where solutions can transfer and scale nicely. You can't safely extrapolate that to real-world problems.

In many endeavors, local knowledge can't safely be ignored, and hubris leads to tragedy.

Nina Munk's reporting on the Millenium Villages Project is illustrative of the difficulties one can be blindsided by when trying to get something done with insufficient regard for local conditions: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/01/nina_munk_on_po.htm...

>There's an enormous gap between knowing the specs of a pump and knowing which company will make one that won't break and will provide decent service for it.

With a few fast and hard rules mostly based on country of origin and price you can go a long way( specifically talking about water pumps ).

But its not actually 'true', right? Butterflies in flight move their wings through all positions. That the one in pictures show the most wing, just like when pinned to a board, doesn't mean that a photographed butterfly is dead; just that it looks like one on a board.

Likewise a picture of a sleeping person may look like a dead person. Stop with the pictures of dead people all over the place already!

I think the point is probably valid. I just spent some time watching slow-mo videos of Butterflies in flight on YouTube. The closes the got to the dividing line between wings approaching 90 degrees to the body, the wings were in a curved configuration. The rest of the time the line seems to be significantly slanted backwards, which does look like it's a much more natural pose in reality.

> Likewise a picture of a sleeping person may look like a dead person. Stop with the pictures of dead people all over the place already!

I think a more accurate equivalent would be a widespread trend of depictions (pictures/tattoos) of people doing everyday activities with their eyes closed: surfing, winning awards, at the Eiffel tower, etc. That would certainly bother me because that is not the usual state for a waking person's eyes.

Edit: L'esprit de l'escalier moment - I should have used the arms-crossed-over-chest corpse-pose rather than eyes closed. Sometimes people assume that posture while living, but I mostly associate it with dead bodies prepared for burial.

My pet peeve: people using digital SLRs that have an overlaid film motor drive sound. Argghhh! Just the shutter sound will do, thanks.

I don't think I would have ever noticed this but now, I think I will always notice it.

For what it's worth, the specimen pose is justified to get a full view of the texture of the wings. If they overlap you'll have a hard time seeing them.

In a field guide or specimen collection, I think it would make a lot of sense to show the whole wing. I don't think it's at the level of gizography and fake gun sounds (now those are a major pet peeve of mine, especially the suppressor misconception).

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