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Comment by pull_my_finger | Hacker News Reader

At the time of writing this, this "article" is #1 on HN default sort. It's an incredibly short, and fluffy post (self reported as a 3 minute read), with little more substance than an urban dictionary listing. I'm baffled.

On the topic of yak shaving though: I recently felt like I wanted to do more technical writing. The prerequisites of this idea involved building a static site generator and redesigning my website. While building the SSG, I of course imagined all the features that would be expected, a tagging system, JSON output in addition to markdown rendering, custom syntax highlighting for codeblocks etc etc. I had that idea at least 1-2 years ago, and I've only recently written my first post within the past 2 months. I think I enjoy tinkering with build systems much more than writing.

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I think we are many who read hacker news for the comments.

The downside is, it’s not so much the article that becomes relevant, but the topic. HN felt like talking about yak shaving and all we needed to get started (you included!) was a headline.

It also creates a vicious cycle where people who do care about article quality are more likely to disengage with the site -- and these are most likely the people who write the highest value comments.

I don't think a culture of 'only reading the comments' is at all a good thing.

Sounds like the path reddit took. Doubt HN will turn into it in perpetuity but I could already see some of that* leaking in the last 2-3 years, although thankfully it is harshly reigned in by moderation and fellow posters alike.

*by that I refer to comment chains just making bland puns, joining in threads for no reason other than saying something, even if it adds nothing and at times is straight up incorrect, etc.

To me, more important issue is allowing users to read, but not comment. Obviously everyone doesn’t have something meaningful to add to every topic, but if someone has read 100 articles and did add anything meaningful, something is wrong with HN.

Agreed - it's like watching the emergent complex behavior that an AI spits out after you give it something unique. You're curious - what on earth could the HN crowd have to say Yak Shaving? The input doesn't matter at that point to a degree, it's the unique/novel thing that was outputted.

You could search Algolia for the last time it was discussed, but it's much for fun to bring up the topic again. Who knows maybe the emergent behaviour is different than the last time it was discussed.

Do you get different emergent behaviour depending on the time of day/week? Have demographics of the site altered such that the prevailing opinions are vastly different? What is the mean time to only tangentially related items being discussed?

I have written comments on articles that were posted before. In many cases the discussions and participants are quite different. And they complement the comments of the original post.

HN completely random, yes there are patterns, but if you looked at 1000 articles that have been posted 5 or more times on HN you would see it’s completely random to if a topic get attention or not. Same with an emerging new story, multiple users will post it and frequently only after it’s posted a few times over hours or days does it get traction; and even then, there’s obviously a lot of posts that never get attention, but do elsewhere, but were within the scope of what’s on topic on HN.

Agree, though HN also clearly has the “Ask/Tell HN” if someone feels like taking about something and they’re by default down weighted vote wise, which to me says the posts linking to content should have substance.

For the people that read HN but don’t comment, please load/scan a link before upvoting. Not doing so will have a net negative impact on HN if enough people are not checking the links.

> The prerequisites of this idea involved building a static site generator and redesigning my website

To clarify: that is not yak shaving, that is just plain old procrastination. Yak shaving includes tasks that you have to complete in order to do whatever your original intent was. For example:

    * I want to add new feature to my code.
    * The feature requires a database migration.
    * To apply the migration to test environment I need to set up AWS credentials.
    * To set up credentials I need to log in to AWS console.
    * My password hasn't been rotated in a while so I need to update it.
    * etc

That is yak shaving.

> Yak shaving includes tasks that you have to complete in order to do whatever your original intent was.

The example (and definition) in the actual article disagree with you:

"You want to bake an apple pie, so you head to the kitchen. In the hallway, you notice some paint chipping on the wall. So you walk to the hardware store for some paint."

You obviously don't need to deal with the paint chipping before baking an apple pie.

Wikitionary gives both definitions: a blocking task or a procrastination detour

That's the problem with the article and Wikipedia. My definition is the only correct one. ;P

I have so many unfinished and abandoned projects due to this kind of stuff. Too much bookkeeping and garbage, so I go do something else.

And the "real-world example" is just someone getting distracted, not yak shaving.

Similar thought: I think you could stay there's a spectrum of yak shaving. I wouldn't as the article call 'going down the rabbit hole' yak shaving as rabbit holes feel more intentional.

My feeling of things related to yak shaving:

Rabbit holes - intentionally following some thread of associations looking for some insight or unexpected solution

Yak shaving - While working on something important you iteratively find something more important that you feel you need to deal with first. Supposedly but not necessarily it's something you have to deal with to be able to solve the original problem.

I agree that the articles example of yak shaving is a special case of yak shaving where it isn't very clear that the shaver feels that the distraction is more important. But I suppose such feeling is always a bit implied in the word distraction.

> Yak shaving - While working on something important you iteratively find something more important that you feel you need to deal with first.

No; yak shaving is something you must deal with to continue working on your original "something important". It is solving blockers, not following distractions.

If you want to write and for it to be a habit you can reduce the friction of writing.

Create a GitHub repository and create a journal repository and create a markdown heading for each entry. It works.

I'm on 4 pages of 100+ journal entries each. See my profile, I journal computer ideas, algorithms in the open.

Using WordPress or using complicated software shall take time away from writing regularly. And you need to open a document and write, not abandon your blog due to forgetting how to post

> I had that idea at least 1-2 years ago, and I've only recently written my first post within the past 2 months. I think I enjoy tinkering with build systems much more than writing.

This is very much an easy trap to fall into! What helped me was not sweating over the small stuff and setting up an instance of Grav, though I think that most of the turnkey blogging solutions out there would work (e.g. Ghost/Bolt as well, maybe not self-hosted Wordpress as a first option due to large surface area): https://getgrav.org/

What I really like about that solution in particular is that it is flat-file based and also has an admin web dashboard that's a separate plugin that can be enabled/disabled (some might prefer writing text files directly, with front matter and all) and has separate URL path that can be put behind basicauth (in addition to built in auth), client certificate auth or anything else.

It's not perfect, of course, and has given me the occasional headaches, but it's also good enough for my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/

That said, I still struggle with my homepage - instead of going back through 5+ years of projects and describing all of the noteworthy ones, putting up a few galleries of screenshots, listing technologies, ordering them by relevance and also making sure that it doesn't contain too much data... it's just sitting there, on my TODO list. It's been that way for a while now.

I want it done. But I don't want to do it.

The HN new queue is interesting because you often have a sea of articles with absolutely no votes, and then one or two articles with dozens of votes. While votes are probably power law or exponentially distributed, that skew seems a bit too extreme.

When quasi-blogspam articles like this rise to the top so quickly, one has to wonder whether it’s the result of vote manipulation.

Yes, been there, done that: tinkering (or yak shaving) makes it easy to forget about KISS. And sometimes results in too many open tabs in one's browsers ;-0

But even the best of us are prone to fall for it, and sometimes they even produce excellent results, cf. Donald Knuth and the TeX / Metafont ecosystem:

Between 1977 and 1979 computer scientist Donald E. Knuth of Stanford University created the TeX page-formatting language and the Metafont character shape specification language, originally as a way of improving the typography of his own publications. [...] -- https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3339

> makes it easy to forget about KISS

Does this really happen?

My experience is that programmers always try to make things as simple as possible, and when they fail at that, it's because they don't know how, or don't have enough time, or maybe the "simple" solution isn't persuasive enough that it covers all the cases, so a "more complex" version is preferred, or something like that; not because they forgot "whoops" I was supposed to make things simple not complicated.

The only times I have heard "KISS" suggested in earnest have been from bad managers.

> But even the best of us are prone to fall for it, and sometimes they even produce excellent results, cf. Donald Knuth and the TeX / Metafont ecosystem:

I don't see how this has anything to do with failing to keeping things simple, yak shaving for sure, but this yak (if it's a yak) did need the shave: there weren't any typesetting systems comparable to TeX at the time (and by some opinions there still aren't). What else can you do? Have someone spend hours typesetting and resetting a thousand page book every time there's an error, or turn the job over to a computer and automatically typeset it?

This is just solving problems. Solving problems you have is good, and where people go wrong, it's when they are solving problems they don't have (but perhaps think they might), or perhaps they underestimate how much of their problem the computer could actually solve.

> I recently felt like I wanted to do more technical writing. The prerequisites of this idea involved …

I am at least 18 months into exactly the same hole. And it isn't the first time.

I've been doing the "How To Take Smart Notes"[0] thing. So far, it's been working quite well for me.

I've been using Obsidian[1] and a few plugins like Incremental Writing[2][3] to help me write. Focused less on publishing and more on writing for me.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-sma...

[1]: https://obsidian.md/

[2]: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_writing

[3]: https://github.com/bjsi/incremental-writing

Emergence at work. There is much to be learned from just the behavior externals of HN.

Uniqueness, mystery, narratives and humor/silliness are probably big drivers of attention on forums and news sites. Like the other commenter suggested, the gold is typically in the comments. I don’t have data to back up this assertion, but it would make for a good study/article.

>At the time of writing this, this "article" is #1 on HN default sort. It's an incredibly short, and fluffy post (self reported as a 3 minute read), with little more substance than an urban dictionary listing. I'm baffled.

The magic is in the Ren & Stimpy reference.

It is blogspam. The OG article on this subject would be much more interesting.

The tl;dr is essentially: "How not to get distracted. Don't get distracted." Super helpful.

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