You've Probably Read Enough | Hacker News Reader

You've Probably Read Enough

bennesvig.com

410 pointsbennesvig72 comments

Though the time I spend here on HN is both enjoyable and educational, a few months ago I ran an interesting test. For each article I read, I wrote down a one line entry on a piece of paper noting the site and basic gist of the article. The next day, before I was "allowed" to read any more articles on HN, I sat down with the blank side of said piece of paper from yesterday, and wrote down the articles I remembered.

I hate to admit it, but my retention rate was just miserable, probably less than 50%. Sure, remembering stuff "cold" on the next day is different than remembering an association during a conversation (e.g. "Ya, I read something about 'X' the other day."), but it was enough to make me wonder if my educational entertainment reading was time well spent, or time wasted?

Everyone needs breaks, and it's fun to keep up with what's going on in the world, but I might be better off doing something else...

It's hard to say for sure, but I find the difference between "cold" recall and latent recall of facts to be pretty large. Happens most frequently with stuff I learned on Wikipedia: I'll end up in a conversation, find myself knowing a fact that I shouldn't really have known given my background, and then realized that I must've gotten it from Wikipedia. Sometimes after that I can mentally recreate the browsing path I must've used to get to the fact, even though I wouldn't have been able to explicitly list the article in question as one I remembered reading.

it's called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_memory (yeah, there's plenty of links spanning from that article, I know)

I think there's a whole cult that promotes learning all kinds of things by remembering by association, can't remember what it was called. My father was introduced to it when he tried to learn a new language, but it failed miserably at that (not all tools are suitable for everything).

Anyway, another good technique to recall something is to think about something else for a moment and not concentrate on a particular thing you can't recall at that moment too much.

I managed to memorize the forwards and backwards order of half a deck of cards the first time I tried using this book: http://www.amazon.com/How-Develop-Super-Power-Memory/dp/0811...

And then I promptly picked up a new book to half read after life distracted me for a week and I forgot about that one.

I started writing notes if I thought it was worth remembering. Too often I'd read the article and then later try to discuss it with someone and forget simple facts. I realized I'm not even learning anything, just temporarily distracting my mind with 'shiny' factoids and stories. Basically the same as looking at imgur all day. I also try to focus what I read and follow only things that relate to my job, projects and 1 or 2 hobby interests.

I've had a similar observation with all of my RSS feeds. Afterward, I dropped about 80% of them. And wow did that feel good! Strange how it becomes a weight after a while. I also reduced my HN reading to just a few top posts a day.

What keeps me coming back to HN is my ongoing curiosity of how technology is evolving. (And also a slight paranoia of another hacker publishing exactly one of my side projects before I do :) I enjoy being engaged with other like minded strangers. And I believe this place helps you better predict, even appreciate the direction of technology.

Just so long as you have balance and it doesn't keep you from actually getting things done. As for the article's point, I do agree. Doing something is immeasurably more beneficial for you than reading about it.

An over-loaded RSS feed, or being subscribed to too many mailing lists has an effect similar to what PG is talking about in his "stuff" essay.

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

George Carlin had similar thoughts:

"A Place for My Stuff" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

I find the articles interesting, that is enough for me to justify reading HN. When I compare HN to the front page of reddit, which I used to read, I feel a lot better about reading HN.

I would also claim you want to 'relax' during breaks, that is, not actively think about something. I can't think of many better activities then reading HN.

I don't see a serious problem with a low retention rate from reading HN articles. I do not come here to memorize every item that flies through... I probably read 50 items a week on HN, but the reason I come back is for the 2-3 items per week that make me re-evaluate what I am doing, and cause me to do it better.

I sure hope you can't remember everything you read on HN. That would be like remembering everything that your roommate ever said to you during four years of college.

There's room in life for casual conversation. It doesn't have to be relentless study all the time. And even if you're intent on only reading stuff worth memorizing you can't achieve that goal. You can fight Sturgeon's Law, but you can't always expect to win.

It depends strongly on the subject, I find. Sometimes this advice is right; sometimes it's very far off. I've made both mistakes, and it's hard to predict which is which. Sometimes you read forever when you should've just done something months ago. But other times you waste a lot of time badly reinventing a wheel and getting saddled with bad design decisions that should've been avoidable, because you didn't realize that what you were trying to do already had a name and a lot of smart things written about it (or realized but didn't want to read them). You might call that the "just get down to business and parse HTML with a regex" school of getting-things-done, to take an extreme but common example that might've benefitted from more reading. ;-) A lot of bad statistics are also in that category...

I think the 2nd mistake might actually be more common, given the amount of wheel-reinventing (and not always reinventing well) that goes on, but it's hard to say.

To add onto this: when you do benefit from pre-researching sufficiently, you may think it was necessary only for that situation.

We only need to wear seatbelts on the days we'll get into an accident, right?

I have this fear literally every time I start on a new problem: am I re-inventing the wheel? Has this problem been solved already - maybe written about and discussed at length about in some paper/textbook/blog I haven't read? The more I learn the more I realize I don't know, which seems only increases my anxiety level. So that's one reason I can't stop reading this stuff.

Very true. I like this comment the best so far. There is sometimes that point where you feel like you got it and proceed with the just doing part and then you suddenly realize you should have read much more but only once it's too late. I recently tried to get a web app up and running on a VPS and I read a Tom about preparing, bootstrapping, configuring, and all about which stack components I should choose. In the end it wasn't enough and now I have to go back, totally reset the VPS to a clean slate and do it over. I went ahead and just did it after thinking reading could no longer help but I found an interesting thing. In some areas of what I was trying to do, it really was time to just do. I then got experienced with a few tools and learned that only then would further reading about how to better use those tools actually help. So it was sort of like "read, do, come back and read again".

Perhaps I'm wrong on what exactly he was getting at, but to apply it to myself I think it's more about wasting time in general. I know I look at HN for inspiration and to stay on top of what is new in my industry. Over time, though, that has turned into a lot of investment (reading/wasting time) with very little return (doing). It reminds me of the question someone asked here the other day about learning how to scale. The best answer was... you learn scaling when your site is over capacity. You can't read that on a site and understand it because the problem is never the same.

I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.

No you probably haven't. The lessons I've learned as being a part of this community over the past three years have been immeasurable, and that comes from browsing this site daily. Here's a sample from the top of my head, and this doesn't even come close to the edge cases where I've encountered a specific problem in my day job and thought to myself "oh shit, I remember reading an article about this on HN, let me go search for it". This also applies to all the reading I've done for fun and in school.

- Drawing U.S choropleth thematic maps (flowing data)

- A/B testing, Adwords, SEO (patio11's blog)

- D3 framework

- VIM advice

- Product development and importance of design

- Being data driven

- Conversion optimization

- Importance of machine learning on web scale problems

- Stupid business models vs business models that actually seem to work

- Mistakes to avoid

Yes you learn by doing. But you learn just as much through discovery, and discovery only happens when you read a shit ton more than you have to. Discovery leads to idea generation. Idea generation leads to products. Creating products leads to learning.

Unless you haven't. Hands-on is very important, especially early on when learning something new. But after the early stages, hands-on only takes you so far. You need to hit the books again.

You'll learn more starting out in Rails, for instance, by getting the basics of controller actions and their relationships to views and then immediately code some stuff. After that you can code till you're blue in the face but you still won't know nothin' bout polymorphic relationships or has_many :through. For that, you need to read some more.

I found over the years I need to have a steady cycle of practical coding, reading, coding, reading. It just depends. If I'm in the heat of getting features out the door, I don't read at all usually, I'm just doing what I do. When things settle down for a bit, I pull out something to read that pushes my weak areas. Maybe algorithms, or TCP/IP stuff I've neglected, or going over stuff I knew at one point but lost out of my wee lil noggin.

That said, when I'm reading that stuff I'll usually have a terminal open where I can practice, either in the shell, repl, mysql terminal, etc. So the cycles of reading/coding can be get real short. That's when I get the most into my brain, actually -- long sessions of doing both together.

I advocate a spiral method: learn until you have a basic grasp, then do until you hit a wall, then learn some more. Don't shirk the learning, though, or anyone who has done it will see right through you. For example, when I started typesetting with LaTeX, I started by reading (and finishing) a full LaTeX tutorial. Most people just grab a sample document and dive in, and I can tell you that their markup sucks. It's painful to read, and difficult to extend or maintain—and it's often ugly to boot. The difference between

    x$_{spring} = A sin(\omega t)$

and

    $x_\mathrm{spring} = A \sin(\omega t)$

is qualitative and unmistakable.

If you care about making things, there's no substitute for doing. If you care about quality, there's no substitute for learning from the experts who have gone before you.

Interestingly enough, this was the same approach that worked for me in school.

In college, I always felt that I couldn't start my math homework until I'd read the chapter thoroughly. It wasn't til my last year/year and a half that I realized, the best way to learn upper division math was to dive right into solving the hard problems, referencing back as needed.

This is what I have done since high school, but only because I never gave myself enough time to review the chapter before having to rush through the homework.

Sometimes I wondered if I would have done better having given myself more time to study the materials.

The basic premise is correct. Most people on HN are liable to read too much, and not do enough.

Personally I believe you have to do both for the fastest learning process. The "read, do, reflect" cycle. If you're not actively "doing" then you will read and associate things quite differently. Without doing, you can build up a very strong theoretical knowledge about a subject, but in doing, not realise the correct time to act on that knowledge. It can also lead to analysis paralysis, as you /know/ there is a bigger picture, and you're trying to figure it out - where as the guy who never read, but just learned by doing, never got slowed down by wondering about that bigger picture.

I know people who just do, and never read - they miss out on a lot of shortcuts they could easily learn, or understanding the bigger picture, motivations etc.

Reflection happens quite naturally for most of us here, but you'll often find it works best when you are actively writing ideas down, or communicating them to others. It then fuels going and reading or doing to fill knowledge gaps.

If you're not doing, then the next best thing you can do is mental rehearsal - if you /did/ have to apply this skill/knowledge to a real situation, how would you do it. You can then find yourself self-coaching when you do the activity for real.

As an aside, this is why hobbies are a Good Thing (tm). They allow you to have different sets of associations, so when I'm learning about a new area, I can link an idea to say organising a scuba dive, rather than something like a sprint planning session.

At a certain point, it's no longer reading to gain more knowledge, it's about procrastination.

Doing takes work, it requires making decisions, it requires critical thinking. Reading helps you delay this with an activity you can justify to yourself as being helpful in the long run.

However at a certain point, you've delayed too long and the time investment you've sunk into reading has been way too much for what you're getting out of it, compared to the act of doing and producing something and/or learning from experience.

(Edit: spacing)

To add: stop reading the same things over and over.

A recurring theme of discussion on HN is whether or not the submissions are getting worse. I tend to think they're not. (Although the comments are another story.) It's just that the twentieth article you read on something like lean startup methodologies is a lot less interesting than the first one.

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested" -Bacon

Unfortunately, most of what's out there on the blogs are only meant to be tasted...if that. Direct experience is valuable, but direct experience guided by an informed authority can be even more valuable.

And yet here I am, not stopping.

I probably have some ulterior motive for reading, rather than really doing it in order to be qualified for that startup idea I have.

But I won't know that until the next article gets upvoted that tells me my mental state in one sentence!

While it's true that reading one article, be it on HN or TC or wherever else, won't make a huge difference, what makes a difference is the aggregate of gleaning what information you can over a long period of time. Much like most (real) classes, you can't really cram, but as you continually ingest information it becomes a part of you.

Coming from the business end of things before I started programming, I learned about IPOs not from business classes but from reading about which companies would IPO. I learned about vesting schedules and cap sheets by reading about people discussing these things. While it's taken years for me to feel like I understands most of the ins and outs, it's also something that you really should be learning second hand. You don't want to be talking to a potential investor and have to ask him what a cap sheet is.

It's not about, "I will read this and understand," it's about immersing yourself in the culture and picking things up as you go.

You probably haven't read enough. It really depends on your goals and what you are trying to learn (or whether you are trying to learn at all). Doing is great and it's how you get things done but not everything can be learnt in a few short articles. It also depends on what you are reading too. Reading within a narrow field or an echo chamber can only take you so far. Reading and discovering new ideas can completely transform your entire way of thinking.

Personally, I've set myself the arduous task of mastering English. If you are reading for less than half your day, you will probably never get there with that one.

Written language is a wonderful tool for understanding the past. If you think you know everything there is to know about the past you are indisputably wrong.

If mastering English is your goal, then reading == doing

If mastering English is your goal, then doing includes conversing. I know a lot of children of immigrants who can understand their parents' language, but can't converse in it.

Where does one converse in English while in a foreign country? I basically taught myself English using the Internet and even though my understanding is top-notch due to copious amounts of reading & watching TV shows, my speech & active vocab are severely underdeveloped.

Get a VOIP/Skype account, find something to sell, phone people in English speaking countries, and sell them it. Google for the expat community in your country if you want someone local.

Apply for VISAs or other things at an English speaking foreign embassy.

Go on craigslist and find stuff for sale phone them and ask questions about whatever it is they are selling. Phone recruiters from craigslist or something.

Figure out something to do that involves English and just do it.

I'm curious what constitutes mastery in English for you.

(I think some commenters assumed I was not a native speaker. English is my first language).

Mastery for me would be mastery of English as an art and as a craft. It's about making something people want to consume. Poetry, novels, songs, technical manuals, plays, screenplays, essays, esoteric manuscripts, perfect commentary, and so on. Those are mediums, I want to create something that lives beyond my lifetime. Mastery for me is writing something that becomes truly immortal communication.

Follow up: i've probably written enough...

Reminds me of http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103111... Which basically alludes to visualizing your success tends to de-motivate you. I can't help but wonder if the people who soak up articles/videos of other people's accomplishments aren't living out their fantasies vicariously through those people, and weakening their own potential.

I read HN and listen to podcasts like TWIST to expose myself to good ideas. My theory is the more you expose yourself to talented thought leaders, the more likely you are to think like them.

Then when you come across a problem while building your product, you can say to yourself "Hey, this is what Mark Suster was talking about in that one blog post...how did he solve the problem?"

I wish that were true, but actually playing with SQL for the first hours can teach you much more than 20 articles about InnoDB vs MyISAM, MySQL tuning, Sql vs NoSql, etc...

I have definitely not read enough.

I've been "self-teaching" (mostly via O'Reilly books) since 2007 and I have completely changed my career. I grow as a programmer more and more every day, mostly thanks to reading.

Sure, I've read books like "Learn You A Haskell" without putting much into practice. But I feel I am much better off reading about new ideas even if I can't make every day use of them.

I think this is a relatively new phenomenon. 20 years ago you had to try hard to find an exhaustive amount of information on any specific topic, and what you did find tended to have been through a few gatekeepers. Now you can fritter away the days reading "useful" information because it's so prolific and readily available almost anywhere you are.

Absolutely. One of my first real programming books was "C" and also one on Unix. I had to drive for a half an hour to the Princeton Univ. bookstore. No such thing as computer books really at normal bookstores back then.

Ditto for gatekeepers. Have a legal issue you want to research? You went to the law library and sat there for hours and used the coin op copier.

When I want to jump into a new interest, I usually spend a chunk of time at the beginning watching videos or grazing thru a manual.

Even if I don't "get" everything yet -- knowing that Final Cut can do "X, Y, Z" and it's somewhere in the middle of the manual -- can be useful in removing some of the early frustration in the learning process.

This is very much how my brain works too, and I wonder if it's prevalent at all.

I'll know something is possible, and vaguely know what the technique is called, and I will be able to incorporate that knowledge into my thinking.

Then whenever it is time to build stuff, there's a lot of very specific googling to lay down a strong foundation of a solution.

Exactly > take the red pill! :) there is too much ambiguation. People spend months,years even, daydreaming. Fuck that childish nonsense. I am learning JS atm and loving myself for actually doing something. It is hard as hell but at least I'm moving forward, instead of being trapped in a dream.

"People spend months,years even, daydreaming."

Raises his hand

And the damned truth is, I know I'll probably fail because of it.

Not that that helps.

Would this hold true for all "kinds-of" audience? People opting in for a career in research (for example) are asked to read & assimilate more than the norm. The trick though is to remember the good parts and the ability to recall the good parts. Your thoughts?

I think that learning something new was a lot easier for me when I had the completely incorrect impression that almost everything I needed to know was in the one book I got from the library or bookstore (especially back when these places would often have only one book on a technical topic). Once I understood the book, I'd be a master! Being young, naive, and without any internet left me awfully gung-ho and I didn't need any external "Just Do It" prodding. Now when I think I'm interested in learning something new, and I dare do search on it, it's something akin to the scene in The Lawnmower Man where the guy's head almost explodes when he walks into the library and tries to absorb everything.

I find that a read/do cycle works really well, especially with a specific task at hand. Doing is important, but if you can learn from others at the same time I find it works really well.

The task at hand is merely to focus your attention on the specific path and along that path you'll learn what you need to do the other things in the field.

If you're trying to learn accounting it won't work by just reading a book, or just trying to balance your cheque book, but if you have a book and you refer to it while progressing through the balancing of your cheque book you'll learn what you need to know, and a large number of things that you didn't know you didn't know which you can learn later with a specific task in mind.

I think this is good advice if you have a particular goal in mind ("be able to edit videos"). It's harder if your goal is more vague ("be better at what I do").

I've found that I read through technical books/articles to get through them as fast as possible rather than actual learning. In the end, they don't help me much because I forget most of it.

Lately, instead of reading chapter after chapter of a book, I like to take in a concept, reflect on how it might have applied to past, present, and future projects. Then, I like to write code to prototype the concept, while examining at how I might have done it previously. I find it helps a lot more than blind reading. Of course, it also takes a bit longer.

Like most things, it's not an extreme of one or the other. Once you stop reading and start doing, it's not like you can never go back to reading. If you dive into doing right away, that doesn't mean you can't go back and read.

Studying, doing, reviewing is a good feedback loop. You study what you're going to learn in small chunks, spend some time grinding it out and working on it the best you can, then stepping back and reviewing your progress or lack thereof. Then back to reading, either reviewing what you read before, or moving onto the next chunk if you've mastered the previous one.

I used to read HN a ton when I had a job that I hated and they didn't give me much work to do. Now that I'm doing what I love (mobile development), I read HN much less often. And I think I'm learning a lot more.

> What is reading one more article going to do? Probably nothing.

Reading articles after articles instead of doing things is a very common form of procrastination. From Wikipedia: "procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of low-priority".

<on-topic-shameless-plug>

To fight this plague I'm working on an anti-procrastination web community for startup founders and people working on side projects: asaclock™ (http://www.asaclock.com).

</on-topic-shameless-plug>

> To get started on one of your lingering interests, you probably don’t need to read about it as much as you think. Go. Do it. And learn from there.

before you "do", you have to read how to do (otherwise you wont know where to start, and will most likely end up getting bored and give up ) , do it , and then read how "they" do it. that one more article could piece together the puzzle you're stuck on. while i agree that learning by doing and breaking stuff is the way to go, reading is just as important to me.

But reading is good for reminders. Go ahead, read a couple of books on a topic and then try to "do". You will soon be knee deep in alligators and unable to remember everything that you absorbed in those two "great books". The solution is to read everyday and let it remind you, directly or indirectly, of the great stuff that you studied but have nearly forgotten because you haven't put it into practice.

There's a profound difference between having "read enough" insightful books and/or lengthy articles on a subject and having "read enough" Youtube videos and blurby articles on a subject. With the former, a few days of deep reading can yield insights and techniques that months of unskilled "jumping into it" wouldn't have revealed. With the latter, yeah, you'll face diminishing returns pretty quickly.

This is the reason I like hanging out at HN, finding people like me with similar problems. Glad that I am not alone trying to deal with this as well.

Every time I think that I read too much I take a break and miss something that I know I would have liked, needed or benefitted from.

And then I end up in the other place where I have tabs of articles and kindle's of books, instapaper and reading list full.

Right now, since I'm in "startup" mode I'm both producing (code, writing, on-boarding docs) and consuming and I'm completely overwhelmed. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

I find people who 'do' and don't 'read' annoying. They tend not to understand their current cultural and mathematical context and end up re-inventing the wheel in their products.

These are the guys who tweet about 'this cool new language, Lisp' and talk about basic CS algorithms as if they were breaking news, discoveries that will disrupt the industry.

That said, at the end of the day, yes: doing is great for understanding.

i have a huge problem with this, between HN, /r/programming, /r/netsec, /r/technology, fastcompany, I find myself not really "doing" that much with programming as a hobby. I studied computer science in college, and for the last 3 years have been working in the military outside the field, but my passion still lies with computer science. Unfortunately these days it seems I mostely read into the success of others.

I guess a lot of it was getting burned out on tutorials, I have a hard time completing them, because the thrill of programming for me lies in solving a new problem, not typing in someone else code. It has been hard for me to pick up rails even with the excellent rails tutorial just because I dont find it all that exciting to type in verbatum code. Anyone have any good suggestions for learning new languages?

I think that just starting small scope projects and adding to them incrementaly with some good ref materials might be the solution.

That's what I'm grappling with right now myself, I've assembled a hefty doc's worth of links to useful resources I've found, and I've got a small library of programming books I've bought lately.

For the holidays, my current plan is to go through a chapter a day of the programming books. Not just read through it, but actually do the example projects, retyping out the code line by line, understanding both the big picture and seeing if there's any gaps in the code that I don't understand. Actually try to experiment afterwards, try to build on top of smaller projects and put them together.

What about http://rubykoans.com/ for learning Ruby? You'll be following TDD, meaning the code should work if all the tests pass. And you learn incrementally as new test cases pass (or koans, as the case may be). I'll venture to say that once you have a grounding in the fundamentals, it'll be much easier to just read the advanced tutorials and understand it.

I think it's like saying "listen, you've learned enough as a programmer, that one additional technique won't change too much in your career".

Sure - there is a limit of healthy news consumption, but if you stop reading altogether (or limit yourself only to "worthy" content) you may wake up in a couple of years and discover that you're an ignorant fool.

This is completely true for me. Every time I want to start a project using something new, I get completely sidetracked wanting to read everything I can get my hands on regarding it. So many side projects have died before they ever really began that way.

Just to throw up a counter example. I spent a ridiculous amount of time in Photoshop using warp when what I really wanted was liquify. 10 minutes of reading could have fixed that.

My perspective : Take much time to read (probably learn). Take less time to do (No. I haven't said, do little!)

Depends on the subject, there's an asymptotic dropoff in usefulness as you become more and more read in it.

Does anyone else see the irony here?

The algorithm is actually read, do, repeat. "Do" gets entirely too much credit because of Yoda.

I'm illiterate though.

Our brains are much more complex data processing systems than we or even the latest neuroscience research can fathom...my advice would be to just keep reading whatever and whenever you feel like it...leave the analysis and processing to your brain!

That being said...I also think that going on information diets(vacation to a beautiful place) for a cpl weeks every few months can be very advantageous for very long term memory retention and also for letting the brain derive awesome conclusions from all that information...just like sleeping for 8 hours everyday has been proved to improve short term and near long term memory retention.

I think this is true in phases. When you barely know something, readin can help a lot. Then you do it, get it, and reading about the same things does nothing. Once you move up the ladder so to speak you can once again gain a lot from reading. It's only once you've really mastered something that reading no longer helps and you end up just repeating the same articles over and over.

Re-posting a comment to the blog to get HN reaction:

Since this article doesn't obviously have an intended audience, you seem to be saying that everyone, everywhere should stop reading all articles once they posses the ability to read English well enough to comprehend this article. It is an interesting idea, but I suspect that this would lead to very uneducated people, so that people who ignore your advice are going to be better educated. If a senior citizen is told, "You've probably read enough" then, yes, maybe they will agree and proceed to purchase a plane ticket to the Bahamas. But if a teenager reads this article, the reaction will probably be, "sure, and by the same token, can you tell my teachers to stop assigning me homework?"

In any case, the core of the point is that by ignoring your advice, your readers can be better educated. Now, I am a Christian, but stupid priests who proclaim the creation myth until their vocal chords give way share something with you: if you ignore THEIR advice, you will be better educated, at least in science.

But really, you're right. The human race has reached the end of knowledge. There really isn't anything more anyone could possibly learn, so why try?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com