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Comment by edfletcher_t137 | Hacker News Reader

This is a great blog post. Concise, lacking fluff or extraneous prose, it gets right to the point, presents the primary-source reference and then gets right to the solution. A bit of editorializing in the middle but that's completely allowed when writing this tightly. Well damn done, OP.

And also it's great information that I - like I'm sure many of you - also never noticed. THANK YOU!

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Well, I don't know, I kinda miss the human angle. I'd have loved to first read six paragraphs about how the author's grandmother raised them on home grown threads and greenlets :^)

> I'd have loved to first read six paragraphs about how the author's grandmother raised them on home grown threads and greenlets.

With recipes, often times your problem is you want to learn how to make something where having the steps listed out is the most important thing. The story behind the recipe isn't important to solve your problem but for tech the story around the choice is important. Often times the "why" is really important and I really like hearing about what led someone to use something first. Often times that's more important or equally as important as the implementation details.

It wouldn't make sense for this post given its title but if someone were making a post about why they chose to use async in Python I'd expect and hope that half of the post goes into the gory details of how they tried alternatives and what their shortcomings were for their specific use cases. That would help me as the reader generalize their post to my specific use cases and see if it applies.

Off-topic but the life story is there to make them eligible to be protected by copyright. IANAL.

Source: https://copyrightalliance.org/are-recipes-cookbooks-protecte...

Interesting. I always thought it was search engine optimization.

SEO is definitely a big part of it; Google penalized pages where people closed or navigated away quickly.

I immediately bounce from those Stackoverflow clones that keep appearing up at the top of searches. So, I am wondering how much this is still weighted in the scores.

You might. But many people don't. They just want an answer and don't care if it's a clone or not.

https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Leaked Google code:

  if(bounced && hosts_doubleclick_ads) pagerank++;

Its engagement optimization. Adsense pays more if you spend more time on the page

SEO makes total sense. I always add grandma keywords when I'm searching for Python stuff on Google.

Like: "grandma, how the hell have I still not memorized the API and keep needing to resort to the same doc pages again and again?"

Now I trained ChatGPT with grandma letters from when I was young, so it will answer just like if it was my grandma.

No reason why it can't be both. The only way to know for sure is to ask the author of the recipe that you're reading. :)

When is the last time you heard of online recipe blogs enforcing copyright claims on other blogspam? Ridiculous.

The real reason is simple, people who write recipes aren’t robots - they’re expressing their stories and emotions, while explaining how to make food that’s dear to them..

>people who write recipes aren’t robots - they’re expressing their stories and emotions, while explaining how to make food that’s dear to them..

the people who write recipes aren't robots, they're narcissists and various forms of insecure and seek validation in the form of attention and adulation from others. That's not a bad thing, it's all too human and we should embrace, not stigmatize, the needy, but if all you want is a recipe rather than to be an acolyte it can seem like a big ask.

You enjoyed time with your grandparents, and you remember it? Welcome the club! and I remember family as much more complicated than simply being all fun, and I feel like you might be Norman Rockwelling a bit.

The theory that recipes are written to make you scroll at least a full screen to show more ads seems much more plausible

yes, but you're cart before horse. The structure of paper newspaper and magazine recipe articles and "prose remembrance" cookbooks is the same. Tweaking that model for online use, very plausible, but it's also the way these "stories" are told anyway.

> they're narcissists and various forms of insecure and seek validation in the form of attention and adulation from others

This is incredibly insensitive and judgemental. Not sure what I expected from HN, I guess...

Why are these "narcissistic" people obliged to provide you with formulaic recipes for free? If the cost is perusing over their feel-good story, I feel it's a fair trade-off.

For some reason whenever this comes up there'll be one person saying "I bet you didn't know it's for copyright" and another saying "I bet you didn't know it's for SEO". I've yet to see either prove anything beyond that it's a plausible explanation that could fit the minimal known facts.

I can't find the reference atm, but Jeff Jarvis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis) says that this _is_ to get around copyright law; the same technique was being done over a hundred years ago (possibly more, that's why I want to reference!). Instead of blogs, think pamphlets.

The More You Know...

I feel alone sometimes as seemingly the one person adding "I bet you didn't know it is because blogs sometimes have regular readers and regular readers drive ad revenue more reliably than SEO or concerns about copyright". I think it fits the facts better, by far, but it's really interesting to see how many HN commenters under-estimate the readership of cooking blogs because they only ever interact with recipes as utilitarian data at the end of a specific web search and aren't often themselves the sorts of people who are the regular audience of recipe blogs so they discount that such audiences exist. (I had my cooking show phase and have friends and loved ones that hooked on the stories of some of the bigger name recipe blogs and I love letting them tell me about the sorts of things they are reading. It's amazing the blinders that the general HN commenter sometimes wears without realizing it.)

Really? Hmm. Had no idea

How does that work though? Surely the life story won't make the recipe itself more copyrightable, so anyone can still extract and copy that.

For recipes, it also signals effort and provides a hint about quality. There's a lot of low effort, broken, "would anyone enjoy eating this?" recipes out there dumped on recipe sites. A few pages of text says that the author thought the recipe was at least worth that amount of effort, and usually confirms that the author thinks the recipe is at least as good as X other recipes, etc.

It's not about recipes and tech blogs. It's about how American journalists have been taught to write, ever since the days of Capote and Hemingway. Everything else flew from there.

As an European, this is painfully evident every time I read something from a US journalist: I have to fast-forward through several paragraphs of useless "human angle" before I can get to the actual meat of the article.

Unfortunately the rot is spreading further and further every year.

What does this add this isn't already right there in the documentation?

It draws attention to a problem that a lot of people have created for themselves by not reading the documentation (or not recalling it if they read it). I guess the author could have just linked the documentation but then they couldn't have added the additional context of the github search demonstrating how common it is.

I must have looked through the docs for create_task a dozen times while trying to figure out how async/await works in Python but still managed to overlook this part.

That is unsurprising. It was first added as a brief note only in 3.9, and expanded to its present length only in 3.10.

Same.

If there was nothing to add then there wouldn’t be loads of projects on GitHub making exactly this mistake.

The author doesn't go into much detail on that point: this warning should be present in documentation of many Python libraries that use create_task and return the result to the user unless that library stores those tasks in a collection as is recommended -- at which point the library author had better roll their own garbage collection!

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