Comment by antegamisou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antegamisou | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately I feel like submissions on the site, as well as general content online, of the same type for significantly less academic subjects (this new cool web framework I'll spend 6000 words writing about) are the norm now.

And before anyone says so, no it has nothing to do with the supposed lessened attention span smartphones have caused. I'm not wasting 15 minutes of my life reading about social media recommendation algorithms [1] when not even a single paragraph is dedicated to at least some rudimentary technical explanation behind them.

Same goes for 30-minute YouTube videos attempting to maximize monetization for subjects whose explanation in less than 10 minutes for an average intelligence person is adequate.

Here's also a recent example of ideal, imo, technical writing that is sadly getting more scarce:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6712

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35087973

Ever since I saw a comment on HN about low information density on the internet, I haven’t been able to unsee it. They were commenting on a YouTube video that had an 8-second bit of content but was nearly 2 minutes long. But it’s so much worse than that.

Recipes tell you how their great grandmother moved to the Americas and made the first apple pie ever. And then detail the entire history of apples and how to make the entire recipe. And then, 70% of the way down the page, right before the comment section, is what you wanted at first glance: what’s in this pie, and how long will it take me to make?

It’s everywhere.

Check out based.cooking - just recipes, no fluff.

"It's bloat" ;)

I agree that there is a lot of blabla and that is not beneficial to anyone. But sometimes things that may seem as blabla actually may not be. You say that you care about technical information and every paragraph should contain some. But there is more than just tech, and it is important to motivate why we should care about the tech topic we are reading about. This will require paragraphs here and there that deal with ethical, social, philosophical considerations, and they may seem like space-fillers, however the contents are not trivial. Maybe you know that recommendation algorithms can have negative impacts, still it cant hurt to see arguments for this position. And other people besides you may not think so, and thus it is important to present them with such positions so that there can be a discussion. Whatever "average intelligence" is supposed to mean, not everyone knows the same things I do, no matter how "smart" they are.

Makes ChatGPT seem more viable.

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