Hacker News Reader

Comment by progrus | Hacker News Reader

Yes. And then share with the world, and who cares if anyone pays attention.

It's a paradox. I'd rather no one reads my ramblings, but then why am I writing them? Somehow I feel it is a shame that most of my inane ideas only exist in my head.

The freeing approach is just to write, know you're a terrible writer, and persevere. I guess that's how you become good, eventually, or maybe you get a following of other idiots that agree with your dumb thoughts :-)

This is why I don't blog, and instead take notes that are publicly accessible. They're for me to refer to, but others may find them useful and I may want to share examples with my coworkers and friends, so I make them public.

EG: https://danielhoherd.com/tech-notes/exiftool/

This is really quite neat. Love both the idea and the execution.

This is super cool.

That's quite neat, but I would say that's more effort than a post, at least for me.

A post is a synthesized idea that has been going on in my head for a while. Write it and forget about it.

Your tech notes are a labour of love that need constant maintenance, which I'm not prepared to do.

You need to refer to your own ideas as inane and to your following as a band of idiots because you know that is how the average reader likes to think of those, how they think of you as a random person on the internet.

I've had more than enough feedback. Only one item remained that was useful, it boils down to: If you think topic X is worth exploring go do the f* work so that you can have a conversation with people who know something about X. They shouldn't care for your thoughts if you know nothing about the domain, they will bother to listen if you know the basics, they will give you time, attention and wonderful feedback if you know the topic well. They don't want to be your helpdesk, they want an exchange of thoughts. You will also be able to judge how great their expertise is which helps a lot ignoring and avoiding [negative] feedback from people who know nothing, are unwilling to learn and/or unable to think constructively about that what is important or precious to you - like exploring your imagination.

I have a thousand great ideas that exist only in my head. At any time at least 999 of them are not progressing.

And the weird thing is you'll find people that care about things you never expected anyone to care about.

Looking through my analytics, things that gets clicks are never what I expected them to be. They're never what I think is the coolest or what I consider to be the best written. They're just random shit I put out there just for the sake of updating my website.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com