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Comment by Jtarii | Hacker News Reader

If you are making something that you care about you should probably understand how it works. I didn't know this was such a hot take.

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So, since you care so much and caring requires knowing everything about everything that even remotely intersects with your project, as (presumably) a software developer presumably you understand in detail how every bit of the CPUs you're targeting, plus the lithography, chemistry, and how solid state physics, and the underlying quantum mechanics work?

You seem to be massively exaggerating here for effect.

I think the main point is, if you're building frontend web apps, you should probably know how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interact to some decently high level. Can you look stuff up on the margins via AI, or StackOverflow, or whatever? Sure.

If you're building <something else>, you should probably know the core tools and concepts at the appropriate level to build them.

No we do not need to know every aspect of CPU branch prediction and whatnot to make a webpage.

I think it's pretty obvious from the context of "if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS)" that this isn't about someone that regularly works on frontend web apps, it's about someone that is having to do something that is not normal for them. E.g. I mainly work on HPC code, maybe once in a year or two I need to throw together an animated poster to accompany a printed one. It's obviously ridiculous to claim that this means I have to learn frontend web dev.

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