Read less HN
johnmurray.io
johnmurray.io
It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.
And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.
>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.
Another problem, and maybe one can call it FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is that sometimes the best knowledge is deep inside the comments.
They may or may not be there but you have to filter all the babble.
So yeah, how do we find out about all these stuff otherwise?
Curated content still gives you what you want, but with less work. Additionally, you're reading will be consolidated (in theory) into a larger block of time on a less frequent basis, freeing up more time throughout your week.
The value to tptacek can be denominated in units of "hundreds of thousands of dollars," for example.
I have to run -- I wish I could go into more detail with this comment. I'd talk about some other non-monetary benefits, like the ability to seek out a network, or to get feedback on weaknesses, or a bunch of other things.
I personally have learned quite a bit on HN that has led me to being a better programmer. A discovered Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/), Javascript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge), and plenty of other things that have expanded my mind. The debate between promises, callbacks, and generators made me think critically about how I do asynchronous JS. The local love of functional programming has inspired me to dive in, and ultimately made me a better imperative programmer as well. And overhype of Edward Snowden's every movement aside, HN does a great job of surfacing stories about the intersection of policy and tech.
I also value a lot of the discourse that happens here. I think HN, even with its flaws, is a better community for discussion than Slashdot, Ars, or most of the rest of the sites covering tech.
That's probably a strawman attack, but the first line of my comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, which I tried to signal with the emoticon.
At the least, HN exists in a thickly-walled bubble. There's not a very wide perspective here.
So the way avoid being a mindless drone is to read articles and comments telling you how to act and think?
Agree that the downside always has to be taken into account.
One thing that I have noticed over time is that at least some successful people tend to be highly focused and less interested in the types of things that, as they say on HN are "anything that piques one's curiosity". I'm amazed at how little curiosity they have actually.
What you are describing (that I think some people are missing here) is that sometimes you read things on HN, you then fork, and then you are going down the next shiny ball of opportunity because it is so much fun to do. And so easy to do. Only a click away. So it's rationalized in a way like "well what could be bad about learning learning is always valuable!!" without taking into account the opportunity cost of all that learning.
The key is as you say "less" and limits. There have been things over the past that I have forked to that have paid off in actual results and money. And things that have not. By devoting a set amount of time to satisfy curiosity you can gain much. But like with anything else you have to make sure you aren't shortchanging something else that is more important.
No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.
> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.
All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.
Also, one quick skim of the article list gives you a good idea of what's hot in tech. Even that has great value, and helps you decide what you should and shouldn't read.
About 10% of the time I jump into comments straightaway because they give you a good idea of the topic/validity of the article.
In short; consume, in moderation, with salt.
I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories either. What I hate is how some people reading those stories give super powers to those people who have succeeded as if there is no luck, timing or anything else and then those people, what they say, is oh so important even on subjects that they have little expertise in. The halo in other words.
Problem with some of the hyped stuff though is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy when a mass of early adopters decides to go down a particular path with the latest thing.
Yeah really bad. It's all crap except my own.
It's best to tune that shit out, but it's hard when people are young and impressionable, and given that the contemporary Silicon Valley culture is all about extending adolescence into the mid-30s (and then discarding people)... well it's easy see why people succumb to that nonsense.
The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
I wish I could upvote this more.
There are many plausible explanations for this (and obviously I've tried to get to the root of this phenomenon too), but at some point I started reflecting on whether this behavior is a good or bad thing.
I think it's both good and bad. It's good primarily because a lot of people look at their own problem in isolation, and share/address them as 'their unique problem', which keeps them from seeing underlying patterns or principles and from tapping into the experiences and observations of the countless others that have had pretty much the exact same problem. But it can also be bad, because not everyone likes being subjected or presented with this kind of generalization, and attempting to think about a problem in a general sense while you are suffering from it yourself complicates the search for solutions immensely (especially practical, direct solutions to implement).
Does anyone know if there has been research into this? I never really thought of diving in the the 'psychology' of programmers...
I noticed it in action recently when watching a David Lynch documentary about Transcendental Meditation where he describes his experience of meditation as "the cables of and elevator being cut and falling into oneness." My first thought was that Lynch has a very unique mind and probably doesn't realize that is not a very typical experience during meditation, but bless his heart, he wants everyone to have it.
Edit: David Wants to Fly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0payvR--nM
In this particular case, this is not only my experience but the experience of some of my colleagues and friends. That doesn't mean that this applies to everyone and obviously it is an opinion article.
I try not to open every link or anything, because I procrastinate just like everyone else. However, some of the value that I provide my clients is knowing about changes to their competitive landscape before they do.
Tightly coupled with both experience and a willingness to offer strong, thoughtful opinions on the day's tech news, I am often able to be the most honest and disconcertingly knowledgeable person at the table... all thanks to scanning HN a few times a day.
I owe much of my livelihood to your often link-bait posts, so thanks. :)
You have manually curate the subreddits you want, unfortunately.
Presumably this isn't entirely a choice: I would expect a good subreddit to get worse if it was made default. (And I've heard that /r/atheism got better when it was made undefault, but I haven't actually looked.)
What we're seeing right now is the after effects of popularity.
I remember going to reddit and thinking, damn these comments are loads better than slashdot. I don't think I can contribute anything interesting, these people are sharp so I won't post at all.
Might have just been me but there is a marked difference in tone on the site.
I would almost suggest replacing /r/gaming with /r/games, which is a 100x more intelligent subreddit with actual discussion (due to proper moderating and disabling of thumbnails), but I would hate to see that subreddit become toxic because of front-page publicity. It really depends on how dedicated its moderators are up for the task.
On HN one can fool himself think that he's getting value, but that isn't always the case.
But I don't work in the startup world. I don't get the stress of second guessing everything I do because in the same week opinions on all sides of an issue germane to startups have been heavily upvoted at different times. So perhaps that is key.
4-5 years ago, you would more often see long articles or self posts where someone would make a case for something on a topic. People would read the whole thing, try and understand the issue, and talk about it.
As reddit has grown, thoughtful posts have been replaced by one liners and memes. The front page is mostly just a dumping ground for whatever is viral at the moment.
I think this, interestingly, mirrors what happened to democracy in the United States. The democracy that the founding fathers imagined was one run mostly by the educated few, with everyone else also having the ability to voice their concerns.
What its turned into now is a chaotic mess of talking points and rhetoric, with two factions on opposite sides just screaming the same things at each other.
I think its because the more people you get involved in decision making, the simpler you have to make the case for each potential choice in order for the most people to be able to understand it. People will choose an inferior choice that they can understand over a superior one that they can't.
And the problem then is that oftentimes the most important things are the things that are hardest to understand.
I noticed that the more time I spend active on HN (in comments) the more I tend to correct friends when they make a mistake or vigorously argue a point of view on something not that important (these aren't bad things the but the frequency with which I was doing them annoyed me and my friends and it wasn't just the important stuff I was arguing, it was stupid things).
When I logged out of HN for a while this behaviour slowly started to improve. I couldn't stay away for ever though but I am much more aware of the effect and try to stop myself before I get too deep into a stupid debate/argument both on HN and IRL.
I don't blame HN. I've learned and still learn a lot of cool stuff here. It's the best source to stay up to date on internet drama and timely background information for security and hacking related incidents. Also a lot of programming and Unix related ideas I would hardly find anywhere else. But it's of little use to me. I'm not the security engineer of a start up. I'm not even really coding at the moment.
My reality is different. I should leave my room, work on my bicycle, solve the real and urgent issues around my life and sit in the library or hanging around with friends doing real stuff. Connecting with real people and learning something about other aspects of life. This may be different for others here.
Instead I'm here trapped in a strange click loop. I would do probably something similar without HN or even without internet. It's sad but the OPs post about is a good reminder to cut it down... it's irrational for me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
But in the beginning it is a wealth of information, giving you insight into what should be expected when trying to start a barebones new company.
So you gorge on the articles until you rarely get new insights from them. Then, naturally, your addiction to HN ends. (Typically this starts the "remember when HN was good?" comments)
Now if you are addicted for other reasons, like you feel socially involved here, that I can not speak to. But if your addiction is content, that will fade once you've had your fill.
How this all plays out in my head is a complex thing, but overall I feel like it is bad for my self-image. It is just very hard to keep the perspective in mind that I might be in the top 20% of people in a field but the top 1% will be the ones who start commenting on a specialised topic on HN. Add to that the different personality types hiding behind people's pseudonymous identities and you are getting a super distorted picture of the world.
There are certainly roles fit for specialists, but generalists with rare blends of difficult and useful skills are a lot more valuable in most situations. Specialization in any one area tends to have rapidly diminishing returns.
I think any above average developer can make themselves more valuable at a much faster rate by becoming decent at complementary disciplines like design, user experience, conversion optimization, writing, etc. than by continuing to hone their development skills.
Even within development, becoming decent at every level of the stack, from dev ops and databases to front end, is usually going to add a lot more value than becoming slightly stronger at your specialty.
A question: What makes you think so? I've gone months and years at a time without reading any news; it's a fantastic feeling, and if something is really important you'll hear about it from a friend.
Just as "read less HN" may not be applicable to everyone, "you should probably keep reading the news" may not apply to others, or at least others may have had positive experiences quitting the consumption of news media.
Scary, I know ;-)
When you read a bunch of articles and upvote interesting ones (for whatever your value of "interesting" is), you contribute to the community by making a distinction between articles.
The problem with reading from a curated feed is that you're most likely no longer participating (because it's too late to meaningfully upvote), and hence delegating curation to all the other users. When a majority of all the other users are doing the same, then the power of curation becomes concentrated in fewer voters.
I suspect the value of HN is amplified by the meaningful participation of its users. There are many other ways to be a passive consumer of news.
But I mainly read HN for the tech news. I'm one of those people who will learn about Github/Twitter/Heroku being down from here. All the big hacks are posted here and thoroughly discussed. I probably would've never played around with CoffeeScript, Angular, Go, and Dart without them being endlessly discussed around here. I wish I had something like HN when I was in college.
But I agree with the larger point -- HN is addictive and biased. Moderation is key.
I view HG as a boy's club for programming fashionistas. It just happens that sometimes amongst all the posturing there's something genuinely valuable.
Regarding the OP - I think that HN is fine as long as you learn to skim and filter.
However, the content that I get from HackerNews is priceless, so quitting makes no sense.
I suggest the ridiculous notion that you should do what makes you happy, and if going on HN fulfills some part of your being - no matter how irrationally - then go for it.
The issue I have with HN (and other Forums), is that there is a lot of repetition in the comments. In part on HN this is probably not helped as it's difficult to overview and digest threads, especially if the comment trees are large. Comment verbosity and positional changes also make it difficult.
I think that is why in part people come, post, then move on. Necro-posting, even a day late is pretty pointless if you want to add to the general discussion.
I think I'd rather comments have a character limit. Or to get people to post summaries of their posts as titles. And/or some tl;dr; post mortems on comment threads.
HN - Why It's Actually Good For Your Well Being (medium.com)
hn is a resource where the stories of the kind listed in this article are available at all. for me this is important because i want to read those stories, i want to learn from the mistakes of others and see what other people /think/ worked well for them. sure it hurts my productivity, but so does the beer i would drink, the movie i would watch or whatever else that i would do in my down time because that is when i read HN for the most part.
what is bad for my well being here is all the 'self-entitled prick with first world problem' stories. i have no respect for them and it saddens me that the community as a whole seems naive enough on average that this stuff is considered news and not just 'smart' people embarrassing themselves with an utter lack of common sense or life experience. it makes me genuinely angry. the worst part of it all is that these stories and promoting them feed the very cause you fight against... see just thinking about draws me into wanting to collectively slap the majority of the community around the face and tell them how it is, you know the good ol' sciency way by pointing at data and examples littered throughout history instead of jumping on some crazy emotional bandwagon.
enough.
Regarding posts about new languages or frameworks, I really don't think anybody is seriously suggesting you go rewrite your production codebase. That's silly hyperbole. Lots of people here actively work on side projects or they may be in the planning phase for a new startup with no code written yet--situations where they can legitimately consider using a newer framework or language.
Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap." It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.
The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art forms.
Sometimes in the comments what's written isn't important, but the thought process behind that writing could really help excel one's career (if one's able to discern it). I have to pay homage to the tremendously experienced consultants here, in which I've learned so much from, and has helped my career unequivocally.
I might get burned for this, but I don't know why people even evangelize posts of this kind. For starters they are off topic. And what is the end goal? At one extreme are you trying to lead an exodus? Do you feel like you're helping people because you're telling people how to effectively use their time? There is such a wide range of types here I don't know how this advice can be applied ubiquitously.
I love HN because I get to see so many great early stage products. I get to hear opinions from all ages that reveal the environment we are in (Young and old developers trying to mesh together, new techniques meet old). I don't really know too many other communities that have what HN has.
Some of the stories I read at HN appears on "mainstream-media" a day or three later. In most cases, Hacker News makes the local technology news "no-news".
As for the author's opinion, media, by definition, usually cover the exceptional stories, great success or failures, but not the daily challenges each of us is coping with, while struggling to generate more leads or turn a lead into a deal (yep, same letters, reads backwards).
I love stay in sync with the remote Silicon Valley and HN, the stories and the comments help me get that.
Thanks PG and the other guys for putting this site together and maintaining this site for us, entrepreneurs all over the world!
Web design weekly definitely provides quality web design related content. I've also talked to the curator and he's a very nice guy which doesn't change the quality of the content, but does let you know your supporting a decent person.
My newsletter Jobety provides web design and dev related jobs once a week. I sort through a lot of different job boards and pick out what I consider to be the best ones.
Of course I'm a bit biased, but I think curated newsletters provide a lot of advantages, several of which are listed in the post. Another one that I would add is the ability to focus on a particular topic or area that you find useful. I created a (curated) list of a lot of them recently - http://www.kaledavis.com/2013/09/06/newsletters-newsletters-....
Nothing's changed. Still the same type of talk, same type of links, same type of mentality.
Ergo, I disagree with the premise of this article.
Hacker News is still awesome community, people here usually have awesome attitude. It keeps me motivated.
I'm not someone that's insecure about what I don't know or how smart I am, as I'm constantly trying to improve all areas of my life; as a result, many of the posts here are inspiring and help set a fire under my ass to get out there start doing.
Sometimes there's no excuse for self-discipline, critical thinking, a healthy perspective on life, and self-esteem. I don't say this flippantly. All of the above are lifelong challenges for most people (myself included).
So, point of my commment is, add me to your anecdata count, of another one that thought in the same way and arrived to the same conclusion.
There are also posts about failure but I'd say they are a bit less common than the ones about success.
Anyone have any more?
"Why I read less HN and you should, too!"
Though perhaps the authors intention is simply to raise a couple points, rather than actually get folks to visit less.
This is still a better ratio than most websites. Sturgeon's Law applies. 90% of everything is crap, another 9% is of decent quality but not relevant to anything I need to do-- leaving 1% that is worth it for me to read. So I'd say that HN's numbers are on par, if not slightly above it.
See, I'd really like to dislike HN. Paul Graham used to be an iconoclast (with some serious technical chops-- go read On Lisp-- deserving of much respect) fighting the stodgy establishment of VC-istan. Having seen the failings of investors nearly destroy his business on several occasions, he tried to build something new and different: a fast path to funding and access so startups could focus on building instead of bullshit. But now that he is the establishment, he's not fighting hard enough. Then there is the issue of HN's abysmal quality of moderation, for which he must accept responsibility. So I really want to dislike HN and tell it to fuck off wholesale...
... but, the problem is that, in spite of these negatives, there's just a lot of really good stuff that ends up here. Reading less HN is good advice, but there's enough high-quality stuff here (in submissions and comments) to make it worthwhile.
Very thin blogspam at the very least.