AndreyErmakov

>> HN is unabashedly homogeneous.

I think you've summed the nature of HN pretty well. I wish I knew that before I joined (recently), but unfortunately I had to learn it the hard way.

>> The set of opinions that will not get you downvoted into oblivion / pushed out of the community is so narrow...

That is exactly the conclusion which I arrived at after about three weeks of active participation. At that point I lost any interest in continuing trying to become a part of the community.

In my opinion, the HN community is not very healthy and has become incestuous in its nature. People basically choose to exchange with the like-minded only, share the same opinions, upvote the things that match their view of the world and downvote deviant opinions.

This all is aggravated by the fact that the HN user base is mostly North American and visitors from other world regions are somewhat of a minority in here (my observation). That's why a lot of ideas and opinions that I see around here are just "alien" to me, although I've never had a problem finding a common language with Europeans, for instance.

In its current form, I can often look at any new question that comes in here, and if I have seen its equivalent on HN before, I already know what will be the most upvoted comment and what kinds of downvoted comments I will find at the bottom of the page. The mechanics of HN is such that it works as a giant "echo chamber" and users are "taught" which kind of opinions they're supposed to like, support and help to spread and what will happen to them if they defy the state (downvoting sanctions).

I'm sure many like this way of things, but the way I view it you can't have healthy offsprings (which are ideas and opinions) if your community embraces incestuous relationships as its core defining value. Without diversity, there is no evolution.

On a related note, I used to be one of the early users of StackOverflow/StackExchange sites. In its first couple of years they had a liberal content policy and this invited a healthy, diverse and vibrant community that produced many profound and wise ideas. When they went down the deletionism route and started discouraging deviant opinions, the most interesting people started to quit and in about a year or two the sites degraded to such an extent that made it pointless to return in the search of quality content.

HN is not there yet, as I still see some high quality answers now and then. Usually they're neither upvoted not downvoted, they just stick somewhere in the middle-bottom area and I have to dig for them. Sadly this requires much time which I'd rather spend on more important things.

I also very much dislike that anti Russia/China/Turkey/Islam rhetoric that comes every now and then. It's not that bad as on Reddit where you can just say some not very intelligent bad thing about those countries and get yourself a few hundred upvotes and a dozen gifted "reddit golds". That's just the new bottom that Reddit recently hit. I sadly see HN moving in the same direction.

>> assuming you like a decent proportion of highly upvoted submissions and comments, you'll almost assuredly like all of them.

>> There are plenty of people who don't. They are just not on HN (anymore).

Apparently I'm with that group as I no longer have any wish to hang around HN. At that point I'd be ashamed to admit I've tried to be a HN member, as it would be an embarrassment to admit to having an active SO/SE account these days. To me, that was a mistake in judgement. I'd like to delete my account and make the divorce official, but apparently HN does not allow that and does not buy into the "Right to be forgotten" idea. I have no doubt that most of the HN users share that same official opinion being the "example citizens" that they are.

Any road will support a horse-drawn carriage. Unless you take extraordinary measures and start building vehicles using wheels with special profiles for which custom-designed roads will be necessary where those wheels will be held on track like with trains.

Naturally horses will stumble on those, and people like you will say the others don't understand the nature of transportation and should get rid of their old horses and conventional cars.

But perhaps the problem is just with you and you newly designed fancy wheels.

What if it happens to be my opinion, the way I view things? I should be able to express it, right?

I can't really crop my ideas if some parts of them are not well received. They come as packages, I either tell what's truly on my mind regarding some matter or I don't tell it at all.

If I can't say what I mean, then I can never mean what I say. And then the entire dialogue becomes meaningless.

Dear AnonymousUserWhoLikesToHideTheirName,

That's just hilarious. For as long as I'm saying things that conform with the majority's opinion, I will be upvoted. But when a have a different opinion, then I will be downvoted until I censor myself back into conformity. Is that how things work here, on Hacker News?

Have you by any chance heard of concepts like pluralism of opinions, freedom of expression and that sort of things? I'm not sure where you come from, but in some parts of the world people are freely able to have a civilized discussion around complex and sometimes controversial matters. You may consider going abroad, living there for a while and learning how a liberal society works. Will be a great help to you.

As a rule, never travel to a job interview on your own expenses, unless it's just a few USD/EUR for a local bus/train ticket or something similar. That would demonstrate to them that you don't value your time and money and that they can potentially abuse you further down the road. You will also encourage them to continue with that strategy in the future.

As for the red flags, google the names of the people who you will be working with and also of those who manage the organization. Go through their public activities and get an idea of their personalities. Sometimes you will find out that your potential colleagues are real jerks, and it can happen that the organization (especially if it's a startup) is run by a 24-year-old arrogant kid. In both cases I would skip that "opportunity" and would look for something else.

In some places, $500 is about a half-year salary from which one has to live and feed their family. Nobody in their right mind would waste it on an electronic toy.

I agree. And yet, this seems to be the rare type. Often it's just a few people in the staff that are trying to do things the right way, for the others it's simply a nice job (with few responsibilities and seemingly no obligations). That's what I've been trying to get across. Teaching is a sensitive job with far-reaching consequences, yet more often than not people don't take it seriously and don't care what their students will carry with them into the life when they leave the walls of that academic institution.

>> Not helped by lecturers who'd either always been lecturers or lecturers who'd left industry 15 years earlier (this was 2005 so they'd have left in 1990).

Exactly what I'm talking about. I've met graduates with very weird ideas about how to approach problem solving, and they would eventually confirm it had been taught to them at the university as the one true method of doing things. I remember that I myself had to "accept" some of the ideas being taught to us and recite them at the examination, pretending I agreed with them. Was the only way to get through some courses, and I recall many other students suffering from wrongful instruction. Some tried to argue with the academic staff and get those wrong things fixed, many of them would pay the price later by failing the examination. Apparently, those lecturers and professors didn't like their competence questioned.

About 15 years ago we had a new lecturer come to teach our group. I remember my thoughts after a couple of his lectures: this guy must have been thrown out of every shop that's out there. Was completely useless, even if senior by age (around 50 I believe). Tried to teach us about computers by reading aloud a book similar to the "Computers for dummies" series. Was not a good reader either. From the rumor that was circulating around he had a buddy in the hierarchy and used that to land a job at our university. Was truly pathetic.

As the common saying goes: Those who can do, do. Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, manage.

Academia carries with it a larger amount of authority than a random programming forum. Students have the expectation that the academic staff is generally knowledgeable and wise and what they say in all probability is very important, has to be remembered and followed (even if you don't quite understand why yet but perhaps you will in the future).

Thank you.

So this is a personal attack then. Frankly, I expected better from the HN community. It looked more evolved when I was just an occasional visitor prior to joining. Rather disappointing.

Your comment saddens me and only confirms what I've been suspecting: a lot of people including those working in academia don't take education seriously and do not comprehend the far-reaching repercussions of their actions.

Generally speaking, a person only begins to reach psychological maturity at around 30 years of age. Until that time all incoming ideas generally fall on a fertile ground, as the person is not yet capable of telling bad apples from the good ones apart and can't always discard the wrong ideas. Sometimes it's exactly those ideas that take and derail somebody's life, unnoticeably, one step at a time.

What/who does "GP" refer to?

The long term effects may be just as devastating.

Consider that as a lecturer every your word will carry a meaning. Even an innocuous remark may turn out to be something that will stick with one of your pupils for years and will lead them to make a sequence of wrong decisions that will eventually ruin their life.

Having access to younger minds and influencing their personal and professional development is not a joke. It's that kind of a job which if not done properly may potentially produce the next tyrant.

Not the first time that I see academia teaching their students the wrong way of doing things. I had to work with some graduates with certain strange ideas about approaching the work and tried to teach them an alternative, at least open their eyes and consider the possibility that what they are doing might not be the right way. Tough job. Sometimes it feels easier to hire somebody with no programming skills and teach them from scratch than to change the mental pathways of stubborn graduates.

On that note, my experience has been that academic environment often does more damage than good to its students. It sometimes takes a monumental effort to make the graduates unlearn all the wrong things they learned in the academic environment before they can proceed further in their professional development without all that bad baggage that keeps pulling them in the wrong direction.

It's like children mistreated by their parents in their youth who will carry their psychological trauma from the childhood through the years and that would detrimentally affect their lives until they get some professional help from a skilled counselor.

When I was a beginner I also tried to design all kinds of fancy, flexible and auto-adjusting stuff. With years I came to the understanding that most of it is just unnecessary and wouldn't diminish the user experience in any way if you didn't do it the fancy way and instead went with a simpler route.

CSS like any technology has its limits. In reality it is often good because it forces you to rethink what you're doing and reconsider whether you really need it. If we had a technology with unlimited capabilities, a lot of developers would be lost there forever and wouldn't be able to accomplish the larger goal completely lost in pursuing all the secondary details they could possibly imagine.

Thanks for the link. Based on some of the screenshots posted over there it indeed looks like what I've been observing on my machine (version 47-something).

Not a problem really. Never used Chrome before. Only installed it out of curiosity and also for testing purposes. Within the first day of using it on my development machine it became clear I wouldn't be using this piece of software in the future either.

Actually, the web is more open than it was a decade ago. Back then I had to use IE-only tricks to make my pages look okay in IE. Today I don't care anymore. It's been several years since I last used an IE trick, and I have no plans of using tricks specific to other browsers in the future. If something doesn't work out of the box in all browsers, I consider this functionality not implemented and do not use it. That's something you could do too and educate others to approach it the same way.

If I may contribute to the article somehow, I'd tell people this: stop using JavaScript for basic markup. I sigh every time I visit a site whose entire navigation structure is spit out in front of me as a disorganized wall of text, and only when I enable JavaScript that mess gets cleaned up and arranged back into something organized. It's just no way to design pages. CSS is for visual appearance and styling. JavaScript is for interactivity. If you can't give your site a proper look without resorting to JavaScript then you have no business designing web pages yet and need to go learn the basics first.

I didn't realize Chrome was becoming the default testing environment. I find it weird, given its terrible font rendering. I tried using Chrome but just couldn't. Smaller size fonts render weak, pale, bleak, like drawn with a dull pencil. I found it rather difficult to read large bodies of text in Chrome which was giving me quite a bit of eye strain. Not sure why anyone would want to test their pages in that in my opinion broken rendering engine.

I'm aware there is a setting which has to do with subpixel rendering or whatever this is called, I tried switching it on and off for no perceivable visual change. So I gave up on Chrome.

IE also has had broken font rendering since they moved to subpixel rendering several years ago, but at least it draws fonts in a strong and dark fashion making them more readable than in Chrome.

Personally, I design for Firefox which I consider the gold standard of web development. Then, at some intervals I check if things are okay in IE and Chrome and usually they are fine. Chrome was useful once in helping me spot some sort of a race condition, its developer tools also conveniently allow you to quickly bypass caching for testing purposes, but other than that I found it useless and unusable.

It's not that much of a joke, more of a curiosity, if you choose to look at both words from a certain angle. I realize that their etymology might be different, but in the end of the day their spelling has become close and the concepts they denote have also developed certain commonalities.

What is the point of pushing people out of their comfort zone? Practical software engineering doesn't happen when you're uncomfortable. Discovering quality solutions requires concentration and immersion into problems.

So we all realize technical interviews serve no practical purpose and should be quietly abandoned, but instead of looking into the future and discovering better ways of identifying talent, people keep inventing stuff that makes the torturing mechanism even more sophisticated so that the suffering can be prolonged.

I'd like to see the people behind this project apply their technical skills to something more useful to the industry and the society in general.

>> to get to pipeline parity, we actually have to increase the number of women studying computer science by an entire order of magnitude

Any woman who's gone through that process will likely want to get another career, that where people are treated with more respect. And I suppose many men are having the exact same thoughts.

The more you mock your talent pool, the more actively that talent is running in the opposite direction, just to get out of this mess.

Because hiring is akin to dating and therefore it suffers from the same problems:

1) It's mostly about subjective impressions and often weird ideas of what a suitable date/candidate must be. There are no official rule books or guidelines about how to proceed. It's not about hard skills and efficiency, it very much revolves around soft skills, presentation abilities and invisible chemistry.

2) More often than not both parties in dating/hiring aren't serious about conducting a transaction and getting to a serious business. It's about meeting new people, hanging out, checking the pulse of the job market but no more. Misrepresenting oneself, one's abilities/features and intentions is the norm with both dates/candidates(companies), which leads to a lot of frustration and bad feelings, keeping the success rate of activities in the both fields rather low.

Different industries, similar problems. And for the both of them no technological/software solution in sight.

P.S. See how "candi-date" is linguistically just a particular case or subset of "date". Just another validation of the point.

>> You are not your job.

Very true. I hold the same liberal view as to what people truly are.

An interesting idea just struck me. If a seasoned software developer quits his full-time job to work on a startup of his dream, while taking a part time job at a bar to be able to pay his bills, who is he then? Is he no longer a professional software engineer? Is he now a bar tender? An entrepreneur? What is he truly then during this period?

By the same token, if say an economist has been getting frustrated at his job and starts learning web programming, building simple personal sites for himself and friends, is it insufficient to call him a programmer, even if we would all agree he is only a junior one?

Where do we draw a line?

If someone is serious about a new vocation and invests a lot of time and energy into mastering it, then by all rights he's already in part what he aspires to become.

>> The best handbook of all, though is simply the study of great writers whose work you love

That is definitely the way to approach things. If you come into writing by choice then it's because you've been drawn to it. Which in its turn means you have read works of others and have been inspired by them. Use those as your handbooks then, learn from the great, imitate them and eventually discover your own path.

It's not like you've never read anything of consequence in your life and all of a sudden you decide you're going to turn into a writer. Doesn't work that way. There are no "Writing for dummies" or "Learning writing in 20 days" manuals. You just start writing because you can, when you become ready for it.

It's true that the golden era of the non-English writers lies mostly in the past. What is not true is that the past writings are now invalid/deprecated or whatever term you may coin. If I had a choice between the body of the past literature and the modern content, I would have chosen to stick with the old texts without a second thought. They're just unbelievably great and what is written today is merely an echo of the past.

But what concerns me the most is that you dismiss the world literature without even knowing it and without being able to learn it. It's so arrogant that I can't seem to find the words to express my sorrow. All I can say is that the loss is yours. Nobody in the world has ever produced literature, songs and music like the French and Russian masters have. I am able to enjoy them in their natural form, as well as the English... let's call it "content". I can directly compare them and I'm telling you it would have been a loss of a monumental scale if I had been born in an English-speaking country and would have never been able to make acquaintance with those pieces.

That's not to mention that foreign languages are often less constrained and more expressive than English which on itself allows for more profound thoughts to be born and more naturally and creatively expressed. But that's not something that English-only speakers will ever find out.

I might try to persuade you to change your opinion but I won't. There's nothing in your position to brag about. In a way, I'm luckier than you and to that end I can only express my deepest regrets to you.

Right to the point.

It's interesting that the author pursued a degree in literature and that's what ultimately pushed her away from that career path. It seems to be a common theme where a formal education in creative arts makes people want to do something else in life, anything else.

I've had acquaintances with a musical background and eventually they went to do something else, including IT. From what an old buddy told me once, most graduates of a musical school learn to hate music and quit that vocation past graduation.

In the opposite fashion, I've never had a literary education and I'm feeling more and more drawn to this line of work. I'm not sure if I want to make a complete switch though, software engineering and startups are just too exciting to give it all up. Somehow it feels I can accomplish more and make a better contribution to the society with my honed programming skills than with words, but I might be wrong about it. For now, I'm just writing essays every now and then, publishing them on my blog and that seems to be enough.

One word of advice in relation to all of this. Don't shy away from reading foreign literature. I know that for many native English speakers other languages simply don't exist in their world, but you're missing out on an incredible body of thoughts and ideas that might expand your vision borders. Don't be stuck in your English silo, learn some foreign language and go exploring. And no, a translation is not the same, it's devoid of the original energy. That's why people are often unimpressed by what before a translation was a profound piece of work. You can't translation energy.

Certainly. Yet there's been a tendency later to declare SQL wrong and deprecated and to incite everyone to forget about it and go with an ORM as the only way. I do not accept that. The stronger the ORM zealots are pushing the more repulsive the idea of an ORM becomes to me. But of course it's just another instrument that has its place among the others.

You are quite correct on all your points and I agree with you.

I suppose I could have expressed my idea better. What I meant is that for people with a programming aptitude there are no barriers these days. Whether they want to jump directly into software engineering or pursue another field and use their knowledge of programming as an asset, for the both choices the road is open. There are tons of information freely available for those who wish to learn. If one wanted to get an official CS degree it's also easily arranged, university chairs of that specialization are under-filled. At least that is so in Europe. For some reason the locals prefer economic/legal/business degrees and engineering isn't terribly popular. Can't say anything about the situation in the US though.