Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of pumping your numbers.
Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam.
Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets, most books are BS.
Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages are BS on top of BS.
Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low quality authors trying to make it, agendas every where, and of course automated crap.
Why do you think HN is so successful?
The concept?
The tech?
Of course not.
It's the quality of moderation, and the fact they used their ability to publish their BS to the front page with moderation. Just enough to help them, but not so much as to destroy the average HN quality.
Dedication to quality on the long run, and restrain in milking the cow. This show visions, and it's hard.
Many years ago a friend of mine proposed a theory of his (I use the word "theory" in the loosest possible sense here, more student dorm than lab) that sounded a lot like this. In his version, most of everything is shit. Most music is shit, most movies are shit, most pizzas are shit. Only a minority of any given thing is actually of high quality.
I haven't seen much over the years to convince me that he or you are wrong
Based on a couple of his best known stories that I read when I was pretty young, I revered him as an author.
But a few years ago, I found out that his short stories had been collected in a multi-volume series, and I started reading them.
I was pretty crestfallen; I don't use the term "cringey" much, but that's how I would describe a lot of them. I intended to read the whole series, but haven't and probably won't.
Not all of them were terrible, but the famous short stories he wrote were presumably famous because they stood apart.
Also he seems to have flirted with Dianetics in its early days, even basing some of his fiction on it.
So, I guess when you look deeper, he himself proved the law. On an individual basis, you have to produce a lot of crap to generate a masterwork.
Yes, it does kind of prove the point, but you wouldn't really confirm it if you perceive an author, a genre, a category, whatever, through some sort of filtering mechanism.
I think you can turn this saying around and consider that if 90% of something does not appear to be crap, and you want to understand its true nature, and maybe find some things others have missed, you need to go to the raw data source.
I didn't end up thinking his short stories were as good as I expected, but I did feel like I understood the person better. And even maybe human nature, or how authors progress, a little better.
HN has decent technical discussions and some really good historical/personal anecdotes. Otherwise, it falls short and lacks in ideological diversity. And there is also bullshit here.
What wound proper ideological diversity look like? Or, which ideologies are underrepresented which would make this a better place, in your opinion?
It doesn’t seem like a monoculture to me: depending on the topic there is usually at least two or three significantly different viewpoints. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have more, but it doesn’t jump out at me as a glaring deficiency.
HN is strongly inclined towards "unreflective instrumentalism". From "Three Kinds of Anti-Intellectualism: Rethinking Hofstadter":
> A third type of anti-intellectualism implied in Hofstadter’s analysis
may be termed unreflective instrumentalism, defined here as the devaluation
of forms of thought that do not promise relatively immediate practical
payoffs. In its narrow conception of practicality, instrumentalism suppresses
questions about the ends toward which practical and efficient means are
directed...
> ...The hostility of an instrumentalist business culture toward intellect expresses not only an impatience with ideas that are deemed impractical or
utopian but also a disdain for purely theoretical inquiry as a valuable activity
in its own right. Theoretical scientists, for example, are called upon to demonstrate practical applications of their work, and esoteric research is held up to
public ridicule with the award of the Golden Fleece. Scientists are sometimes provoked to argue for the value of their research on the grounds that it may eventually yield useful outcomes that are not immediately apparent, producing in their own behalf testimonial examples from the history of science. That such defenses are necessary in the competitive struggle for research dollars is indicative of the power of instrumental criteria to define the direction in which scientific and other kinds of knowledge will be allowed to grow...
> ...Likewise, liberal education is increasingly defended on instrumental
grounds. The liberal arts graduate is presumed to possess skills in analyzing,
synthesizing, organizing and communicating complex ideas, skills that are
(as we now say) marketable in the corporate environment of the post-industrial society. The phrase “ivory tower” has become an almost universal term
of contempt. Beyond the ivory tower, it seems, lies a university-industrial
complex in which intellect is seen principally as a useful problem-solving
tool.
I think you're going a little bit far, but I tend to agree. My reasoning for this is, to look back on experts from the past.
Unless it's a hard scientific fact, a law of physics, most things are really just opinions that people tend to agree with. Remember Leaded gasoline? How about DDT or Asbestos? How about Freud? Of the thing the bible likes to talk about, slavery.
Even in the 25 years, I've been in programming, it seems like all "Proper Way To Do It" have all aged about as well as milk on a hot day.
> The only thing I follow is keeping stuff simple.
Some other things I’ve kept around:
- Complex systems must develop out of a simple system (there’s a clever quote I can’t find right now) - also known as “make it work, then make it better”
- Bugs shall become test cases
- Bug reproducibility should be maximized (crash tracking / good logs, sacrifice performance if necessary)
- Fail fast
- Composition over inheritance (arguably a subjective one, but I’ve never regretted doing it)
I wouldn't say that any of those are bullshit per se.
Leaded gasoline reduced knocking/increased compression in contemporary engines, asbestos is a top-notch insulator, and DDT did kill a lot of bugs. Each just has really unfortunate side-effects, most of which were known at the time--if not appreciated widely enough.
This is grossly reductive. There is a huge spectrum of quality in content. Most of what you describe, formal studies by experts, is on a much much higher tier than the 99% of content most people read.
Comparing informed formal studies to the uninformed opinion pieces most of the tech crowd reads and implying they are somehow the same is borderline supporting disinformation.
There is absolutely a big spectrum of quality in the higher tiers of content too. People in those domains spend countless evenings discussing it.
But the vast majority of people are not reading anything at that level. The typical tech blog is closer to talking about what kind of sandwich you like for lunch than anything that will advance the field.
I’m not sure what you mean by reductive in this case. 90% of kids’ plays are crap while 90% of Broadway shows are crap, with no need to compare those two domains.
Yeah, buy an expensive jersey with your sports heroes name on it, paint your face the team colors, yell and wave flags in the parking lot, then go find your $2000 chairs in the big building like real adults spend their time.
The thing with humanity progress, is that you have to start a lot of completely different efforts in parallel, because history has proven that there is no way to know what will play the biggest role in the future.
"No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years." — G. H. Hardy (1941)
Not advocating to use them right now, but the fact is bootstrapping Python is finally acknowledged as one major cause of packaging issues and a priority to solve.
Those will likely cause more problems (as per https://xkcd.com/927/). While bootstrapping Python is a problem, it's a symptom, not a cause. The underlying cause is there is a substantial part of the ecosystem (of which the "data science" component overlaps with) that is coupled to hardware, the OS and external (non-Python) software libraries which doesn't align well with the single-language approach that a part of the Python community wants (vague gesture to the "web dev" side of the community). This drives the pip vs. conda arguments, the discussion around docker, nix, homebrew etc. You can't tool your way out of this divide over what the community wants (and while there are two vague meta-groups, there are really sub-groups which want different aspects of both).
It's worth looking at how some other popular languages (don't) handle this: from what I've seen, CGo is generally frowned upon, and so there is rewrites of libraries into go (Python does the same), or network/IPC connections are used to bridge the game; Rust also has the rewrite attitude, but for bridging to other languages there's build.rs (which calls other tools and wrappers), but those usually require you have the external library already installed (via some other means e.g. homebrew), or at least don't feature as a self-contained part of the cargo ecosystem (there's a cargo plugin which downloads a version of the library from somewhere); nodejs seems to either try to build from source (which fails if you don't have Python install for gyp), or download random binaries which sometimes work.
Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of pumping your numbers.
Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam.
Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets, most books are BS.
Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages are BS on top of BS.
Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low quality authors trying to make it, agendas every where, and of course automated crap.
Why do you think HN is so successful?
The concept?
The tech?
Of course not.
It's the quality of moderation, and the fact they used their ability to publish their BS to the front page with moderation. Just enough to help them, but not so much as to destroy the average HN quality.
Dedication to quality on the long run, and restrain in milking the cow. This show visions, and it's hard.