[HN Gopher] Is it worth writing about?
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Is it worth writing about?
Author : ingve
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-12-02 10:10 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.eatonphil.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.eatonphil.com)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I agree, and I'd add ".. and speak in public more, too."
|
| I have a Substack post "Public Speaking for Engineers" about
| this, but unfortunately it lost out in the poll to the one about
| my experiences at Oracle in the 90s, so you'll have to wait for
| that one.
|
| Anyhow, getting practice speaking, even if it's only to two
| people, is indispensable, and so is practicing writing. "Nobody
| reads what I write," you say? That's OK, you can wait a week and
| then read it yourself.
|
| There's a YouTube video that advocates that you just speak to
| your computer for a few minutes a day, so you don't even really
| need an audience for that. Getting inured to watching and hearing
| yourself is really valuable. The shock wears off.
| Shindi wrote:
| Even if only 2 people read what you write today, you'll have
| your writing forever. It's easy to repurpose writing, or
| literally repost. I feel like if you're not writing online
| today, you're severely missing out, me included.
|
| A other phenom post by eatonphil. I think this is the
| datastation guy.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Almost everything is worth writing about. The vast majority of us
| never write about anything at all and most of those who do write
| only about the things that they feel are approved of by those who
| surround us or by some imagined social standard.
|
| Even if no one else reads it the mere act of committing to paper,
| or electronic document, helps to crystallize one's ideas.
| iamsanteri wrote:
| I recently started writing a lot about depression trying to
| channel all this neurotic energy I have into some nice
| descriptive writing. Here's one where I describe the nice sauna
| experience I have every now and then in the town we're currently
| studying in: "One with Nature" ->
| https://sentience.lostbookofsales.com/one-with-nature/
|
| It's some kind of a meditative process and I do it only when I
| truly feel like it. With a cup of tea and some nice background
| music. Definitely recommended!
| Animats wrote:
| Unless you can do better than GPT-3, no.
| LlamaTrauma wrote:
| But how do you know if GPT-3 can do better? Should you prove
| that an article contains information found nowhere else on the
| internet before posting it? There's also the existential
| question of if anything's worth doing when another process can
| achieve objectively better results.
| samsquire wrote:
| Thank you Eatonphil for writing this.
|
| I agree that I would love to see more of this kind and quality
| this kind of article of technical subjects.
|
| https://blog.jcoglan.com/2017/02/12/the-myers-diff-algorithm...
| https://keleshev.com/abstract-syntax-tree-an-example-in-c/
|
| I don't want to add more work to people who are already working
| more than everyone else. But when you write software or code that
| is truly good, I want people to write lots of examples and
| descriptions of their mental model and how to think of the
| software.
|
| I'm still trying to understand what the difference between a
| poller and an awaiter in Rust async.
|
| I use Flask because I find Flask easier to understand than
| Django. There's even a simple example on the Flask homepage. But
| Django has a very large tutorial which still doesn't really
| explain how each component fits together. I don't understand the
| mental model behind Django but I do with Flask.
|
| For example, I'm still trying to understand C++ coroutines. And I
| have some code that kind of works and some code someone provided
| on Stackoverflow I cannot get to work with GCC. There's not large
| amounts of documentation on C++ coroutines.
|
| I see people post fascinating awesome GitHub projects and have
| sparse README.md and no screenshots
|
| The code doesnt speak for itself. You can write the perfect code
| at a company and that code never flourishes because nobody wrote
| about it. Or you can write the perfect code at home but it
| doesn't get used.
|
| I would rather read your documentation of the inner workings of
| your software than your code itself. Code is harder to read and
| understand.
|
| This article essentially explains how to write a extremely fast
| query engine for columnular data, row data and exact match
| search:
|
| https://rockset.com/blog/converged-indexing-the-secret-sauce...
|
| I prefer a whitepaper + code than just code or just whitepaper. I
| learned from whitepapers and Wikipedia descriptions of algorithms
| more than I read people's code. I find it easier to understand
| people's descriptions of things and mental model.
|
| I hope people shall stop saying code IS the documentation and
| start documenting their software.
| dangoor wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with this article and think it's worth
| writing more. I used to blog a ton and am considering restarting
| the habit.
|
| A good companion article to this could be Simon Willison's "What
| to blog about" https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-
| about/
| oxff wrote:
| (Not having read the article) the main purpose for me, to write
| publicly in something like a personal blog, would be to keep
| myself honest and place the writing under review / critique so I
| could learn from people who know more.
| a_c wrote:
| I long have the impression that we are building software wrong.
| Wrong as in not ideal. We are like the personal electronics in
| the 90s. One gatget for one task, phone, radio, MP3, camera,
| watch, etc. They all make sense at the time, until the advent of
| iPhone/smartphone. Same for software development. IMO it is prime
| time for a smartphone for software dev. Seeing this post
| motivates me to distill my thinking, write about what I imagined
| the smartphone to be. Or maybe not.
| azhenley wrote:
| "Writing is thinking"
| sxg wrote:
| Very happy to see this meta-topic written about! Especially happy
| to see the "bad faith" argument called out:
|
| "The internet is already full of crap. People who aren't experts
| are just making it worse."
|
| I keep seeing this argument, particularly on Hacker News. As the
| article says, it's not the content creator's fault for creating
| something the reader doesn't like. It's the content aggregator's
| job to improve matching content to readers.
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