It's just I'm tired of seeing all those "social" startup stories, and the thousands of posts in the intertubes typically from some aforementioned startup employee/founder using all the half-baked or ill-suited technologies du jour, and posting something better suited for Comp Sci 101 as a huge discovery.
That's what I deserve for scouting all over for some relevant Python/Ruby/Web dev etc articles, I guess.
(disclosure: I work in a startup, but one developing, gasp an actual product (!), sold to the customer etc, employing several PHD guys to code in good ole C and implement new hardcore algorithms for our class of problems.).
It's not just the programming stuff I wish I could filter, it's the worship of Ruby, node.js, CSS, etc. Web languages that really aren't useful in the hacker sense of the word, but rather in the business sense of the word.
My opinion wasn't so much about what would replace those posts, but what not having those posts would attract.
There is no secret guild of good software engineers, stop with the circlejerk about programming so much.
Being good in software development has little to do with playing D&D or Settler of Catan.
Please less articles about semicolons, finding technical cofounders, bubbles, oversized valuations, why emails are broken (and not), brogramming, etc. It's almost SEO for Hacker News at that point.
Please more in-depth article with actual realisations, with figures, examples, showing new techniques and where you learn something.
Even though I had to highlight the text of your comment to read it, you do echo a point that has kind of irritated me somewhat. On a website called "hacker news", 90% (hyperbole) of the links are related to designing flashy GUIs and selling social web startups and whatever the flavor-of-the-week web design trend is. There's very little "do it yourself, do it quickly, do what no one has done before" spirit, it's mostly "do what everyone has done before, but flashier and in a newer language".
Not that it's a bad thing in any way, but the title of "hacker news" is a bit disingenuous when "developer news" might be a little more accurate. I wish I could filter out the programming and startup stuff.
I'm tired of an industry where it's assumed that using technical tools is the skill, rather than understanding and applying technical concepts.
I'm tired of "I'm a .NET developer" or "I'm a python developer". I want a world where we're not tied to a particular framework, where people hire expert technologists and business analysts regardless of what framework they used at their last job. Where managers truly value people and interactions over tools and process.
The inhumanity and subsequent waste of it all is really piling up, and theses posts only reinforce the ignorant and shallow perception that the tools make the professional.
I agree with this. I see most of the people here doing what everyone else is doing. Using RoR and AWS because it's 'cool', using all kind of bullshit names to indicate non-existing bullshit jobs, applying practices because everyone else is using them... There's nothing wrong with using a normal programming language that has debug tools (such as C#) and there is nothing wrong with building something that has nothing to do with social media, but something that's actually useful. Yet some people think that they can become rich by doing what everyone else is doing... Doesn't work like that.
Too bad the author kind of participates in this as well with hipster terms like 'ex-rockstar', 'bootstrapping' and 'lean startup'.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I find the business, political, and social posts far more valuable than any technical post about a library, framework, or new abstraction.
Very few people change the world with code. It’s either soft skills or business acumen.
Tired of incendiary, link baiting articles like these. They all follow the same pattern: Why I hate (Ruby, Rails, OOP, Functional Programming, Programming Quizzes in Interviews, Startups, Enterprises, Google, Apple, Microsoft, whatever) and then the article never impresses.
I still feel compelled to click due to the headline though, so props for that.
These articles that you think are useless put the technology we love to read about into a social context. I personally think this site has a great balance of low-level programming topics and high-level context articles. If the site ONLY had the articles you deem as "useful" then it wouldn't be so damn addictive and wouldn't be nearly as popular. I'm sure you'd love a small community so that you can feel special that you know about something no one else does - but I think Y Combinator is probably trying to build a popular site that they can potentially make money on some day. To that end they're doing a hell of a job so far.
I'll posit that the "startup" theme was what was responsible for all the self-help-SEO type posts.
I'll gladly put up with arcane posts about how to configure your emacs environment to write haskell if it means I don't have to see anymore inane posts about improving my credit score by "track suit CEO."
It seems to me that these are separate pursuits. I suppose that if the community is smart, they will pick reasonable programming articles as well, and the two can overlap harmlessly; my worry is that smart programming communities if not given an explicit focus (e.g. Lisp, Haskell) quickly deteriorate into non-smart programming communities (witness programming reddit). This may be true for startup news communities as well, but I haven't witnessed it yet.
As a non professional coder (I'm a technical architect), I like the mixed balance of posts. If it were ALL articles about the latest programming frameworks and languages, I'd feel out of place pretty quickly :(
Yep. I feel like I’ve watched the web lay waste to any sort of collective technical aesthetic. It’s a combination of huge numbers of new devs entering, SEO, and everyone chasing the short tail of devs who are 1-5 years into their career.
It almost feels like it is a bit gauche to actually talk about programming itself. Instead, you’re supposed to be talking about microservices vs monoliths, k8s, monorepos, or some other inanity. Though this is not exclusive to devs: guitarists write books on gear and then a few sentences on actual technique in most forums. Something about our platforms seems to actively resist deep content.
It’s been pretty alienating for me. I work with other technologists in R&D and that is great, but when I glance at industry, I see a ton of self-inflicted wounds paired with denial that there’s even a problem.
I feel you. I hate this field these days. The churn is largely unnecessary, but comes from people cargo culting what they see coming from a handful of super successful companies that aren’t at all representative of what most development is. Add to it the glut of web developers that are generally disinterested in actually learning how systems work and insist on unbelievably deep and fragile layers of crap to insulate them from thinking while they glue programs together as fast as possible. I wouldn’t say the field of software engineering is cursed, but we do have a signal to noise ratio problem if you follow sites like this one. I recommend my approach: avoid this site as much as you can, and avoid the comments when you can’t resist visiting.
And then a bunch of complaints about building web-apps.
SIGH.
Why doesn’t the author try many of the other areas of computing?
Game engine development, live coding environments, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, Theoretical computer science and algorithms, embedded hardware and low energy computing, mobile development, compiler design, FPGA development, computational finance, distributed computing frameworks, blockchain development, automated theorem proving.
All of these areas are super interesting and fun,
The author saying “Computers aren’t fun anymore” and then whining about web development is like me proclaiming that Earth isn’t fun anymore because I’m tired of my bedroom.
As a newcomer to the field, parent post is far more welcoming than the bevy of trash Ninja flavor-of-the-week bullshit that makes it seem impossible to catch up.
I only actually got my bearings and self-confidence as a programmer when I realized that most of the people pushing blogs with subscriptions about "cutting-edge" tech were literally snake-oil salesmen and shovel merchants.
That coding wasn't actually different from anything else I had learned in my life, and that there were some fundamentals I could latch onto, and grow from there upwards. All this nonsense about the field experiencing a revolution that upends all existing knowledge year-after-year is far more mentally taxing.
It's just I'm tired of seeing all those "social" startup stories, and the thousands of posts in the intertubes typically from some aforementioned startup employee/founder using all the half-baked or ill-suited technologies du jour, and posting something better suited for Comp Sci 101 as a huge discovery.
That's what I deserve for scouting all over for some relevant Python/Ruby/Web dev etc articles, I guess.
(disclosure: I work in a startup, but one developing, gasp an actual product (!), sold to the customer etc, employing several PHD guys to code in good ole C and implement new hardcore algorithms for our class of problems.).
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