Though the time I spend here on HN is both enjoyable and educational, a
few months ago I ran an interesting test. For each article I read, I
wrote down a one line entry on a piece of paper noting the site and
basic gist of the article. The next day, before I was "allowed" to read
any more articles on HN, I sat down with the blank side of said piece of
paper from yesterday, and wrote down the articles I remembered.
I hate to admit it, but my retention rate was just miserable, probably
less than 50%. Sure, remembering stuff "cold" on the next day is
different than remembering an association during a conversation (e.g.
"Ya, I read something about 'X' the other day."), but it was enough to
make me wonder if my educational entertainment reading was time well
spent, or time wasted?
Everyone needs breaks, and it's fun to keep up with what's going on in
the world, but I might be better off doing something else...
It's hard to say for sure, but I find the difference between "cold" recall and latent recall of facts to be pretty large. Happens most frequently with stuff I learned on Wikipedia: I'll end up in a conversation, find myself knowing a fact that I shouldn't really have known given my background, and then realized that I must've gotten it from Wikipedia. Sometimes after that I can mentally recreate the browsing path I must've used to get to the fact, even though I wouldn't have been able to explicitly list the article in question as one I remembered reading.
I sure hope you can't remember everything you read on HN. That would be like remembering everything that your roommate ever said to you during four years of college.
There's room in life for casual conversation. It doesn't have to be relentless study all the time. And even if you're intent on only reading stuff worth memorizing you can't achieve that goal. You can fight Sturgeon's Law, but you can't always expect to win.
I don't see a serious problem with a low retention rate from reading HN articles. I do not come here to memorize every item that flies through... I probably read 50 items a week on HN, but the reason I come back is for the 2-3 items per week that make me re-evaluate what I am doing, and cause me to do it better.
I've had a similar observation with all of my RSS feeds. Afterward, I dropped about 80% of them. And wow did that feel good! Strange how it becomes a weight after a while. I also reduced my HN reading to just a few top posts a day.
What keeps me coming back to HN is my ongoing curiosity of how technology is evolving. (And also a slight paranoia of another hacker publishing exactly one of my side projects before I do :) I enjoy being engaged with other like minded strangers. And I believe this place helps you better predict, even appreciate the direction of technology.
Just so long as you have balance and it doesn't keep you from actually getting things done. As for the article's point, I do agree. Doing something is immeasurably more beneficial for you than reading about it.
I started writing notes if I thought it was worth remembering. Too often I'd read the article and then later try to discuss it with someone and forget simple facts. I realized I'm not even learning anything, just temporarily distracting my mind with 'shiny' factoids and stories. Basically the same as looking at imgur all day. I also try to focus what I read and follow only things that relate to my job, projects and 1 or 2 hobby interests.
I find the articles interesting, that is enough for me to justify reading HN. When I compare HN to the front page of reddit, which I used to read, I feel a lot better about reading HN.
I would also claim you want to 'relax' during breaks, that is, not actively think about something. I can't think of many better activities then reading HN.
It depends strongly on the subject, I find. Sometimes this advice is right; sometimes it's very far off. I've made both mistakes, and it's hard to predict which is which. Sometimes you read forever when you should've just done something months ago. But other times you waste a lot of time badly reinventing a wheel and getting saddled with bad design decisions that should've been avoidable, because you didn't realize that what you were trying to do already had a name and a lot of smart things written about it (or realized but didn't want to read them). You might call that the "just get down to business and parse HTML with a regex" school of getting-things-done, to take an extreme but common example that might've benefitted from more reading. ;-) A lot of bad statistics are also in that category...
I think the 2nd mistake might actually be more common, given the amount of wheel-reinventing (and not always reinventing well) that goes on, but it's hard to say.
Perhaps I'm wrong on what exactly he was getting at, but to apply it to myself I think it's more about wasting time in general. I know I look at HN for inspiration and to stay on top of what is new in my industry. Over time, though, that has turned into a lot of investment (reading/wasting time) with very little return (doing). It reminds me of the question someone asked here the other day about learning how to scale. The best answer was... you learn scaling when your site is over capacity. You can't read that on a site and understand it because the problem is never the same.
I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.
Very true. I like this comment the best so far. There is sometimes that point where you feel like you got it and proceed with the just doing part and then you suddenly realize you should have read much more but only once it's too late. I recently tried to get a web app up and running on a VPS and I read a Tom about preparing, bootstrapping, configuring, and all about which stack components I should choose. In the end it wasn't enough and now I have to go back, totally reset the VPS to a clean slate and do it over. I went ahead and just did it after thinking reading could no longer help but I found an interesting thing. In some areas of what I was trying to do, it really was time to just do. I then got experienced with a few tools and learned that only then would further reading about how to better use those tools actually help. So it was sort of like "read, do, come back and read again".
No you probably haven't. The lessons I've learned as being a part of this community over the past three years have been immeasurable, and that comes from browsing this site daily. Here's a sample from the top of my head, and this doesn't even come close to the edge cases where I've encountered a specific problem in my day job and thought to myself "oh shit, I remember reading an article about this on HN, let me go search for it". This also applies to all the reading I've done for fun and in school.
- Importance of machine learning on web scale problems
- Stupid business models vs business models that actually seem to work
- Mistakes to avoid
Yes you learn by doing. But you learn just as much through discovery, and discovery only happens when you read a shit ton more than you have to. Discovery leads to idea generation. Idea generation leads to products. Creating products leads to learning.
Unless you haven't. Hands-on is very important, especially early on when learning something new. But after the early stages, hands-on only takes you so far. You need to hit the books again.
You'll learn more starting out in Rails, for instance, by getting the basics of controller actions and their relationships to views and then immediately code some stuff. After that you can code till you're blue in the face but you still won't know nothin' bout polymorphic relationships or has_many :through. For that, you need to read some more.
I found over the years I need to have a steady cycle of practical coding, reading, coding, reading. It just depends. If I'm in the heat of getting features out the door, I don't read at all usually, I'm just doing what I do. When things settle down for a bit, I pull out something to read that pushes my weak areas. Maybe algorithms, or TCP/IP stuff I've neglected, or going over stuff I knew at one point but lost out of my wee lil noggin.
That said, when I'm reading that stuff I'll usually have a terminal open where I can practice, either in the shell, repl, mysql terminal, etc. So the cycles of reading/coding can be get real short. That's when I get the most into my brain, actually -- long sessions of doing both together.
I advocate a spiral method: learn until you have a basic grasp, then do until you hit a wall, then learn some more. Don't shirk the learning, though, or anyone who has done it will see right through you. For example, when I started typesetting with LaTeX, I started by reading (and finishing) a full LaTeX tutorial. Most people just grab a sample document and dive in, and I can tell you that their markup sucks. It's painful to read, and difficult to extend or maintain—and it's often ugly to boot. The difference between
x$_{spring} = A sin(\omega t)$
and
$x_\mathrm{spring} = A \sin(\omega t)$
is qualitative and unmistakable.
If you care about making things, there's no substitute for doing. If you care about quality, there's no substitute for learning from the experts who have gone before you.
Interestingly enough, this was the same approach that worked for me in school.
In college, I always felt that I couldn't start my math homework until I'd read the chapter thoroughly. It wasn't til my last year/year and a half that I realized, the best way to learn upper division math was to dive right into solving the hard problems, referencing back as needed.
This is what I have done since high school, but only because I never gave myself enough time to review the chapter before having to rush through the homework.
Sometimes I wondered if I would have done better having given myself more time to study the materials.
The basic premise is correct. Most people on HN are liable to read too much, and not do enough.
Personally I believe you have to do both for the fastest learning process. The "read, do, reflect" cycle. If you're not actively "doing" then you will read and associate things quite differently. Without doing, you can build up a very strong theoretical knowledge about a subject, but in doing, not realise the correct time to act on that knowledge. It can also lead to analysis paralysis, as you /know/ there is a bigger picture, and you're trying to figure it out - where as the guy who never read, but just learned by doing, never got slowed down by wondering about that bigger picture.
I know people who just do, and never read - they miss out on a lot of shortcuts they could easily learn, or understanding the bigger picture, motivations etc.
Reflection happens quite naturally for most of us here, but you'll often find it works best when you are actively writing ideas down, or communicating them to others. It then fuels going and reading or doing to fill knowledge gaps.
If you're not doing, then the next best thing you can do is mental rehearsal - if you /did/ have to apply this skill/knowledge to a real situation, how would you do it. You can then find yourself self-coaching when you do the activity for real.
As an aside, this is why hobbies are a Good Thing (tm). They allow you to have different sets of associations, so when I'm learning about a new area, I can link an idea to say organising a scuba dive, rather than something like a sprint planning session.
At a certain point, it's no longer reading to gain more knowledge, it's about procrastination.
Doing takes work, it requires making decisions, it requires critical thinking. Reading helps you delay this with an activity you can justify to yourself as being helpful in the long run.
However at a certain point, you've delayed too long and the time investment you've sunk into reading has been way too much for what you're getting out of it, compared to the act of doing and producing something and/or learning from experience.
To add: stop reading the same things over and over.
A recurring theme of discussion on HN is whether or not the submissions are getting worse. I tend to think they're not. (Although the comments are another story.) It's just that the twentieth article you read on something like lean startup methodologies is a lot less interesting than the first one.
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested" -Bacon
Unfortunately, most of what's out there on the blogs are only meant to be tasted...if that. Direct experience is valuable, but direct experience guided by an informed authority can be even more valuable.
While it's true that reading one article, be it on HN or TC or wherever else, won't make a huge difference, what makes a difference is the aggregate of gleaning what information you can over a long period of time. Much like most (real) classes, you can't really cram, but as you continually ingest information it becomes a part of you.
Coming from the business end of things before I started programming, I learned about IPOs not from business classes but from reading about which companies would IPO. I learned about vesting schedules and cap sheets by reading about people discussing these things. While it's taken years for me to feel like I understands most of the ins and outs, it's also something that you really should be learning second hand. You don't want to be talking to a potential investor and have to ask him what a cap sheet is.
It's not about, "I will read this and understand," it's about immersing yourself in the culture and picking things up as you go.
You probably haven't read enough. It really depends on your goals and what you are trying to learn (or whether you are trying to learn at all). Doing is great and it's how you get things done but not everything can be learnt in a few short articles. It also depends on what you are reading too. Reading within a narrow field or an echo chamber can only take you so far. Reading and discovering new ideas can completely transform your entire way of thinking.
Personally, I've set myself the arduous task of mastering English. If you are reading for less than half your day, you will probably never get there with that one.
Written language is a wonderful tool for understanding the past. If you think you know everything there is to know about the past you are indisputably wrong.
Reminds me of http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103111... Which basically alludes to visualizing your success tends to de-motivate you. I can't help but wonder if the people who soak up articles/videos of other people's accomplishments aren't living out their fantasies vicariously through those people, and weakening their own potential.
I read HN and listen to podcasts like TWIST to expose myself to good ideas. My theory is the more you expose yourself to talented thought leaders, the more likely you are to think like them.
Then when you come across a problem while building your product, you can say to yourself "Hey, this is what Mark Suster was talking about in that one blog post...how did he solve the problem?"
I wish that were true, but actually playing with SQL for the first hours can teach you much more than 20 articles about InnoDB vs MyISAM, MySQL tuning, Sql vs NoSql, etc...
I've been "self-teaching" (mostly via O'Reilly books) since 2007 and I have completely changed my career. I grow as a programmer more and more every day, mostly thanks to reading.
Sure, I've read books like "Learn You A Haskell" without putting much into practice. But I feel I am much better off reading about new ideas even if I can't make every day use of them.
I think this is a relatively new phenomenon. 20 years ago you had to try hard to find an exhaustive amount of information on any specific topic, and what you did find tended to have been through a few gatekeepers. Now you can fritter away the days reading "useful" information because it's so prolific and readily available almost anywhere you are.
Absolutely. One of my first real programming books was "C" and also one on Unix. I had to drive for a half an hour to the Princeton Univ. bookstore. No such thing as computer books really at normal bookstores back then.
Ditto for gatekeepers. Have a legal issue you want to research? You went to the law library and sat there for hours and used the coin op copier.
When I want to jump into a new interest, I usually spend a chunk of time at the beginning watching videos or grazing thru a manual.
Even if I don't "get" everything yet -- knowing that Final Cut can do "X, Y, Z" and it's somewhere in the middle of the manual -- can be useful in removing some of the early frustration in the learning process.
Exactly > take the red pill! :) there is too much ambiguation. People spend months,years even, daydreaming. Fuck that childish nonsense. I am learning JS atm and loving myself for actually doing something. It is hard as hell but at least I'm moving forward, instead of being trapped in a dream.
[+] [-] jcr|14 years ago|reply
I hate to admit it, but my retention rate was just miserable, probably less than 50%. Sure, remembering stuff "cold" on the next day is different than remembering an association during a conversation (e.g. "Ya, I read something about 'X' the other day."), but it was enough to make me wonder if my educational entertainment reading was time well spent, or time wasted?
Everyone needs breaks, and it's fun to keep up with what's going on in the world, but I might be better off doing something else...
[+] [-] _delirium|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|14 years ago|reply
There's room in life for casual conversation. It doesn't have to be relentless study all the time. And even if you're intent on only reading stuff worth memorizing you can't achieve that goal. You can fight Sturgeon's Law, but you can't always expect to win.
[+] [-] synnik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeyespo|14 years ago|reply
What keeps me coming back to HN is my ongoing curiosity of how technology is evolving. (And also a slight paranoia of another hacker publishing exactly one of my side projects before I do :) I enjoy being engaged with other like minded strangers. And I believe this place helps you better predict, even appreciate the direction of technology.
Just so long as you have balance and it doesn't keep you from actually getting things done. As for the article's point, I do agree. Doing something is immeasurably more beneficial for you than reading about it.
[+] [-] ithought|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keeperofdakeys|14 years ago|reply
I would also claim you want to 'relax' during breaks, that is, not actively think about something. I can't think of many better activities then reading HN.
[+] [-] _delirium|14 years ago|reply
I think the 2nd mistake might actually be more common, given the amount of wheel-reinventing (and not always reinventing well) that goes on, but it's hard to say.
[+] [-] eric-hu|14 years ago|reply
We only need to wear seatbelts on the days we'll get into an accident, right?
[+] [-] cityzen|14 years ago|reply
I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.
[+] [-] billpatrianakos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physcab|14 years ago|reply
- Drawing U.S choropleth thematic maps (flowing data)
- A/B testing, Adwords, SEO (patio11's blog)
- D3 framework
- VIM advice
- Product development and importance of design
- Being data driven
- Conversion optimization
- Importance of machine learning on web scale problems
- Stupid business models vs business models that actually seem to work
- Mistakes to avoid
Yes you learn by doing. But you learn just as much through discovery, and discovery only happens when you read a shit ton more than you have to. Discovery leads to idea generation. Idea generation leads to products. Creating products leads to learning.
[+] [-] davesims|14 years ago|reply
You'll learn more starting out in Rails, for instance, by getting the basics of controller actions and their relationships to views and then immediately code some stuff. After that you can code till you're blue in the face but you still won't know nothin' bout polymorphic relationships or has_many :through. For that, you need to read some more.
I found over the years I need to have a steady cycle of practical coding, reading, coding, reading. It just depends. If I'm in the heat of getting features out the door, I don't read at all usually, I'm just doing what I do. When things settle down for a bit, I pull out something to read that pushes my weak areas. Maybe algorithms, or TCP/IP stuff I've neglected, or going over stuff I knew at one point but lost out of my wee lil noggin.
That said, when I'm reading that stuff I'll usually have a terminal open where I can practice, either in the shell, repl, mysql terminal, etc. So the cycles of reading/coding can be get real short. That's when I get the most into my brain, actually -- long sessions of doing both together.
[+] [-] mhartl|14 years ago|reply
If you care about making things, there's no substitute for doing. If you care about quality, there's no substitute for learning from the experts who have gone before you.
[+] [-] gxs|14 years ago|reply
In college, I always felt that I couldn't start my math homework until I'd read the chapter thoroughly. It wasn't til my last year/year and a half that I realized, the best way to learn upper division math was to dive right into solving the hard problems, referencing back as needed.
[+] [-] dbtc|14 years ago|reply
Sometimes I wondered if I would have done better having given myself more time to study the materials.
[+] [-] Swannie|14 years ago|reply
Personally I believe you have to do both for the fastest learning process. The "read, do, reflect" cycle. If you're not actively "doing" then you will read and associate things quite differently. Without doing, you can build up a very strong theoretical knowledge about a subject, but in doing, not realise the correct time to act on that knowledge. It can also lead to analysis paralysis, as you /know/ there is a bigger picture, and you're trying to figure it out - where as the guy who never read, but just learned by doing, never got slowed down by wondering about that bigger picture.
I know people who just do, and never read - they miss out on a lot of shortcuts they could easily learn, or understanding the bigger picture, motivations etc.
Reflection happens quite naturally for most of us here, but you'll often find it works best when you are actively writing ideas down, or communicating them to others. It then fuels going and reading or doing to fill knowledge gaps.
If you're not doing, then the next best thing you can do is mental rehearsal - if you /did/ have to apply this skill/knowledge to a real situation, how would you do it. You can then find yourself self-coaching when you do the activity for real.
As an aside, this is why hobbies are a Good Thing (tm). They allow you to have different sets of associations, so when I'm learning about a new area, I can link an idea to say organising a scuba dive, rather than something like a sprint planning session.
[+] [-] hrabago|14 years ago|reply
Doing takes work, it requires making decisions, it requires critical thinking. Reading helps you delay this with an activity you can justify to yourself as being helpful in the long run.
However at a certain point, you've delayed too long and the time investment you've sunk into reading has been way too much for what you're getting out of it, compared to the act of doing and producing something and/or learning from experience.
(Edit: spacing)
[+] [-] samdk|14 years ago|reply
A recurring theme of discussion on HN is whether or not the submissions are getting worse. I tend to think they're not. (Although the comments are another story.) It's just that the twentieth article you read on something like lean startup methodologies is a lot less interesting than the first one.
[+] [-] KenjiCrosland|14 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, most of what's out there on the blogs are only meant to be tasted...if that. Direct experience is valuable, but direct experience guided by an informed authority can be even more valuable.
[+] [-] angelbob|14 years ago|reply
I probably have some ulterior motive for reading, rather than really doing it in order to be qualified for that startup idea I have.
But I won't know that until the next article gets upvoted that tells me my mental state in one sentence!
[+] [-] austenallred|14 years ago|reply
Coming from the business end of things before I started programming, I learned about IPOs not from business classes but from reading about which companies would IPO. I learned about vesting schedules and cap sheets by reading about people discussing these things. While it's taken years for me to feel like I understands most of the ins and outs, it's also something that you really should be learning second hand. You don't want to be talking to a potential investor and have to ask him what a cap sheet is.
It's not about, "I will read this and understand," it's about immersing yourself in the culture and picking things up as you go.
[+] [-] Tsagadai|14 years ago|reply
Personally, I've set myself the arduous task of mastering English. If you are reading for less than half your day, you will probably never get there with that one.
Written language is a wonderful tool for understanding the past. If you think you know everything there is to know about the past you are indisputably wrong.
[+] [-] tcarney|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorkos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgentry|14 years ago|reply
Then when you come across a problem while building your product, you can say to yourself "Hey, this is what Mark Suster was talking about in that one blog post...how did he solve the problem?"
[+] [-] swah|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorbuley|14 years ago|reply
I've been "self-teaching" (mostly via O'Reilly books) since 2007 and I have completely changed my career. I grow as a programmer more and more every day, mostly thanks to reading.
Sure, I've read books like "Learn You A Haskell" without putting much into practice. But I feel I am much better off reading about new ideas even if I can't make every day use of them.
[+] [-] dasil003|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
Ditto for gatekeepers. Have a legal issue you want to research? You went to the law library and sat there for hours and used the coin op copier.
[+] [-] bprater|14 years ago|reply
Even if I don't "get" everything yet -- knowing that Final Cut can do "X, Y, Z" and it's somewhere in the middle of the manual -- can be useful in removing some of the early frustration in the learning process.
[+] [-] div|14 years ago|reply
I'll know something is possible, and vaguely know what the technique is called, and I will be able to incorporate that knowledge into my thinking.
Then whenever it is time to build stuff, there's a lot of very specific googling to lay down a strong foundation of a solution.
[+] [-] ofca|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mediocrity|14 years ago|reply
Raises his hand
And the damned truth is, I know I'll probably fail because of it.
Not that that helps.