I too do all these things listed by James, skipping articles and comparisons. But that's because I am now an expert: I've read far too much about dynamic vs. static to have the patient to fully read the good old opinions about this subject.
The same about comparisons, I know it's 10% better than last year's because last year I actually read an article, and it was 10%-15% better than 2010, which was 10% better than 2009.
Two things helped: I stopped doing the engineering dance, dueling trivia with others. I don't care if the new iPhone does 5 times less network requests on maps when not on wi-fi but gets less POIs because the map provider is pulverized, on China is X while on Iceland is Y, but on San Francisco bla bla bla. Frankly, talking to a Wikipedia is boring.
The other thing that helped is that I gave up trying to live on the bleeding edge of anything. I don't sleep on the line to buy an iPad mini, I wait three days if and when I have the free time. I don't know what's the current best SSD, I google it when I am actually about to buy it. Slowing down is one of the best things I ever did. I have lots of friends that complain about being too "anxious" (all properly self-diagnosed). Just don't do something if you know you'll be complaining about it later.
I wouldn't take it for granted that it's 10-15% better than last year.
Up until a few years ago, for instance, you could count on this year's CPUs being much better than last year's CPUs. After Intel came out with Nehalehm, the pace has slowed down. The really interesting developments are in details like virtualization support, SIMD instruction, and things like AMD's Fusion. And it took me plenty of talking with people to really understand that Fusion is nowhere near as exciting as I thought it was at first, since you can't get high-end (or even medium) GPU performance out of RAM designed for CPU's.
The things I build today could be at their market peak three years in the future so understanding the hardware on the market and where its going can be the difference between making somethign that's commercially viable and something that isnt.
The author mentions the fine Hacker Monthly but curated e-mails also have a role to play here. If you want something with more coverage and volume but still remain sane, http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ is a weekly newsletter with the best of HN's links by HN's own 'duck'.
I do similar work with my Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly and StatusCode newsletters and frequently get e-mails from people who say they like being subscribed so they can turn down the 'noise' they get on Twitter, etc.
There are thousands of such regular, curated digests in almost any medium you could think of. Not just e-mails or magazines, but podcasts, link blogs, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts too. Have a good look around on the topics that interest you, subscribe to the digests, and then skip the noise.
Thanks for the tip! I personally use http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/, an automated feed of the ten new articles with most points. Since it comes once a day, it helps me spend much less time here, just look it through in the morning and be done.
The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?
@James Hague: so what are the unusual blogs you're subscribing to? I'm always on the lookout for that kind of stuff. I'll start off with one of my discoveries: the feed for a readlist (http://readlists.com/) created by a guy named Stu Sherwin: http://readlists.com/user/stusherwin/feed/
I find this interesting, because as some have pointed out here, there is a LOT of noise on HN. There's a simple fix for this though, don't click on the posts.
I went for a couple months without checking HN and to be honest I felt like I was missing something. I like knowing what the latest things are and what cool projects people are working on. I enjoy many of the well written comments.
I find that the things I learn about on HN aren't necessarily something that is helpful immediately, but something that I can recall when I have an itch. Perhaps we're implementing analytics emails for consumers at work and using PhantomJS is an interesting option. Or... whatever.
There is a ton of noise, I simply don't click on posts about languages any longer.
Since when is Hacker News a programming news site? AFAICT it's mainly a startup news/self-promotion vehicle, with a few programming articles thrown in to satisfy the technical cofounders.
this is a serious struggle i face, too. in my role i have to stay fresh and on top of large areas, new ideas, and what's coming next. curation, while tempting, leads to an echo chamber. i've built curation tools for the past ten years, mostly for myself (and they work really well, i share them with select friends), but ultimately i have to withstand the noise and dig out interesting stuff.
i just triage quickly, to be honest, and i try not to rely on other people to do my curation for me (either crowd-based selection or manual selection). i can stil avoid much of the same old noise and debates but i get to see new ideas, perspectives, topics, and things.
some of the links here have been great to see, however, and i will have to utilize them. thanks for sharing them.
Hacker News has become the source of the noise for me and I'm increasingly not coming here. I often block it in my hosts file, in fact, along with reddit and Facebook.
There is still, occasionally, a relevant technical article (that's not primarily opinion) or link to a new open source project that is relevant to my interests.
But that seems to be around %2-4 of the content.
HN is crowded out with submissions that are designed primarily to be excuses to be outraged at anyone who believes in intellectual property, or that isn't a leftist, with the occasional outrage at violations of privacy thrown in.
And you certainly can't have a good discussion on those articles-- haters going to hate, and leftists hate private property and fandroids hate apple.
This is the fourth time I've seen this happen.
The first was slashdot, which by 2002 or so, was so overrun with GPL fascists that you couldn't say anything short of the party line, less it be downvoted to oblivion. Then Digg which gave so much power to early users that it was pointless to even try. Then Reddit which has its general /r/politics subreddit-- which everyone is subscribe to by default- with a moderation policy that bans anyone who doesn't toe the leftist line well enough to goose step. And now Hacker News.
Once I did an experiment. There was an article where I didn't like the outcome, along with most of HN, but the principle involved, a greater principle, one that most on HN claim to espouse, was being violated. I posted a comment noting that I didn't like the outcome, naming the principle, noting that most of us agree with that principle, and then showing how upholding that principle (eg: not being a hypocrite) required us to temper our outrage. I got downvoted to oblivion (which on HN helpfully means your post fades into the background making it impossible to read, which I find hilarious- we're not just going to put you at the bottom of the page, we're going to make it impossible for those who are broad minded enough to scroll down to even read it.)
So, despite agreeing with the majority, clearly explaining my position, and why I hated having to reach that conclusion, what the principle was, and why we all generally agree with that principle... I was still downvoted, because I wasn't making a post agreeing with the party line.
That's the point when I accepted that moderation is broken, and Hacker News is not a place where good discussion can happen reliably.
I think human curation has failed. Ideological downvotes have killed the signal to noise ratio of all four of these sites.
Given that the first thing I think when I see your username is "who is he going to shit on today", I would suggest that perhaps some "physician, heal thyself" is in order.
I find that, as trite as it sounds, you really do get out of HN what you put in. When I first posted at HN I adopted an aggressive, frankly really fucking douchey attitude that reminds me of your continual one. I'm still slowbanned because of it[1]. When I moderated the dipshit attitude out of my posting, however, it became a lot more fun and I've made a few friends through posting here.
Let's get real here. Ideological downvotes aren't your--and I mean your, in particular--problem. Being an asshole, who apparently can't get through a day of posting without attacking someone or caricaturing a position with which you disagree, is. I mean, come on. "Fandroids hate Apple." "Leftists hate private property." You're not fooling anyone: the schtick you are employing is to make statements that are tailored to offend, under the guise of "stating your opinion," and then get outraged when they do offend and people take advantage of the moderation mechanism of a downvote to say, "we don't want this here." You don't get to be surprised or offended when you do that and conflating rejection of your behavior with rejection of your beliefs is intellectually dishonest.
The problem with the reception of your posts is you. I know this, because I've been there, and I chose not to be quite as much of an ass. You, apparently, have not. Act like less of an asshole and I'll bet you that what you see as "ideological downvotes" go away.
.
[1] - The slowban used to annoy me, but I find it moderates my initial, fly-off-the-handle reaction pretty well. I think I'd miss it if it went away.
I'm not seeing it myself. While I hew to the "leftist" side of the political line, I'm also somewhat pro-IP. Every time I have posted a legitimate, well-cited criticism of an anti-IP article, I have gotten upvoted to the top. Not mindless tropes like "IP incentivizes innovation," which are actually ideological statements masquerading as factual statements, but actually factual statements.
My experience with HN has been, at least up to this point, that ideological ranting will largely be met with ideological upvoting. That is to say if your arguments are based on ideology, you're going to get upvotes or downvotes based on your ideological compatibility with people on the site. However unlike reddit, if you base your comments on defensible assertions and evidence, you will get upvoted even if your comment goes against the grain of the prevailing ideology.
I think human curation has failed. Ideological downvotes have killed the signal to noise ratio of all four of these sites.
Uncontrolled, collective curation has a lot of flaws, perhaps, but 'human curation' generally is more important than ever particularly from individuals or small groups. You just need to choose your gatekeepers carefully and steer clear of the herd mentality if it doesn't work for you.
I just read this comment thread then realised how pointless it was, therefore creating an example of what the author of the article was talking about. Very meta!
Most things written for the web are written to get page views. Whenever a social news site gets big enough, then people will start submitting content to it for that purpose. That's where the money is. If a blog posts an article about Apple violating court rulings, boom, lots of traffic and ad money for little to no research costs, even if it isn't really anything worthwhile for programmers to read. You could always look for some other source of articles to read, such as following your coworkers on Twitter or Yammer or something, or curating your own set of RSS feeds of programming blogs, etc..
"Hacker News has become the source of the noise for me and I'm increasingly not coming here. I often block it in my hosts file, in fact, along with reddit and Facebook."
If any website causes you to often block it in your HOSTS file, then perhaps you should make a real effort at not unblocking it?
All I'm saying is that if chewing on glass gives you discomfort, well, stop chewing.
James claims not to be burned out, but I think I can see the telltale signs. If you're interested in programming, you won't arbitrarily declare that big parts of programming are "below the threshold of what matters." That's a pretty bold claim to make-- even most non-technical managers wouldn't go that far.
I understand getting fed up with reading endless (often poorly argued) debates online, but that's a different issue.
At one point there's the realization that there are not as many hours in the day as there used to be because of other obligations. That's the point where your threshold of what really matters starts to get pretty close to the ceiling. It has nothing to do with being burnt out and has more to do with coming to grips with the fact that there's more to the world than you.
Although today is a special day (in most of the US) because you get that "extra hour." Grumblegrumble DST...
[+] [-] inerte|13 years ago|reply
The same about comparisons, I know it's 10% better than last year's because last year I actually read an article, and it was 10%-15% better than 2010, which was 10% better than 2009.
Two things helped: I stopped doing the engineering dance, dueling trivia with others. I don't care if the new iPhone does 5 times less network requests on maps when not on wi-fi but gets less POIs because the map provider is pulverized, on China is X while on Iceland is Y, but on San Francisco bla bla bla. Frankly, talking to a Wikipedia is boring.
The other thing that helped is that I gave up trying to live on the bleeding edge of anything. I don't sleep on the line to buy an iPad mini, I wait three days if and when I have the free time. I don't know what's the current best SSD, I google it when I am actually about to buy it. Slowing down is one of the best things I ever did. I have lots of friends that complain about being too "anxious" (all properly self-diagnosed). Just don't do something if you know you'll be complaining about it later.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|13 years ago|reply
Up until a few years ago, for instance, you could count on this year's CPUs being much better than last year's CPUs. After Intel came out with Nehalehm, the pace has slowed down. The really interesting developments are in details like virtualization support, SIMD instruction, and things like AMD's Fusion. And it took me plenty of talking with people to really understand that Fusion is nowhere near as exciting as I thought it was at first, since you can't get high-end (or even medium) GPU performance out of RAM designed for CPU's.
The things I build today could be at their market peak three years in the future so understanding the hardware on the market and where its going can be the difference between making somethign that's commercially viable and something that isnt.
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
I do similar work with my Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly, HTML5 Weekly and StatusCode newsletters and frequently get e-mails from people who say they like being subscribed so they can turn down the 'noise' they get on Twitter, etc.
There are thousands of such regular, curated digests in almost any medium you could think of. Not just e-mails or magazines, but podcasts, link blogs, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts too. Have a good look around on the topics that interest you, subscribe to the digests, and then skip the noise.
[+] [-] kallus|13 years ago|reply
The downside though, is that it gets close to impossible to join in on, or even read, the discussions. When I see articles usually ~24h after they were posted, the discussion page is so full of nested questions that it's really hard to find anything more than the highest voted comment. How can curation be combined with possibility to discuss, in a better working way?
[+] [-] yawaramin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jseliger|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] akoncius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orofino|13 years ago|reply
I went for a couple months without checking HN and to be honest I felt like I was missing something. I like knowing what the latest things are and what cool projects people are working on. I enjoy many of the well written comments.
I find that the things I learn about on HN aren't necessarily something that is helpful immediately, but something that I can recall when I have an itch. Perhaps we're implementing analytics emails for consumers at work and using PhantomJS is an interesting option. Or... whatever.
There is a ton of noise, I simply don't click on posts about languages any longer.
[+] [-] ExpiredLink|13 years ago|reply
There's a slight problem wrt this though, you can't really judge an article by its title.
[+] [-] Camillo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedmiston|13 years ago|reply
1: http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web
[+] [-] jnazario|13 years ago|reply
i just triage quickly, to be honest, and i try not to rely on other people to do my curation for me (either crowd-based selection or manual selection). i can stil avoid much of the same old noise and debates but i get to see new ideas, perspectives, topics, and things.
some of the links here have been great to see, however, and i will have to utilize them. thanks for sharing them.
[+] [-] ksikka|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirvana|13 years ago|reply
There is still, occasionally, a relevant technical article (that's not primarily opinion) or link to a new open source project that is relevant to my interests.
But that seems to be around %2-4 of the content.
HN is crowded out with submissions that are designed primarily to be excuses to be outraged at anyone who believes in intellectual property, or that isn't a leftist, with the occasional outrage at violations of privacy thrown in.
And you certainly can't have a good discussion on those articles-- haters going to hate, and leftists hate private property and fandroids hate apple.
This is the fourth time I've seen this happen.
The first was slashdot, which by 2002 or so, was so overrun with GPL fascists that you couldn't say anything short of the party line, less it be downvoted to oblivion. Then Digg which gave so much power to early users that it was pointless to even try. Then Reddit which has its general /r/politics subreddit-- which everyone is subscribe to by default- with a moderation policy that bans anyone who doesn't toe the leftist line well enough to goose step. And now Hacker News.
Once I did an experiment. There was an article where I didn't like the outcome, along with most of HN, but the principle involved, a greater principle, one that most on HN claim to espouse, was being violated. I posted a comment noting that I didn't like the outcome, naming the principle, noting that most of us agree with that principle, and then showing how upholding that principle (eg: not being a hypocrite) required us to temper our outrage. I got downvoted to oblivion (which on HN helpfully means your post fades into the background making it impossible to read, which I find hilarious- we're not just going to put you at the bottom of the page, we're going to make it impossible for those who are broad minded enough to scroll down to even read it.)
So, despite agreeing with the majority, clearly explaining my position, and why I hated having to reach that conclusion, what the principle was, and why we all generally agree with that principle... I was still downvoted, because I wasn't making a post agreeing with the party line.
That's the point when I accepted that moderation is broken, and Hacker News is not a place where good discussion can happen reliably.
I think human curation has failed. Ideological downvotes have killed the signal to noise ratio of all four of these sites.
[+] [-] eropple|13 years ago|reply
I find that, as trite as it sounds, you really do get out of HN what you put in. When I first posted at HN I adopted an aggressive, frankly really fucking douchey attitude that reminds me of your continual one. I'm still slowbanned because of it[1]. When I moderated the dipshit attitude out of my posting, however, it became a lot more fun and I've made a few friends through posting here.
Let's get real here. Ideological downvotes aren't your--and I mean your, in particular--problem. Being an asshole, who apparently can't get through a day of posting without attacking someone or caricaturing a position with which you disagree, is. I mean, come on. "Fandroids hate Apple." "Leftists hate private property." You're not fooling anyone: the schtick you are employing is to make statements that are tailored to offend, under the guise of "stating your opinion," and then get outraged when they do offend and people take advantage of the moderation mechanism of a downvote to say, "we don't want this here." You don't get to be surprised or offended when you do that and conflating rejection of your behavior with rejection of your beliefs is intellectually dishonest.
The problem with the reception of your posts is you. I know this, because I've been there, and I chose not to be quite as much of an ass. You, apparently, have not. Act like less of an asshole and I'll bet you that what you see as "ideological downvotes" go away.
.
[1] - The slowban used to annoy me, but I find it moderates my initial, fly-off-the-handle reaction pretty well. I think I'd miss it if it went away.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
My experience with HN has been, at least up to this point, that ideological ranting will largely be met with ideological upvoting. That is to say if your arguments are based on ideology, you're going to get upvotes or downvotes based on your ideological compatibility with people on the site. However unlike reddit, if you base your comments on defensible assertions and evidence, you will get upvoted even if your comment goes against the grain of the prevailing ideology.
[+] [-] incision|13 years ago|reply
2) Spend the rest of the tangent hypocritically complaining about name-calling while demanding that someone refute your purely anecdotal evidence.
3) Triumphantly explain how I've somehow proven your point by posting this.
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
Uncontrolled, collective curation has a lot of flaws, perhaps, but 'human curation' generally is more important than ever particularly from individuals or small groups. You just need to choose your gatekeepers carefully and steer clear of the herd mentality if it doesn't work for you.
[+] [-] taybin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AmVess|13 years ago|reply
If any website causes you to often block it in your HOSTS file, then perhaps you should make a real effort at not unblocking it?
All I'm saying is that if chewing on glass gives you discomfort, well, stop chewing.
[+] [-] shardling|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cmccabe|13 years ago|reply
I understand getting fed up with reading endless (often poorly argued) debates online, but that's a different issue.
[+] [-] adestefan|13 years ago|reply
Although today is a special day (in most of the US) because you get that "extra hour." Grumble grumble DST...
[+] [-] nirvanaeropple|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]