I disagree about his choice in link aggregation sites. HN rarely has any good programming articles. Programming Reddit is all programming articles, but they are usually so stupid that it's not even worth checking out. (And God help you if you accidentally start reading the comments.)
If you want something passive to do, I recommend reading the blog aggregator for your favorite programming language (Planet Perl, Planet Haskell, etc.). There is obviously some junk in there too (the Perl people get to read all my Lisp articles), but the articles are generally "primary sources" describing new projects and techniques. (That is to say, the author of new module foo is the one talking about it. It's not some pundit that thinks it's cool.)
Anyway, read social news sites if you want, but remember that they are mostly entertainment, not work. If you want to be a better programmer, the most important thing to do is to program and be aware of other ways of doing things. Read the source code to your libraries. Read the academic papers that the documentation links to. Experiment with new ideas and techniques. Those things will actually make you a better programmer. Reading blogs, not so much.
> the author of new module foo is the one talking about it. It's not some pundit that thinks it's cool.
The author of foo might not be able to explain foo very well. The HN crowd is used to reading the blogs and discussions of "hackers"--people who both program, and think/write/talk about programming. However, there's this huge set of programmers who aren't hackers, and have no idea how to communicate to you why you would want to use this thing they've built (or perhaps just don't care whether anyone beyond them uses it, now that they've scratched their itch.) That's what pundits are for.
Completely off topic (and I apologize to everyone else), but in viewing your profile to find all your Lisp articles, I noticed we are rocking the same top color... it is quite pretty.
Same here, I removed coding horror from my RSS reader just the day I read that article.
Not because of the article alone, but it summed up with an almost creepy precision what had already unconsciously reduced my interest in his writing over the past months. Most of his blog-posts really match the template.
When I dropped the feed there were still 10 or 20 articles in the queue. Don't think I missed out on much.
Only yesterday, Jeff was agreeing with someone on reddit that HN is "sterile"; that people here are "on their best behaviour", and yet now he's recommending HN like he's used it for years?
There's the same amount of crap, it's just dressed up in more pretentious verbiage. IMHO.
90% of everything is crap, no matter how "non-lame" your audience is.
with his apparent recommendation to use HN the following day. The only thing I can think of is that he wants to dilute the HN community with his own.
No backtracking necessary: In this post he quotes some windbag:
"Let's assume that some or even most of it will not be new. Let's assume that we'll positively detest some of it. But let's also look at it in terms of our own profit: we win if we can find just one thing in there that makes us better programmers."
Yesterday he said HN is becoming overwhelmed with dreck. Today he is saying it's a win to read HN if you can find just one thing that makes you better.
The two statements are entirely consistent with each other, and I suggest they are the entire point of the post he quotes.
Wait a second... the guy who, yesterday, had an article on here about how HN was fundamentally flawed due to lack of story downvotes is now recommending it to his following?
It's Jeff Atwood. He talks out of his ass and randomly bolds stuff. That's about it. (Remember, he wrote a book review on his blog about a book he clearly hadn't read. All he does is talk.)
It's been about 50 years since we discovered the "[commercialized] never-ending serial"; we still haven't realized that it's a bad idea. TV shows (and soap operas especially), MMOs, blogs; all should really have definite endings and closure, but they continue, after having done all they've set out to do, based on brand alone.
It's not like the same people can't make something else, something new--for example, you could put all the writers, artists and actors of the Simpsons on a new project, if you like--but they don't need to do the Simpsons any more. It's done. Every possible angle, every single side-story, every inter-character meeting has been explored.
1000 posts is enough to say what you came to say. If not, maybe go back and delete a few, distill some points to free up room for new expression. Perhaps blogging software should have a million-character limit on the total aggregate length of post body columns; it seems to have encouraged tweets to be more well-thought-out (though some of that is also probably from the fact that the ones sent from phones cost money.)
I see nothing wrong with changing your mind about things, even quickly. So long as the change is not a quick oscillation between two opposite opinions (which would be two-faced or crazy), changing your mind quickly is a healthy habit.
I don't think HN is a good place to sharpen your programming saw. However, it's an exceedingly good place to sharpen your entrepreneurial saw, as well as an excellent place to keep track of the pulse of start-up things on the web.
I do learn somewhat from reading stuff online, but it's often because I'm inspired to play around with something on my own. Like a lot of people, I learn the most by doing. So I think the point that a lot of people are making is a good one: write more code.
There are some concepts from practicing music that might be interesting to consider in the context of coding:
1. Play music that's beyond your current abilities; playing the things you already know won't help you improve. This is pretty easy to put in the context of writing software: don't write yet another little ruby app, write it in Haskell or Io or Clojure or Erlang...
2. Isolate weaknesses and focus on specific things to improve. I think this is tougher in software than in music, because a good musician is always listening to good music to benchmark against, but it's probably not as common for developers to constantly be reading good code. So, maybe go find some good code to read and find ways in which it's better than what you're churning out.
3. Don't practice music with mistakes; it's better to slow down and get it right than to learn it incorrectly. So maybe a test suite for that weekend hack isn't a bad idea...
I should do more of that... in both music and coding...
The funny thing is that most of Jeff's articles get ridiculed here, and he still recommends it. Does he post here? I don't remember ever seeing him defend an article or anything, not that I think it would be very effective.
Does anyone else think Jeff finds a crafty little picture, and then writes a post about it.
He doesn't post with any regularity, but he did defend a post he made a few days ago (one where he says Hacker News "gets it wrong" for not allowing downvotes to stories):
If you want something passive to do, I recommend reading the blog aggregator for your favorite programming language (Planet Perl, Planet Haskell, etc.). There is obviously some junk in there too (the Perl people get to read all my Lisp articles), but the articles are generally "primary sources" describing new projects and techniques. (That is to say, the author of new module foo is the one talking about it. It's not some pundit that thinks it's cool.)
Anyway, read social news sites if you want, but remember that they are mostly entertainment, not work. If you want to be a better programmer, the most important thing to do is to program and be aware of other ways of doing things. Read the source code to your libraries. Read the academic papers that the documentation links to. Experiment with new ideas and techniques. Those things will actually make you a better programmer. Reading blogs, not so much.