

BAQL: Reading Hacker News as a non-CS liberal arts graduate - jordanlee
http://bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com/post/29540504926/reading-hacker-news-as-a-non-cs-liberal-arts

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h2s
What is this doing on the front page of HN? It isn't news, it isn't
interesting technical content, and it isn't relevant to the tech business or
startups.

It's literally just a funny picture. I love me some funny pictures, but not on
Hacker News. Can we please keep this Reddit-style stuff from becoming a thing?
I come here to read interesting things, not to browse through funny pictures
for cheap laughs.

~~~
mkr-hn
This is criticism of HN, not a silly image. More than a few people were
critical of HN in text and hit a brick wall. Maybe this will work better.

~~~
tomasien
Do you really think it's a criticism? I don't, I think it's honestly how he
sees it. That's EXACTLY how I felt when I was in the same position, and I
still feel this way sometimes. I loved this!

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johncoltrane
I'm not a CS graduate, I didn't went to the university and I understand/follow
the basic concepts behind most of what I see here because it happens to to map
quite well with my areas of interest _and_ my actual job: front end developer.
What I don't understand/don't know I'm very glad I can read about it here.

I usually avoid the facebook/twitter/google/ms/apple/stocks stuff because I
don't give a crap and am not a fanboy but I like most of the rest. The
signal/noise ratio is still extremely high on HN for me (it was higher when I
started lurking, though). If it's too low for you, why do you inflict yourself
all this suffering?

~~~
rayiner
The SNR on HN is great. For one, most people here still know what SNR means. I
still like reddit but at some point in the last several years teenagers became
the primary demographic. Anyone remember when it was mostly programmers?

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frozenport
Its worse. Now its regular people.

~~~
thaumaturgy
The first sign of trouble I've seen for every social site in the last 10 years
has been when that site's users start saying, "At least we're better than
________."

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carlisle_
I think all the replies I've seen to this (including on the blog) seem to
completely miss the tongue-in-cheek humor.

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raverbashing
This also rings a bell here I suppose
<http://bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com/image/32317753046>

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jessedhillon
Add to that: "Why racism, ageism, sexism and other problems had by people not
like me don't actually exist"

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icemelt8
Here let me give the response which was actually meant for this: hahaha ...
this is funny :D

~~~
matt4711
her other posts are also very funny in my opinion :p

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pianoben
Am I the only person who read the acronym as 'Bay Area Query Language'?

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naradaellis
My first thought was Bachelor (of) Arts Query Language

~~~
z92
I thought is was some new form of SQL, and the article will be claiming how
it's better than NoSQL.

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brudgers
What makes HN interesting is that there are a lot of stories on topics with
which I am unfamiliar. Odds are that a lot of them will be uninteresting when
I read or more likely skim the first article or two. Often this is because I
don't have the contextual hooks to make it interesting - Clojure and closures
are but two examples of topics that have become interesting from reading HN
articles.

But, that's just reading the articles. Much of the value of reading HN is
reading the discussions, and for myself, even more of the value I find in HN
is participating in those discussions.

As a Liberal Arts graduate, I use HN to improve my writing. The constraints
imposed by the topic and the feedback provided by the karma system help.
Interaction with some really fucking smart people who write well helps even
more.

Which reminds me that as parody the article falls flat - no article about
Apple's latest at the top of the HN front page.

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tomasien
I love this, it's important to remember the way HN can simulate the SV bubble
and step out of it and see things from someone with new eyes' perspective. I'd
love to see at least 1 HN satire thing make the front page every day.

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pervycreeper
The insinuation that one needs a technical degree to understand HN headlines
is erroneous and pernicious. The advantage of being on the internet is that
you are a small number of clicks away from learning the meaning of any
arbitrary string of punctuation marks. The only requirement to do this is a
willingness to learn. The apposition of what presumably denotes technical
terminology and meaningless management jargon (i.e. "## paradigm") suggests
that the author of this comic is unwilling to venture very far outside of a
small intellectual comfort zone.

~~~
cafard
The insinuation is erroneous and pernicious? Spoken like a liberal arts
graduate! (I should know, I am one.)

~~~
pervycreeper
Hey, I try my best. If I can accurately represent my position in words, I
consider myself lucky, even if it costs me a few 50 cent words.

~~~
cafard
No, it's well that you avoided "considered harmful".

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davidw
Reading and commenting on Hacker News as a non-graduate of anything, with one
whole term of a programming course:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidw>

