Ok, this is the perfect place to say how I use Algolia :)
I view HN as follows: smart people upvote interesting resources. Among those resources are educational resources. These resources are potentially of very high quality. It's a good reason to upvote something into oblivion.
So whenever I want to learn something, I don't go to Google first. I go to Hacker news. I type in the topic I want to learn, and hope that there are highly upvoted educational resources.
Two things can happen:
1. The upvoted resource is amazing.
2. The upvoted resource gets burned to the ground in the comments.
In the case of 2, then there is almost always a good recommendation to find in the comments. Sometimes these comments are standalone comments -- a bit risky, but better than nothing. Sometimes these comments are well supported by positive raving child comments.
Whenever I have a stupid question or a weird problem that I google, 95 of the time I find a blog post detailing how someone fixed it. It's a small thing, perhaps, but it really is worth appreciating all the people who take the time to help point other folks on their way.
Yeah. And that's what we have to keep in mind when complaining. Sometimes I have to say to myself, wait a minute, at least he/she took the time to write about it.
Wow, almost every comment on there sounds like it belongs on /r/iamverysmart. They also match tone with one friend I still have on facebook, a guy who went to the same rural Christian high school as me and is now a London lawyer who sounds like he's competing to be the most pretentious person on earth every time he opens his mouth.
I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about that guy, and the econjobrumors people, and I think it's just the general un-empathetic contempt that they seem to offer pretty much everyone.
HN has it's fair share of bad habits (god help you if you post a demo website that doesn't work well on mobile, for example), but to me the overall tone feels respectful and kind, and most criticism is directed at the work rather than at the creator. That's what keeps me here, and why I stay the hell away from sycophant factories like the linked forum.
This was particularly true during the pre-crash years when Econ was the _default_ college major because finance was so much more lucrative than other disciplines.
Frankly, now CS is the _default_ college major in at least the elite sort of places with an abundance of smart students with a lack of direction. A career as in software (whether it be as a SWE or PM) is on a per hour basis now so much more lucrative than most other disciplines.
I'm a Princeton alum. The largest Freshman declared major is CS [1]. That's from a Dean's mouth. I was absolutely shocked since we are one of the most prominent WS feeder schools.
[1] presumably some will switch majors but piling into a lucrative major as a freshman is a strong signal of how students perceive the industries.
I love how the things I wish I knew about JavaScript includes shorthand declaration for objects and arrays, the Math function and how great json is. It must have been a much simpler time.
I look forward to when in the future some automated system knows what everyone is doing in the upcoming week/month/yr and automatically shows them "things I wish" style things relevant to them.
"cambridge analytica" is big and public one.
Facebook did some experiments too, selling to depressed teenagers or something...
They know "things you wish you knew", they know what is beneficial to you, but they will use this knowledge to manipulate you, they will use stuff you don't know against you to persuade you and me on scale, and later we will write "I wish I knew" but nobody will listen.
It's better to show ad about new nosql in town, and make some money, if they know you will make a mistake of trying new framework instead of sticking with what you know and what works, they will show you ads for online courses.
I view HN as follows: smart people upvote interesting resources. Among those resources are educational resources. These resources are potentially of very high quality. It's a good reason to upvote something into oblivion.
So whenever I want to learn something, I don't go to Google first. I go to Hacker news. I type in the topic I want to learn, and hope that there are highly upvoted educational resources.
Two things can happen:
1. The upvoted resource is amazing.
2. The upvoted resource gets burned to the ground in the comments.
In the case of 2, then there is almost always a good recommendation to find in the comments. Sometimes these comments are standalone comments -- a bit risky, but better than nothing. Sometimes these comments are well supported by positive raving child comments.