This is not aimed at the commenter, but rather a generalized statement:
yntries like this make me love and at the same time hate HN. Great articles with mostly uninformed comments, whereas the two or three guys with knowledge on the topic are buried deep underneath.
Egypt was ptolemaic, thus hellenised. Cleopatra is famously Greek, not Egyptian.
Bring uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated, not condescended. It's an attitude that I see too much of in our society but hope to see less of here on HN.
This is a topic I'm also ignorant of, and I'm glad to see a discussion spark up.
> Bring uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated
I disagree. There's too much noise already. This isn't StackOverflow. Wikipedia exists. People should take a moment to read up on whatever subject before they ask questions rather than wasting other people's time coming up to speed on fundamental knowledge. (It's not like ancient Egyptians and Greeks are particularly obscure, eh?)
We can have much deeper discussions if people ask informed questions.
Sometimes the experts have a really deep discussion, and that's cool. Sometimes people just want to spitball because a post sparked their imagination.
The great thing is, we can do both. If you don't like the question that was asked, find another or ask one yourself. I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
How much research should be necessary? How much baseline knowledge is "enough" to participate? Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you, and instead people get to draw their own lines by engaging, or not, with other commenters on this social network.
> Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you...
I'm not the Spanish Inquisition. The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.
> I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
That's not how I feel. In fact, I would say that "feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions" is a symptom of mental or emotional illness.
What I feel is that it's disrespectful at best to lean on other people for basic knowledge rather than doing one's own homework. Even if you don't agree that "lazyweb" is disrespectful, I would still argue that it wastes a lot of time and energy. If someone asks a question that could be answered by ten minutes of googling, they are just using the forum as a interface to google, eh?
There are plenty of other places on the Internet where people can go to get basic information, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Google, etc... Places where it's perfectly appropriate to be one of the "lucky 10,000" ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ).
I don't think being "uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated" here. FWIW I do think it should be tolerated, because A) that's how some people learn (however disrespectfully and lazily) and B) occasionally ignorant questions lead to very interesting and informative discussions (which is the whole point of HN as far as I'm concerned) and we cannot reliably predict which ignorant questions will lead to such discussions.
> The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.
You can also state your point eloquently, as you did. All I'm doing is expressing my counterpoint to yours in this public forum.
I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?
There's certainly a point where it turns to trolling, but questions asked in good intent are fair game as far as I'm concerned.
> I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?
Well, part of my crankiness on this point comes from the fact that if you're on HN you're on the Internet, so the "information you have on hand at the moment" is more-or-less the information you can find in "10 minutes of googling", eh?
(I'm old enough to remember the day I realized that the 'net was as fast as my hard drive. It was like an expanding horizon, a kind of vision of cyberspace, all that information only milliseconds away... It still blows my mind if I think about it for more than a few moments. Effectively infinite information in a hyper-fractal sea.)
FWIW I do agree with you that condescending to people in re: ignorant questions is unproductive (not to same lame. It's emotional junk food.)
It's a subject you probably heard about at least three times in secondary school. If you forgot, look it up. It's like these people who were in the same state-required economics class I had to take in high school who pass around memes about how kids should have to learn about interest and credit cards and checking accounts and taxes and saving for retirement in high school, because they had to learn on their own.
And your point is? Most people will learn about Alexander at some point in their education; you might notice he wasn’t American either. Same for the Roman Empire.
So what? Do you pass on memes about how there ought to be a required class, as if there weren't one, that you actually were required to take in school?
> Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."[15]
I loved that book! It's interesting with the perfect balance between being academic and still being accessible.
I was just gutted, that it stops in the middle of the 20th century... Yeah, i know, Mulaney will publish a second part, but it was a bit of a let down.
"[...], but for now it is enough to observe that people who don’t know how to use a particular tool very well are being told to throw that tool away and learn to use an entirely new one on the grounds that it will enable them to do things that they could have done at least as well with the old one – which is (when you think about it) a little peculiar if the aim is really to help people with their writing, and not (heaven forbid!) simply to evangelise for a community’s preferred way of doing things."
I'm sorry, but this is a bad argument and the worst life advice in the article.
It's the same students in school tell all the time, when they question why they should learn math, though they are set to become an artist or editor or anything that seemingly does not involve math. You particularly go to college or university to learn NEW things. Even if they are things you probably won't need in the future and are seemingly obsolete.
While he does have a point that (La)TeX Users fetishize their tool of use, most of his arguments can be used on Word or any WISIWYG tool, too. The example he gives in point 4 is so arbitrarily chosen and his minimal example he thinks is better is just as ambigious and confusing as the LaTeX one. Most comments already mention what the author's real problem: Preference of tool.
Well, I don't agree with the author of the article in that I do think that Latex does offer an advantage in many of the use cases. In any case, any student in STEM is supposed to write some reports, and LaTeX is the only choice that makes sense, since there are not many other options with the same support for mathematical typesetting.
However, you're twisting his words a bit. He says that it's not good to learn a new tool if you have an old one which can do the job. Not that you should avoid things for which you need new tools.
I'm all for learning new skills and ideas. However, I hate learning new tools. The ideas in web development are not hard at all. However, there is an idiotic amount of trendy tools and programming languages, and that is something I would object to, because it costs a lot of people a lot of effort.
I never went to school or university to learn obsolete or unnecessary things.
Math, starting from a certain point, is useless for most people, still it is required to be learnt. Math might be a good tool to measure how good a person can think abstractly, but if it's used for that, then be honest and say so.
I wonder what would change in society if we forced all children to learn an instrument as intensive as we force them to learn math.
> It's the same students in school tell all the time, when they question why they should learn math, though they are set to become an artist or editor or anything that seemingly does not involve math.
I never finished high school. Went on to study a bit of nutrition. I work in my trade (metal fabrication) operating a laser cutter, doing a lot of 2D CAD work. I can rebuilt a car engine or build a house, including all electrical and plumbing and brickwork. I've built boats, sailed, dived, I ski, rock climb, occasionally draw a thing with a pencil. I can bash out a simple tune on a piano. I can pull a decent shot of coffee on a commercial grade espresso machine.
Please tell me which bit of your useless math I didn't do has limited me in anyway I care about?
It should not. Moral decay is a result of the system itself. Not that it is something new, but it gets more and more adamant when more and more people or employers want a PhD. Standards for post graduate students have been lowered (at least in my country) over the last 30 years to cope with the demand.
Plus the points she mentions in the fourth part of her posts is the one that made me turn my stomach over, because it is the one argument that i always knew myself, but could not grasp. It's the same reason why i left. You are not wanted because you will take the job someone already occupies.
It is probable that the Odyssey is some kind of navigational diary. In ancient times, ships could only sail the Mediterranean clockwise, alas westward. So it might've made sense he traveled westward.
Ah I'm sorry, i got it a bit wrong. Currents and winds in the Mediterranean are mostly counter-clockwise.
Ancient seafaring was difficult and mostly bound to land. I mean, that they had to travel along the Coast for most of the time and usually tried to avoid high waters. It WAS possible to cross from one side to the other in certain places, e.g. from Sicily to Tunisia, as it is less than 300km apart, but it was generally avoided elsewhere.
Also, sea travel was depended a lot on weather and season. Greeks and Romans were usually advised NOT to travel during winter as winds were rough and unsteady. Even short distance travels took unusually long and were dangerous. The most famous example is of St. Paul who was shipwrecked in Malta at one point. And counter-intuitive at all: The Greeks were actually not very good at seatravel. They always were jealous of the Phoenicians for doing better sea-trade than they.
The Odyssey falls broadly in the category of Periplus. I forgot what a lot of people interpreted into Homer's story, but i guess he just wanted to say "Follow the rules, don't try to sail against the currents or bad things will happen!"
This is why maybe he sailed westward in the story and not straight back...
I did. (as a millenial)
I didn't even study a subject connected to mathematics. I came across it and thought it was neat, so i learned it... but forgot it.
I love the debate in ancient historical studies, that argues if those people that were "conquered" by Alexander and were subjects to later rulers (even though the often tried to deviate from this status by violent or nonviolent means), simply adapted to the new influence not because it was necessary, but because it was fashionable.
Just like a lot of people are fascinate by American culture today and therefore try to learn English or watch Hollywood movies.
https://breitbandmessung.de/kartenansicht-funkloch