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- Hacker News
- Yeah, whatever's obvious to you might not be obvious to someone else, and your take on a common take may appeal to certain people more than existing ones.
Plus let's be honest, there are a surprising number of topics where the obvious hasn't actually been documented in any real way, or where finding an answer to certain questions is near impossible. In those cases, just having an answer publicly available rather than say, on Discord or Google Docs can be a huge help.
by CM30 - There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.
And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.
I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.
by sharkjacobs - I read a lot of beginner/tute FP stuff. A mistake they make is doing 2 sentences of "here's how to conceptualise this new notation and what Int -> Int -> Boolean means"
And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.
Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.
Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.
So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)
by ggm - Writing, anywhere, serves multiple ends.
There's spreading new wisdom. There's sharing your own recent discoveries. There's bearing witness to a phenomenon, or adding one's own voice to support or opposition to it (both of which apply to the Gruber example noted here). There is documenting your own path, hopefully forward. There's simply sharing commonplaces and the quotidian, which whilst not grand or spectacular often serves to record or fill in the details which make up a place or time. (One of my own favourite finds at museums are the incidental details, whether within a larger work or of themselves: everyday elements within a painting, small studies or sketches, archeological artefacts such as the gaming pieces, make-up tools and materials, and sand toilets dating from pharonic Egypt of 5,000 years ago.
I do seek novel discoveries myself, I may have made a small handful. More usually, if I think of something I look to see who might have come across the idea first. If I'm quite lucky, I'm only a few decades behind the vanguard. Generally I see that not as a failure but a sign that I'm treading interesting ground, and not too far from the frontier itself.
by dredmorbius - Thank you for sharing this observation.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
- A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me:
1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
by nate - Everyone learns different things at different phases of life. And when they do, they're excited to share. And if they have a website, they will write about it there.
Think of this way. It doesn't matter if the message/info you are sharing is already written about. A ton of people didn't know about it. So when the message is written about again by YOU, more new people will know about it. And read it. Sucks for people who know about what you are sharing. But you're not writing for them, are you?
Not to mention, even if a person already know about the topic someone wrote about, there is still new perspective and angle to it that this piece might have. So, read it for different perspectives or angles!
- > So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
by Paracompact