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- Hacker News
- Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.by rglover
- An engineer friend of mine, after a decade in industry where he rose to management, decided to go get an MBA at a top ten management school. Compared to engineering, he said it was easy, since everything they teach you is obvious common sense.
I thought that meant the degree was worthless. But he said just the opposite. Even though it's all obvious common sense, it really helps to have someone lay it all out together and remind you to think about those obvious common sense things as you go about managing a business.
by zugi - Common sense is gold. It's also hard to find. Ask yourself where, if you were interested, you might find a book full of common sense about say, the airline industry. It's a hard question, right? Most stuff will be either too technical, or too shallow, or simply annoying.
Relatedly, I've found that AIs are spectacularly good at common sense. Nowadays, if I ask myself where I can find common sense about the airline industry, the answer is "Ask an AI, of course." We've never had the ability to find common sense so easily.
by sandspar - Stating the obvious (or maybe not). A bit of internet history, the word blog comes from web log, and shorten to take just the last 4 letters.
I like actually taking the full form weblog and nudging the space we get also 'we blog'.
by jzer0cool - Bit of extra Internet history:
Blogs existed in a previous iteration, before anyone coined the weblog term. The community called them E/N sites.
by qup - I never imagined my blogs to be useful to anyone. For me, they're mostly just things I felt like sharing but with no particular audience in mind. Over the years though, I find myself receiving email from people who I helped. I even googled quite a few things in the past years only to find the first answer to be a blog of mine. So I unblocked myself a few times.
Blogging is fun. What's obvious for you isn't for everyone.
by jlengrand - indeed! this is pretty much exactly how i feel about mine as well. i blog for myself, mostly. i enjoy the act of writing, just about whatever is on my mind at any point in time and inspires me to write about it. i know that i have some readers (like you, i've gotten very kind emails from people who have stopped by my site), and i am very thankful for those readers.
but even if i had zero readers, i would still enjoy the act of writing and putting it out there. i can go back to my blog and look through the years, and see how my outlook on things has changed, how i've grown over time. and the process of writing itself is just cathartic, at the same time.
and as you mentioned, it's fun! :)
by rav3ndust - 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 - We're all just birds displaying our plumage.by sandspar
- 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 - Hahaha, this is so accurate. I do this so often because I start off with a certain mindset and then when I get maybe 10% of the way through I find that I won't finish the post in any time if I write at this pace. So I have this idea! "Imperfect is Okay! I'll publish it and refine it over time by expounding on each section". Then I publish it and never look at it again. Hilarious! In the end, this entire genre of writing is no longer useful so I suppose not much harm is done.by arjie
- 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.
- > ...I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact...
I was about to reply that hey, i like novelty...but, then thought about it, and agree with you! I think you're totally right! What i *really* like is the impact that novelty might have. So, novelty might merely be one of several vehicles to convey impact/value!
by mxuribe - 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 - Somebody already linked 1053, but https://xkcd.com/2501/ also applies. When you're wrapped in an information bubble, it's easy to forget that this could be new, exciting/important information to people outside the bubble.by cryptopian
- by dgudkov
- 3) It's validating to know that other people see the problem, and it can create a discussion around it.by nicbou
- When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
- Reminds me of this tweet thread from Emmett Shear (cofounder of Twitch):
"I used to struggle w needing to be “creative” or “original” in my work. At some point I had a breakthrough that really helped me: I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how basic or common, without imparting some of my worldview into it.
Even by choosing which basic ideas to amplify, I impart some small amount of myself into each output. It’s literally impossible for a given tweet to be “unoriginal”. Equally impossible to be Truly Original too of course, since you’re always remixing others thoughts.
This POV does put a premium on cultivating and developing one’s worldview, since that is the underlying originality simmering under the surface of each “basic” thought. The best writing is rewriting, including of other people’s words, and the lens is your whole mind."
by krrishd - 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!
- As it was fortold in the prophecy:
Relevant xkcd <https://xkcd.com/1053/>
by jedimastert - https://xkcd.com/1053/
For every thing "everyone knows", there are ten thousand people learning about it for the first time, every day.
by andai - > 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 - Maybe society just rewards the first penguin to jump into the sea.by melagonster
- Popularity is not quality, and quality depends on the audience and your own value system, not internet randos.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
ADD: Here's the scene I was referring to. John Lithgow had far, far too much fun chewing up the furniture on that series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIN4tC5Zwx0
- by anileated
- "I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"by dchftcs
- Most relevant xkcd I thing:by baxtr