There was a Vox video called "Who made these circles in the Sahara?" that really showcased the investigative powers of journalists once they have the budget to bring in the big guns.
Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader.
Counterpoint: part of how I learned from smarter people was to copy their habits, and part of their habits was to read good books with good practices.
Learning how to read non-fiction books, as I discovered, is actually a skill that needs to be learned, as my historian friends who wolf down thirty books in a week will tell you (the trick is to read only the parts you need instead of reading cover to cover, though I am still learning how to learn).
And counterpoint to counterpoint: While fields in the humanities are 'book-based', CS is mostly 'article-based'. And furthermore, on the bleeding edge, textbooks don't exist yet, documentation is shoddy, and sometimes you have to read the original source code.
Reading only the parts you need sounds awfully like consulting the docs, source, or talking to other people (stack overflow, Reddit, etc falls into this category for me).
Reminds me of "ye", pronounced and meaning "the", in English, because medieval printers imported from Germany didn't have that letter "Þ' and 'Y' was the closest substitute.
It's worth noting that "ye" also existed as the second person plural pronoun while "þe" simultaneously existed as a second person singular. These are now merged in most English dialects. Getting the unrelated definite article "þe" mixed up in this and substituting a "y" was more than just a matter of misguided font substitution because some forms of the handwritten thorn look very similar to a "y". Two words pronounced "the", one of which is easily conflated with another spelled and pronounced "ye" leads to the inevitable result.
I think it is unreasonable to expect that hackers are expert assyriologists, material scientists, or sociologists, despite what we may think about ourselves. Some of us are fortunate enough to know many things and master a few more disciplines. Few of us have mastered everything.
I know that I'm a glorified glue monkey. On all other subjects, I am ignorant, and rely on the opinions of others.
After leaving reddit, I'm trying not to relapse into karma farming and speculating about topics which I have no expertise in, which just about leaves my own personal anecdotes about growing up Canadian. That, and asking the beginner's question. That's probably for the best for the health of the forum at large.
Welcome to Hacker News, where you curate your experience mostly the old-fashioned way - in your brain.
It doesn't always work out great, but no one ever promised it would. About three days in five, I look at the front page and shake my head. But the other two, it's worth more to me than any of the newspapers I actually pay for.
It occurs to me that metaprogramming looks awfully familiar in JavaScript.
function process_item(item, action)
{
item[action]();
}
(Also similarly forgetting the guard statement).
Probably not great code, but still.
Since there are no classes in JS and everything is an object, you technically have complete control over such 'classes' and 'methods'. This is probably why people keep trying on turning JS into a different and saner language, or better yet, are using another language entirely like TS. Which is a shame, because it's kind of fun to dynamically generate new functions on the fly and having complete freedom to do anything you want.
The lathe is honestly one of the most underrated inventions of modern civilization.
Though I can't recall of the top of my head, there are certainly more than a few inventions which were simply not practical to build before the invention of the lathe because the tolerances were not good enough with traditional techniques.
There's an entire books series on this concept, the "Gingery" books where the first in the series is setting up a foundry for casting, while the second is making a lathe from investment castings because a lathe is the only tool in a workshop which can duplicate itself.
The practical kind of steam engine that drove the industrial revolution is one example. Steam engines existed earlier but when they started turning the cylinders, they became much more efficient which allowed them to be used for a much larger variety of tasks.
"The Perfectionists" by Simon Winchester goes into a whole lot of detail about the history of precision and the role it's taken.
I like the meme of the personal webpage, which has sort of fallen by the wayside with the rise of social media.
It's one of those ideas that spreads because you see other people doing it: You get the OG blogs still up with 90s styling, student blogs with like 2 posts, and longform explorations of trying to squeeze out every ms of performance from D3 by rewriting parts of it in WASM [1], which link to the posts that it was inspired by, an even crazier attempt which tries to turn off all its safeties.
It forms an entire ecosystem, to which Hackernews, Google, et etc, form a kind of gateway into the canopy of a blogosphere.
One more thing: can we do more linking? Like, have a section of our blogs that's basically, "here are the blogs of a bunch of people I find interesting"? Is there a reason why we don't do that (spam or harassment)?
For the past few decades, Americans, and especially college-educated professionals, have been sold a distorted view of politics that essentially amounts to watching sports.
Most of us have never seen a working example of democracy. We have just sort of tacitly accepted a kind of benevolent dictatorship in most institutions, from our workplace to open-source (and please correct me if I'm wrong here, I know that there is a kind of democracy in forking and collaboration, but as I understand it, voting democracy isn't really found anywhere.)
I was just watching Car 54 where are you? the other night, and in it, you can see the members of a fictional police union voting on absolutely everything, from union dues, to where to host the christmas dinner. People voted, made speeches, and ran for office, and all of this within like a tiny local. This kind of general participatory democracy seems as quaint as the black and white film it's played on.
My advice to you is to join something. There's a number of civics activists trying to push for some local issue, like transit, or housing, or raising funds for a local hospital; all else failing, you could always volunteer for your local party and get to know the candidate. It's a really good salve to that feeling of general powerlessness.
Then, instead of feeling powerless, you'll know you're mostly powerless, but at the very least, you won't be alone.
It's articles that these that remind me of how much we English-speakers are missing in the full breadth of human literature. For every Shakespeare, there is a Jára Cimrman, and for every Jára Cimrman, there is another who goes unnamed.
Budget cuts and the gutting of profitable newspapers by Alden Global Capital really destroyed a lot of journalism and turned it into "internet journalism", at which point, they are scarcely better than the average reader.
https://youtu.be/twAP3buj9Og