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Comment by fridek | Hacker News Reader

I hope this list stays brief. Every list so far I observed was eventually bloated to hundreds of items (useful or not) by helpful pull requests.

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That's because the people who make them don't know what pedagogy is. This is lazy pedagogy. It's like leaving a kid at a library instead of at a school. Why do we have schools and teachers, when libraries with big lists of things to read have existed for hundreds of year?

If you want the answer to that spend a year or two looking at what good pedagogy is preferably with someone who is highly skilled at it.

it's already too bloated, some are things every systems programmer should know, the SEO is things every web programmer should know. The embedded programmers don't need to know it, really. Hardly any programmer needs to know the RegexHQ one, they can look that stuff up if needed.

I guess they should have done an AND instead of an OR?

Right now it's "Every Programmer Combined Should Know"

Right, there are things that every programmer ANDED should know, but those are few.

And at that level of generality it could probably be pruned slightly more for a list of things that everybody who manages programmers or is a programmer should know.

There are loads of people who don't actually know how to efficiently cut the loin from a pig, tack against the wind, or ensure proper close air support while bringing even a few thousand soldiers into territory held by an enemy force...

But who still post that Heinline monologue about how specialization is for insects.

Heinlein's quote I think is not to be taken too literally. It's the notion that human beings can do so many things and there's a lot of synergy in knowing that many things. You'll start seeing connections between one and the other and solve problems in activity A while doing activity B. It's fun too!

I might not know how to butcher a pig, but I know multiple programming languages, multiple human languages, I ski, I climb, I skate, I ride bikes. I can cook foods from cuisines from all over the world. I read books on things I haven't formally studied.

Life is just more interesting if you're not a one trick insect.

> not to be taken too literally

Sure, but it doesn't help you actually decide where the line is between "things which I should focus on learning" and "things which are massive skills that it would take many years to learn and I shouldn't bother." My biggest problem here is with "learn how to plan an invasion".

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