Hacker News Reader

Comment by petterroea | Hacker News Reader

One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.

Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.

View on HN

I upvoted but I was not taught this! I have had to slowly figure it out on my own. Writing things down is kind of like augmenting your brain. It's a memory that does not forget. When working through a problem, writing it down tends to point out the holes in your understanding. A corner case is never lost or forgotten when written down, it just stares at you until you write down a solution. The next step after realizing this is to develop the discipline to write things down and to organize your environment so it's effortless to write things down.

Same, I had to learn this the hard way. In fact, I find that many (younger me included) are arrogant about *not* wanting to deal with writing due to it feeling like waste of time. But after maintaining codebases for 5+ years, you begin to appreciate younger you explaining wtf you were thinking.

And now, being at a point in my career where I have opinions on many things and discuss them with peers, I slowly realized writing about it was actually helping me more than anything.

Using something like confluence religiously in a team is a big boon. Write docs about everything. Write to get decisions done, to plan, to celebrate, to retrospect, to architect, to help oncall. Everything! Doesnt need to be beautiful prose - just needs to be famn useful and ideally easy/quick to read.

Maybe in US, if you learn to write in a simple and straightforward way.

In France essays are all about writing in a complex way to show how smart you are. Which not only is not a useful skill to have, it's detrimental because we learn to write in obscure and hard to understand ways.

This is painfully true. I went to a US university after high school in France and had a really hard time adjusting to the American style of essays. So many paragraphs with sentences crossed off for being too long, in particular. Hitting word limits when, in a French dissertation, you'd just be getting started (an exaggeration, yes, but still).

It wasn't a "language" problem because I was already a fluent American English speaker. It was all style-related.

I've recently started reading 19th century French literature again and sometimes I have to reread sentences multiple times because they're so long I come to the wrong conclusion too early.

This reminds me a bit of my Korean professor from college. Perhaps the most memorable thing from his class was when he explained the Korean style of writing essays was to not explain up front what you are going to cover but to "beat around the bush" until the end. He accompanied the bit in quotes with a mime of him swinging a stick at various parts of a really big bush.

For some reason, that image will forever accompany that phrase in my mind.

I watch a lot of k-dramas and all I can say is: that tracks.

They still want you to write in an academic style, even if that style is fairly different.

I was once asked to write to then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to sway him on some political issue. That's certainly a practical assignment, but I chatted with some classmates about it, and none of us thought the professor would give a good grade to something that might genuinely sway the man.

I've tried a few time to read le Journal du Hacker, the french-speaking clone of Hacker News and each time I've found that the writing level is so low it's basically unreadable.

"One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually."

It is interesting in how challenging it can be to convince some younger developers of this. Some of the stronger and more technically proficient developers (that are young-ish... mid 30's and down, let's say) have a level of contempt for those skills that is surprising and not trivial to coach them on. They seem to suffer from "smartest person in the room" syndrome and mistakenly believe those smarts apply to everything they deal with rather than the just the technical areas that they excel in.

I agree. But I also think there is an overlap between programming and writing. If you are a good programmer, you have some abilities that can help you explain a subject or argue some point. Especially when it is about something non-trivial.

I write to the computers because sure as fuck wasn't nobody gonna give me no money for writing to the humans. Instead, I am lead to understand that during the formative years of my primary caretakers, what people got for writing was jail time. And the people who put 'em there never actually went anywhere; they just became less visible as they shed the dead weight of the state apparatus.

As a result, computer touchin' is how my entire cohort developed sentience, since computers have the useful property of always responding correctly when asked correctly. Humans, meanwhile, can quite easily become trapped in a permanent low-intensity fight-or-flight state - where they only respond correctly to incorrect statements, and vice versa.

For better or worse, ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining people to you if you describe what you did and what happened and don't leave out the details. Just be aware that you're human too and it'll syncophantically tell you you're right if you leave anything out, which really strokes the ego, but doesn't actually help. Don't fall into that trap. If you're worried about privacy, get a local one instead of ChatGPT.

I'm definitely in the "for worse" camp on that one, and doing my part.

If I was exposed to LLMs when I was a wee atom, I strongly suspect it would've had a massively detrimental effect.

Tbh, an effect not unlike that of the shitfractal of media that our salad days were wasted on. You know, all those endless cultural artifacts that purport to explain people to themselves (in a literally - but at least somewhat more visibly - irresponsible way.) Just ... vastly more so.

Basically, with my socioeconomic background, if I'd had GPT as a kid, I don't think I would have even developed a mind. Exact opposite of a Diamond Age scenario.

Generally, I consider the perspective of people aligned with AI to be a perspective from which a P-zombie is superior in all respects to a conscious being. And I've seen enough of that shit without needing to fucking self-host it, thank you very much, go get an actual therapist, they need to eat too.

Pithy: "Writing things down is a special way of processing them for yourself."

A fictional example of this that I love is (seriously) the Twilight rewrite Luminosity: https://luminous.elcenia.com/chapters/ch1.shtml. Bella writes everything down in her notebook and is unusually self-reflective.

One benefit of blogs that isn't mentioned enough is the opportunity to express unorthodox ideas, and the chance to defend them to form a good thesis.

Diversity of thought is pretty valuable. So is training yourself to think independently, come up with your own premises and learning to build sound arguments, which you also get from writing and discussing ideas.

I wish they taught this in my school!

Likewise with marketing skills.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com