Comment by adityaathalye | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adityaathalye | Hacker News Reader

My word, my whole blog is antipatterns (probably because I write it for me :D). Like, look at these doozies (all have lengthy preambles). There are more, but these cover all the antipatterns mtlynch mentioned. I am not at all sad, rather I am chuckling because when one doesn't care who reads the post, one can get away with such ghastly antimatter :D

And, allow me to add antipattern no. N, in full display in the posts below: A 1:1 ratio of main body to footnotes, because we want some place to put all the spicy asides and hot takes.

What to do, my brain struggles with brevity :)

  Exhibit A:

Over ten thousand ~~words~~ tokens on bitemporal data modeling (in SQLite and Clojure), which has a preamble and a postamble: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/poor-mans-time-oriented-data... (Plus, this one breaks on mobile portrait view because I couldn't figure out the CSS-fu needed to stop one pesky table from overflowing, and I am not going to fix it because the post reads fine in landscape mode).

  Exhibit B:

More thousands of words, urg no, tokens... on Terraforming one's infra: It opens with a Harvey Specter meme. https://www.evalapply.org/posts/systems-approach-to-infrastr...

  Exhibit C:

Another giant post on web stacks from first principles, and this one has a whole parable as well as a preamble: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/clojure-web-app-from-scratch...

  Exhibit D:

A six part series, because this one got too long (re-making your dotemacs from scratch tends to go that way). Um, and each post gets progressively longer and preambly-er: https://www.evalapply.org/tags/emacs/index.html#main

(edit: reorder + fix formatting for clarity)

Honest question: if you truly only write for yourself, why submit the posts to HN and prominently display social sharing shortcuts at the top of each post?

I can understand the position that you do care about other people reading your post, but you weigh your own enjoyment of your posts more heavily than anything else, but I'm skeptical of the claim that you don't care who reads your posts.

Well, my site doesn't track views. No analytics etc. So I have no idea which post gets what traffic, and I very much prefer it that way.

Also, the posts are structured to the way I have come to arrive at some conclusion, or some understanding. So it is very much written for my own benefit, and incidentally shared because well why not. Surely I'm not the only one who was confused, or ignorant, or just curious about $Topic... Just don't expect that I will rewrite the thing for some abstract audience persona and how their brain works. If something is weird or unclear or plain wrong, search is at hand. And if something is annoying, well there are certainly lots of other places to go to instead. So, no, I don't really think about who reads my stuff. These days, it must be all bots anyway. So be it.

But I do like to also "learn generously", and I love to share and talk the about stuff I end up publishing from my drafts and notes (which far exceed the stuff up there in public view). So when I feel like it, I share links in various places. Usually its crickets. Sometimes there is conversation.

The "share to HN" etc. stuff is in service of prompting people to share if they feel so inclined. And honestly, I don't think people share via those links. No data, just gut feel, given how long the site has been up, and how uncommon it is for not-me people to post links to HN.

As for the prominence of said links. It has been an eyesore and a long-pending thing to delete. Sometimes I use the site as a playground. That time, I wanted to see if what "they" say is true about putting sharing links up top, prominently. So I slapped that section in, during one of the layout refactors.

And so, the top of the posts got way too busy with those "see me! pick me! choose me!" links, and stayed because I couldn't bring myself to refactor yet again. (Also because there's not much to lose because someone got annoyed at the eyesore click-share links. Yeah, friend, I'm annoyed too. Sucks to be us.)

(edit: expand comment to clarify some thoughts)

Interesting, I appreciate the detailed response!

Thanks :)

It so happens the eyesore "pick me!" links are gone now, except they are in a draft layout refactor. But please don't ask I know when it's going to go live. Could be tomorrow (or rather today---it's 2am here---and in that delicious sleep-deprived fugue state say eff this, I'm done, send it).

Or it could be next year.

(:

Oh, I should add: "practise discussing things in public, without losing my cool" is also a reason I self-post links to forums like HN.

Not uncommonly, people are salty in the comments. Mostly it's fun to ignore the salt, and let the community do its thing, while also trying to observe what's going on with my feelings. Sometimes it's fun, or necessary, to show up and respond to flip the thread from destructive to constructive. This is a skill I can get better at, and I feel my odds of being better are higher with topics I've thought about for a good long while, and so that balances out in favour of taking the risk to self-share.

Well, I have only just now skimmed your blog, but you already gave me a smirk.

  If you spot any, please write to complaints @ my domain. (And if you want to say nice things, write to compliments @ my domain :).

It's because your blog is good. Not all blogs need to be primers targeted at idiot level leeches who abhor thinking for themselves and cry when confronted with facts like "the author is a different human than me".

Thanks for the compliment, but also wow the second part got salty fast!

Honestly, I think there is value in having lived in "idiot mode", because that is the feeling I walk around with most of my life. And thinking is hard, so I don't want to, most of the time, but then I have to, because who will pay my bills otherwise?

Some of those posts are, in fact, because I felt like an uncomprehending idiot, about the blog post's topic, for the longest time ever. And it turned out that I was holding it completely wrong, or had pop-cultured myself into a prejudiced (therefore uninformed) opinion. Then, once some clarity arrived, I wanted to spool it to disk before it evaporated again. And lo and behold, post emerges.

Well, you saved me writing a similar comment, and I like your blog too. (BTW I completely agree with your musings on what we might do with all this hardware, post-bubble. I actually started and... not quite abandoned a "sci-fi-ish short fiction" series on my own blog trying to think through those applications in my own industry.)

In my own writing it's like, I'm mostly trying to put something out in the world that I, and sometimes my friends, enjoy. The rambling is not exactly the point, but not exactly not the point either. If other like-minded people find it, great. Once somebody tipped me a thousandth of a Bitcoin or so, and that was fun too.

Hah, thank you for the kind appreciation. And I totally get that sentiment "the rambling is not exactly the point, but... ... ... ...".

For half a second I read the rest of it as "a thousand Bitcoin", and immediately thought "okay, so there's a story here about how it was way early and how you tipped someone else, and now, just look at them, wow".

(edit: also, cool blog yourself... subscribed!)

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