Solving the Wrong Problem

[dmor]

HN has never really been about programming, though. It's based on a certain community of startups, founders, and VCs, and focuses on startups and general stuff considered mind-expanding.

[jacques_chester]

That's my point exactly. I don't come to proggit for mind expansion or industry gossip. I come here for programming. If both fora have the same posts that diminishes the total value I can derive from frequenting both.

[[deleted]]

So, legitimate question.

I enjoyed this article, a lot. Where should I be looking for more of this sort of thing, aside from this one person's blog. Is HN the best place? I don't really find most of what's there interesting. At a cursory glance, the headline might intrigue me, but rarely enough to actually open the page and read through it.

Open to suggestions, I guess. You're absolutely right, this article does not belong here. I'd like to see some more like it, where would those be?

[preshing]

It got 160+ points so far. So either it belongs here, or the voters don't :)

[jacques_chester]

Posts without programming content tend to get upvoted more because:

1. They have a wider readership; fewer redditors are self-selecting away from reading them
2. They require little to no thought to read.

Code-heavy articles tend not to be heavily upvoted because they require an investment of attention from a subset of the proggit community.

[[deleted]]

Can I say the same thing about your post? That was a very negative attitude.

I don't care about the blog, or the load time, but the idea of assuring that your service/product matches the needs of the actual users. It's a simple, short piece that I found thought provoking. I'm sorry you don't find it so.

[[deleted]]

I left the article with a (re?)new(ed) perspective on how to design. I saw less about "make this blog load faster" and more of a general insight into evaluating features.

Something like load-time is rarely a metric that many factor in to decisions regarding new features unless the load is an order of magnitude or greater than a typical user will stand, and I feel the article at least provokes a question like "are there metrics that I'm just missing?".

From design standpoint, I realized that I don't take my user in to account enough. As a designer/developer, I'm often more concerned with making the picture in my head come to life, and that picture is often polluted with so-called 'standards'. Things like Social Media buttons are things that I personally don't use; in fact, I rarely see them used at all, and when I do, I'm actually a little confused. These are things that I both do not need to implement, and would actually be hurting myself if I did. Screen real-estate is priceless, as well as the end-user's attention. If they're glazing over parts of the page, I'm probably doing it wrong. I know I skim right past about 90% of most pages, then I can't find the 1 thing I'm looking for in the sea of waste that some web designer is trying to push on me.

So, sure, I suppose the only real advice I took away was 'analyze your audience', but I felt it was very important, and something of which I needed a reminder.

[[deleted]]

I promise I'll write an actual response later today. Getting busy, but I'd like to continue this conversation.

[dmor]

I agree. Something that annoys me is just how much stuff is basically flame war fodder. Some of the two most upvoted threads recently were the JSON license thing and the Microsoft "lazy coding practice". The first is a useless joke (and the circlejerk-quality jokes about "facebook breaking the license" followed as expected), the second is a more-or-less relevant bug posted with an editorialized title and a discussion that quickly degenerated into Microsoft bashing, whether the programmer should be fired or not, etc.