BAQL: Reading Hacker News as a non-CS liberal arts graduate

http://bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com/post/29540504926/reading-hacker-news-as-a-non-cs-liberal-arts

by jordanlee • 14 years ago

76 27 14 years ago

bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com

davidw• 14 years ago

Reading and commenting on Hacker News as a non-graduate of anything, with one whole term of a programming course:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidw

johncoltrane2• 14 years ago

I'm not a CS graduate, I didn't went to the university and I understand/follow the basic concepts behind most of what I see here because it happens to to map quite well with my areas of interest and my actual job: front end developer. What I don't understand/don't know I'm very glad I can read about it here.

I usually avoid the facebook/twitter/google/ms/apple/stocks stuff because I don't give a crap and am not a fanboy but I like most of the rest. The signal/noise ratio is still extremely high on HN for me (it was higher when I started lurking, though). If it's too low for you, why do you inflict yourself all this suffering?

rayiner• 14 years ago

The SNR on HN is great. For one, most people here still know what SNR means. I still like reddit but at some point in the last several years teenagers became the primary demographic. Anyone remember when it was mostly programmers?

frozenport• 14 years ago

Its worse. Now its regular people.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

Yes, I remember that.

And, of course, Reddit's promotion algorithm is anti-content.

carlisle_• 14 years ago

I think all the replies I've seen to this (including on the blog) seem to completely miss the tongue-in-cheek humor.

icemelt8• 14 years ago

Here let me give the response which was actually meant for this: hahaha ... this is funny :D

matt4711• 14 years ago

her other posts are also very funny in my opinion :p

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

Add to that: "Why racism, ageism, sexism and other problems had by people not like me don't actually exist"

raverbashing• 14 years ago

This also rings a bell here I suppose http://bayareaquarterlife.tumblr.com/image/32317753046

pianoben• 14 years ago

Am I the only person who read the acronym as 'Bay Area Query Language'?

naradaellis• 14 years ago

My first thought was Bachelor (of) Arts Query Language

z92• 14 years ago

I thought is was some new form of SQL, and the article will be claiming how it's better than NoSQL.

pervycreeper2• 14 years ago

The insinuation that one needs a technical degree to understand HN headlines is erroneous and pernicious. The advantage of being on the internet is that you are a small number of clicks away from learning the meaning of any arbitrary string of punctuation marks. The only requirement to do this is a willingness to learn. The apposition of what presumably denotes technical terminology and meaningless management jargon (i.e. "## paradigm") suggests that the author of this comic is unwilling to venture very far outside of a small intellectual comfort zone.

cafard2• 14 years ago

The insinuation is erroneous and pernicious? Spoken like a liberal arts graduate! (I should know, I am one.)

pervycreeper2• 14 years ago

Hey, I try my best. If I can accurately represent my position in words, I consider myself lucky, even if it costs me a few 50 cent words.

bobwaycott• 14 years ago

Hmm. You received quite a different insinuation than I did. I don't think there was any suggestion that one needs a technical degree to understand HN headlines. Judging by the other comics on the site, I don't think the author has any difficulty understanding HN headlines.

Instead, I believe the artist was attempting to communicate that a great number of the stories that are posted to HN embody a litany of subjective, semi-defensible, jargon-filled articles that don't quite meet the bar of objective, defensible information and/or positions expected by (and drilled into) those who have a liberal arts degree.

Perhaps I'm reading a bit too much into the comic and granting it insinuation that's not there (granted, my degree & grad work was in history and philosophy, so I could be off on the author's intention and reading in my own subjective interpretation), but it struck me as the author saying the typical HN post is far less technical and objective than one might expect it to be, and far more subjectively opinionated on various topics. With a dash of overreactive emotional polemics in response to change.

h2s• 14 years ago

What is this doing on the front page of HN? It isn't news, it isn't interesting technical content, and it isn't relevant to the tech business or startups.

It's literally just a funny picture. I love me some funny pictures, but not on Hacker News. Can we please keep this Reddit-style stuff from becoming a thing? I come here to read interesting things, not to browse through funny pictures for cheap laughs.

mkr-hn• 14 years ago

This is criticism of HN, not a silly image. More than a few people were critical of HN in text and hit a brick wall. Maybe this will work better.

tomasien2• 14 years ago

Do you really think it's a criticism? I don't, I think it's honestly how he sees it. That's EXACTLY how I felt when I was in the same position, and I still feel this way sometimes. I loved this!

ArekDymalski• 14 years ago

If it Is any criticism it's more targeted on people who come here but don't bother too educate themselves on topics which are posted and discussed. I'm not an engineer but I'm able to actively use HN.

brudgers• 14 years ago

What makes HN interesting is that there are a lot of stories on topics with which I am unfamiliar. Odds are that a lot of them will be uninteresting when I read or more likely skim the first article or two. Often this is because I don't have the contextual hooks to make it interesting - Clojure and closures are but two examples of topics that have become interesting from reading HN articles.

But, that's just reading the articles. Much of the value of reading HN is reading the discussions, and for myself, even more of the value I find in HN is participating in those discussions.

As a Liberal Arts graduate, I use HN to improve my writing. The constraints imposed by the topic and the feedback provided by the karma system help. Interaction with some really fucking smart people who write well helps even more.

Which reminds me that as parody the article falls flat - no article about Apple's latest at the top of the HN front page.

tomasien2• 14 years ago

I love this, it's important to remember the way HN can simulate the SV bubble and step out of it and see things from someone with new eyes' perspective. I'd love to see at least 1 HN satire thing make the front page every day.

BAQL: Reading Hacker News as a non-CS liberal arts graduate

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