Ask HN: Hour of reading articles in HN vs. 1 hour of reading books?

33 points by hamsterbooster 5 years ago | 26 comments

I'm debating about what would be a better of use of time between reading different blog posts in HN and other tech blogs/news vs. reading books. Some tech blogs or research paper offers a lot of value and help me come up with new ideas and stay up to date. However, reading a book is also very helpful in understanding a particular topic in details.

sushshshsh 5 years ago |

Reading the best books on a topic is infinitely better than any time spent on this site. There is nothing to learn here anymore, it's just news.

For example you'll never hear the words "Concurrent hashmap" or "denormalization strategy" on this site, but you will in an interview.

nextaccountic 5 years ago | |

On concurrent hash tables alone

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22699176 Dashmap: Fast concurrent HashMap for Rust, 4 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425954 Java 8: New features in ConcurrentHashMap, January 2017

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052299 Concurrent Hash Tables: Fast and General? (2019), 84 days ago (a real nice article)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22541925 Show HN: A Simple GPU Hash Table, 4 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14386333 An Atomic Hash Table, May 2017 (I love this)

I suppose there's even more posts database denormalization.

sushshshsh 5 years ago | | |

I did a search on Algolia for "concurrent hashmap" with the search setting on "All" and i got 16 pages of results.

I then did the same for "Justin Bieber" and got 94 pages of results, and I also found an Algolia bug that was printing 97 pages as available but the last three were blank.

This isn't very good news for anyone looking for "technology news" here but it is actually quite good for people who are looking for "entrepreneurship news".

p1esk 5 years ago | |

Ironically, this HN comment is probably the only place where I'd have heard these terms, or that I need to know them for an interview :)

sushshshsh 5 years ago | | |

Enjoy it! Aside from interviews, it has real technical/business value :)

adamlangsner 5 years ago |

Both. If you want to learn about a specific subject / gain a new skill, then books are the way to go. They tend to be more informationally dense and comprehensive as compared to blog posts. Books tend to be of a higher quality because of the economics involved. It's much harder to get a book published than to create a blog, so there's more curation of what gets published which is for your benefit; there's a higher standard for the content. Also, a lot of blogs are used as marketing channels, trying to sell you something. this can corrupt the information in the blog post because they're trying to sell you something other than the blog post. With the book, you're paying for the book so the incentives between you and the author are more aligned.

But, periodicals, blog posts and forums are good to keep apprised of new things going on in the industry and they can be used to get new ideas like you said and as jumping off points to read books. I often see something referenced online, want to learn more and then buy a book on the subject. I like to think of blog posts as more like op-eds than factual works.

dhanna 5 years ago |

HN is ok for passive discovery. But like others have said, it has a low SnR.

Textbooks and research papers are fantastic. It's important to actively read and even do problems when it's really vital locking down knowledge.

bfieidhbrjr 5 years ago |

Books. The older the better, so they've passed the great filter of time.

nambit 5 years ago | |

I still have a book on programming in COBOL I need to dust off.

shishy 5 years ago |

Pick books.

signal to noise ratio here has gotten worse; not as worth anymore.

codepenguin 5 years ago | |

There's still some interesting stuff showing up on Show HN threads though.

paulorlando 5 years ago |

Depends on what your goals are of course. Entertainment, staying current etc. But here's a rough heuristic: if the book has survived for a while, say a few years, decades, or centuries, it's a good book. With limited time choose something of quality rather than sorting through the noise. Or take the opposite advice if you have different and just as valid goals.

muzani 5 years ago |

If you're not sure what books to read, dig through HN or ask. I've learned a lot about productivity, procedural generation, and functional programming from sources linked on HN. Sometimes there are clever quotes from good books.

But you still have to read the book. If you have a book to read, read the book. If not, HN.

h0p3 5 years ago |

I cannot speak to your context well enough. If I only get to choose one, I choose HN (or even carefully curated Plebbit). While there are radical dark patterns in the attention economy with which to concern ourselves (and I'm happy to talk shit about the nature and states of discourse available to people), there are also many salient voices to hear within a recent and brief timeframe that aren't usually as easy to find elsewhere (at least not with as much signal-to-noise ratio).

ilaksh 5 years ago |

I think ideally both. Wish I could motivate myself to read more.

But I think that it really depends on which book and which blog post etc.

And usually to really understand something in detail you can't just read the book. You have to do exercises to actually secure the knowledge or skill.

scott31 5 years ago |

I'd say go with HN. As a NodeJS developer, I found books to be lacking of the latest JS frameworks and modules. Books have been obsoleted since the internet was created 15 years ago.

fortran77 5 years ago | |

As a Rust developer, it's very important for me to be on HN to make sure than everyone knows about Rust, and to introduce Rust into every discussion about other programming languages.

barbarbar 5 years ago | | |

This comment is great in every way I can think of.

danfraticiu 5 years ago | |

Spoken like a true JS developer.

veddox 5 years ago | |

Because anything that was created before the Internet spontaneoulsy generated in 2005 is obviously so not worth reading about.

HN is about more than just the latest JS fad: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

gitgud 5 years ago | |

Additionally, a book can't even be updated or patched, which makes it inferior to the npm package manager.

pseudonymousgun 5 years ago |

Reading books > Reading articles on HN

Although i admit, HN is addictive.

jppope 5 years ago |

Well that Depends on the books and depends on the articles. What books are you looking at and what blogs?

sbmthakur 5 years ago |

May I know specifically about which topics you are asking about?

fortran77 5 years ago |

But every hour of reading comments is time wasted.

aaron695 5 years ago |

If you are asking the question, books.

Once you can read a book and find mistakes or contradictions, HN.