> Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news

frankly terrible advice, especially now that this website is just AI News. If you want to be a better programmer, there are better places, but I'm not going to advertise them here because I do not want to infect them with the HN commentariat which is much too focused on trends.

Engineering fundamentals have not changed in decades. Screw trends, especially at the beginning.

Books written before 2022 are a good bet. Maybe the value of traditional education has also returned.

This website has always somewhat been about trends. Before AI it was the metaverse. Crypto before that. NoSQL before that. Rails before that. Arguably there's always the undercurrent of the cult of personality of PG. ...

I'm sure I've missed some things, I've taken more than one hiatus.

Nuance usually cannot be well conveyed in a blog post. Someone is always selling something. When something exists long enough the bullshit behind it is eventually revealed. Reality is messy and there's always bullshit hiding somewhere.

It doesn't mean HN is useless. I use it as a bellweather to see what other people are putting their attention on. I don't pay attention to AI other than what's on here. I mostly follow my interests, which outside my dayjob, is currently concurrency. But I don't write about it.

Ultimately the place to become a better programmer is behind a keyboard learning what works, what doesn't, where it does, where it doesn't, and why or why not. It's difficult to convey all the nuance in every decision which means most people never actually do it. Any post is dripping with assumptions. In my mind nearly any decision could be justified and would be surprised to find a place that actually attempts to teach these.

Rather than consuming media you're probably better off putting it out there and letting people tell you all the ways you're "wrong" (because they love to do that). Somewhat paradoxically I don't really follow my own advice, but that's humans for you.

I mean, the whole point of my post was to say that books are more useful than anything else, and it would certainly better to have access to 10 good books and no hacker news at all than the reverse. But I do think there is value in keeping an eye on trends. They shape our industry; you may wish they didn’t, I wish they didn’t sometimes, but they do. Obviously good fundamentals are more important, but I think it’s doing a disservice to juniors if you tell them to ignore the “commentariat” completely.