Item — HN Reader

We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read.

Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.

But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.

15 comments

> "I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.

Progamming in a corporate/business environment was not prestigious or high paying then either. It was a decent job, don't get me wrong, but something more similar to accounting or other back-office work in terms of pay and prestige.

I blame it on the COBOL.

if you wear yourself out mentally all day as part of your occupation, digging into a "good" book is often too much work.

As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.

I relate to this. My brain is fried after a long day of work, and the last thing I have the energy for is reading something challenging. It’s either light reading, or more often (which I’m a little sad about), watching something.

Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.

What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.

As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.

I love learning, but I hate reading. Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.

In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.

>Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.

You're not actually learning anything then. Memorizing trivia, sure. But not actually learning.

That seems like a pretty controversial take. Why would you not be able to learn things orally?

You absolutely can learn orally, what I'd question is if you can do so without active listening. Listing to anything while doing, well anything, is pretty pointless to me, I tends to not listen and not absorb anything. I can barely listen to a podcast while working out, I miss huge gaps where my brain just isn't listening.

With me (I have ADHD), I would never be able to listen to an audiobook alone, I would zone out and day dream one paragraph in. But If I'm playing a game on my phone, I can listen and pay attention for hours.

Can I ask why you hate reading? Is this a general statement or is it about the quality of programming-related reading in particular?

> I love learning, but I hate reading.

Correction: you love the feeling of consuming information, not learning.

Imagine gatekeeping learning. I suppose the blind are incapable of it, then? Or is taking in information via the fingers somehow more valid than via the ears?

How in the heck can you plausibly correct someone else like that? You (almost certainly) don’t know that person, even in passing.

People can learn from watching a documentary just as well as they can learn from reading, but reading teaches you how to interpret language as you continue reading, and other forms of information delivery convey understanding of their own mediums in their own ways. I would not have learned how to quickly spot a terrible documentary over a great one if I had not watched so many in my life. It doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything because I watched and listened instead of read, it just means that I didn’t read the documentaries.

Pro tip: don’t correct people about their own lives.

Why not go further - learning is doing, not consuming (reading, watching, listening)?

Reading is not the only modality for learning.

We read, a lot, but not books. We read manuals, get started docs, apis, git repos, AI responses, wikipedia, tik tok comments just for fun, we read constantly and will read till the end of times. That's the way we learn and entertain ourselves, there is no other way around that.

> I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.

I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.

Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.

And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.

How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?

> you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

So HN is OK with being extremely condescending toward others as long as it's a general group of others, not a specific HN user? Just imagine this sentence with almost any other activity:

"You don't like to run? I would have assumed that people who enjoy physical activity would be into real exercise, but I guess they're all actually lazy."

"You don't play an instrument? I would have assumed people who like music would be into creativity, but I guess I was wrong and they're all boring and uncreative."

It is the height of arrogance to assume that people who don't enjoy the same things you like are obviously stupid, lazy losers. And yes, that's absolutely what you are doing in your comment. You seriously cannot imagine any other form of intellectual stimulation that they might be into instead?

Brother, I took a look at your comment history and I think you're projecting.

I also noticed on your profile that you've submitted literally nothing to this site but have made lots of comments, usually negative ones.

To paraphrase Justified: if you met an arrogant person in the morning, you met an arrogant person in the morning. If you meet arrogant people all day...

"You can't possibly be right about something being mean, because you're negative about things". Do I have your argument correct?

You are a programmer? You understand that different firmwares and operative systems work in different ways and excel at different things?

For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?

This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.

If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.

Just yesterday, someone on LinkedIn wanted to improve her vibe-coded software, which she plans to charge money for.

I recommended an article of mine with a 34 minute read time. When she saw that in the header, she submitted my article to an AI for summary and complained that she wasn't going to spend 34 minutes (on learning programming).

I gave up reading when I got my first portable computer. Not sure why. But after some time I got sick of it and got back to reading and I love it!

For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.

Can you recommend me a book to read?

It's difficult to recommend things without knowing a reader's taste, but I blanket recommend The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination

Theft of Fire is my favorite book in the last ten years for sure.

https://devoneriksen.com/products/theft-of-fire-orbital-spac...

How about an Elmore Leonard novel? Very digestible novels from a deceptively skilled craftsman.

If you can stomach older English novels: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

What counts as a good book varies from person to person.

But take a look at anything by Asimov. I have a collection of his short stories and it is a nice read. Oh, and any short story collection by Chekhov.

Honestly it doesn't matter much, go grab a random book from goodwill. If you do "need" a recommendation, I'd suggest "Roots", I'm reading it now and it's amazingly well written.

One suggestion I would make is to read something from before 1980. No real reason why, but books from 1900 - 1980 work better for me personally, not sure why.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Fiction or non-fiction?

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

Programming probably is more intellectually stimulating than reading fiction novels.

As someone with a degree in literature, I'm gonna disagree there. It depends on both the novel and the programming.

It’s not.

Novels are fiction by the way.

Yes? What's so important about novels? They're a relatively recent innovation in literature.

> Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

The rise of vibecoding and the disdain many in the industry hold for the skill of software development should fully disabuse you of any vestiges of this notion...

Every single day, here, on "Hacker" news I see folks describe coding as just a means to an end, and that things like code quality, architecture, etc, don't matter.

Welcome to late stage capitalism, where if you can't immediately monetize it its not worth doing (consider how this might explain the rise of gambling as recreation).

I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.

No one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.

Then maybe you should not read prose. It is about conveying an experience, a story. You might have simply picked a bad author. Personally, I prefer long reads. I understand that some people might not enjoy that style of storytelling, but saying “give up reading” overall is a shame. Try something like Warhammer 40k novels. They are simple, entertaining, and split into shorter parts. What you are describing does not happen there.

I read The Goldfinch a while back. Not at all my usual fare. The plot progressed at a snail's pace, but I enjoyed every page of it. (The movie treatment was horribly shallow in comparison, but there's no way they could possibly convey the depth in two hours.)

Books have a built in fast-forward feature.

My English teachers told me to get to the point, don't start sentences with "and", and every sentence should support the central theme. Apparently authors think they can make their book thicker and more authoritative by wasting time describing the color of something I wouldn't even look at in real life. But I notice and don't fall for it. Sorry you don't value your time.