The reaction was very reasonable (generous, in fact): A bit of denial followed by a very discreet "no thanks."
The unfortunate thing is that the conclusion was "we probably just shouldn't take the money." For someone who clearly considers herself proactive and professional on matters of sexuality, this a rather profound failure in terms of sexual equality.
Don't get me wrong: This is exactly what I'd do. But it's not what I'd expect from someone selling a brand called "gutsy broads" and boasting credentials including "sexuality specialist."
Standing up to sexism isn't easy. But this isn't even an attempt, from someone who should at very least be making an attempt, not selling anecdotes that do little more than pat the author on the back for... what, exactly? This is very tepid commentary on what would otherwise be a fairly significant incident to someone in such a position.
Agreed. And as an another commentor noted above, hopefully she was able to privately name this investor to YC. They're well positioned to take effective action in a way that doesn't put the author at risk.
We've unfortunately seen far too many cases where "being a woman on the internet" has led to harassment. Posting about this publicly and putting her name on it is already plenty gutsy.
"Everything you thought you knew about z is wrong."
Am I the only one that finds titles like this completely offputting? If you think you have insight that's useful to people, try not talking down to them. As it is, hell, I may not know Javascript, but I'm certainly not clicking through.
I explain the title, and the intended tone and purpose of the book series, in the preface. If you wouldn't mind taking the 3 minutes to read it, I'd be curious if it changes anything about your opinion of the title:
Nope, it still doesn't work for me, personally. I never played "You Don't Know Jack", and so I tend to interpret your title literally. And your title implies that no matter how much somebody knows about JavaScript, it's not enough.
Two decades ago, I was really into learning all the disgusting corners of badly-designed programming languages. I got really excited about C++ implicit conversions and clever template hacks. But that always proved to be a mistake, because nobody wants to read or maintain any of that crap.
These days, I try to focus on the essentials of a language: What works well and portably? What offers unique expressive capabilities that I haven't seen before? What's idiomatic? If I learn any nasty corner-cases, I only do it solve a specific problem, or to avoid pitfalls.
I really can't get excited about the implicit conversion semantics of JavaScript's "==" operator or the weirder points of how "this" get bound in callbacks. It's all just pointless technical arcana. If something neither expands my brain nor solves an immediate commercial problem, I'm happy ignoring it until it becomes obsolete. And my clients are usually a lot happier, too.
(That said, the actual books are nicely written. But you asked about the titles.)
Your code should rarely be clever or rely on the the weird dark corner-case cruft of a language. Too often I see JS code written like an entry in the Obfuscated C contest. Yes, that code can work, but don't do that.
The books point all the arcane points of the language so that the reader can understand them. They're also full of commentary like "never do this".
Rather than most books which gloss over the "bad parts", which prevents people from fuller learning and leaves them to their own devices when they run across that stuff in the real world, YDKJS covers all the parts, and tries to use the deeper understanding as a tool and guide to making better-informed decisions about how to effectively write JS.
I think it's entirely unfair to suggest that covering "technical arcana" is the same thing as endorsing it.
I never once mentioned your books Kyle. I actually enjoy the parts that I've read. I was making a broader point that I have witnessed with the JS community: using technical arcana in production code as if it was a good thing. Just one example: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057
Having played the "You Don't Know Jack" PC game from 1995 I found the title playful. From your preface I see you'll be doing exactly what I wanted from a book with this title. Going into all the areas I never would in a programming language. Not just how but why.
I agree with the GP though, on feeling some fatigue around people telling me I'm doing something wrong. Eating food, reading a book, tying my shoes, putting on a shirt. Anyhow it seems like you've just touched on that area a bit for this person. Experts don't like for Dummies books, not because they are rubbish, which they might be, but because owning or reading them visibly puts into question their knowledge and challenges their self image. In the same way someone might find your title a challenge to their knowledge, instead of seeing that you're interested in highlighting often overlooked things about JS.
For the love of God please don't put a giant headed person on your cover though. I've come to terms with every other book series having a positive quality with the exception of "Head First" and their distorted human cover photos. /rant
We all have our ticks when it comes to books and advertising around things we love.
side note: my kickstarter for the books, 2 years ago, playfully used the bald head image to catch people's attention (never the intended branding). I soon afer got a friendly lawyer takedown notice from the folks who own the game. We worked it out, and the new branding was born. :)
I'd suggest, "The Tough Parts", as you mention in the preface.
Not sure who your target market is but as a professional developer who writes javascript daily, "The Tough Parts", piques my curiosity and sounds like an interesting challenge. "You Don't Know JS" evokes a more negative reaction.
Honestly, I don't care what the title is, the books are great. I've recommended them a number of times as newer resources than "the good parts" and raganwald's, and not one person has asked if I thought I was implying that they were dumb. If anything, the title serves as a compliment, since anything I do not know is something that I can learn. If you know everything already, then why are you looking at books which serve to teach?
That said, from a marketing perspective, they've got a great unique cover and a solid series title. If more than the original 5 come around in the future, they'll be easy to identify.
Sorry, but I think it should be clear from my comment that your title is indeed putting people off of reading your work at all. I don't doubt that it's worth reading, but I think you should consider that the title itself, accuracy aside, is dissuading more people than just me from reading your work.
The point isn't the quality of your work. It's your hook that's failing at least some of us to the point that you are potentially missing out on part of your target audience by default.
I understand and appreciate your feedback. Unfortunately, given that most of the series is done and half of them are already in print, it's too late to change.
I did have lengthy discussions with my book editor about the title and its potential to be off-putting to some. We wrangled with the decision awhile, but ultimately came to the conclusion that most would find it a mix/balance of playful, attention grabbing (in a sea of "JS: The Handy Guide" type titles), and challenging.
The title itself is supposed to be equal parts a joke and a serious commentary on what I consider to be a disturbing trend in JS specifically, which is either a false sense of confidence or (worse) an apathy to not care about what is not known.
Again, thank you for your thoughtful response and your feedback. I do regret that it's hit you the way it has. Perhaps at some point you may give it another shot.
Yup. The original talks were called "Advanced JS: The 'What You Need To Know' Parts" - and I'd much rather have a book with _that_ title on my desk, rather than one that makes it look like I'm reading a "...For Dummies" book.
Just putting it out there but knocking the "For Dummies" books based on the title is a bit pretentious. Sure, the title doesn't really make you look good but the books are often well written and informative. They have a great layout and serve well as introductory books.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say a lot of other books could learn a lot from the layout of the series. I've read many books and the dry books don't hold my attention for long. There is something to be said for books you just absorb.
I find the for Dummies books nearly unusable due to the evident required number of puns and homespun regular folks observations between every bit of actual technical info.
Yeah if For Dummies would just kill off the bad jokes it'd actually be easier to read. I don't like cringing through a book when I'm trying to learn something.
Maybe it's a play on how horrible the language is?
E.g. "You don't know what callback hell means. You don't know the horror of refactoring a weakly typed dynamic language. You are truly blessed for you don't know JS."
If the post was titled "In-depth look at Javascript" or something, I might've skip it. This title piqued my interest because I write Javascript for living for a long time and I was genuinely wondering what I don't know yet about the language.
Learning JS is very different from other languages in that there's greater amounts of misinformation (lots of people know it, but prefer to use it as little as possible), and it changes faster. For example, in 2015:
- you won't find any Python new articles that tell you to use Python 1's 'strings' module
- You'll still see things like <script> tag soup, 'JS isn't object oriented', globals and patchable-ES3-isms in new JS articles.
Kyle Simpson is a well known JS speaker and O Reilly author - his books are a great source of current best practice.
I've read the book and even contributed a tiny tiny bit with issues in GH (the book is managed through GH). While I didn't learn much I did gain perspective about things so I'd say reading it was definitely worth my time.
Likewise. I'll read the books on Safari Books Online using the work subscription, just to fill in the gaps. I'm pretty sure I will actually learn something.
Am I the only one that finds titles like this completely offputting?
No, you aren't, though FWIW I try to force myself to at least look at what's been submitted before commenting, in the spirit of not judging books by covers and all that.
In this case, I found very little to suggest that I do not, in fact, know JavaScript.
I'm also assuming that this is a very early draft of the material, but it could certainly benefit from the input of a good editor before any final publication.
Just curious what parts you looked at? Did you glance at the table of contents, or did you read full chapters? I certainly tried to reveal in every chapter several different things that, in my professional experience teaching JS to teams of developers, are commonly misunderstood or under-understood.
If you had any specific feedback on what I could have done better to live up to the title, tone, and mission of the book series, I'd be appreciative of it.
> very early draft
Depends on which book(s) you looked at. The series is 18 months old by now, with 6 titles. 5 of them are already "complete".
3 of them have already been edited and published (though publisher edits didn't necessarily all make it back into the free repo versions).
2 of them are in final editing and production stages, so they're still being cleaned up. The sixth one is still a very early and partial draft, so it's quite rough.
Just curious what parts you looked at? Did you glance at the table of contents, or did you read full chapters?
I skimmed through pretty much all of "Scope & Closures". I also looked through the first few chapters of "this & Object Prototypes" to see whether they were any better.
If you had any specific feedback on what I could have done better to live up to the title, tone, and mission of the book series, I'd be appreciative of it.
Sadly, with that title and your chosen goals, I think you left yourself no chance of meeting expectations right from the start. If you're going to tell me I don't know a language I've been using for 20 years, you'd better mean it in the sense that there is something significant and new in your book, perhaps some cutting edge developments in the language itself, or maybe an original application or new perspective on how to use what was already there. In this case, the closest you get in the books I looked at is touching on a few basics of ES6 -- nothing wrong with that, but hardly earth-shattering news to a professional who runs 6to5 (ahem sorry, Babel) every day.
Leaving aside the title, though, the material is often surprisingly narrow and imprecise if your intention is to teach the subtle details of JavaScript more thoroughly than many programmers might know them already.
Your opening paragraph of chapter 1 makes several debatable claims. For example, your characterisation of mutable variables as fundamental to nearly all programming languages immediately ignores alternatives such as purely functional or logic languages. That is perhaps an unfortunate choice given the current trends in JS libraries and frameworks, which in many cases are moving in that more declarative direction.
You then seem to conflate various concepts of scope, storage and lifetime throughout the book, and similarly do not seem to distinguish clearly and consistently between the concepts of identifiers, variables and values. In a language where closures and references to functions are used routinely and where you have some types passed by value but others effectively passed by reference, these kinds of distinctions matter, particularly to someone who has learned by osmosis or perhaps come from a background working with other programming languages, which seems to be a lot of your target audience here.
More generally, your terminology tends to drift away from the ECMAScript spec quite a lot, again making it less precise. Another example would be the opening paragraph of chapter 1 of "this & Object Prototypes", where you describe this as being a "special identifier keyword". By definition (in the spec) an identifier can't be a keyword, because an identifier is precisely an identifier name that is not a reserved word.
The most vague section of those I read was probably when you discuss closures in the final chapter, where I'm sorry to say you come across as rather unfamiliar with the concept yourself. Your usage is somewhat casual, unidiomatic even, not least in your definition of the term itself. Your explanation for where closures come from ("Closures happen as a result of writing code that relies on lexical scope. They just happen.") is just plain wrong, as evidenced by the fact that numerous languages with lexical scope do not provide closures as a language feature at all.
Sorry if this all seems a bit nit-picky, but you did just write a book about the importance of understanding the details and telling me I didn't know the language. :-)
It seems that you are offput by his title in a way that you feel he is personally challenging your knowledge and experience with JavaScript. I would guess that when he was writing and naming this series, he did not have someone with 20 years experience in mind. Seems like the series is geared towards someone with moderate experience.
I don't think the title is the big issue here. I don't think it's good, and clearly it does put some people off with its tone, but as you say, maybe at least some of those people aren't the intended target audience.
My stronger reservation is that these books have a lot of loose writing and give so much space over to asides or describing bad practices that someone who wasn't so experienced might still not know JS by the end, having missed the wood for the trees.
It's easy to be a critic. On the internet it's even possible to be a popular critic on a topic by admitting that one hasn't even read the subject of the criticism. In the world of male tech, one can easily achieve top common in an HN thread exactly for judging a book by its cover.
Anyone who doesn't have imposter syndrome hasn't tried the exercises in TAoCP.
In fact it's so easy that you can make a snide comment criticizing someone else's criticism and it will do really well if you throw in some unnecessary and ridiculous "male dominated" comment.
I think it says more about your ego imo. I mean you're getting worked up about a book's title to the point that you won't look at its content. Just because it insinuated you don't know said content.
While I've never been particularly interested in YC itself, that quote is something I'd never read, and honestly it's really sad. That he straight up admits that he's looking for people who are [synonym for evil that doesn't make him look as bad] is really telling and sad.
Maybe I'm just too idealistic in general -- entirely possible -- but when I read "breaking rules, but not rules that matter," I wonder who gets to decide which rules matter. Because someone obviously thought they mattered enough to be rules in the first place.
I book I've found that helped me get a historical sense for morality and its place in politics, religion, and personal success is Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood.
So basically you support Adolf Eichmann's claim that "following orders" was a legitimate excuse for participating in the Holocaust? Either that, or you do not understand PG's argument.
While this is an interesting idea, if this becomes common practice, the only possible result is a chilling effect on the willingness of informers to inform or whistleblowers to blow said whistles. It's another needle in the coffin of anonymity.
Plus, if this was written by a journalist (or someone else) based on a good-faith account from a legislator, the result will be either that person giving up his source (see paragraph 1, above) or being ethical and refusing to, potentially casting a bad light on the article whether it's appropriate or not.
One might expect that scary agencies already have machine-learning-based approaches as common practice...
Could one defeat it by writing something, then having someone else "translate" it into their own vocabulary sentence-by-sentence, or even paragraph-by-paragraph, and having the original author approve the "translation"?
My question would be what this really does that isn't already happening. App discovery is definitely an open problem, but if what you're doing is facilitating sharing apps with people who know you (already easy directly between individuals) or seeing what people at large like (already done via the top charts), I'm not sure what the point is.
Also, and I know from sites like Flickr that I'm not exactly making a bulletproof point, I really dislike the whole "leave off a letter" approach to naming a product. Telling someone "jungle dot com, but without the e" moves you from a two syllable TLD to one that requires an extra five and perhaps a follow up just to make sure they're searching for the right thing.
With this app we really want to work on social connections and the connections with people from apps we have in common. If we ever do a 'Top' chart, you will only see the top of your community and not the top from the entire Jungl crowd.
For example, at the moment we have 300 account created, each accounts have listed their favorite apps. I'm personally connected to 15 users with the most apps in common with me. My 'Top' chart would be different than yours as long as our favorite apps selections are different.
We are working to make a very personalized and living catalog of the latest cool apps.
Sad doesn't even begin to describe how people should feel. People should feel irate.
Of course, that assumes people are or become informed about the nature of and reason for vaccination. Which should (and, at least as of my education, was) be a trivial part of US education.
Granted: The fact that many people apparently considered Jenny McCarthy a reliable source of scientific information points to a far more basic stupidity than a failure to understand high school microbiology. It's hard to educate people in general; it's way harder to educate people who have left the compulsory school system and decided that Twitter and celebrity are reliable sources of valid health advice.
And in the actual context of the way "ramen" is misused in the article, your snarky response misses the point of the GP. Thanks for trying, play better next time.
Japan (and any Confucian culture) shames people who do not accept their traditional roles. Men are expected to work until they fall dead. Women are expected to take care of children (while optionally following career at the same time). This sort of works in closed system, where people do not really know about any alternatives.
You could look at it this way, I suppose, but it falls apart a bit when you consider that Japan's falling birthrate is at least partially a product of women tossing out their traditional roles. Yeah, that still leaves plenty of pressure on everyone, but it also sets a precedent, or at least enforces it.
But no, most Japanese -- hikikomori or not -- do not "just want to live western way." The things you mention about that are largely the opposite of Japanese experience and expectation, and to suggest that kids who have never left the nation, let alone their own homes, have somehow adopted the cultural norms of cultures thousands of miles away just by consuming their internet leavings seems more than a bit questionable.
>to suggest that kids who have never left the nation, let alone their own homes, have somehow adopted the cultural norms of cultures thousands of miles away just by consuming their internet leavings seems more than a bit questionable.
I don't completely agree with the post you're replying to, however this part is not so far fetched to believe. It doesn't matter much how often these people go outside, the Japanese media and culture is vastly focused on Anime (at least for these shut-in people, which are one of their target audience) and there has been a constant cross-pollination between the western and eastern cultures. A lot of people are living a more western 'make-believe' culture in Japan that easily goes against their traditional set of moral values. The Japanese world is changing and we're still seeing this major cultural shift, which very well might be the cause of this, or at least a catalyst.
As a matter of fact, these people are much more detached than the rest of the population and are much more susceptible to the western Internet cultural phenomenon to such an extent that it might be changing their point of view in such a way that they find themselves unable to fit into their actual culture. Obviously this is all my hypothesis, it might very well be unfound.
> As a matter of fact, these people are much more detached than the rest of the population and are much more susceptible to the western Internet cultural phenomenon to such an extent that it might be changing their point of view in such a way that they find themselves unable to fit into their actual culture.
Hmm. I think you might be right. I can tell for me, as an Asian guy that came to the US about 6-7 years ago, I feel much more liberated and less stressful being in the US than in where I came from. It is exactly the make-believe culture that I have been exposed to thanks to the Internet that made me feel detached from the culture over there. Whether it is the main reason that people shut in, I can't tell. It is probably not the case (and it doesn't have to be) for the majority of my fellow friends who came to the US to do post-graduate studies (I came for undergrad after being a drop out). They often find that it is more stressful to live in the US where they don't have friends and their familiar environment.
have somehow adopted the cultural norms of cultures thousands of miles away
Not adoption of new cultural norms, but corruption of existing cultural norms. I would offer parallel in how soviet block was disturbed by western culture. People were not so keen to build communism anymore,since they saw alternatives.
That's definitely not hikikomori. The real thing basically never leaves its room, with family providing food. Even a less extreme example almost certainly would never leave the home for long enough to die anywhere else.
They do often spend a lot of time on the internet, but it's not a cause, it's a related fixation (when you're trapped -- by what's probably some combination of your own preference and perceived outside forces -- in a room, the internet provides a wealth of things to do). It's a social malaise that might as well be an extension of the NEET phenomenon.
They are still people, even if you disagree or outright hate how they live their life. If this was an attempt at making the sentence gender-neutral, please use "one(s)" and "they" in the future like so: The real ones basically never leave their room, with...
What happens when a hikkomori gets kicked out of the house? My immediate thought running through my mind was that if these were my kids, they'd get the boot. Obviously things aren't that simple, but has anyone actually tried that? What happens? Do they just die?
