Things like this increasingly make me think we need to go back to having web directories, like Yahoo and dmoz. There is so much great content out there that having good curated lists is very high value.
With the awesome lists, digital gardens, Pinboard and personal websites coming back I wouldn't be surprised if 'the human curated web' is the next big thing
In the few years before the WWW, I had a hobby at work of finding public FTP sites and downloading local copies of what was on the sites. A simple grep search over these files often surfaced useful code and data. I shared this with just my local work group at work.
I agree that the ‘awesome list’ repos on GitHub are very useful.
> A surprisingly large fraction of applicants, even those with masters' degrees and PhDs in computer science, fail during interviews when asked to carry out basic programming tasks. For example, I've personally interviewed graduates who can't answer "Write a loop that counts from 1 to 10" or "What's the number after F in hexadecimal?
You are right, I was concentrating more on the second half of the quote which is about someone's personal experience. If what they describe is what they've encountered, it should not have an expiry date.
For the extrapolating "surprisingly large fraction" part, I have no idea. Maybe someone is keeping count on these numbers; it would be interesting to see them.
Why is "opinionated" considered so valuable these days? In this case, it's redundant (curated implies opinionated, I think), so it's there to say something loudly. What? Are people not being opinionated enough? Is this defensiveness (if someone doesn't like what you did, well, you've already said it's just your opinion, man)?
I don't think it claims to be particularly valuable, it's just highlighting that this is one person's viewpoint and is not intended to be the end-all be-all definitive take on the topic.
Partly it's a way to head off the inevitable aggressive commenters who will jump all over some detail and how it doesn't apply to some particular situation.
I suspect it's part of an effort to push back against the overwhelming number of thoughtless "listicles" which seem to dominate the internet. I'm planning a trip abroad right now and half the effort is in finding a list of places to visit which was put together by someone who actually went there and has some thoughts rather than someone who slapped together some nonsense. Or someone who has taken the time to really whittle a list down to 7 items rather than making another useless "1200 Things to Do in Italy Mega Post!!!"
I think you're right in that "opinionated" seems like a shorthand for "thoughtful curation" which is the opposite of what search engines tend to turn up.
I see it as a disclaimer: "I don't claim this to be the best thing applicable to everyone. I have strong opinions that some people don't agree with and this list doesn't include some things other people's lists would."
In contrast there are some list which claim to be comprehensive.
I would say whether it's valuable is subjective: sometimes I want a more objective data-driven overview of trends, sometimes I want someone whom I've chosen to trust to provide partial views. Flagging it up front serves as much as a warning & disclaimer as it does a hook.
As for redundancy, they're technically synonymous but "curated" has become a much abused term and more often than not these days is erroneously used to mean "amassed and presented without endorsement". So I think the redundancy adds clarity here.
It's yet another funny trend that goes around in tech circles. As someone originally from math, my personal pet peeve is the way that tech people use "orthogonal" these days.
I guess people just want to communicate the idea that this piece of opinionated text is biased. Of course, everything is biased, so opinionated is supposed to be redundant. So it's a signal that the author understands that they have biases, and expresses them.
EDIT: I am not contesting any downvotes, but feel free to drop a note explaining why.
Possibly the first published use of the term in software was Van Wijngaarden, in the design of Algol 68, from 1968:
> The number of independent primitive concepts has been minimized in order that the language be easy to describe, to learn, and to implement. On the other hand, these concepts have been applied “orthogonally” in order to maximize the expressive power of the language while trying to avoid deleterious superfluities.
You’re using an overly narrow sense of the term in math.
Consider any orthogonal coordinate system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_coordinates). The whole point of orthogonality in this case is that it makes coordinate values independent of each other - varying only one coordinate cannot result in a change in any other coordinate. The term is used in this same sense in many other areas of math, and elsewhere. This is the sense in which it’s been used in software, for more than half a century.
Forgive my curiosity, but in what sense were you “originally from math” but aren’t familiar with this term beyond a high school level understanding of geometry?
When I see "opinionated", I am interested in the popularity of the project. A popular opinionated framework has found something that works well. But opinionated on its own can equally well be terrible. So I am quite sceptical when I see something advertised as opinionated.
I like opinionated people and sources in general because, even if I ultimately don’t agree, it helps to clarify the dialectics present in the landscape of options.
Things like this increasingly make me think we need to go back to having web directories, like Yahoo and dmoz. There is so much great content out there that having good curated lists is very high value.