It Is Done
ascii.textfiles.com
ascii.textfiles.com
Today, we look back at the development of mass manufacturing from a historical perspective, there are entire museums dedicated to nothing but preserving and educating people about this technological transformation...and we still learn modern lessons from it every day.
For example, you can go to Harpers Ferry, WV and see a small museum with a working workshop that's capable of converting nothing more than raw materials and river power to guns.
To wit, an impressive amount of my career has been about nothing more than applying mass manufacturing techniques to previously bespoke work, and I'm proud to say that it has transformed the way some organizations approach certain classes of problems. And it's often nothing more than me coming into a workplace and saying "let's see if we can get this problem up-to-speed with the industrial revolution"
These manuals are not so much about how an individual can operate outdated equipment as that they capture how humans dealt with complex technical challenges over decades. In a hundred years, historians looking at the digital scans of this archive might find a "first of" known process or technology that turns into a later technological revolution that we might not even be aware that we're part of right now that could transform all of humanity.
Astonishing work and well done.
That sounds fascinating. Can you give some examples?
For example, I have a program manager coworker who spent about half of her week building reports to go out to her client. Almost 90% of that time was spent copy-pasting data into excel and turning those tables into charts.
I pointed out that these charts could probably just be automatically generated. Half a day of work by one of our colleagues and it was. Another couple days work and all she needed to do was run a script in the folder with the raw data and it'd even spit out a draft .docx with most of the key sections done (I think he used python-docx for this).
It's just very simple stuff like that, when you work up and down any organization's business processes, you can find all kinds of stuff like this -- often long running. It doesn't even always have to be automated, sometimes just rethinking physical processes in simple ways can have a profound impact.
I'm reminded of this http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/27/nyregion/in-lieu-of-money-...
The hard part is convincing people that this means their employees can either finish the same amount of work early, or can do more with the time they have.
A lot of them are still doing it.
I've been following this, and if I didn't live eons away, would have been there in a flash.
But this went down in less than a week, and here we are.
And what an achievement! And how many new 'converts' made? Might pay dividends down the road as we begin to lose the paper archives.
I took the word of someone standing right there over someone on a forum bloviating about the One True And Right Way.
Situated knowledge wins every time. Listen to the ones doing it and moderate/evaluate the feedback.
Like it often is with professionals, they didn’t whine, grate, or sniff when faced with a room of boxes – they just got to it.
I, as part of a team, aspire to this smooth well articulated action.
Of course, once they started throwing money at the problem, it went better. Boxes were purchased and quickly delivered. Trucks were rented. A storage space was rented. Professional movers were brought in. Then it's no problem.
OK, now what's the plan for the next phase?
(Indiana Jones is a pretty terrible archæologist)
In terms of "is there market demand to sell copies of these manuals for a profit" or whatever? Probably not, which is why they were slated for disposal in the first place. But do they serve an important role in maintaining the historical record and connecting the dots across time? Absolutely? Are they invaluable to at least a handful of individuals out there "right now"? Almost certainly. Will they be of value to somebody else "down the road"? I'd wager yes.
It's not just 50,000 old manuals, it's a huge body of knowledge, much of which probably isn't yet in digital form, and a large portion of which would probably be lost for good if this trove of manuals had gone to the landfill. Now, IF all the things can happen that would need to happen (raising money, blah), and this collection can be scanned and digitized and placed online, you're talking about a real treasure trove of useful knowledge.
Imagine the kid at J. Random Hackerspace who finds an old oscilloscope at a flea-market for $15.00. What a wonderful project it would be to fix that thing up, get it working, and watch a circuit work using it. But what if he wasn't able to find a parts list, schematics, or operators manual? But if this batch of material is truly saved, how much better is his chance of finding what he needs? How could someone's life be changed by participating in a project like that? A lifetime of interest in electronics, engineering, making, and building could be sparked (heh, pun intended) by something like that.
So yeah, these manuals do fill a useful, if indirect, role. Jason and the other volunteers are "doing FSM's work" as far as I'm concerned.
See also, bane's comment above. He puts it much more eloquently than I do.
If Hacker News allowed modifying titles, a reasonable one would be "Over 50,000 Old Technology Manuals Rescued".
# For editors to reduce duplicate posts.
In this case I can't find anything useful. I guess a correct alternative is to use the title of the previous submission to provide context so my proposal is
"Saving 25,000 Manual: It Is Done"
Anyway, the mods can disagree and change it back to the original, so YMMV.
(Note 1: They saved more than 25,000 :).)
(Note 2: I think your proposed title is good, but I tried to create one using cut&paste text from the article.)
The title thing seems to have caused confusion. dang has said that there hasn't been a change in policy (nor in the way the policy has been applied) and that the policy has always been "the original title is preferred except when it is misleading or linkbait."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227198#up_8228566
But this meme of "you must only ever use the original title, even if it's terrible" is pretty strong.
I think people don't understand that HN seems to prefer titles that convey little meaning over titles that create kneejerk reactions. There are plenty of posts on HN from people who are responding to the title, and who haven't read the submitted article.
(EDIT: I think I upvoted you. I meant to. I might have accidentally downvoted, and I'm sorry if I did).
I haven't been following any of this stuff, and I wasn't familiar with textfiles before. I clicked the link only by accident. I actually meant to click the submission above it, which was much more descriptive and immediately told me what the submission was about: "How Coursera Cracked the Chinese Market".
I know the title rule exists for a reason, but let's not kid ourselves: some titles are written by the author only with a specific context in mind, which is usually their own website or blog. Such titles aren't a good fit for HN.
"The goal, as you might recall, was to go into a closing warehouse of manuals, take as much as we could, and store it somewhere so that it could be properly “dealt with”, with the rest ending up in the trash."