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Comment by neotrope | Hacker News Reader

> 2. Don’t shy away from technical details.

> The mere mention of the word “hashing” is probably enough to make non-technical employees’ eyes gloss over. So instead I just call it “Magic”.

What..? Why state a principle and then tell us how you violate it a few sentences later.

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I think the point is that technical terminology and technical details are different things, and the latter is much more important.

The alternative is to say "hashing is a technical topic, and technical terms intimidate and confuse people, so we won't mention hashing". Instead, the article says that you should try to make hashing approachable and non-intimidating, since understanding the ideas around hashing will help people understand why strong passwords and password managers are important.

I've taught this exact concept to a non-technical audience before. I simply told them it was like scrambling an egg--you can't "unscramble" it and then explained with hashing, you could scramble an identical egg and get identical results and compare the two scrambled eggs to see if they were identical before being scrambled.

That said, I do wonder how well they understood that explanation.

And the scrambles form a unique fingerprint!

A non-technical audience's ability to understand depends entirely on their willingness to even try. Most people just don't care and want you to stop wasting their time, so they put no effort into internalizing an explanation. If you want to teach people security, first make them care about it beyond not getting caught: from an employee's point of view, they don't need to be faster than the tiger, they just have to be faster than their slowest colleague.

Using the standard name can aid understanding by allowing the audience to connect what you're saying to what they already know. However, if the audience's existing knowledge is tainted by fears, misconceptions and confusion, then the connection may hinder more than it helps. In that case, it might be better to make up a new name so the explanation can stand on its own.

I don't know if "magic" was the best choice, but you can still explain all the details of how it works even if you call it something else.

One thing I dislike about medical doctors, is many of them try to "dumb things down" when talking to me. I'd much prefer they tell me the correct technical medical terminology. Some of it I already know what it means, and if I don't I can always ask them to explain further, or go look it up and read more about it.

(My mother and brother are doctors, and I don't get the feeling they are dumbing things down if I ask them for medical advice.)

A professional who talks about technical details, even if I don't completely understand those details, gives me the impression that they know what they are talking about, and that makes me feel confident in their abilities.

It also makes researching what they talked about much much easier. I can google “demyelination” while some metaphorical treatment of the topic involving insulated wires may be substantially less amenable to that.

As a TA of statistics for non-statistics major, I find it hard to choose the appropriate level of complexity because every audience has a different expectation. I'd encourage you to communicate with your doctors that you'd like the full details and terminology. Otherwise they simply can't know what you want.

Take a notepad, write things down, ask questions. Not necessarily in that order. It is a prop, but it indicates you take this seriously and want to learn more.

Or skip the notepad and just ask questions. In my experience some doctors are just jerks or otherwise terrible at cooperative communication; others recalibrate their explanations.

I had a math book in high school that tried using a non standard name to make something sound less scary. I didn’t understand and couldn’t google about it because no one else called it that. I avoided college for a couple years partially because of how hard a time I had with math that year.

To be fair, they did say it was "our approach", they did not say it was a "good approach."

You're right there's some contradiction, but overall I agree technical subjects are nearly always too dumbed down. People are smart! Give them a chance! Boring!=technical. And you can definitely explain hashing in an easy way.

I would substitute "scramble" with "magic". Something like: "The password is scrambled [1] so no one can see what it was originally. Second, this scrambling method ensures the result is the same length as every other password. Third, that very similar passwords, like 'aaaa' and 'aaab' [2] come out very different looking. And it's impossible [3] to descramble it to the original password."

[1] Using a mathematical concept known as "hashing"---see [link] for futher information.

[2] These are bad passwords; used for an example only.

[3] Not quite impossible, but very darned near impossible. See [link] for more information.

I was thinking about this, is a good hashing analogy something like mixing paint? Ie a defined set of constituent colours will produce a particular colour paint. But you can't go from a mixed colour back to the constituents. The only way to find out what constituents are required to create a colour is to try lots of constituents.

Oh that's a very good one. I was using the "magic" approach so far but now I am fond to paint colors. Thanks!

> Boring!=technical.

Yes. One of the best trainings I've been on was in my first job.

40+ minutes on... how to adjust your chair, by the health and safety manager. From how to position the arms, to spinning the chair over and adjusting the springyness of the tilt, to levelling the height against a screen. Almost 2 decades later, I remember the take-aways clearly.

Hashing should be fairly easy to explain - start with a picture of some whole vegetables and maybe a meat (though perhaps not an actual pig....), show them all chopped up, and show a "breakfast skillet" at the end. While discussing, make sure you point out that computers are machines that are really good at doing repetitive tasks like chopping numbers up the same way every time and recombining them.

Heck, that can even make it easy to slip discussion of "salting" in there.

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