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Comment by cmplxconjugate | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I’m actually quite surprised at your response. Is ECC really not well know these days?

We all hang around different circles, I hadn't heard about ECC since before, so unless that link was there, I would definitely go searching for it.

He’s part of today’s lucky 10,000. Nothing wrong with that!

Meta, this is what the daily lucky 10000 is about: https://xkcd.com/1053/

:-)

It's more that lazyweb has been infecting HN. Nobody should be surprised by basic concepts that are trivially Googleable (e.g. available on Wikipedia). Posting bare links with no explanation doesn't add anything to the discussion. I hope this trend ends soon.

> Nobody should be surprised by basic concepts that are trivially Googleable (e.g. available on Wikipedia).

Abbreviations are terrible for searchability. For example, a DDG search just now told me that ECC could mean Erie Community College, Elgin Community College, El Camino College, or Essex Community College. Of course it's easy to find out what "error-correcting code" means once I know that that's for what "ECC" stands, but that latter fact might not be so easy to discover. (In this particular case, it's the 5th DDG result, but I've definitely run into abbreviations with no plausible expansion, or, which is perhaps worse, multiple plausible expansions.)

Try any of the other keywords in the comment or title, such as 'memory', '32GB', 'RAM', 'DDR4', 'SO-DIMM' -- searching those with ECC gives the correct result every time. How are we supposed to get to hacking if we can't even do simple research based on context?

While I agree with you, searching for unknown terms is easy, many people browse on their phones, where searching is not as convenient.

More importantly however, if a phrase is uncommon, then one person asking and one person answering can save hundreds of people from searching and thousands of people from not searching and not knowing.

A phone these days is even simpler than a desktop. A $20 Android phone can understand "Hey Google, what is ECC memory?".

HN is not like other sites. It is for informed discussion that adds depth to the topic. If I want a linkfarm of relevant topics, I can easily go to Google or Wikipedia. If I want to see karma whoring for copy+paste links, I can go to Reddit. HN is not going to stay more informative than other sites if we are satisfied with discussing basic topics.

Your comment sounds pretentious. Why not just assume that all kinds of people browse HN? Even IT is a diverse field.

edit: What are you people downvoting for? I'm not insulting anyone. I just frankly pointed out how I would interpret the attitude of the person asking as above.

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