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Comment by simmons | Hacker News Reader

My Dad is in his early 70's and has never used the Internet. In fact, he never even had a cellphone until this year when I bought him a flip-phone and convinced him to accept it. I think he's plenty capable of learning such technology, he just doesn't see any compelling reason. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable choice -- I'm certainly not going to tell a senior citizen what they need to be happy.

He is starting to run into some practical problems. For example, the local library apparently stopped stocking all the paper IRS forms.

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What is interesting is that it seems to have more to do with age than intellectual capacity. I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. They might learn just how to use it but have no curiosity on how it works.

I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it.

I know a woman who until recently worked as a secretary to one of the presidents of a large regional bank. The first thing she did each morning was to print out the president's e-mails, and bring them to him on paper. He would then dictate his responses and she would send the e-mail responses for him.

The job paid big bucks for several reasons:

- She knows how to take fast, accurate dictation with steno. They don't teach that anywhere anymore.

- She knows how to file. Real paper files.

- She would place his phone calls for him, old-fashioned style. He would say, "I need to talk to Mr. X," and a in a couple of minutes she'd be on the phone: "Is this Mr. X? Please hold for bank president Y."

- She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

- She didn't mind making coffee for the boss. It's a hate crime to even ask these days, but she did it happily.

That bank president must have a very low stress level, since he only had to see his paper e-mail once a day.

> - She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

> - She didn't mind making coffee for the boss. It's a hate crime to even ask these days, but she did it happily.

This seems like very strange editorializing to me. Do backpacks bother you so much? Who is complaining about making coffee if that's in the job description?

There are some groups of people that find such tasks offensive/beneath them. I don't understand why, I have just seen it in practice.

Perhaps my experience is unique, but in the places i've worked, everybody made each other tea all the time when their colleages were busy - and if one thing was certain, its that the boss never made their own tea. I don't think it was every considered a problem. That was just the order of things

You accidentally hit the core of the coffee problem. Woman in your story is secretary and coffee and baby sitting boss is her job description. Bank (industry) professionals are not expected to make coffee nor write boss mails. The women who complain about the coffee requirement are complaining that they are treated as secretaries and expected to do secretarial work, despite being industry professionals.

It is also dominance game - there is that thug-of-war among professionals over autonomy, leadership, ideas, credit, blame and what not. A person that should have no authority to order her around is ordering her around in front of third parties, which makes him look more like a boss and her more like secretary. Both request and complaint are office politics. Not coincidentally, secretaries (unlike industry professionals) are supposed to act rather submissive and manage boss emotions rather then propose ideas, argue or fight for them.

> - She dressed the part; coming to work in a proper business suit and briefcase each day, not carrying a backpack like a sixth-grader.

This is something I've been thinking more and more about lately. I used to be happy with the lax attitude most tech places have to attire but honestly I look around my office now and I wish we had a bit more of a dress standard. I was a tshirt and hoodie fiend but changed to slacks/smart jeans and a shirt recently. I've been on the end of so many barbs and jokes from coworkers over this (which I take in good humour). Interestingly I've found that I'm being taken more seriously by our management side/CTO etc. I have no interest in moving over there by the way, I'll be coding til I retire.

I'm going to be asked why we should change and what's wrong with the casual approach. I think if as a profession we want to be taken seriously, we need to start looking the part. Sure a lawyer could rock up into court wearing shorts and a faded 1980s Man Utd jersey and still do a good job, but honestly what would you actually think of him? What is actually wrong with looking smart?

I'd do the same if they invested in proper AC (Germany wide issue). But for now, shorts it is until summer is over.

Right! Workplaces seem to advertise to, for example, computer people how they are relaxed and that you can come to work in jeans. I just want to get to wear a suit for once, for the enjoyment of myself and others!

We had Classy (Client* Team) Mondays at a previous job of mine. The whole larger group would come in dressed up in suits and business appropriate dresses, then have some nibbles and drinks afterwards.

Pretty much a reverse of a casual Friday.

* Client in the client-server computing sense.

Monday is a good day for that as well - gives you time to panic-prepare/iron on sunday evening :)

>but honestly what would you actually think of him

I would hire him as my full time lawyer in a heartbeat, but that's just me.

If you'd hire someone based solely on their clothing (the only data point we have here), then you should review your decision making processes.

You read my mind with that last sentence. As I read your anecdote, I was marveling at how much relief she probably created by circumventing the email/slack/txt/messenger treadmill the rest of us are forced to run on during a workday.

>the email/slack/txt/messenger treadmill the rest of us are forced to run on during a workday.

Or at all hours of the evening, night and early morning, since some people we work with don't seem to understand the concept of leaving work at work.

You can enforce such rules on your own, by slowly trimming down after-hours "work" (since it is unpaid, it's not work to me). You can compensate this with very good time management and always being on time/reading up on meeting agendas. Nobody will openly criticize you for such a practice since everyone sees you as together and competent. Eventually they get used to this status quo and nobody will even question it anymore in your case. It might take you a few years, but it pays off in the end I think.

Maybe the _are_ still at work! :-)

I think having an assistant would be a relief even if I read my own email.

I would be surprised if this is still not one of the responsibilities of secretaries that work for CEO's.

I know law partners who are like this. If they generate so much value for their employer they can hire an assistant solely to bridge the technology gap.

My father was exactly like this (he retired last year after 49 years in practice as a lawyer, several decades of which he was managing partner of his own firm) - if he needed to send an email, just like sending a letter, he would shout down the corridor to his secretary and she would send it for him. Here's one just for the HN open-office haters: he only really retired because the consultancy gig he'd taken on for the twilight of his career (during which he still had a secretary who would send emails for him) switched to an open-office floor plan and he was extremely miserable because he could no longer take a nap after lunch.

Curiously, post-retirement he's bought a smartphone and is actually moderately competent with it, in a way I never really saw him be with a computer...

What’s wrong with having a bookbag?

Here in Finland, practically everyone carries one. From young kids to grown adult men and women. I even saw an old person with one the other day. One can’t carry as much nor is it practical to use briefcases.

I'd argue that briefcase's are more practical for that kind of job where it involves a lot of paperwork, as you can lay them flat without worrying about crumbling them.

I'll allow a book strap.

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/illustration-depicting-...

They said it themselves. Its about _looking_ a part. If they wanted practicality it would be business casual and a backpack but its not about that. Monkey suit and briefcase shows you're willing to jump through the hoops, toe the line and wear the uniform.

I think the Finnish point was that in Finland you are looking the part with a back pack.

- She knows how to take fast, accurate dictation with steno. They don't teach that anywhere anymore.

Of course they do, usually it's directed at court jobs, but anyone can take a steno course.

Court stenography is computerized now. And even decades ago was mechanized.

"Steno" with pencil and a steno pad. Not a stenography machine.

Yes, but there are still shorthand classes, e.g. https://www.kbcc.cuny.edu/TutorialServices/Pages/tutorialcou... (search for "Office Administration & Technology")

Warren Buffett I believe works in a similar way - his emails are printed out and he dictates responses. It probably saves quite a lot of time over checking the inbox in the usual way.

If you spent your life becoming very efficient in a particular environment, there's an incentive to keep this environment from changing, and not to expend any effort to learn a new environment. That learning capacity can be more efficiently spent elsewhere.

(An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)

A big component of mastery is wiring your brain to make the right decision without sweating over the details like you did when you were 25. Replacing problem solving with intuition. But what happens 20 years later when your intuition is no longer correct? Or when someone keeps asking why? You’re out of practice, And you’re trying to rewire a part of your brain that is no longer part of your internal dialog.

Teaching seems to be one way to avoid this. You have to keep defending your decisions. Switching specializations (or creating new ones) is another. The only other way I know is to seek outside help, and that level of humility is rare in experts.

There is another way. Keep challenging yourself with new projects, be a life learner.

> (An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while. They have more important things to do.)

We're currently re-building all our systems to target RHEL6 because that's what the execs decided, if we're lucky the project will be done before it's end of lifed. They also decided that we'd be using modern c++, more modern than the GCC that ships with RHEL6. Thanks to these largely incompatible requirements the team responsible has practically built their own distro on top of RHEL6, with a newer gcc and a rebuild of all the libraries we use complete with it's own package management system. I think it's customized enough that a highly doubt redhat could off us any support anyway.

>there are still places running RHEL6 in production

We just got off of RHEL5, so I can understand why there are people still running 6.

> An IT illustration: there are still places running RHEL6 in production and not seeing an effort to migrate from it worth the while.

I recently interviewed at a startup (though a reasonably far-along/mature, if not spectacularly successful by VC standards) that was both running RHEL6 and depending a remarkable amount on "enterprise" gear, software, and support, which seemed incongruous for any small company, let alone a startup.

They did see it as worthwhile to "migrate" to CentOS6, but I'm pretty sure the interviewer who was the incumbent rejected me quickly and strenuously after I admitted a preference for Ubuntu (due to its package ecosystem better catering to a wider array of developers, making my DevOps culture evangelism and implementation that much easier) and a focus on frugality first when it comes to hardware (that being a huge benefit of it being a commodity).

> They have more important things to do.

Poe's Law aside, I do actually find this to be a valid argument, if it's presented eyes-open, rather than just through inertia.

That is, there's a difference between having considered the migration and deciding it's not worth it (or that the "more important things" are more worth it and take priority) and not having considered the migration at all because those "more important things" completely consumed everyone's attention. I don't mean to present these as a false dichotomy, just two extremes that illustrate my point.

It gets better: there are places selling their software via hardware appliances that run RHEL6.

That is better, actually. If it's proven for that many years why mess with it? Why assume that older is unilaterally worse?

Ecliptic Curve cryptography. In-tree driver modules for last year's 10Gb Ethernet cards. Python 2.7, let alone 3. Official support for kernel 4.x.

I've barely been in the industry for 90 days and I've already had to deal with the lack of the above in RHEL6.

(Indirectly, mind you; but I believe that the transition between RHEL6 and CentOS6 is negligible for the current topic.)

Hardware appliances would generally be one place none of these things matter - you know if your gray box ships with a 10gbe card or not, customer doesn’t care about userland versions, etc.

That said, I also hate working on RHEL 6.

> none of those things matter

... unless the software's needs evolve over time such as to require them.

> you know if your gray box ships with a 10gbe card or not

Yes; and lucky we do know. Else, our upcoming model of gray boxes that - unlike their predecessors - aren't approaching EOL but are only available with 10gbe cards ... would already be shipping with broken networking.

What's better than a relatively impenetrable appliance? One that manifestly doesn't care about security and therefore uses an old kernel and vulnerable userland. If they use an old unsupported OS, what other vulnerable libraries are hiding inside?

RHEL 6 is supported until 2024.

Oh, goody, just in time for the theoreticians to finally tell us that any kind of speculative execution can be made into a security flaw, and that there's nothing to do about it but to crawl back into a hole, err, I mean, back to ARM micro-controllers. :)

RISCV :)

Hypothetically, if you needed python couldn't you either compile it to binary or just install the runtime ? I don't see how a language would be coupled to the version of Linux.

Doing so means putting all Python packages into a single opaque OS-level package. Not fun when your build system and related infrastructure, were all designed to work with OS-level packages.

Can't you just set PYTHON_PATH="where yoy put python" ?

> all Python packages

That's a weakness in the language. You trade such a simple syntax for dependency hell. Oh, you wanted XML-derp-3.5.2.9.6? Well that requires XML-slurp-2.6.5.9.77 and you only have '75, sorry bud, can't possibly work. Oh but if you upgrade XML-slurp that breaks pycairo-2.7.55-1 and all your GUI code will stop working. Fun stuff.

Not my choice. We've had over 50kloc of Python for several years before I arrived. The packaging shenanigans still occasionally sputter.

Why? You just use package dependencies to indicated that they depend on the New Python.

Third-party dependencies. Their BRPMs will all install to the OS's old Python. Pull them from PyPI using setup.py, and we get the problem I describe; the alternative is to build our own BRPMs, which is a massive headache to set up.

There are places that just forked RHEL5ish and update the kernel and packages. At some point it's a mess, but until then, just keep patching.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

My parents both had Ph.D. educations in chemistry. A big part of my father's work involved scientific programming in Fortran. Both used computers in their research. Neither really got on board with the internet. My father never even used email. My mom did, but minimally.

For many people who started worked before the 80’s, using a keyboard is for clerical work, and a sign of reduced social status.

Doctors expect to be catered to. They're at the top of an entire apparatus designed for their convenience, that starts by making people come for appointments on their schedule, and ends with it being acceptable for them still to use paper charts in 2018.

I'm not blaming these guys, they're part of a system that treats them like gods.

Age? How many young kids are curious about how plumbing works or lawnmower engines? It probably has more to do with you and your friends being curious about something and not understanding why other people in general aren't curious about it.

> who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser

Do you need to now IP protocol to use the internet?

Old people generally don't like change, they have things set up as they like them.

If you need to configure a computer, understand the difference between an email and a webmail and imap, what is a certificate and why it matters, you need a basic understanding of how these things work.

Right, but they don't need to configure that crap, they get someone else to do it.

> who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser

Out of and interest in both computer protocols and medicine, I'm curious to know if you have any specific examples of those concepts you mention.

Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. Part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing [citation needed, I know].

Part of me thinks that the easy way now where we can do IRS forms (and everything) online and to our door of our houses, will make us weak.

There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times, but I think i'm going on a tangent from the disappearance of paper IRS forms at local libraries...

You are definitely onto something. I'm going to skew this comment towards something similar. As an early twenty-something, I'm urging more friends and family to stop using the internet loosely - meaning, use the medium as a tool but not as a form of entertainment. Extensively, use it as little as possible.

I'm not saying reject the medium but rather try to be acutely aware of how it affects things: perception, mind, body, people, culture, etc. Especially, and this doesn't have to do solely with the internet, try to take an objective view of yourself and your life. In my teens, I used to play a lot of video games and surf the internet for 2/3rds of the day, every day. One late evening, I had to take out the trash to my backyard where the trash-bin was. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed but late evenings are one of the greatest times of the day - it's just honeyed indolence. Well, from outside in my backyard, I noticed my room, I saw all the light coming from my television and my computer. It was sad. That was most of my life. That room. Since then, I try to use technology less and try to be outside as much as I can. But to the point, please take notice of things.

Alas, further reading: Don DeLillo's White Noise.

This sounds like thinking I've heard from some Amish people.

I sometimes think if the barbarians of the 4th and 5th Century are like today's people who adopt Amish principles, and the rest of the population as 4th and 5th Century Romans. There are extremely identifiable markers.

The only recollection I have on the Amish is from Family Guy - I'm not close to that. On a serious note, what I was trying to argue, in short, was: 1. Anything in excess is not good. 2. Try to think and be aware of the effects of things like the internet have on you, people, culture, etc.

Is HN a tool or entertainment?

Definitely a tool or at least, mostly a tool - I continue to learn a lot from the site, largely from the comments but also from the links to articles, etc. I suppose it's important to define tool and entertainment. As I see it: A tool is something that helps you grow, create, learn, etc. Entertainment, on the other hand, is something with no intention of helping you, it's only for gratification purposes.

For instance, I think, mindlessly scrolling through reddit.com is a form of entertainment. But if you are subscribed to only certain particular subs in order, for example, to become a better writer, that would be a tool. This is a shaky example though.

> I continue to learn a lot from the site

To me, that makes it entertainment, though I guess learning things can be useful for work too. :-)

Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already.

I'm not sure why. Libraries are still massively popular, and most have embraced digital media fully. In many of the cities where I've been in the last 10 years, the libraries are struggling to keep up with demand. Many even have coffee shops and internet cafes.

In my estimation, a lot of people under 40 think the library is empty all the time because they've never been to one to see what it offers.

It's like how people say they don't watch PBS because there's nothing good on. But how do they know there's nothing good on if they don't watch?

The quote is from Herodotus Book 9 Chapter 122, "Soft lands breed soft men", by Cyrus the Persian.

Reference: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...

Oh wow thank you! I have wondered for years where it has come from. I love the following sentence: "...wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.".

This all is reminding me of another saying, a spartan one. A Spartan woman was asked why they do not submit to their men, and she replied with "strong men are not born from weak women".

If anyone is liking these forms of phrases (short, insightful), there is a word just for it: Laconic [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase

> part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing

And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authentic as interaction in real life.

> There is some old Roman bit about easy/good/soft times breeding weak men who bring tough times

Contemporary moral systems look down on suffering. As engineers, we should strive to create a society where suffering and "hard times" are eliminated. The end-goal is everyone being able to enjoy life with tragedies and hardships eliminated.

This is not to say that we should get rid of all intellectual challenges - just that (by any contemporary moral system) it should be the end goal to rid ourselves of suffering.

And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before.

I don't find looking at a person on a screen makes me feel "close" to them anymore than watching a person on a television show.

The people I feel "close" to are people I see in real life. But maybe I have a different definition of "close" than other people.

Worry not my friend, for you are not alone.

This was intended more towards people you don't normally see face to face. My parents live across the country. I can maybe see them twice a year. My college friends have moved elsewhere, but we can definitely play a game of DnD over Hangouts and Roll20. My relatives live abroad, but I still get (virtual) face-to-face time with them.

This would have been incomprehensible 100 years ago, and is a huge innovation in terms of bringing humans closer together. Sure, if you decide to start communicating with your roommate over FaceTime rather than actually talking to them in person, you're going to experience a decline in "closeness", but if you use these technologies normally, I think they absolutely have the potential to maintain strong connections where none could have existed before.

> suffering and "hard times" are eliminated

There's an ancient intellectual tradition of Buddhism, very much concerned with elimination of suffering. What they came up with is that to stop suffering, one has to stop existing ("break the circle of re-incarnation").

What we can realistically hope for using engineering is to eliminate gross material causes of suffering, like famines, or large-scale warfare, or various illnesses. We can hope to eliminate hardships, but not tragedies, which are endogenous.

Just saying.

Agreed. Elimination of material causes is the best we can do given our current lack of insight into the brain. The discussion becomes much more interesting when we do begin to gain that insight when coupled with the ability precisely and extensively modify it.

I've never heard that quote before but it's pretty solid. :)

My parents were internet-free until they figured out that a smartphone could show them pictures of grandkids. My siblings with kids were printing and mailing them pictures, but out parents were cut out of the daily fb updates of their grandchildren.

It is funny, I think that is pretty standard stuff, getting instant photos. But it is actually a huge change compared to how things were 20 years ago.

Does the US IRS have an auto-fill feature for tax software?

In Canada you sign up at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA is Canada's IRS) and get a log on. Then at tax time you can download free tax software from links on the CRA website, click auto-fill to populate with your info and then click the e-file button. That's it, done.

My dad in his mid 70s probably wouldn't do it so your dad may not either if it was available in the US. But it is a great feature to have it makes it almost to the point of why is anyone doing this it should be automatic each year.

> Does the US IRS have an auto-fill feature for tax software?

No.

See: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/03/22/521132960/epis...

I used to think making it more automatic was a clearly good idea _until_ I listened to that episode and was introduced to the counter-argument that people should well know what taxes they pay, to make it harder to sneak things in there or make the existing things swell without scrutiny.

This is why there's automatic withholding of income tax from your paycheck. If you never see it, you're less likely to miss it. The whole system is designed to try to keep you from realizing how much you pay.

Here in South Africa, you give your employer(s) your tax number and for ordinary employment they report your earnings. Then come tax time, you log onto the e-filing system and most of it is done for you already.

Many companies sell software to do US taxes for you and an automated system would shut them down overnight so they spend a lot of money blocking any changes to make tax easy.

That's perfectly fine. To the vast majority of HN, the internet may be the 2nd most time consuming aspect of our lives after family life (or perhaps the 1st). So much of our lives revolves around the internet - maintaining friendships, getting into careers, learning new things - that we've become almost inseparable from the revolutionary communication it provides.

Yet, as amazing as the internet can be, it's still what you make of it. There's users with greatly varying proficiencies with vastly different use cases. Some people just aren't as accustomed to it as others. For us younger folks, it's easier to take something for granted when you've had it basically your entire life. A person who is 50-60 years old (born between 1958-1968) was in their 20s-30s when the internet was becoming mainstream. As someone in their 20s that thinks "wtf are these kids talking about" when a teenage cousin explains the internet culture of "vlogging", I could imagine some of the people back when the internet first came about were like "wtf I can send mails to other people over the telephone wires that's not telegraph and is done by computers" (I'm exaggerating). As you can see by standard adoption curves, there's always a group of last remaining holdouts. Maybe they've gotten by fine in life without adopting and don't feel compelled to bother. As the old saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". These people carry with them what seems to be a soon-to-be historical lifestyle that's still important to remember.

Side note: he should be able to get those forms at the post office.

The IRS will also mail them plus the directions if you call and ask.

Also, the library has internet access, so the librarian should be able to print them.

My 70-something parents keep their cell phones at home, since they are so nice, so nothing happens to them. They carry pens and paper if they need to track something.

My dad was a privacy-conscious bus driver in the 1980s, and has always had an unlisted number. These days, I know he's calling because caller ID shows "Private Number" when he calls.

They carry pens and paper if they need to track something.

I do, too. And in the nerdiest possible way: https://logostore-globalid.us/ProductDetail.aspx?did=17363&p...

And it's super cheap!

This looks like a great gift. Thanks for the idea!

These days I know it's my dad calling because he's the only one who actually makes plain-old telephone calls.

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