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Comment by fooblat | Hacker News Reader

My friends often tease me because I read the manual from everything I buy. Even if it is a tiny pamphlet.

I really like this informative blog post on unix pipes, but reading the readme would have saved some time.

It contains the answer in a simple form:

     `youtube-dl -o - https://youtu.be/BaW_jenozKc | castnow --quiet -`

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Do you really read them entirely? I mean, when I buy a TV, I download the manuals first and check if the features in the menu are what I expect from it. Same goes for a mainboard, monitor or a car, things where the capabilities are important to me.

But when something arrives I don't read the manual unless a question arises, then I search for it specifically in that section. For example how exactly did that microwave/grill-combo work? What exactly did this setting in the washing machine do?

I mean, people say the same thing about me, but I think that this is because they never even consider picking up the manual when they have a problem, while for me it's normal to tell them to read the manual. Maybe I should tell them "maybe you can find the answer in the manual", instead of "read the manual".

But some don't even look the "getting started mini-manual". This drives me crazy, specially when they then struggle using the scanning functionality of the printer or stuff like that.

Yes I really do read them cover to cover and when I find something interesting I make a note of it. Perhaps I'm unusual in that I like reading manuals and documentation. For me it is part of my enjoyment of learning how things work.

I read the entire manual for tech stuff before I buy it if the manual is available online, but that's just part of my compulsive researching habit.

I used to do this (stopped checking every manual but still do it for tech stuff with a bunch of features) and nowadays it pays off a lot for my hobby of electronic music production, reading manuals for the synths I want to buy helps a lot to visualise the potential.

Have you noticed any quality issues? Can you speak to who is making the better manuals?

It's a fairly common convention for the filename '-' to mean stdin or stdout. However, it's only a convention, and many things don't seem to follow it, particularly things ported from a non-unix-like OS (looking at you, pico2wave).

As someone who's never read a manual for anything I owned in my entire life I find this fascinating.

Is there anything I'm missing out on, and if I wouldn't read manuals cover-to-cover, what parts would you recommend reading?

Also, assuming many are like me, do you find a lot of quality issues or inconsistencies in documentation just because it's a "tick-in-the-box" exercise to provide a documentation and maybe an overlooked part of the product development?

Thank you!

not the original comment author but I also read most manuals when I buy something. If you buy electronics/products from decent companies, you will be surprise how well the documentation is done.

Numerous times I found warnings of how to use or not a certain product, that further expanded by understanding of how certain things works. Even the most boring product can have instructions that you might don't know and could use to learn them.

Example, my local shop sells tomatoes in a box, written with bold letters, don't store in fridge. I bought from that shop for 2 years, and always store them in the fridge until I took notice of the warning and it pushed me to read why.

Well, why shouldn't you store tomatoes in the fridge?

Serious Eats has an in-depth article about how to store tomatoes. Short answer is that you should store them at room temperature until they ripen, then refrigerate only if necessary: https://www.seriouseats.com/2014/09/why-you-should-refrigera...

I really recommend reading the manual. For instance, the one for my Weber grill had quite a few tips in there that I wouldn't have come across otherwise.

I'm not a manual reader in the same way as you, but I've got fond memories of reading man pages on my way down to art school (before I switched courses!). Love cli programs with tonnes of flags and heaps of features, like curl, socat and rsync.

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