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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Practically nobody writes classic HOWTOs anymore.

At best you get amateurs speaking authoritatively on subjects they've barely scratched the surface of in blog posts they can try monetize, at worst you get the same thing but in the form of a youtube video.

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I dunno IMHO there's a lot of rose colored glasses looking back at them. I cut my teeth learning Linux in the era of howtos and such of the late 90s/2000s, and it was a real mess. Someone on an IRC channel would tell you to RTFM and point at a guide, you'd read it and slog through pages and pages of bloviation about unix philosophy, incredible minutia about every CLI parameter (half of which don't exist anymore) or whatever and be even more confused than when you started. You'd go back to IRC and someone else would say oh yeah don't read that guide, it's old and not up to date. Here read this guide... and the process starts over again. There were some good guides, but it was really hard to find them and sort out the good from the bad.

I spent my teens installing linux from floppies and Infomagic CDs. Back then the distro would often by default include the howtos package bringing in the whole enchilada of knowledge.

They were generally relevant to the versions of software included, and updated when the rest of the system did.

Things started getting messy as everyone got connected 24x7 and increasingly diverged from what packages distros were shipping, and of course the HOWTOs in general just stopped getting maintained/created until we arrived at today's misery.

Honestly, I still write them. Either for my private documents or office documents.

I’m planning to open my personal trove step by step, on my self hosted server, via a static site. They are Linux/development documents too.

Note: No ads, no tracking, GFDL licensed.

There’s some preliminary stuff I wrote: https://bayindirh.lists.sh/Useful%20technical%20documents

Same. Things are getting so noisy and hard to find that even if good howtos exist somewhere on the internet, finding it can waste hours vs just word searching your own documents.

The linked Evernote pages don't even render here (noscript). Following a long delay it just shows a blank page.

Excellent demonstration of how awful the status quo is vs. opening local files in /usr/share/doc/howto/txt/ with `less`.

Actually publishing the documents via Evernote is a stopgap measure until I perfect the pipeline from Evernote to the static site I plan to put up.

Evernote allows me to take notes in real-time and access it regardless of place or OS I'm using at that time. It also allows me to collaborate on stuff, so I don't think it's concentrated evil juice.

In today's OpenCV video, we'll show you how to find the red cup just like the docs.

Make sure to smash that Like and subscribe button.

This video is sponsored by SKYN condoms. Get a 6-pack for just $8.99 that you can truly feel.

And now for the red cup with OpenCV.

Nah, real linux hackers go raw.

I also forgot to insert the Youtube ad.

Limiting the search to github gists as a first option is a pretty decent way to escape the machine generated algorithmic SEO garbage.

Until HowTo’s get sponsorship, like streaming, that is how it is going to be. Not that enough people RTFM to make it worthwhile. The best way to explain Linux is socially, though.

The best way to learn a subject is from an authoritative source. 'socially' results in a whole bunch of misinformation and wrong practices, like PHP developers chmod'ing 777 the hell out of the system because they don't understand what the fuck they are doing.

That's what google does with your data and it's considered security.

We should revive the HOWTOs ..

Or a podcast.

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