Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you (2013)

coding2learn.org

44 pointsColinWright90 comments

It's kind of funny how far back this whinging about kids not being able to use computers goes, especially how condescending this blog is. Most people will only learn as much about computers to do their work and nothing more, because isn't it normal to only learn the bare minimum about something you don't care about?

The kids these days don‘t know how to use their cars. They go to mechanics to do something basic like change the oil or replace the brake pads when they could spend a few hours doing it themselves in a half-assed way.

Maybe they have money. The kids who don’t have money and are somewhat more intelligent that the average learn that doing it themselves saves them some money they can spend on other things. There’s a cultural aspect of it that changes over time but that’s possibly influenced by changes in technology. When I was a a teenager you could comprehend how a car worked and have modest success debugging and fixing a car. I doubt that’s easy to do these days.

It should be said that changing oil does not take hours and however you half ass it, the average lube tech uses even less ass than that.

Yeah, on most cars, changing the oil consists of: loosen/remove one bolt, drain oil, unscrew oil filter, put new filter on and bolt back, fill with amount and type of oil specified in manual. (Some also have a little plastic shield you have to remove first.) And yeah, you’re likely to care a whole lot more about your car than some average lube tech. (This is why I change my oil now: I found out how little they care when the lube techs at two different places reattached the plastic shield wrong causing it to fall and drag on the road. Saving money was just a bonus.)

I’ve notice people seriously overestimate how complicated really simple maintenance/mechanical tasks are generally.

I remember hearing an NPR story about a plumber shortage where the person being interviewed had just paid some thousand dollars to have their PVC drain line repaired. I was shocked. They could have done it themselves with a shovel, a hacksaw, and $5 worth of PVC and glue in maybe 10-25 minutes, well within almost anyone’s capabilities if they had thought to look into it before calling someone.

We really are very rich that we can not think about these things.

Even easier, if you're willing to spend a little up front. Just get a vacuum pump extractor, purpose built for changing oil. You shove the hose down the dipstick hole, pump it a few times, and watch as your oil is removed from the car. No need to jack up the car or crawl under. When the thing starts to make bathtub drain noises, wiggle the hose around to make sure it was seated, pull it up out, and pour a new bottle of oil in. No mess no fuss

Now show the "Replace oil filter with new" step, ideally (like you mentioned) without lifting the vehicle

Many oil filters these days are accessible from the top of the engine, and IME it’s possible to get under many SUVs/CUVs/trucks far enough to remove the filter/bung without lifting anyway. A set of drive-on ramps makes it kind of a non issue either way

For all of my cars, its centrally located, near the dipstick.

That's how I do it on my vehicle, no lift no ramps. I just slide under on my back and everything is very accessible. Toyota still doing something right I guess.

i found those vaccuum pump never suck all of the oil completely. You can test it yourself, after sucking the oil, remove the drain plug and there is oil still dripping out

I expect most people don't fancy crawling under their car nor do they have a lift. It's also surprisingly hard to do DIY stuff if you aren't used to or equipped for it; you can waste hours fiddling with something that you haven't built the wisdom to do in the right/quick/easy way, like unscrewing something in an awkward place or angle.

You don't need a lift, you just need some ramps or to use the jack that probably comes with your car with some jack stands. I can't imagine almost any DIYer uses a lift, unless they're moved into the Very Serious Car Person With Project Cars stage of DIY.

You didn't include jack stands, crawling under the car, nor needing an appropriate place to work in your original description making it sound so easy. I do a lot of DIY including car stuff, but for oil it's a toss up of whether I actually want that hassle or whether I'll just outsource it to a still-competitive market for a low price.

(I did get burned on a cross country road trip by some dipshit stripping my oil pan drain hole. I don't know if they just didn't like the far-off plates, or aluminum was an exotic material to them, or what. But that's much less of a worry when you go to the same local place)

Depends on your car but you don't need to jack it up for oil. I do it whereever its parked. I've done it on the side of the road when I had to park it there before.

You can find out how to do this with a hundred different detailed youtube videos.

I will outline the procedure on my car how I do it so you can see how simple it actually is. No you don't need a lift. Yes you lay down but keep in mind 65 year old mechanics can lay down and its not a big ask for most people in good health to lay down under their car.

> unscrew oil cap at the top of the engine

> get plastic pan to collect oil and slide it under the oil pan

> get 14mm socket wrench and slightly loosen the drain plug

> loosen it the rest of the way by hand, then carefully remove the plug to not drop it into the collection pan (not a big deal if it happens)

> go have lunch

> come back and pour a little new oil down

> go and clean up lunch

> come back and screw the drain plug back on with a new copper washer

> unscrew the filter which i do by hand because i do this myself and don't overtorque like the lube tech

> pour a little oil into new replacement filter and screw back on

> fill with oil

> cap the fill lid

> done

as you can see you screw and unscrew three things. this should fit within the mental model of most people quite easily barring intellectual disability.

You forgot „properly dispose of old oil“. That alone justifies the trip to the shop for me.

There’s nothing hard about that, you take it to the closest auto parts store and dump it in the big tank they have for that.

And they are going to let you do this for free instead of invoicing you for changing your oil. Very nice guys. Most of all because they have to pay to dispose of _your_ oil afterward.

Maybe car shops are philanthropic where you live, not so much where I live…

I have literally never seen anyplace geared towards selling parts / oil, charge for oil disposal. I can think of 6+ places within 30 minutes that offer it for free.

Like the sibling commenter, I have never heard of an auto parts store charging for this. Walmart accepts it as well. Maybe it's just in the US that things are this way, and you're in another country?

I assume part of the reason they offer this service is to incentivize you to buy parts and oil from them, but I imagine there are also regulatory reasons.

I do live in another country and you started to make me doubt, so I checked.

So car shops generally won’t take you old oil where I live (although allegedly some do, which I somehow have never heard of), but it appears that most of the gas stations do.

So, my mistake, it appears it’s not so much a pain as I thought, I’ll look into this.

Have you ever actually tried this stuff instead of supposing things and writing about it as a fact online? I just take it to autozone and they don't ask questions or need to file anything, or even really ask me anything about the oil I brought in. Some people don't even go that far and just leave a used jug outside the autozone (bad practice as it could spill and is rude to the workers).

Yeah by the time you go to a place that accepts you might as well have paid them to do the work.

Places accept oil for free all over the place. Its not a huge pain at all.

Most of places that sell you new oil will gladly take your old one.

That is the easiest step among the pile of very easy steps.

I think you underestimate the level of complexity. The actual oil change is simple enough but getting the car lifted requires ramps. Then there is the disposal problem individually each step is simple but when you add them up and trade them against paying 50$ for the oil change it’s not always a great trade.

As for plumbing you definitely underestimate how much of a pain in the a it is to dig a 4-6’ deep hole to do your own pipes. It can be done in a day or 2 outside of most peoples comfort zone.

This was a story set in the south, where such pipes are rarely buried more than 2’ because the frost line is basically at the surface.

I’ve done it, so I’m not underestimating it. I’ve had the exact problem described in the story. And I’m definitely not a plumber.

No ramps needed for my car. Disposal is easy you just take the used oil wherever you bought the fresh oil. Autozone in my case.

I know how to change the oil and do the breaks in my car.

I pay a mechanic to do them because I don't have a lift and disposing of used oil is a pain.

Kids these days are growing up into a world where breaks rarely need changing and oil is something you use in the kitchen, not a car.

You don’t need a lift, Walmart sells cheap ramps and many cars are high enough now you don’t even need those. Of course you can also use a jack and jack stands too, and almost every car comes now with a jack.

Used oil can be disposed of at almost any of the super abundant auto parts stores. You take it in, walk to the back, and dump it in the giant tank.

Are those really your reasons?

I can't say for everyone, but my current Mazda 3 (and I suspect my previous tenth-gen Civic) lifts to only one side at a time. There is no jack point (in the manual at least) at the front allowing you to jack the vehicle (with the single included jack) and put in jack stands for both sides.

Suggests the jack is included only to change a tire at the side of the road, not for maintenance. You were right earlier though, inexpensive ramps for work would be fine.

You raise one side, lower it onto the jack stand, remove the jack, then repeat for the other side. You don't raise the entire front of the car.

> There is no jack point (in the manual at least) at the front allowing you to jack the vehicle (with the single included jack) and put in jack stands for both sides.

That is not how you put the front up on stands with one jack and the manual's indicated tire change jack points. You jack up one side, using the "jack point" for changing that front tire on that side, insert one jack stand on that side, then you switch to the other side, jack up the other side using its approved "jack point", and insert the other jack stand on the other side.

> Are those really your reasons?

Yes. Space is an expensive luxury where I live. Doesn't matter _how cheap_ the ramp(s) and jack(s) and stand(s) are. I'm going to use them ~5 times a year and the rest of the time they're going to be taking up space that more utilized tools/materials/stuff can occupy.

The few $ i spend every ~ 4k miles on oil changes is worth it. Mechanic does it faster than I could because they have power lift and it's second nature to them. While they're under there, they call anything else that's worth it to my attention, too.

My next car will not need oil and then those cheap ramps will _really_ be a waste of space.

Most auto part stores actually have an oil recycling and disposal service, just take your bottles there

I started going to the oil change places when I owned a car that I couldn't get at the oil filter. If I crawled under it, I could just barely touch it with my finger, but at the price of pulling a shoulder muscle. I still can't figure out how you're supposed to change the thing, but after one attempt, I was content to let someone else do it.

Yeah, I know, not very "hacker spirit" of me. But I've got a finite amount of that, and there are other places I want to spend it.

While true, the computer as a general purpose machine has become a bloated incomprehensive, somewhat hostile affair to the user and that pushes newcomers away. There was a time when more newcomers stayed.

And not only that but kids aren't even interested in computers any more. They want a cell phone and an ipad. That's even more abstracted.

There's still a pretty significant PC gaming culture.

I once asked a 20 something kid "do you know why computers are a big deal", and he said, "because it is a communication device"?

Computers are so good at being programmable that now a days people don't see it as a programmable device, but only as the thing that it is programmed to be. Today there are computers everywhere, but people see a workstatinon, a web server, a gaming rig, a tv, a phone etc, but never the computer is behind all those things.

The underlying theme of knowing how things work, or how they are put together, at least conceptually to not get taken advantage of is what remained standing out to me.

There has been some thought about students who grew up mostly with touch screens and aren't that great with keyboards and mouse, although I'm not sure how widespread that might be.

Being a consumer, instead of a creator, or knowing how the creation is doen (what goes into it, how it could be maintained).

Optimistically, I'm looking forward to diy food (gardening) among other things being rediscovered if it isn't already being.

A few years ago I was doing some tutoring at a school and a student mentioned "Computer Science" class. I was impressed that fifth graders at this school with generally low performing students had access to Computer Science classes at that age.

Then I discovered they were learning how to use Word. The students really thought they were taking a "Computer Science" course. I would have liked to meet the teacher - I suspect they wouldn't know how to write a binary search in the language of their choice to save their life, let alone discuss if a problem was NP Complete.

This sort of thing used to be called "Computer Literacy", which was a much better name. The equivalent of (and I suppose including) what was called "typing class" in the 80s.

So I stopped at the bit about the proxies because seriously, I’ve had to care about proxies almost never in the last 11 years. If your network is set up to require some special proxy setting, it shouldn’t be a network that people sign into with some random device and I would expect the IT staff to manage the proxy settings when setting up the devices that are meant to go on that network. As for being able to join a wifi network, yes, the kids know exactly how to do that and they do just fine. Maybe a handful of people who take a learned helplessness approach to anything technical might be flummoxed but the kids can do it.

And spare me the recollections of the old days when your computer booted up into a BASIC prompt. I was there, Charlie, it wasn’t all wine and roses. You had a computer you could program, but that most people didn’t have much use for and frankly right now the ability to program your computers is way better than it‘s been at any time in my 50+ years since you’ve got world class compilers, interpreters and development tools available for free along with all the documentation you can eat on the internet as opposed to having to have your uncle visit half a dozen computer stores looking for the book that describes the undocumented entry points into the ROM that let you do cool stuff.

>right now the ability to program your computers is way better than it‘s been at any time in my 50+ years since you’ve got world class compilers, interpreters and development tools available for free along with all the documentation you can eat on the internet...

Sure, but all that is useless if motivation is missing. A BASIC prompt, or even a terminal into which type commands, is infinitly more motivating w.r.t programming than a desktop filled with "Apps".

How many software engineers do we have in 2025 vs. 1985?

Without evidence, this argument just measures population growth.

~28.2 million SW engineers in 2024

6,800 SW engineers in 1985

that's what I found - probably not called SW engineers in 1985 though

do you count frontend engineers as software engineers (I dont)

The number has increased by so many orders of magnitude, you can discount any subset you like and it won’t meaningfully change the obvious conclusion.

A lot more, but I think it is pretty obvious that it is mostly because it pays a lot. Not because of more intrinsic motivation.

Okay. And?

That’s not me just being glib. We have almost a million percent more engineers these days, and that number is very nearly not an exaggeration.

I’ll take that over your BASIC prompt plus “intrinsic motivation”, whatever that is. By every possible measure, more of the people you think probably “should” be software engineers are today.

I don't think more people should become software engineers. But I think more people, even non-professional programmers should be able to program computers for their own needs.

So basically I think programming should be something that a lay person do, like learning to drive a car.

More people than ever are capable of this today by a wide margin than at any point in history.

Computers being insanely useful out of the box is what has driven their adoption, and that widespread access has done more to enable people to explore programming than dropping hapless novices into a BASIC prompt at startup.

> More people than ever are capable of this today by a wide margin than at any point in history.

Capable, yes. Because there is Internet.

But is it easily discoverable? and is it interesting once discovered? No and No.

Okay, and?

You keep changing the point you’re trying to make.

So there is no/vastly less motivation to program the computer for ones own needs or fun, (unless you are already a programmer by trade)

That's funny, I was just setting up a proxy today to avoid KYC for newly regulated content in my jurisdiction.

Maybe all the kids need is a little censorship!

Often people believe that they are using the computer when in fact the computer is using them.

My first computer was a DOS machine with BASIC. If I wanted to play games I had to write them. No ads. No algorithm.

The key lesson is that computers are general purpose machines that you can bend to your will.

This isn’t really a lesson.

Not everyone cares about computers or is destined to spend their lives tinkering with them. Most people are content with simply thinking of computers as a magic box that does things and going on with their lives. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everything needs to be bent to your will.

In very old days kids would have had to build their own toys instead of going to a toy store. Is there some lesson there?

> In very old days kids would have had to build their own toys instead of going to a toy store. Is there some lesson there?

Probably, yes. People have a better appreciation for what they build[0] and seem to also be more mindful about the usage of what they build[1].

Wouldn't surprise me if this extends to tech, too, but I couldn't find anything that explored this.

[0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/11-091.pdf

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-018-9465-6

The lesson is that you are not required to express yourself in terms of what’s been designed by others and placed on shelves in jewel wrap.

I remember being so excited when I found out I could get computer game books at the library. I would take one out, and spend the next hour typing out several pages of "Tour de France" in BASIC, then another hour figuring out where my typos were, so that I could spend the rest of the evening playing a primitive text based game. It was a simpler time.

> If I wanted to play games I had to write them.

This reminds me of "in my childhood we could only ate car tires for breakfast, then walked 10km to school barefoot, chased by a bear" posts. You most definitely did not need to write your own DOS games, they were abundant.

Previous discussion (linked in the article itself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6186730

Quite sad to see things have become much much worse over 12 years.

The old family laptop's Windows 10 license is about to expire soon so I took the chance to install Linux Mint on it for my younger sibling. From what they tell me, it's perfectly usable, though I don't know to what extent they're using it. If it's just logging on and going straight to Firefox, there's not much difference from Windows kn terms of what they're learning. I've been thinking about what I can do to get them to engage more constructively with the computer, but no concrete ideas yet. Any suggestions from those of you who've done something similar for your siblings or kids?

Get them into game modding or the like, fuzzing around to get a mod working delves into a good amount of computer-y things.

I haven't used anything but linux on a personal machine in a decade.

When did Windows licenses stop being for the life of the machine?

Windows 10 EOL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

Also a lot of very capable machines cannot run Windows 11.

I have a windows machine (windows 10) that I will never upgrade to windows 11, that’s the end of the line for me as far as Windows goes. I also have an old laptop that still runs windows XP, I turn on once in a while but I do keep it offline.

At work windows reigns. Im not looking forward to but soon they’ll install windows 11 on our dev machines. I’m really not looking forward to that at all.

Windows won’t stop functioning, it just stops receiving updates. Win10 machines will still work, and you can reinstall win10 if you like.

In practice, what usually seems to happen is Microsoft will begrudgingly extend security updates for a few years after official EOS, because most people won’t switch over that quickly and having all those machines with unpatched vulnerabilities would be a bigger pain that potentially more expensive than just keeping on for a few more years.

add a chat gpt to the terminal with a prompt. "I want to dowload pictures of cats and opening them in an image program." and it downloads cats and installs and open gimp. linux can be very star trek nowadays.

The first computer I remember having as a kid was an old DOS machine that was gifted to us.

I remember it had a command prompt and you had to type pop or something to launch prince of Persia. It was mind blowing, but led to trying to figure out what else you could input into this mysterious C:\ prompt.

That's 12 years old. You're not supposed to understand how computers work any more.

On some machines, you can't re-install Windows any more. You're pretty much a slave to the cloud with Office 360 or Google. Chromebooks are total slaves. Phones get more locked down each year.

Even on Linux, you're often now slaved to some remote system which keeps installing new stuff.

What is this "remote system which keeps installing new stuff" that you speak of?

Ubuntu's Software Updater, of course.

Yes, kids should come into school a month early, form self selected groups to, unsupervised, build their own desktops and re-cable the entire school network following instructions on the internet, on their phones.

The end of school term, they carefully disassemble everything.

You’re making fun, but I’d send my kid to this school.

To be fair, this kind of sounds like how Japanese schools handle cleaning tasks.

Fortunately the kids not being able to use computers has been very profitable for us!

I’m shocked the “What’s a computer?” Apple ad is only 8 years old?

Meh. My 16 year old writes shaders for her own games, writes for her VR headset, programs her graphing calculator, etc etc. The next generation will have plenty of self-taught SWEs, just like ours. Most kids couldn’t use computers in the 80s or now, and it wasn’t a disaster either time.

The issue is it probably won’t be your daughter who creates and passes the legislation that dictates how she and the rest of us get to use our computers (net neutrality, encryption, etc). In a democracy, the majority of the population needs to be computer literate enough to vote for candidates who will support these things.

This reeks of insecurity

Amazing poster child for HN comments having nothing to due with original post.

Almost everything in here at the moment is about changing oil in a car 8-)

Which avoids the obvious issue that modern tech users are just another new exploited consumer class.

And if anyone points out the obvious: "Maybe you're just dumb as a rock?", of course they're just being condescending. I mean you're an expert in "Call of Doo Doo, The Final Genocide 18"... Or, you know how to type really smart things into an LLM prompt...

p.s.: It should be pointed out that "dumb" is almost never a physical disability, it's almost always a willful lack of mental discipline.

I definitely like to use folders and know how to use a printer, copier, or fax machine but rejected ad nauseam for jobs. I guess I should put it in my “skills” section. Being in “stride” appears to be most important part, i.e., straight from college with the experience of maybe working at the cafeteria/book store/whatever to that prestigious job lol

What’s the relation to the post?

The bare bone use of computer related peripherals?

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