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Comment by giobox | Hacker News Reader

In the case of 1, the usual mantra "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" surely applies?

There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.

While I don't know much about cleaning windows, providing more specific context for example 2 will likely do wonders to the quality of result returned too.

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It's not a worthless question at all. The answer is "read the manual" and maybe also "your usage might meet the severe maintenance schedule and you'll need to read the footnotes."

Yes, it's not a question that has a literal numerical answer in the exact form that's being asked for, but if you ask an actual human they can 100% answer it for you.

Ask a mechanic friend how often to do an oil change and they will 9 times out of 10 give you an answer without asking what model of car.

I can’t say I’m in the business of asking 10 or more friends to confirm this, but any number they provide without knowing the car is a guess at best, and likely erroring on side of caution. A Google search with the car model in the query virtually always returns the correct figure ranges for said car.

Ah but see the most important piece of information is not what the manufacturer specifies. Most mechanic friends would tell you manufacturers are over-extending the interval to make their cars look good to purchasers and because they only care about getting to the warranty end not total life of the car. While 3k miles old wisdom is out dated, if you do your own oil changes you can see a massive change in what comes out after 5k miles.

By over specifying the question you will miss out on the more important context.

Much of what you say is true, but again your mechanic friend can only provide a meaningful answer if they know the model of car. It’s the first question any half way competent mechanic will ask!

The cars sitting outside my home vary in oil service interval by over 10k miles, as just one simple example, and I don’t drive anything particularly exotic.

By under-specifying the question, you rob it of the context to be answered accurately.

>There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.

Doesn't seem too hard to generate a bunch of content marketing articles for "how often to change oil for {2012,2013,...2026} corolla", similar to how there's content marketing spam for every windows error message imaginable, which end up being some variant of "have you tried sfc /scannow?".

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