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Comment by helterskelter2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an engineer, but this is how I was taught to use digital search back in my elementary school's library in the second or third grade (it replaced the card catalogue) and it's how I've searched ever since. We had an entire class period on how to keep our search keywords to the minimum so we'd get good results.

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The problem was our parents never got this course, and sadly, neither did the generations after us. "Computer" Class for me (born early 90s) was keyboarding -> how to find information online -> how to evaluate and rate itegrity of internet sources -> Microsoft Office.

The kids who stopped getting that are probabaly old enough for a bachelors degree now. Today, the schools mostly just hand them an iPad and a Google Workspace sign-in and pretend everything is fine.

They did. Our local libraries in the 90s had internet courses you could take that would teach you how to browse and search. But this stopped for everyone around 2000 when suddenly knowing how to use any piece of software was considered assumed knowledge for some reason.

This is also why the wacko and bizarro concept that "removing options and configs from programs" aka Gnome's big purge more than a decade ago, is nonsense today.

All those studies about GUI usability were done in the early 2000s. Before phones. When most people were just learning how to use a computer. The idea of options certainly was confusing, because "clicking on things" was even confusing.

Yet today, we have a populous which, more and more, grew up with computers. And loves to personalize. And wants options. So just keep that in mind, all you frontenders, config options aren't necessarily bad. Ancient studies have little relevance 24 years later.

Sorry to hijack a bit, but felt it was relevant to courses, teaching, and the state of time in 2000 vs now.

I think Gnome removing options was more about having a smaller and more manageable set of features that need to be QA tested. I'd much rather have well-designed and well-supported defaults than 500 buggy customizable components that don't work well together.

https://ometer.com/preferences.html

I'm not sure about you, but I find Gnome very easy to use, although I miss some features. Those features can be added with Gnome extensions that are maintained by third-parties. Meanwhile I find GIMP extremely hard to use, as it packs in too many features to allow their designers to figure out a good UX which doesn't break some component.

They could; those were opt-in classes, neither of my parents took them. In my case, it was because my mom didn't care, and my dad didn't think he needed them (worked at IBM in field tech). I imagine most folks were in the same boat.

I wouldn't have taken keyboarding if I hadn't been forced to at the age of 8. I hated keyboarding classes. I am so glad I took them now. I hated doing boring research projects and looking crap up on Yahoo's Directory. I love that I have a basic understanding of how to rate and investigate a website's trustworthiness. Mfers don't even look at the "About" section anymore.

> how to find information online -> how to evaluate and rate itegrity of internet sources

You were lucky to have that part. Mine, as I remember, was just Microsoft Office throughout.

Yes, but is making everyone learn information retrieval techniques, re-skilling as needed for new generations of systems, really a societal optimum? Prior to the Internet, this was a dedicated job done by librarians and paralegals. LLM-augmented search has gotten us over the temporary hump of it being everyone’s job.

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