Back when not every question had an answer | Hacker News Reader

Back when not every question had an answer

hyperorg.com

38 pointsJonhoo26 comments

I got my first real computer around 1982 as well, a Heathkit/Zenith Z-100. Thinking back, I'm amazed at the amount of high quality documentation that came with it. Full schematics, lengthy component level trouble shooting workflows, s-100 bus signaling documentation, component sources, multiple manuals for dos, 8086 and 8085 assembly, qbasic, cp/m, ande each compiler's docs took 2 or 3 3 ring binders.

One time we had trouble with it and had to take it to the dealer, who after discussing the problem with us showed us how he tracked down a poor solder joint and taught me (at 9 years old) how to use a wick to remove the solder and replace it.

There was also a local user group that drew 50-100 folks a month and always had 1-2 technical talks, and at least a dozen local bulletin boards that were frequented by well educated users and engineers.

My most recent computer came with a tiny brochure about how to power it on, and the user forums primarily contain copypasta about repairing disk permissions or resetting the SMC.

So, you know, there are plusses and minuses.

The problem shifted from "solution is hard to find" to "solutions are abound, but its hard to find the best". Github has lots of code, and its really difficult to tell what are the best solutions (and of course, there's the whole issue of marketing, where some stuff that show up highly on google or github searches aren't the best but rather the most highly marketed)

There is also a specific set of problems that require a question to be formed in, what I like to call "Google Gymnastics Language" - i.e. a unique problem space that uses common words to describe it so you have to alter your query. For example, searching problems in "CLIPS" programming language or tabs in Foundation (https://www.google.com/search?q=foundation+4+tabs).

On the contrary I feel great pity for people who grow up only knowing an entirely searchable world. There was so much magic and excitement when things were unknown, secret, mysterious.

Specifically trying to solve the kind of problem discussed by the OP, yes it was frustrating as hell but it taught tenacity, resourcefulness, and was ultimately SO satisfying when you figured it out.

Now you just google and get pissed if the first result doesn't have a copy/paste answer to your problem.

No, now you google and if you don't find a good answer you post to yahoo answers/stackexchange and start a discussion with other folks who are experiencing the same issues (or experts in that topic).

Eventually this gets indexed and google's capabilities to answer increase.

Yahoo Answers. Amazing. Have you recently visited their Programming & Design section? How does that community survive?

It's still, quietly, the best place for what it does. Much like a lot of Yahoo.

This sums it up: http://cdn-www.cracked.com/articleimages/ob/4052532525_0a2c9...

Yahoo Answers... you mean the College Student Health Care Plan?

...just because it's not for you, doesn't mean it's (totally) useless.

Not all questions are programming questions. For non-programming questions (ie, baby health questions), it does ok.

I use Google to find yahoo answers.

I actually feel some pity for people who, because answers were once hard to find, never got in the habit of looking for them. A mystery can be exciting and magical, or it can be intimidating. You remember the magic and excitement because that's the kind of person you were. Others came to the conclusion that curiosity about certain things was pointless, because their odds of finding an answer were so low. These are the people who get stumped by easily-googlable questions because it simply never occurs to them to google, or the people who don't try to plug in a DVD player because the cables look so complicated, even though they aren't really. I get the sense that there used to be more of these people back before information became so easy to find.

(A broader point here is that you're a sample containing one person, and probably an outlier in many ways. Be careful when generalizing from yourself.)

This article reminds of me of Chris Goggans' closing editorial in Phrack 48 [1] where he made a similar point about how much things had changed with regards to being able to access and learn about computers:

  "In this day and age, you really don't have to do anything illegal to be
   a hacker.  It is well within the reach of everyone to learn more, and use
   more powerful computers legally than any of us from the late 70's and early
   80's ever dreamed.  Way back then, it was ALL about learning how to use these
   crazy things called computers.  There were hundreds of different types of
   systems, hundreds of different networks, and everyone was starting from ground
   zero.  There were no public means of access; there were no books in stores or
   library shelves espousing arcane command syntaxes; there were no classes
   available to the layperson.  We were locked out."

[1] http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=48&id=2#article

I would say that finding solutions to problems on the internet is still far from moving beyond its infancy. We are very lucky, but there is much more to come.

I think the problem has transformed to "how best to state a problem to find the best solution"

Which is a very very useful skill to have in its own right

Not to complain about the information richness of the modern Internet, but it's gradually becoming more difficult to find useful information, as more and more real content is pushed aside by advertising.

Nothing annoys me more than to click a search result link, only to be taken to one of those parasitic sites that pretends to have useful content through the simple device of including a lot of words with no relevance to its actual content. Inevitably such a site is ranked higher in the search results than one with real information.

Good information is still scarce. That is why self R&D is the best method to collect quality data. Building a search engine has reay opened my eyes to this. There is a lot of bad data. Nowadays, I think the effort is more on understanding which data is valuable and trustworthy. Which simply takes more effort than findings things out by yourself. Reason why I don't search github for good python code, but rather read/view videos about python directly and learn how to write good code by myself.

Bullshit. At least 70% of the time I have a specific problem Google will come up with an article or a StackOverflow that solves that problem. And StackOverflow has the best answers sorted to the top.

If you are looking for answer related to software. Yes, its effective. Try other subjects. You will not have such luck.

If you find answers that easy, then you are asking the wrong questions. Every time I have asked a question on the internet about programming, it has never been answered and I had to figure it out myself. Nobody will be answering the real tough questions about programming on the internet.

I agree that the easy basic questions are all over the internet but once you get beyond fundamentals the answers are hard to find with that method.

I've felt this myself as well. When I get to the point of being stuck on a question, it is often in such a niche that getting help on it is very difficult.

You know, I had this same exact problem with TI-BASIC on the TI-99/4A. Try as I might to follow the documentation's examples, I couldn't open files. (Keep in mind these files were on tape!) 20 years on I never did figure it out…

You really don't have to go back that far. There was no Stack Overflow in my VB and C days (1995/1996). You bought a huge reference book.

There was IRC, comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.misc, and AOL/Compuserve had a ton of Windows programming resources as well.

> Let me remind you young whippersnappers what looking for knowledge was like before the Internet

What, like, teenagers? Because practically everyone 25 or older, arguably everyone older than 20, knows what it was like to search for information without the web.

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