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Comment by gahahaha | Hacker News Reader

> the most rudimentary technical chops

Working as a high school teacher, I can tell you that it is far less common among kids to have those chops than you imagine...

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It's a subconscious equation between "Internet" and Facebook et al. When your first click or URL is to check these, the information you retrieve is effectively white-washed by the like/retweet cycle.

I feel there might have been a gap since the introduction of Social Media which may have robbed a generation of its ability to work out the "Web" or the "Internet" for that matter. I mean, I grew up in the 90's in the days of Geocities (even before Wikipedia) and library computer access was most interesting when I couldn't reach a site.

So how do I get around that? "Proxies" says an even geekier friend and now I'm scouring forums for info on configuring Netscape to use a proxy with the included IPs. At home, I got to use IRC and that turned out to be a fountain of knowledge (still before Wikipedia).

I feel sorry for kids who never got to experience driving stick shift.

Having just worked as a system administrator for a college for the past 5 years, I completely agree with gahahaha. I'd say less than 5% of the student body had any computer skill beyond "turn it on and fire up a web browser".

Agreed. I think the difference is nowadays everything is very user friendly. There's no need for the kids to learn how to use a DOS prompt or know about IRQ values to get sound in games working. Apple's "it just works" phrase applies to so much that nobody needs to know much to get things done.

I am around kids at work and their technical knowledge is amazingly limited. Who needs to know stuff when 'there's an app for that...'?

I'd imagine they'll learn fast when properly motivated.

(Though to be honest, no-one has ever explained how this is all supposed to work. My UK 3G connection randomly stopped showing me some web sites, that were entirely non-porny, and I had to confirm my age via a credit card or something to remove this block. If you have to do the same thing on home internet then everyone will opt out eventually as the uselessness of it is pretty quickly apparent.)

Same thing happened to me. I couldn't even look up reviews of pubs.

The funny thing is, mobile porn is a killer app for 3G/4G operators, having the potential to consume so much billable data.

When I was in school, only one of my friends knew how to install Quake in the PC lab (I think he used a keylogger, to get the admin password - it was back in the days when kids weren't treated like criminals for minor stunts like this). But he wasn't the only one who got to play it.

Only one of them needs to know how, and before you know it it will be packaged up nicely in a script or written up on web pages everyone will know about.

Maybe, but as long as one kid knows how to get around it the rest will ask him.

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