Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krick | Hacker News Reader

That's right, but I guess we're missing the real problem here.

The real gold are these words:

> You've really read the LSB specification for init scripts and your distribution's distro-specific documentation? If so, you're almost certainly a Debian Developer or the equivalent specialist for other distributions.

Many of us would agree, that it's true. But why is it true? Shouldn't that make us suspicious in the first place? It's almost paradoxical, even funny: making the work done is easier, than finding out, how to do that work. You see, init scripts or makefiles aren't exactly rocket science. I mean, things we are willing to achieve with them are pretty simple: just start some process, just build some project (which means "execute bunch of shell commands in the right order", and not implementing out own superoptimizing compiler).

So when we arrive to situation like one we've got today, the right message wouldn't be "come on guys, you see what we're doing because of being lazy? we should stop being so lazy!". That is, yeah, we all are lazy and maybe we should stop it, but that's not the point. What this situation actually means is that our tools for doing simple stuff are overcomplicated shit, and our documentation for these tools is shit. If anything, it's pretty obvious that a couple of lines of code, showing how to do the work is better documentation than complete list of possible flags and parameters with no examples whatsoever. So no wonder people are reading stackoverflow instead of man-pages. And so on.

> it's pretty obvious that a couple of lines of code, showing how to do the work is better documentation than complete list of possible flags and parameters with no examples whatsoever. So no wonder people are reading stackoverflow instead of man-pages. And so on.

the best manpage is a man page with a nice EXAMPLES section you can grep to quickly. though the permutations offered by many programs prohibit all bases being covered.

http://bropages.org to the rescue!

alias aprobros="bro"

I think for a lot of people reading man pages is not as fun and satisfying as just making things and watching them work. It's a form of instant gratification.

from my own personal experience I can tell that most of the time I prefer stackoverflow instead of man pages simply because I need to achieve one task and stackoverflow contains answer of how to do it, man pages can teach me how to do all sorts of a tasks, then I have to choose the right one from those that I have learned.

On top of that, to be able to use man page, I need to know command in the first place, while google will digest my broke english question and point me to the right stackoverflow answer most of the time.

I think it really depends.. I was at a job where it was like "Hey, these monthly md checks are causing IO issues let us disable them." So I read the man page for md and yeah... Let's not disable them.

This is an anecdote sure, but an important one. Not everyone needs to understand what's going on with everything but I can tell you the ones who seek out the information and really try to grok the systems are rare and can be well compensated for it.

Another anecdote: trying to use ZFS, and in particular de-dupe, without understanding it. De-dupe has its own trail of tears laid out from people who did not understand the memory requirements of it.

Hello, I'm Rapzid. I'm 30 years old, and I'm a man page reader. Sue me.

There is a balance to be struck.

Progress depends on humans being lazy. We have inventions and innovations precisely because humans are so good at finding ways to make their (own) lives easier - usually by eliminating repetitive tasks via some kind of work-around or alternate approach.

There is a well known quote about insanity [0] and blind repetition that occasionally gets associated with idiocy too. If everyone was always starting from first principles, we could argue that humanity, as aggregate, is insane. (Which might still be true!)

Repeating experiments to verify results is good. Doing the same things over and over again likely means you're not learning.

0: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Insanity (search for "different results")

I don't think laziness accounts for that behavior. Need for efficiency and business might, since most inventions are motivated by yet other endeavors which hardly counts as lazy. I think that the most basic ideas involved in hunting, farming and fighting are motivated by the ultimate need to get some rest.

OTOH, rest shouldn't be confused with laziness, which has a negative connotation, because some see idleness as an ill when it is assigned the highest priority before other desires/needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com