Hacker News Reader

I'd say it's also worth mentioning that after knowing what to google is knowing how to apply what you've found. Most of the time an answer on stackoverflow isn't something you can copypaste and have work sans unintended consequences.

Do people really ever check in unmodified pastes that don't work?

I've seen this while conducting phone screens. Obviously, it didn't work out for them. But I don't blame them for trying; they were already completely flubbing the interview anyway, so why not go for a hail mary?

I've sent my brother (non-programmer) many code snippets and google results to help him learn python. They don't help because the problems he's trying to solve are about 8 levels of programming knowledge above what his current knowledge level is (trying to understand a for loop). Conversely he asked me to automate some java application workflow for him and even though I haven't done swing in 8 years it was trivial for me to do. It might have taken him months even with googling.

Totally. I've been programming for twenty years now. The way I learn a new language/framework/API is by Googling for examples. I've found it to be the fastest way to pick up something new, to the point where I stop reading the official documentation if it isn't heavy on code samples and go search for something someone else has written that is.

You can pick up so much about a new tool so quickly simply by applying an existing broad knowledge base of programming information to a few examples.

If you know what to google then you probably know what to look for in the documentation. Its often just faster to google though. I think google is good for beginners that dont know what they dont know - or for a quick reference examples.

When i am learning a new language/library, rather than reading through the documentation trying to find something to solve my problem (as i dont know what to look for), i simply google it and get to the solution faster. I retain knowledge much better if its relevant to my current problem. Often i will then be able to place a name/concept to my problem and then be able to find it much easier in the documentation.

>>Been talking about this a lot with friends/peers recently. Personally I think half the skill is knowing what to Google.

Yes, exactly. I said this a few days ago in another similar discussion: Google is really good at "meta-guidance." If I search for something and don't get any results, it means I'm either asking the question incorrectly, or I'm trying to solve the wrong problem.

Which brings me to the subject at hand: if someone is really good at Google'ing answers on a topic, then they're most likely good at that topic. I believe it was Einstein who said (I may be misattributing the quote here): never memorize something you can look up easily.

> Which brings me to the subject at hand: if someone is really good at Google'ing answers on a topic, then they're most likely good at that topic.

So much this. I noticed this myself. When I google for information in the domains I know, I can be extremely efficient, because I know what to ask for and how to evaluate both results and the metadata - i.e. how much results I got, how good/crappy they are, etc. But when I try to search for information on topics I have little to no experience in, I struggle to find what I'm looking for. And more often than not, I'm left with this feeling of incompleteness, like the information I needed was still out there, if I could only phrase my query correctly...

Try watching someone who's just learning how to program, and you'll see that their Google searches are much worse–they'll include irrelevant words, exclude key phrases, click on lower quality search results, and so on.

It really is a skill, built up over time.

For me its kind of a step by step. Lets say we want to build a Twitch bot.

1. Google: twitch bot and look for official docs, github, and stackoverflow.

2. Google: Twich bot Golang , or twich bot nodejs, or twitch bot c#. Sometimes i look up samples in several languages to get a better general idea of how it works.

3. Based on what we learned in last search, filter our search for specifics such as twitch IRC, twich API etc.