Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It still is, and I hope it remains that way for future generations too.

The first-time experience of hearing "voices from thin air" is unforgettable.

Did you do this before you ever used a full on radio? That seems hard to believe, so I guess you are implying that it is an experience that feels different. I wonder how so?

Consumer radios operate by witchcraft. Presumably a fairy from another dimension rides into town on horseback with a satchel full of vinyl and then camps out outside your window so when she sees you switch on the radio she can play the vinyl for you.

It feels different when you put it together yourself out of basic components and see that there is no magic in there, and yet... there is.

On a serious note, it concerns me a little how easy new generations accept that everything is a magical black box and not even question how their smartphones work.

Isn’t it interesting that the more technology people have, the less they understand how it works?

The profit motive for business is to make things easier to use, but ironically that also makes it less likely for anyone using it to have any idea how it actually works. The reason most of us are here is because we had to struggle and learn in order to get computers to work. I don’t think as many kids today will have that opportunity, which probably means that we’ll have more people who use technology but less of them capable of creating it.

This is true, but those kids will simply operate at a higher level of abstraction than we do and get bigger things done. I don't know how to fab a transistor, but I can make good things happen across billions of them.

You need to plug in or put batteries in a regular radio, but a crystal radio has no apparent power source of its own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com