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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

> Yes - that's what is meant by technical. As soon as you mention file, you've lost a lot of people.

I believe you, and I'm sad about this. I had hoped as the Internet grew in importance, the proportion of people with basic computer skills would increase.

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I used to think this too.

I think electricity offers a useful analog. Today is ubiquitous and relied upon by almost everyone in the world. Yet I would bet that the percentage of people who have a good understanding of amps, volts, etc. is roughly the same as it was 200 years ago.

I do think the average person should know too many amps starts a fire and wrong voltage means devices don't work (sometimes with damage). They should probably know how many amps a typical household breaker is rated for where they live, and that thin extension cords might not be safe with an appliance that has a large motor or heating element.

The list of things they should know about computers is quite a bit longer because computers are more complex. A rudimentary understanding of files, directories and email attachments would make my list.

https://xkcd.com/2501/

I think the way I'd put it is for things that are an important element of someone's daily life, their understanding should be one level deeper than they usually need.

The average person who drives a car, for example does not need to know that the stoichiometric ratio of air to gasoline is about 14.7:1, but they do need to know that their car will run worse if the air filter is clogged. They should probably also be able to change a tire, and have practiced it in the past decade.

Understanding computer fundamentals shouldn't be a specialty field when nearly everyone uses computers (smartphones included) every day in a way that would yield better results if they had some idea what they were doing.

They need to, but that doesn't mean they usually know. It's astonishing the quantity of people that rarely (or never) do oil changes on their cars. And I don't mean by themselves, but just bringing it to a workshop. And that's the easiest and most effective way to keep your car running longer in most of the world.

But I guess lots of people treat their devices (in general: cars, computers, fridges...) just as black box appliances until they break. Probably I'm doing it with something I haven't noticed yet.

Cars are getting a bit more discoverable in this regard with many new cars displaying a prominent notice when it's time for an oil change. Some understanding is still a significant advantage though; it's fine to wait a week for the oil change, but the low tire pressure warning ought to be addressed immediately.

Ah! We sometimes have to choose wisely between the important and the urgent ;)

> It's astonishing the quantity of people that rarely (or never) do oil changes on their cars. And I don't mean by themselves, but just bringing it to a workshop. And that's the easiest and most effective way to keep your car running longer in most of the world.

Case in point: several years ago my wife's car died while we were on a trip (fortunately we were close enough to home that we could get a ride back from family and have the car towed). When I took the car to the shop to fix, they informed me that the engine had seized, and that the most likely cause was that the oil hadn't been changed for too long. When I asked my wife when the last time was that she had changed the oil in her car, she said "I'm not sure but I think it was before we got married". That meant it had been at least 5 years since the oil was changed in that car!

I have always changed the oil in my car reasonably regularly (every 3000 miles, or whatever the oil is rated for). I never knew why, that was just what I was taught about how to maintain a car. My wife obviously didn't get that lesson from her parents (or didn't listen), and unfortunately the neglect of maintenance killed her car.

Modern synthetic oils run in circles around the ones my dad used, and can easily get 7-10K miles. But it will also depend on the temperature of your engine (higher temp, less life). And also contaminants. If some humidity or coolant filters to your oil because of a bad gasket or because of bad combustion, after some time the oil can become a sludge and seize your engine.

So it's a good to change oil every so often even if you don't do a lot of mileage. A year and a half or two might be OK (unless you're doing tens of thousands of miles a year), but five years... over the top, I think.

I just expend 150 a year on the yearly maintenance (oil and filter change, air filter, some other stuff...) and forget about it.

(Mind my English, not my first language and I might be butchering the car terminology)

> I do think the average person should know too many amps starts a fire and wrong voltage means devices don't work (sometimes with damage).

"Should"?

Almost every device I have, there's a bit that goes in the wall, and a bit that goes in the device. If it fits in the wall, it's meant to cope with the voltage in the wall. If it fits in the device, it's meant to supply the voltage the device can cope with.

That the bit in the middle for most of my devices is a modern miracle of semiconductors which contains a CPU more powerful than my first four or so home computers and games consoles to automatically negotiate* voltage and current, is cool, but not what I'd call a "should know".

> and that thin extension cords might not be safe with an appliance that has a large motor or heating element.

I didn't even think about that and I do know what amps and volts are — reason being, I assume that anything I buy in a store for general use is suitable for general use unless specified otherwise.

* e.g. but not only: https://www.righto.com/2015/11/macbook-charger-teardown-surp...

> I assume that anything I buy in a store for general use is suitable for general use unless specified otherwise.

That's not a safe thing to assume, or at least, the way it's specified otherwise is with a current rating.

I had to work at it a bit to find one on Amazon; a search for "lamp extension cord" led me to the sort of thing I'm talking about[0]. These do show up in retail stores, especially low-cost stores (e.g. dollar stores, but I wouldn't be shocked to find one at a Walmart). This cord is rated for 5A. A standard American household breaker is rated for 15A (and it's possible to encounter 20A). Plugging in a hair dryer, toaster oven, or space heater with this cord is a fire hazard.

I note the plug shown in a photo says 10A while the description says 5A. I don't know which is true.

So yes, should, because you can walk out of a retail store with a combination of electrical devices that will burn your house down when used in a way that would appear safe without that knowledge.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5C88B1M

I live in Europe, and we have (usually) sensible consumer safety rules for everything.

So, here's my equivalent: https://www.action.com/de-de/p/2520398/pro-max-verlangerungs...

Germany's mains is 230 volts, so the 3680 watt limit implies 16 amps.

Other than hard-wired things like the oven and heat pump, I'm not sure my house has even one single item that draws 3.7 kW…

That's not equivalent because German household breakers are typically 13A, which is less than the 16A that extension cord is rated for. A 2.5A rated Europlug cord[0] is the closest equivalent, but safety standards help there too. Higher-current devices use Schuko, which will not readily plug in to Europlug.

I found an easy way to create an unsafe combination on German Amazon: a Europlug to IEC C8 cord into a C8 to C13 adapter. That's much harder to do by accident than the American version.

[0] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B07Y1TT5CH

> Almost every device I have, there's a bit that goes in the wall, and a bit that goes in the device. If it fits in the wall, it's meant to cope with the voltage in the wall. If it fits in the device, it's meant to supply the voltage the device can cope with.

I have some concerns in this area related to outlet adapters, though.

It did increase for a while, and then when Chromebooks came out, schools started using those instead of real computers, because it saved a ton of money. So, the students have only been taught to use Google Docs/Sheets/etc. for years now, and no actual computer literacy. Some can write code, but can't find their own homework file. It's crazy, but we stopped teaching them this stuff, so most don't know it.

I wouldn’t be so quick to blame it on Chromebooks. Had they not been developed, or even if schools had never went all in on devices, the future would surely look different but I doubt it would significantly change the average persons’s interest in learning anything about how computers work. Perhaps, for a time, they would be forced to retain awareness of the concept of a file, but eventually someone would realize that most of them really don’t want to, and will happily pay for a sealed black box.

Again, I would compare it to electricity. There’s all sorts of possible futures from its invention, but in each one, I think the pattern would be the same – an initial rise in understanding and awareness as people learn about the new thing, and cope with early limitations, followed by a decline back to near zero as it becomes infrastructure.

To be clear, this saddens me too. I’m not saying this is good necessarily, only that I think it’s inevitable. When I was younger, I was so certain that computers would change the world, and that this change would involve more people discovering the beauty that I had discovered within the machine. Several decades on, I believe that I was mistaken. There is still beauty in there for those who are interested, but most are not, and never will be. It’s just a tool, it’s just infrastructure, that either works or doesn’t.

I think we were on that trajectory until smartphones happened.

That might be true, but Windows, Mac OS, and even Linux desktops required far less technical skill to operate successfully in 2009 than in 1999.

If you tried to play games online in 1999 using Windows 98, it would break, and you would learn to fix it or you wouldn't play games anymore. Using Windows 7 in 2009, you'd probably have to know what compatibility mode is but it usually wouldn't break beyond that.

It is definitely smartphones. Any kid playing games on a PC would be forced to understand at least what programs are, what files and folders are, how to download games off the internet or install them from a CD, etc.

iPad kids just know "tap the square with the tiktok icon and swipe to make it go".

You don't need to know anything about files and folders to install and use Steam, which represents most of PC gaming and have done so for a very long time now.

People still learn those things to manually install mods and cheats, but it represents a fairly small subset of the overall gamer crowd. And if you look at the kinds of questions people ask on Steam forums that are related to that, it's clear that many users today have no concept of file system at all.

Lot's of kids still learn a lot from playing Minecraft Java-edition! There's a lot of skill involved in learning to setup a server, install mods, and it can't be installed through Steam, etc.

So its not entirely black-and-white, but I agree that for a large portion of people they do indeed never need to care.

Smartphones work very hard to obfuscate that files even exist, probably to push people to use cloud services. Hard to learn how they work if you can't even see them.

I needed to edit a file on an iPad. It took me a long time to find a text editor that could edit local files and wasn't a paid app.

I needed to edit something for a tether, IIRC.

I think the biggest problem is that the next generation is growing up without computers. They have closed ecosystems like phones, tablets and Chromebooks.

Combine this with the fact that corporations are locking down what you can do on work computers, and forcing everyone to save files in the cloud (Office365 / Sharepoint / etc).

And you end up with a world where owning a computer is a niche thing, and most people only use it in a limited way for work or gaming.

I think it's a good place for a reminder that people who know nothing about math, physics, technology, anything really are born every minute. The more complicated things are, the more tedious the "tutorial" for newly spawned. In the grand scheme, no single thing is obvious.

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