[anrope]

Maybe I'm just not in a skeptical mood today, but the anecdote in that story points out something that I tend to take for granted. I'm probably not alone, especially here on HN.

That is, the fact that some people just really don't understand the most basic concepts of using a computer. And it's not their fault.

Your breath seizes in your chest, and you realize you have no idea what to do. You have the form that they gave you at the social services office, which has an address, which you sort of know what that does, but you can't quite remember – 17 minutes, by the way. You try typing X City Social Services in a box at the top, a page comes back and says “address not found” with a list of things below it. You're panicking...

I'm all for increasing the use of technology in order to make things work more smoothly and efficiently, but this story points out just how left-behind this can leave some people.

I guess the answer is better education, and not just in schools. I guess I can be glad that there are a lot of people working in that space. Even then, before anyone can use Khan Academy or enroll in online classes, they need to have a better idea of "what a [web] address does", and sometimes even whether to "do a left or right click".

[danielford]

I've been surprised by the lack of technical ability in my college classes, especially from students that are my age or younger. This semester, a student told me she couldn't find a program to write a short assignment. I sent her a link to OpenOffice and was baffled by how excited she was about it. She informed me that she was writing papers nonstop, just because she was happy to finally have a tool that let her do it. And this wasn't a dumb person either. Last week she was half a point away from a perfect score on an exam that would have ruined my semester back when I was in college.

[peregrine]

Sidebar: Memorization is one, highly over valued, facet of intelligence. I've know several of the 'smartest' kids in my classes to be actually very slow, very un perceptive, very 'dumb' by all standards. Nonetheless they got high honors and accolades because they possessed a remarkable ability to memorize and put in crazy hours. Some of these people put int 20+ hours in to get an A in a lab when I would put in 2-3 hours tops and get an AB.

My point is would you want to work with someone who when faced with the issue of having to write a paper doesn't have the spike of genius to search for "word processor" in google?

[teamonkey]

They got a better grade in the end, didn't they? I would rather work with someone who can deliver, genius or not.

[peregrine]

A better grade is more important than delivering in a reasonable time? I think you might have missed my point, you can get A an but the point of the education is not to get an A, its to learn the material.

If they can learn the material, get a very reasonable grade, an AB and spend far far less time I want to work with that person. This person is more likely to be a hacker because they see that there is such a thing as diminishing returns with grades.

[teamonkey]

> A better grade is more important than delivering in a reasonable time?

Consider a business tender. The brief is to get the best result by a specific day. Multiple contractors have the same time to complete the brief. Those who can provide the best result on the final day will win the contract.

Using your memory is a great hacking tool, probably the best there is. Those students used any tool available to get the job done. That's the true hacker spirit.

[notatoad]

if you've ever done phone tech support, you know how inept the average person is when it comes to using a computer. directions like "go to google" or "open up the internet and go to www.some-website.com" might as well be a foreign language.

in my experience, i'd estimate that a solid 25% of the population has no idea how to navigate to an arbitrary website. 'the internet' for them consists of the shortcut icons that dell placed on the desktop when they sold the computer, search results, and links that get emailed to them.