[peterwwillis]

I think it's more likely that mistakes will happen if someone believes they know what they are doing. But how do they know if they know what they are doing or not? That's where "sensible person" becomes subjective to me.

I wrote an IP stack, of sorts, and used Wikipedia to do it. I'm aware that it's probably crappy, but only because it was basically designed to be. If I had tried to design it well, I might lead myself to believe I had done it correctly, for example because I found no problems with it in my testing. But as you're aware, there's plenty of problems with tcp/ip stacks that only come up as edge cases. So even if I was being sensible I might end up with shitty code and push it into a product, and then we're screwed. But if I had learned the stack correctly I couldn't be in that mess.

A kind of solution lies in forums like HN, though. Sure, the posts are fallible and are often upvoted merely because they are perceived as authoritative. But we have the comments section, and knowledgeable persons who can speak up and educate. So it may not matter at all who's teaching, as long as somebody picks up the slack.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

I guess my point is: The reasonable (and responsible) thing to do when you actually build something (rather than just learn about something out of curiosity or to be able to use the understanding in troubleshooting) is to read the primary sources, the standard documents, and in particular to be aware that whatever you learned from hearsay is not reliable enough to actually build a product on if there is an option to get your hands on the primary source. Especially with internet technology, we are in the great position that W3C recommendations and RFCs are freely available for everyone, so there isn't really much of a reason not to read them.

That might not be quite enough for a really good implementation, but overall software quality would be a hell of a lot better if everyone did that, it's just amazing when you look just at websites and also emails, how many people just make up how they think things work rather that reading the standards that are only a google search away.