I bought my first house three years ago and have been sharing notes with my dad about home ownership. This is a big thing that came up.
He went to the library and borrowed books about how to do various handyman stuff. They typically had pencil drawings and instructions. I go on YouTube and watch, in HD, ten different people actually do the task. One constant though: chatting up the employees at the hardware store.
My grandfather once told a story of when he was 14 or 15 one summer, stopping by a construction site and asking a guy if he could come in and just watch people work. As the story went, the foreman decided he can watch in the morning but he has to work in the afternoon. And he did just that. He said he watched a lot of framing and then carried lumber and fetched tools for four hours. They offered to pay him something like $2 a day to come back so he did for a few weeks until my great grandmother learned of it. He always liked to comment on two things: 1) how they just trusted him to show up after lunch that first day. 2) that you can curry an incredible amount of favour by doing the crappy jobs with energy.
I like that story because it imbued in me a characteristic that I further developed in university: the comfort to go up to someone and say, “would you teach me about that?” (seriously, do not underestimate how much anyone loves talking about their job.)
> 1) how they just trusted him to show up after lunch that first day.
It is nice that they trusted him, but they're not exactly out of pocket if he breaks their trust. It's cost them 1 morning of having a teenager watching them work. Which costs nothing.
Costs nothing to them, meant everything to him, but still in principal earned him respect.
I don’t know what to call this phenomenon, but it happens a lot in life. Trust with low consequences? Asymmetric trust? Flake balance?
They’re not out of pocket but if he didn’t show up he would have tanked his reputation and climbing out of that hole EVEN if he never missed a day starting from Day 3 would have taken a lot of effort. Meanwhile the construction crew just picks up the next plucky teenager and makes a low stakes bet on whether or not they come through.
Before search engines, my childhood was filled with Funk and Wagnall encyclopedia sets. Most family arguments were settled with them, and thus it spurred my love for learning, and to win more household debates I would just sit and read the Funk and Wagnalls.
The library was awesome too, but you had to be there, usually at school, and most of the time you had to do your own index searches.
Once I got my hands on the internet it was a brave new world.
>Before search engines, my childhood was filled with Funk and Wagnall encyclopedia sets. Most family arguments were settled with them
These days, your family will say that any references can't be trusted, and that you should believe some random YouTube video pushing some crazy conspiracy theory instead.
> You could probably answer all of these trivially with a quick query on your favorite search engine. But it hasn’t always been that way. In the old days...
you can get an Amazon link with some counterfeit or fly by night product and a bunch of knucklehead reviewers saying stuff like "the black cable was indeed black!" and "it took long to ship!", or you can go to the local store that sells all the electronics stuff you need in some subcategory, which you would likely already know. also depending on what you want to look up, google will give you an invalid state approved answer (coming soon)
>If you wanted to find out about a particular IC in the old days, the best thing to do was to find the manufacturer’s data book. If you were in a school or a company, there might be what you wanted in the library.
...and today you get some shithead's 3rd party website with a bunch of pdfs from god knows where encoded into web page slide shows with google captchas
> ...and today you get some shithead's 3rd party website with a bunch of pdfs from god knows where encoded into web page slide shows with google captchas
No, today you go to one of the major distributors like Digikey, look up the part, and download the datasheet provided by the manufacturer. The manufacturers also have full catalogs on their websites but it’s often a more clunky experience.
wow that thomasnet is a useful website, ive been trying to find what kind of color filters exist and what characteristics they can have and it gets me some nice spectral output graphs
My grandmother's best friend was a librarian, so I got a lot of encouragement growing up to make use of library services.
I remember calling the local library dozens of times for school reports. The local library wasn't where my grandmother's friend worked, so I wasn't getting any preferential treatment. To them I was just another random eight-year-old ringing them up to ask questions.
They were always delightfully eager to help with obscure questions about geology and history and science, running off to grab books while I waited, slowly reading me facts and passages while I took notes. They'd set aside books for me to check out later in the week, with bookmarks already placed in the sections where they thought I'd be most interested.
As much as I love the instant access to information we have nowadays, I feel a sense of loss over kids missing out on that shared human sense of enthusiasm and encouragement from working with a person who enjoys feeding childrens' curiosity.
Where I live at least, there's a great library infrastructure. Brand new, state-of-the-art libraries with great physical and digital collections are the norm. It's not unusual to find small maker spaces, recording studios, study rooms, and other community services.
On any given day of the week they're usually pretty frothy with people. It skews towards teens and below, but you'll see people from all walks of life in these places. They regularly hold talks, book events, community meetings, and so on.
I grew up loving libraries and a trip every so often to the big regional hub library was an all-day treat as a kid. It makes me feel so happy, and so satisfied with my tax dollars, to see these community institutions in action and doing wonderful things.
I learned recently that my closest library, a 1970s era structure that has become a bit decrepit, is about to be torn down (sad face) and replaced (ecstatic face) with an all new library and community performance arts center.
Curious question: I really only know about and understand libraries in the U.S., what are libraries and the library system like in other places?
I used to spend a lot of nights after work in the reference room of the Boston Public Library in the 1980's. They closed at 9pm, but until then they would get phone calls from guys in bars to settle arguments. I think of them every time I'm out with people and I check my phone to settle a debate.
One time the Boston Globe was running a contest which gave daily clues to the identity of a famous Bostonian. Most were trivially easy, but I happened to be there one night when I would hear them pick up the phone and just say "Melnea Cass" and hang up, over and over again. This was before the street was named after her.
They still exist - going to the public library with my children looks like 'Hi! We're looking for books about x and y and z. What do you suggest?'. The librarian stops, thinks for a minute, and comes back a minute later with a pile of books, and starts explaining why they're great. Google doesn't do this, and I haven't found a good recommendation site for children's books (not in English!).
Let us not forget those days when Father would come into the drawing
room bringing news of recipes, jokes and stories found on The
Internet, and all the family would gather around... we had Alta Vista,
Lycos, Ask, Excite, InfoSeek (and Google). And before that Grandfather
told us stories of Gopher.
Gopher still works, and I believe is ready for an update soon.
my dad was a reference librarian and when the WWW first showed up, I tried both gopher and WWW, and concluded the former had no future. My dad was trying to explain that gopher was better. That's when I realized an important transition to my generation had occurred.
With the dismal quality of search engines being a relatively common topic on HN, I could definitely see the role of reference librarian seeing a resurgence, with a stronger focus on internet based resources.
I'm not eager for the good old days back but what I miss is the structure of these reference works and the curation. With Google et. al. I may get the answer but there is a real risk of missing context.
My mother is a reference librarian. Morale has fallen at the library in recent years due to lower foot traffic. COVID has exacerbated this. It’s become so boring for the reference staff in 2021 and 2022 that she’s probably retiring early.
Knowing that self-help online services are being used is not enough of a consolation for people whose calling is working with people and information at the same time.
If you live near a library you would probably make them happy by coming in and trying to find something specific.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 67.3 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_interview
He went to the library and borrowed books about how to do various handyman stuff. They typically had pencil drawings and instructions. I go on YouTube and watch, in HD, ten different people actually do the task. One constant though: chatting up the employees at the hardware store.
My grandfather once told a story of when he was 14 or 15 one summer, stopping by a construction site and asking a guy if he could come in and just watch people work. As the story went, the foreman decided he can watch in the morning but he has to work in the afternoon. And he did just that. He said he watched a lot of framing and then carried lumber and fetched tools for four hours. They offered to pay him something like $2 a day to come back so he did for a few weeks until my great grandmother learned of it. He always liked to comment on two things: 1) how they just trusted him to show up after lunch that first day. 2) that you can curry an incredible amount of favour by doing the crappy jobs with energy.
I like that story because it imbued in me a characteristic that I further developed in university: the comfort to go up to someone and say, “would you teach me about that?” (seriously, do not underestimate how much anyone loves talking about their job.)
It is nice that they trusted him, but they're not exactly out of pocket if he breaks their trust. It's cost them 1 morning of having a teenager watching them work. Which costs nothing.
I don’t know what to call this phenomenon, but it happens a lot in life. Trust with low consequences? Asymmetric trust? Flake balance?
They’re not out of pocket but if he didn’t show up he would have tanked his reputation and climbing out of that hole EVEN if he never missed a day starting from Day 3 would have taken a lot of effort. Meanwhile the construction crew just picks up the next plucky teenager and makes a low stakes bet on whether or not they come through.
The library was awesome too, but you had to be there, usually at school, and most of the time you had to do your own index searches.
Once I got my hands on the internet it was a brave new world.
These days, your family will say that any references can't be trusted, and that you should believe some random YouTube video pushing some crazy conspiracy theory instead.
you can get an Amazon link with some counterfeit or fly by night product and a bunch of knucklehead reviewers saying stuff like "the black cable was indeed black!" and "it took long to ship!", or you can go to the local store that sells all the electronics stuff you need in some subcategory, which you would likely already know. also depending on what you want to look up, google will give you an invalid state approved answer (coming soon)
>If you wanted to find out about a particular IC in the old days, the best thing to do was to find the manufacturer’s data book. If you were in a school or a company, there might be what you wanted in the library.
...and today you get some shithead's 3rd party website with a bunch of pdfs from god knows where encoded into web page slide shows with google captchas
No, today you go to one of the major distributors like Digikey, look up the part, and download the datasheet provided by the manufacturer. The manufacturers also have full catalogs on their websites but it’s often a more clunky experience.
https://abrisatechnologies.com/optical-coatings/color-correc...
i feel like this type of search engine would provide more variety than google which is more of a "the one answer". need more meta articles like this
I remember calling the local library dozens of times for school reports. The local library wasn't where my grandmother's friend worked, so I wasn't getting any preferential treatment. To them I was just another random eight-year-old ringing them up to ask questions.
They were always delightfully eager to help with obscure questions about geology and history and science, running off to grab books while I waited, slowly reading me facts and passages while I took notes. They'd set aside books for me to check out later in the week, with bookmarks already placed in the sections where they thought I'd be most interested.
As much as I love the instant access to information we have nowadays, I feel a sense of loss over kids missing out on that shared human sense of enthusiasm and encouragement from working with a person who enjoys feeding childrens' curiosity.
On any given day of the week they're usually pretty frothy with people. It skews towards teens and below, but you'll see people from all walks of life in these places. They regularly hold talks, book events, community meetings, and so on.
I grew up loving libraries and a trip every so often to the big regional hub library was an all-day treat as a kid. It makes me feel so happy, and so satisfied with my tax dollars, to see these community institutions in action and doing wonderful things.
I learned recently that my closest library, a 1970s era structure that has become a bit decrepit, is about to be torn down (sad face) and replaced (ecstatic face) with an all new library and community performance arts center.
Curious question: I really only know about and understand libraries in the U.S., what are libraries and the library system like in other places?
One time the Boston Globe was running a contest which gave daily clues to the identity of a famous Bostonian. Most were trivially easy, but I happened to be there one night when I would hear them pick up the phone and just say "Melnea Cass" and hang up, over and over again. This was before the street was named after her.
Gopher still works, and I believe is ready for an update soon.
If he says to me "I think you should read it" I pretty much know that I'm up for a really enjoyable read. His recommendation are spot on.
Knowing that self-help online services are being used is not enough of a consolation for people whose calling is working with people and information at the same time.
If you live near a library you would probably make them happy by coming in and trying to find something specific.