I Google everything • Hacker News Board

Re: I Google everything

#11

Post by waterhouse » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

> I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips?

Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l " to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and whatever needed to display the pages in question. And if you want to only get the text pages/reject the images, the "-A" and/or "-R" options may be useful. Consult the man page and experiment.

Re: I Google everything

#12

Post by marban » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page

Not sure why dumps don't occur more often though.

Re: I Google everything

#13

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

corin_ wrote: post #7

danso wrote: post #4

> I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot. Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit. > Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of cop…

"Talking shit" can mean exactly the same thing as "talking bullshit", in the UK at least.

[deleted]

Re: I Google everything

#14

Post by sp332 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:16 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #4

> I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot. Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit. > Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of cop…

I think it's ambiguous, but the article probably meant shit-talking.

Re: I Google everything

#15

Post by Simucal » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:18 PM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

There is an iOS app called "Wiki Offline" which gives you a local copy of the English Wikipedia that has been compressed to around 3.5GB.

Re: I Google everything

#16

Post by cliveholloway » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:19 PM UTC

These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy.

eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.

Re: I Google everything

#17

Post by jhull » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:19 PM UTC

"Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of copying and pasting the error."

I am pretty sure I would have gotten higher grades if I had known about StackOverflow in college. There is definitely value in figuring out things for yourself, but at the same time, staring at a C program acting differently every time because you didn't understand pointers from Day 1 and your dataset kept getting randomly overwritten, only had me learn a deep dislike for C programming.

Re: I Google everything

#18

Post by mseebach » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:23 PM UTC

cliveholloway wrote: post #16

These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy. eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression". You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than t…

> If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

And then you've got two problems :) https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=natural%20language%20date%...

Re: I Google everything

#19

Post by repoman » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:23 PM UTC

Is it bad? No. Is it acceptable? No. Where is the line? It's okay to spend your whole day trying to get tutorials out of Google because the documentation sucks or you just have no idea how the f you can start with that idea. But you must be able to digest them effectively and extends those tutorials beyond just tutorials, and make something out of them. Otherwise, if you just reuse tutorial codes from top to bottom everywhere, then you are not learning. You are copying.

Re: I Google everything

#20

Post by alanfalcon » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:31 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #14

danso wrote: post #4

> I’ve heard whispers of a time when people could talk shit at pubs and not be audited by wikipedia on the spot. Talk "shit" or "bullshit"? The latter we could stand to reduce. The former...well, I guess it is annoying that any dolt can Google up a list of 500 comebacks. So I guess the emphasized skill is in delivery rather than wit. > Where cognitive energy would need to be spent to work out your bug, instead of cop…

I think it's ambiguous, but the article probably meant shit-talking.

Or even just shit like urban legends. Like when my sister-in-law says, "you know Chipoltle is owned by McDonald's, right?" and in the time frame it takes for me to think I doubt that I've already looked up the truth on my phone.