Ask HN: Everyday things you do that seem like magic

[jdietrich]

With the hullabaloo surrounding the iPad launch, I've been thinking a lot about the gulf between us techies and the rest of the world in how we use and understand technology.

I vividly remember an incident from a few years ago when I showed a friend how to create Excel macros. Within twenty minutes he had automated a task that had taken him four hours every week. He practically fell off his chair with excitement. To me it was the simplest of hacks, but to him it was as if I had taught him a magical incantation. He really couldn't believe that a computer could do such a thing.

I didn't really understand his reaction, but it occurred to me recently that he just had no concept of a computer being programmable. To him, the software on his PC seemed as hard-wired as the buttons on his washing machine.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been talking to a lot of non-geeks and have been amazed at the gulf of understanding between us. As users, they don't have the first idea about what goes on inside the computer, but as a developer, I don't have the first idea what goes on inside them. It felt like one of those moments when you learn enough to realise that you really don't know anything.

What have you done recently that has blown a non-geek's mind?

[mbrubeck]

* Running another OS in a virtual machine.

* Jumping around between/within apps using only the keyboard. (I use vim, xmonad, Gnome Do, etc.)

* Dropbox, Google Voice, Android Maps navigation

[d4rt]

Using a text editor (Vim) to edit text. Particularly in this case use of the :g/ and :v/ commands to filter text and edit all lines matching a pattern.

Excel scripting and filtering and text functions. (Basic things, like looking for a particular string, and filtering a list to just those containing it using formula functions).

[dmd]

Watched a movie by plugging my laptop into my TV.

[nishantmodak]

I wrote several Gtalk bots and asked them to add those as friends.

They had fun chatting!

[clistctrl]

I'm amazed at how fast computers are. For instance I recently wrote a query on a medium sized database with several thousand records in a few tables joined together. The query took about 2 seconds, which was frustrating to me as I'm trying to get it under a second... but even 2 seconds is actually really impressive when you think about what you are doing. This machine can do more math in less than a second, then I could do with a pencil and paper over a year.