We all know the situation when someone posts a question to a forum and the text clearly shows that the writer is asking advice for a detail of a bigger project, which is way too complicated for him to manage. And the discussion usually leads to the point where the writer thinks everybody just acts like arseholes, when they try to tell him to kindly step back a few steps and learn the basics.

I just read such a posting on an Arduino forum. It was about a colour sensor and creating a database of items and their colours on a computer using an attached Arduino microcontroller with an attached colour sensor. Not very complicated, but not exactly a noob project. But the writer's question was about how to fix the values from the sensor so that they wouldn't exceed 255.

The thread has so far only one answer, but my educated guess is that the "noob index" of the OP implies that frustration will enter the thread. So, instead of trying to help someone asking for crumbs by giving him crumbs, when he actually needs a whole loaf which he needs to be able to bake himself, one could just start with "I think the noob index in your writing and your question is rather high, but anyway, multiply the readings from your sensor by 255 and divide with the biggest reading you think your sensor can give".

The noob index would not tell how noob the writer is, but how relevant the question is and how realistic expectations the writer has. When the noob asks the right question, the noob index would be 1, he'd get just the right answers which will help him on his way.

Now we only need a simple definition of "noob index", feel free to suggest a better name for it, and a wikipedia page to link to every time we encounter postings on forums, postings with too high noob indices.

That's a very interesting hypothesis Chris. Would you say that it's related to the concept of 'bikeshedding' where people feel the need to assert their opinions on a subject they perceive themselves of having knowledge in?

The short answer is probably no simply because there's probably no feasible way to secure Windows 95, period. I'd be surprised too if there was no Linux distribution that would run on that ~30 year old laptop or 8 MB of RAM. Also, I'd be curious WTH 30 year old laptop you'd even want to run a Web server on in 2017 or earlier.

The problem with asking such difficult questions is that there is no short, simple solution to the problem. It's not a very useful question to ask on a site like SO because there isn't really an answer (other than "no"). That would probably belong better on a hacker mailing list, but they'd probably only help you if you had already proven yourself to them as fitting in (in which case, you probably wouldn't ask at all, you'd simply show them how you did this).

Yes, I know that. And I wanted to know why. Basically, the real answer was, because you'd have to secure the entire TCP/IP stack (impossible with binary, non-FOSS Windows), and write your own HTTP server to be sure it was safe.

The issue was that many posters took a single line in my comment ("I can't run linux on it.") and spent all of their comments and answers proclaiming "YOU CAN RUN LINUX ON 8MB OF RAM. OMFG.~@$!$#@!@" Likely because they had no idea about the security question. They also didn't bother to consider that Linux drivers used to be complete crap, and still don't exist for many proprietary systems. The mouse. The SVGA card. The 8-bit PCMCIA ethernet card. And last of all, throwing Linux on it changes the problem! It's not a Win95 laptop hosting a webserver. It's just some really old hardware running modern Linux. Half of the cool factor disappears.

The why is the same reason I ask any question. To learn. I use insane projects to learn depth in topics. Likewise, why does anyone run a Commodore 64 web server? Or build their own custom CPU.

That kind of work falls more under the umbrella of hacker culture than software development. It doesn't really fit into SO and I don't think any existing SE site fits either. I really think that a hacker community would exist where that would be far more interesting to discuss, if you can convince them that you're worth their time. Odds are the best such communities are off the grid and invite only.