skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the elitism is just immaturity and childishness. It's a field dominated by younger people and with that comes some childish benavior. Not all young people, but overall you get more of it.

However, people do need to respect the craft.

The demand for skills is massive, and so now everyone should learn to code. You don't become an expert from taking a 6-week bootcamp. It's a profession. You study the field. It takes years to master.

For those who actually care about the craft, there's no condescension toward someone starting out - but let's not pretend the bootcamp grad is already deeply skilled.
6 Image Hover Effects Using Page Curls
>Is a front-end developer not a “real” developer if she can’t describe what a bubble sort is or does?

Yes.

Being able to accomplish one specific thing in a field, does not make you skilled in that trade. It makes you skilled at doing that specific thing.

A farrier is not a blacksmith. A blacksmith would probably know how to forge a horseshoe but find it difficult to actually shoe the horse. They are not really in the same profession though their professions are related.

And software development is not my profession but if it were I'd be equally protective of it and I would not welcome any mass influx of newcomers to the labour pool. Why would I?
> "civilised world" is kept together by midddle- and working class people.

Well, sort of. I think first you need technological innovation, and then the middle- and working class fill the labor to maintain that technology, but they for the most part didn't create it. They are users of it. Companies do investments and allocation of capital to produce that technology. Without a central source of capital, it would be hard to get the investments needed to research and produce it. I think technology (in all its forms from basic to advanced) is what enables the motion of society and individuals and the freedoms.

And also civilized society is just as much about daily life and consumption of information and perceived oppression or unfairness as it is pure work. It feels like a lot of modern arguments are about these perceived unfair situations, but on a personal level rather than systematic level. This leads to systematic "macro" chaos but predictable individual "micro" movement in the system (based on emotion and current view of the world). As long as the technology and resources can be maintained, there will be some order in the basics in society, since everyone needs food, shelter, clothing, security and so forth, so I would say, the whole system is what keeps the civilized world going and then some day, something fundamental breaks in some way, due to the accumulated macro momentum of micro scale movement, and then the macro breaks, or something like that.

Edit: also as an addon, these micro movements are decided today, by so called "thought leaders", and so these thought leaders are also responsible for the civilized world in that sense. An idea or representation of something has a huge effect I think.
Show HN: Draw characters to help computers read human handwriting
> I remember being laughed at when I told more experienced colleagues in 2004 that the only programming language I knew was JavaScript. I wasn’t a “real” programmer yet, according to them, because I hadn’t learned how to write assembly code.

And they'd be right. You're not a real programmer until you understand how the machine functions. This is usually achieved by learning a low-level language like C, Pascal, Fortran, etc. Although I guess you could read a book on computer architecture instead.

Elitism is not the same as having basic standards. I wouldn't trust a doctor who didn't know where my elbow is, and I wouldn't trust a programmer who doesn't know what malloc() is.
When a technical interview happens, two (of many) competing motivations arise within the programmer who interviews a candidate:

1. I don't want my company to hire someone smarter than I am -- eventually they'll make me look bad and I'll be relegated to uninteresting work or made redundant. (Also, that person will end up condescending to me and that's simply not allowed; I'm the only genius in the village...)

2. I don't want my company to hire someone dumber than I am -- we cannot work with some half-productive person whose work needs constant fixes/rewriting/maintenance -- don't waste this brilliant team's time. (Plus, what would we talk about at lunch with this kind of person -- old episodes of Little Britain? You must be joking.)

Now, maybe this is wrong, but it seems that situation #2 arises a lot more often than situation #1. It only looks like a "growing elitism problem" to some observers, but maybe the level of elitism is the same as always. Maybe what's happening is that a lot more applicants are encountering situation #2 than in previous years.
BSD Now 117: The Cantrill Strikes Back [video]
This isn't unique to software. You'll find similar criticism of education institutions that offer quasi-substitutes for four years of education in a few weeks, with almost universally lower standards. E.g. Phoenix.

In the US there are stringent and often legally enforced requirements for doctors, lawyers, and engineers, that programmers do not have.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that there will be informal restraints to counteract the lack of formal ones. Hence, "elitism".

The problem with code academies is that they offer an experience at almost the cost of a formal education, but with a fraction of the benefit (necessarily so, due to their duration).

Next time you receive services from a professional (tax accountant, architect, dentist, auto mechanic, attorney, electrician), consider whether you would be comfortable if the duration of their training was one tenth of the industry norm.
Interview starts circa 23:10.
I agree. But that's not going to convince a company which has a financial incentive to spy on you.

But if their product becomes illegal to use without such a switch then you can be certain that they will take it seriously.

Well, hopefully more seriously than the browser choice switch.
But it's sportsball! I don't like it, players are paid too much, so it must be a bubble! It's not fair that the Patriots or the Yankees are worth more than my uber-for-toilet covers! /s
This article :)
Yeats's The Second Coming, written in 1919 and following the cataclysm of the First World War, conveyed the same horrific and accurate vision of the future:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
What a clickbait, provocative article with nothing beyond a single anecdote, not even a second one other than the generic "you've never written assembly so you're not a programmer" comment. Seriously has anyone heard a programmer say this in the last 10 years?

Elitism exists everywhere and I don't see how software development is any better or worse than the rest. We have an arrogant vocal minority just like everyone else, it just so happens they are the people for whom blogging and displaying their arrogance has a lower barrier to entry than for other groups.

》 Coding academies have opened new doors for people with a variety of backgrounds, many who couldn’t afford a more traditional four-year computer science degree, or may have been steered clear of a technical degree in college (or younger) due to societal pressures or family culture, just to name a couple.

BAM. 'nuff said. Why bring elitism into this?
It might have been an effective thesis if it didn't start off by defending coding academies. I think it's a given today that your ability to do the job trumps your ability to generate credentials for the job, but stripping specialized developers is setting yourself up for failure. Also, in many cases it makes sense to have at least someone on the team with some academic exposure to specific problem domains. Most people can write some code to accomplish the task, some people can be clever about it, but sometimes you also need people who can refer back to their <data structures, algorithms, math, whatever> classes so they can either write some performance critical code, solve a hard math problem, or assess the engineering design decisions from a more trained perspective -- especially in an industry dominated by egos, is ego + lack of specialized knowledge always the best approach? Certainly it gets stuff done. Also, as devs get older (years more experience picking up specialized knowledge along the way), this problem can obviously be mitigated.

Edit: to be fair, I mean stratification is appropriate at a project level of organization level, clearly you should be pigeonholed.
As if there was any doubt... Only the Israeli government can cynically claim otherwise.
The submission points to a comment since it articulates pretty well the relation between fossil fuel prices, renewable energy and energy storage.
Atari 7800 Ninja Golf
Software development is my profession, and I welcome everyone and anyone willing to learn. Trying to hold onto it like it's some sort of exclusive club is ridiculous and childish.
I think the elitism problem is with people in the technology media specifically like the person who wrote this drivel. What companies are being mean by telling the truth about a 6 week 'boot camp' that will make a liberal arts major code like linus torvalds? Maybe theres a shred of truth to that... as someone else said, should we have medical bootcamps for open heart surgery? How about for flying airplanes? Or designing boeing engines? Good idea or would that not be adequate? I think people see magic around computers and somehow think its "simple and easy" to code if you just learn a few key phrase as if it were a spanish course or something. We know otherwise.
Tech's Big Gender Diversity Push, One Year In
I think it's you projecting a narrative here. :)

> I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs.

Seems to me a distinction without a difference. The "new Medieval society" was the same as the old Roman society. It may have been different families in charge in many areas, but they were all cut from the same cloth.

> Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.

I think you overestimate the scale of collapse and rebuilding. The most devastating collapse the world has ever seen, World War II, directly transitioned to the biggest boom the world has ever seen.

To me, a collapse is like a forest wildfire. It burns away overgrown areas and makes room for a fresh start. If we see a decline in American hegemony in our lifetime, and that's big if, I'm confident it will be replaced by something far more interesting.
When you consider what the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and Acorn Archimedes were capable of in the late 80s and early 90s, you see how little progress we've really made.
Instead of proving the thesis, the article merely describes what elitism is. Ironically, this definition proves that programming is probably the least elitist field there is.

> Elitists aren’t interested in sharing knowledge, they’re interested in being the source of the knowledge.

Compare how easy it is to learn programming on the web to any other profession. Oh! And you can use only content that was created by professional programmers in their spare time (SO answers, forum posts, RTFMs and FAQs, all the free software), without actually using any content that was created by people who were paid for that (all the code academies) — and still learn pretty much everything.

> these novices have access to tools and shortcuts that the elitist never had

I don't think a lot of programmers actually think like that. I've never seen a programmer who declared that "if you never wrote a compiler, you're not a true programmer". This actually seems like a ridiculous strawman.

But regardless if you like it or not, there are "real" and "not-real" programmers, yes. Unfortunately, "not-real" programmers can actually have titles like "Lead Developer" and even "IT Director", but not be able to solve a FizzBuzz problem in a way that doesn't make hair stand up on your head. And for some reason, the quality of writing good code is correlated with such things as "learning programming for it's own merit", or "getting a CS degree from a good school", or "having a good understanding of mathematical logic and set theory".

(Once again, I have to repeat myself: _correlation_. If you decide that I'm saying that people without CS degrees aren't real programmers, it means that you don't know how to understand what you read).

So, I would never say that "coding academies are nonsense". Any loud, non-compromising statement of this kind is anti-intellectual and most of the time blatantly false. Even the concept of "realness" of a programmer as a binary trait is already oversimplified. But scepticism that IT professionals have about code academy graduates has a very serious root in reality.

It's not about being "threatened". It's about maintaining bad programmer's code.
It is possible to make VM work with the 68000, Masscomp did it but it was pretty brute force, they ran two 68000's in
lock step with one just behind the other so when the first one faulted it stopped the other one and the other handled the fault. Something like that. Clem Cole would know the exact details.

They made for a pretty beefy machine, I ran ~20 users on one. That was when we had a pile students on a Vax 11/780, I had accounts on both and much preferred the Masscomp.
Lisp Machines possibly even more so, these were entire systems built in lisp from the ground up, extensively documented, introspectable and editable.
Facebook like messaging system with PHP
It's the ultimate Read-Only Friday. Don't touch anything
Do you like your job?
A general purpose computer seems like the worst possible thing you could buy then.
Almost every time a PHP or JavaScript project is brought up here, the fact that it's written in PHP or JavaScript is always used to negatively comment on the project and author. Just because someone doesn't like a language, they see fit to demean the author.

Edit: Even better, someone has already done that in the comments here on HN for this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10637947
How does C# know what type the literal is?
A couple things. Simple outlining, to me, gets a big part of the mindmapping benefit, at least if you're often collapsing and expanding documents so you get big picture and drill down to smaller. Of course, outlining has basically a single heirarchy and doesn't do what mindmapping does with showing relationships between disparate headings. In Org-mode the "Agenda" is where you would generate, view, and process these kinds of relationships, by doing searches, potentially over hundreds of different files.

The Agenda is one of the two or three major parts of Org-mode (also one part where many/most users barely scratch surface of what it can do). It's definitely a different model of associating connections from what you get in the usual mindmap application. But, I would argue, not less powerful. In fact, I think using the Agenda to find relationships is probably more powerful than mindmapping, but it requires perhaps a bit more effort since the connections aren't directly visible, need to do searches and have items gathered together in Agenda buffer to "see" them. All of this probably makes little sense until you've fully grokked how Org-mode can work (but which probably the majority of Org users never do). Org is one of the most full-featured applications I can think of, both in breadth and depth of features, far more than any mind map application. There is a fairly big learning curve to access all the power, though. (And part of learning curve is not just in learning features, but in learning how to organize your data so you can use features to access, process, and view it in the most helpful ways).

Also, Emacs (and thus Org) do a good job of handling colors, fonts, diagrams, images (can be displayed in Emacs buffer and hidden when node collapses), web and file links (can immediately open in Emacs buffer and/or separate app), there are extensions that allow you to quickly/automatically insert external links into org documents, etc.
"you wouldn't recount NFL games on twitter"
Loved watching the Dragoons dance around their opponents while taking almost no damage. They seemed to have slipped a few times where they could've doubled up on fire but just one was firing instead. I might have looked at it wrong though.
Indeed. The only reason to still consider certain parts of the Middle Ages as "dark", particularity the early portion, is the due to the lack of contemporary sources. The Merovingian Kingdoms of the seventh century, for example, are genuinely hard to study because we've lost so much.

The term "dark" should not be used, as it still much too frequently is, as some negative value judgment that covers a thousand year period which encompassed hundreds of different societies and cultures spanning an entire continent.

It is understandable why people think this way, since European history (at least in the United States and Canada) is still largely taught in a way that skims over the Middle Ages: check out how awesome Greece and Rome were, then, well, the Middle Ages when they had these grand churches, but who cares because then came the Renaissance when everything was cool again.

I've taught European Medieval history survey courses at the university level and one of the most difficult challenges was getting this idea of a horrible "dark" age dispelled from the students' minds. This is not to say that everything was somehow great or that all ages are "equal" in "value" (whatever that really means), but you can not begin to study a period of history without facing your own preconceptions of it (and, really, your own society).
My point was that the whole period, starting with Augustine, was about Christianising the previous philosophy and government. The Greeks had well developed morality but universalism was not really a part, even the Romans firmly split between citizens and non-citizens, patricians and plebs. Greek philosophy is heavily responsible for the misogynistic aspects of Christianity for instance, but during this period women had more legal freedoms and ability to exist independently and their rights actually became worse later on.
Everyone is influenced by what came before, but we very much live in a world in which their developments on previous philosophy are very welcome.
Paris Attacks Plot Was Hatched in Plain Sight
Democracy has nothing to do with how well an economy operates, and it has nothing to do with how free individuals are, all it ensures is that a majority has control of who rules them. An economy operates best when individuals are free to pursue their own ideas, because the best ideas - the ones that create lasting value for the world - are spread throughout a population, they aren't concentrated within the mind of a democratically elected leader.
It is not the stupid who run Russia, in fact looking at Syria Putin seems to be the only one with a realistic goal in that war. The Russian interests are their access to the Mediterranean and following from that they want to aid their ally, the Assad regime, both clearly attainable military goals. Contrast that with the western engagement in Syria, ISIS was created in Iraq during the occupation, and now the West tries to put down by bombs what was created by bombs, a strategy that did not work for Israel in the last 50 years. So perhaps Russia is run by the cynical, but certainly not by the stupid.
I was reading about WebCrypto API lately and read negative view about it [1]. What I understand is that with HTTPS one of the problems is having private key online. In case of break-in someone can just modify served files and now forged files are served. It would be good to have static files signed with separate signing key just for static content. Then private key can be offline and forgery can be easily detected.

Is there something like that in case of offline web apps?

[1] http://tonyarcieri.com/whats-wrong-with-webcrypto
Postfix isn't hard to understand.

Postifix with no syntactic delimitation is hard to understand.

The problem with Forth is that although we undersatnd what each word does in isolation, when we look at a word in the middle of the program, we do not have an instant idea about what material to the left of the word produces its arguments and how, and what material to the right consumes its result. We have to go back and simulate the stack machine in our mind to work this out.

What does this do? w1 w2 w3 w4?

We have to know what w1 through w4 do to understand how their data flows are connected together! That's just wrong. In any sane language, we don't have to know what w4 exactly does in order to understand that, for instance, takes two inputs produced by w1 through w3.

The above words could be totally independent from each other, and produce four operands on the stack. Or it could be that they thread a value through them: each one transforms the top word on the stack.

The expressions in a nice, nested, functional notation give us the functional tree at a glance. We can achieve this while keeping the notation postfix, by adding parentheses:

(w1 w2 w3)w4

Now w4 is a three-argument function. w1 through w3 take no arguments.

((w1)w2 w3)w4

Now w1 produces the argument value for w2. This is the left argument of w4, and w3 is the right argument.

Moreover, now we can reason about different evaluation orders, as long as we know there are no side effects. I can think about w3 and then w2 and w1, or vice versa.

Moreover, if w4 is declared as requiring exactly one argument, the error is now statically obvious.
'So that's their secret'

:-/
But surely it would not be so weird to "stratify" electricians and signalers (people who turn signs).

Both do "construction", but the difference in skill and market supply/demand.
Special herbal recipes
Deep Learning on Spatio-temporal graphs
Australian consumers lose as banks snub Apple's 'digital wallet' system
Perhaps they need a government tourism office that focuses on advertising the many wonderful hiking opportunities on the islands.

A Ministry of Scilly Walks.
It might be worth including your f***ups on your CV
Black+Friday:+Quality+Vs+Quantity
being caught doing so would severely damage
their business

The threat of bad publicity for his employer discourages Andy from looking in the S3 buckets. But it also stops Bob blowing the whistle if he sees Andy looking in the S3 buckets.
EXACTLY what I was thinking before and then even more after reading the predominantly defensive, insecure elitist responses here.
How does this get around all the heavy faa regulation?
> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

It was Hume and Kant who injected skepticism back into Western thought and are responsible for empowering the stupid, including the Nazis. If you know the cause of your plight then you can fix the effect.
One of the Thirty was a student of Socrates, not all thirty, and none of them were philosopher kings. They were a puppet government installed by the Spartans, which is why Socrates was amongst the people who opposed them. The fact that Critias was among the Thirty was used by Socrates' enemies to slander him but he had lots of pupils among the youth of Athens all of whom had different reasons for listening to his lectures.
Plenty of us saw Irving Gould as pretty much satan back then, though at the same time it's clear he was essential in funding Commodore in the early years.

You could probably still get a lot of people to pay for an opportunity to egg Gould (if he'd still been alive) and Mehdi Ali (Goulds last executive hire, who conveniently leave out what happened to Commodore under his tenure on his website these days) to this day.