skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't worry, you don't become a professional programmer in one day. It's a long process.

I started programming (Qbasic) at the age of 12. My first programs were just some combinations of blocks of code taken from the help document. Until 18, I had been always an amateur programmer. Then Things changed. Programming can be flipped from fun to work. I can get paid to have fun, so why don't do it?

I was introduced to the real world and I discovered that my knowledge, as huge as it was (a little from everything) wouldn't really help building the smallest application. I also can't write code on my own. I need another application to copy from or re-use the code. My frustrations began, but they lasted short.

I started reading books. My target was Visual C#. I read a book about .Net fundamentals and another one about Visual Studio. I become a better programmer. It did took me months to understand OOP, but I finished by mastering it. And yay! I used collections.

I left Visual C# and decided to develop for the web. I planned to learn it from scratch. From the start to the end. First, I need a strong knowledge about the Client Side. That is HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The first two are somewhat easy to master and learn. JavaScript is very expressive and can take a while to master.

Actually, I felt in love with JavaScript and with it's prototypal and dynamic nature. I'm 19 and I already built 2 scripts that I'm selling on code canyon (I'm working on the third right now ;)) Suddenly while browsing on the web, I found a small niche, that can be valued to $100K/year. It's hidden somewhere and related to JavaScript. No one explored this domain (except low-quality Open Source solutions) I made my researches, grabbed a related domain and making a plan.

Learning Programming? Oups! I forgot about it!!!
This is true. I did high school in Western Australia, where your university admission is determined by a percentile scaled factoring in your peers' scores, school and other information. It's complex but the end result is a very fair system. However an unfortunate side effect is that your classmates' scores going down makes your score goes up.

We found out years after graduation that there were quite a few students who actively hid the amount of study and after-school tuition they did, possibly due to the above incentive. In school they felt like naturally talented geniuses, which made it feel futile to compete.

Kids don't really have a clear picture of hard work creating ability, because in their experience they only see talent and potential, not end results. I think Adams' idea would be a pretty good demonstration of this.
Building a better human
A history of the Amiga
If you're talking about [1] then I'm one of the people who down-voted it yesterday, for the reasons that steveklabnik [2] cites.

It's just an assertion with nothing backing it up, so it's not contributing anything to the discussion. It's an assertion that I happen to agree with in large part for my own reasons. But as long as you're not making a case for it it's just noise that deserves to be down-voted, while comments that back up their assertions and stimulate thoughtful argument deserve an up-vote.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643726
2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647505
I believe it will have an impact on the email marketing industry. I can see lots of marketer getting worried. I think however that it will have the worst impact on companies that use their lists in a way that annoy users.

If you simply offer a useful service (and I believe I do with the recently launched http://anynewbooks.com) I don't think you are going to be terribly impacted. People will always open emails that they find valuable whether they are newsletters or not.

If all you offer is low quality bacn though, you're going to hate this new Gmail feature.
PG, what would you do if you already had a profitable, slowly growing product that was based on a mediocre idea, and two new ideas:

A good idea with low diversification costs
A great idea with high diversification costs

I say diversification costs, primarily time and focus, instead of switching costs because the first product will still be maintained and grown, not abandoned.
I assume so, but it's reversible
Hacker News was born as a website for YC participants, grew up as a curious little brat interested in all kinds of technical topics, then had a minor identity crisis (hacker vs. entrepreneur) during adolescence, and now seems to have settled in favor of taking the middle ground between hustler & hacker.
At least Gmail, unlike Yahoo Mail (which I’m currently stuck with), allows free POP and IMAP access. If Gmail doesn’t support something, you can hook whatever email client you want to it. There is probably an open-source mail program you can write a plugin for to do what you want.
Do Any Of These Anti-Aging Creams Work?
Thanks for your advice. I had to look up FizzBuzz, so that's one good direction to go in. I'm not looking for the be-all, end-all solution to learning programming, I want to read everyone's methods and possibly come upon the method that will deliver me to programming heaven.
"I've tried lots of things to motivate them and didn't succeed."
"I have to nudge them to get things done,constantly."

Sounds like the managerial and systemic failure is all yours, dude.

If you've not introduced automated systems to track what's being done and /help/ them (e.g. redmine, tracking relatively highly decomposed tasks, etc) keep on top of the work and the deadlines (and know why each deadline's important; i.e. who they'll be screwing over if they don't deliver) then you've only got yourself to blame.

Why would you think it'll be different with new people - because you'll just "be better" at hiring this time around? Unlikely.

J
government tax credits for hiring someone? tell me more.

I mean, yeah, I agree with you, for unskilled work, an intern is often the best option. I have my sister doing that work for me; I know that she's extremely responsible, and I trust her with my bank account, something I'd have a hard time doing with another random intern.

but actually, hiring people locally is a fairly large pain in the ass, unless you are willing to ignore the law when it comes to contractor/employee classification. (and really, that law is such that nearly all 'contractor' jobs I've had have been technically misclassified... illegal. But, if you want to work, you get used to working illegally. I'm doing my damnedest right now to not hire illegally, but it's real work.)

I've personally just gotten myself an office, so I've got to make my SysAdmin an actual employee now rather than a contractor, as he's actually working in my office rather than just working from home when he feels like it.

As far as I can tell, the government isn't giving me any breaks for this; far from it. I've gotta calculate and pay all kinds of taxes that I didn't have to worry about before. Granted, now my former contractor is going to have to pay fewer taxes, so it's not all bad. I mean, my accountant just deals with that sort of thing without spending my time on it, and I'm better equipped to maintain an accountant than my SysAdmin is, but still... especially if I didn't have an accountant, hiring a foreign contractor is much lower overhead than hiring a local.
(FWIW, I have no management experience, so these are just some ideas and questions from the other side. Good luck whatever happens.) If 5 out of 8 people working for me were sometimes good and sometimes bad, I'd worry I am not leading them right. Also, with so many people performing badly, is poor performance now part of your company's culture? What contact do your employees have with each other?

Before you let them go, have you analysed what makes the difference between their performance being good and bad? What have you tried to motivate them? Have you asked them if there is anything that would motivate them and if there is anything that is demotivating them?

One suggestion though: Are they being given enough direction? No-one likes a micro-manager, but having a couple of clear goals for what to get out of a day does wonders for my productivity. The thing is though, I'm not great at setting that for myself. Working with someone to set that kind of daily target is great. You say you have to nudge them constantly, but I'd argue you are probably an exceptional person (e.g. starting your own company and employing 8 people.) Setting goals and direction is what you are good at. If your employees were good at it, they wouldn't be working for you, they'd be your competition!
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Is there any difference from using System Preferences-> Accounts-> Login Items?
I agree completely - I tried a couple on subjects I didn't know much about and found them slow. But I think this is perhaps a more complex problem - even advanced lectures at university sometimes seemed so slow as to be boring, even when I found the overall topic quite difficult. Pacing needs to change during lecture according to the individual maybe? Only easy solution is 1:1 teaching I'd guess.
I wish I could upvote your indvidual descriptions.

> #5: Wiki. More pagerank than God.

This one would have got most Karma. Wikipedia is an excellent example of self-generating pagerank. More people link to it because anybody can edit it, hence would be "fair" and "comprehensive". And just because a particular Wiki article gets popular, it starts getting more attention (by experts) and hence becomes fair, comprehensive and detailed. The cycle repeats.
Okay. "Everything from fixing your MTU settings on your Q1000 modem to Java framework tips I find handy to years worth of game and movies reviews to hilarious cat pictures."

Two words: brand consistency.

People like to know what to expect. You aren't giving them that. Instead, you're offering an undifferentiated mishmash, not unlike a KFC Bowl. Only less edible.

SEO is not your problem. No matter how good your individual articles are, you have failed at a core part of product-making.

"If you build it, they will come" has always been wrong. If, in addition to having a fragmented and un-classifiable product, you aren't out there busting your hump trying to guest post, make connections, and whatnot, you're still gonna fail.

If you want to succeed, look at all the genuinely successful sites. They all have a thread of personality, a pattern, a rhythm, and a predictable-ness -- that doesn't mean boring, it means they are graspable.
Ivan Illich, in his writings on Deschooling Society, would have been immensely proud - especially once this gets truly p2p. Being able to get an education, without being institutionalised, on demand not force-fed - what a beautiful counterpoint this will become to traditional education. If kids went home to this and every morning/evening did some collaborative community service of some sort - so that they learn to socialise - how much better off society could be!
Getting customers, the Get Satisfaction way
remember when get satisfaction made profile pages for companies without their permission, let users start rating and commenting on them and then emailed the companies saying - do you want to claim your page? - was that a good way to get in the door or a trashy thing to do.

thinking it would be effective but not very ethical.

thoughts?
My search history page says ~70 queries/day on work days and ~30 on weekends - majority of that stuff is about programming. So yeah it's not a problem.

That said - I don't even bother remembering the links to documentation. When I need something I just go to "python docs multiprocessing" or similar address and hope that I'm lucky. Search is the new URL ;)
Perhaps because he's been dogfooding Priority Inbox? :)
That is interesting. The experience has been almost the opposite for me. When I first started programming, it did not take me long to start "getting it", and I was very confident that there was no programming problem I could not solve. As the years went by, I've noticed that my confidence has decreased to the point where I am almost certain that there is no problem I can solve (besides the most trivial ones). Maybe I'm just getting dumber.
There is no real restriction that an object oriented language be imperative and, rule of Demeter aside, I think it's been sort of agreed that always returning a value as a result of any given method invocation makes OO languages much nicer (even if side-effects take place as well). However, procedural implies imperative, I believe.

In any case, I always thought language classifications could get a little fuzzy.
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Oh, certainly. The fact that it can be used for evil makes it no less impressive and useful for other purposes. But thinking of this attack makes me wonder if our browser security models are getting outdated. With things like this possible, and so much valuable data being web-based these days, is there any way of using cool things like that yet avoiding the major risks?
Stuart Roseman's startup SaneBox already does something similar - http://www.sanebox.com. As a paid service, I guess they are in for some competition.
I remember only 5 years a gruffy old sysadmin preaching "Can't you guys code without googling all the time? Programming is not what it used to be." I listened to his advice for a while & I'm thankful for it. I now try to do big conceptual work in offline mode but google like crazy for all the nitty-gritty details.
As others have said, it does sound like a management issue. One thing that might be interesting is figuring out why the other 3 are doing better. Do they work on different parts of the project (or even a different project)? Do they communicate more amongst each other or with you, do they have a personal bond beyond the "colleague" level? Do they have equity or some other motivating factor? It could well be that they do just naturally have a lot of drive, but if that is the case you're doing pretty well at 37.5% self-motivated employees.
Can you clarify the question a bit more, please.

For me, at least, learning a language and solving a problem with it are two different things. For example, I can solve problems in quite a few languages that I would never claim to know.

Many languages share similar syntax and basic properties, so it's not particularly hard to "get things done" in them, provided you know one.

By breaking down a large problem into its components -- which will happen automatically if you follow a tdd-like process -- you can tackle each smaller problem in isolation, which might simply be googling for it and copy & pasting the code. (I'm not advocating this as the "right way", just a method to get things going.)

But, as I said, is it the language or the problem solving that you feel is the block?
Comparision of Zope's object DB with Django's ORM
I will chip in with my finding of an experiment I did few months back.

* bought a 7 year old domain name.

* wrote 5 pages of content on it.

* then made it live, linked it from a very relevant article on wikipedia.

* Soon got few links.

* The hyper linked text of the incoming link starts to rank within a month.

tl;dr: SEO is just recommendation from other sites. Everything else are micro-details that you can afford to ignore.
tl;dr The best chauffeur doesn't have to be the best driver, and consulting firms are not raw meritocracies.

I work at a McBain Group level consulting firm as one of the analysis-slaves. My colleagues hail from many different universities, but only around half are Ivy League, though all are first tier. There are 15 of us, whittled down from a field of around 3,000. In other words, for each position, they considered about 200 applications.

We might not be the best analyst, the best client negotiator, or the best excel wrangler, but in this industry those aren't the only things that are valued - the firm's profits aren't singularly tied to the strength of their recommendations. There's a certain amount of flash and pedigree that they need to justify billing out a 24 year old at $300 an hour. This isn't unique to consulting, but seems to get paraded around due to the amounts of money the position commands and the apparent inequity of taking the 'rich' and making them richer.

Think of your girlfriend/wife's hairdresser. Are they worth the $50-150 she pays them to cut their hair? Is that haircut really worth the %300 premium over supercuts or the corner store?

Based on the raw haircut of course not. But this stylist does Michelle Obama's hair, he has great gossiping skills, and the salon looks great. So she does it anyway.

There are tons of industries just like this. Why are there no ugly people in Hollywood? Why do Apple products command a premium? It's very similar to any other luxury good; you pay a lot for each incremental improvement.
Perhaps, rather than firing all 5 of them, you should hire a really good manager who can work with them. Or, fire the worst of the lot, and use his salary to hire a manager.

Focus on what you're good at, and if you have the money, hire someone to fill in where you're weak.
I'm not sure I'm convinced by the thesis Prolog was killed by association with a Japanese project that was a failure. I thought Prolog died a natural death, for several reasons:

Firstly, Prolog is it was great at the deductive, expert system type of AI, but in 90's, a new generation of AI based on statistics (firstly, fuzzy logic, and then proper statistical reasoning, particularly Bayesian approaches) appeared and showed that truth and failure just don't cut it any more.

Secondly, I don't know if anyone has done the research, but I wouldn't be surprised if Blub programmers are just better at thinking imperatively; Prolog tends to kind of warp the brain away from that, which would put off Blub programmers, but it doesn't provide the kind of killer power that makes expert programmers want to use it either.

Thirdly, Prolog is hard to optimise well, and hard to predict the performance characteristics of. In the 80's and 90's, where apps were getting written in C, this was killer.
Another observation following from the example of Stevie Wonder: if you compare, say, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" with "I Just Called To Say I Love You", it's not at all clear that more practice makes you better.
Apple is not fighting jailbreaking, at least not with more than token efforts to appease people like AT&T and other carriers. All iPhones revisions out there can be jailbroken and can be unlocked and there is a huge number of iPhones out there in countries that don't even have an official iPhone carrier.

Apple collects a nice sum of money for every iPhone sold and does not care whether that was carrier subsidized and whether said carrier now makes a loss due to the fact that the phone was jailbroken and unlocked and used one a different network.
E-Mail Without The Inbox
I've asked very similar question. Check comments in it as well

Ask HN: Should you fire average devs and have only talented devs in a team?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1634231
Push email dates to 4.0BSD (or so the man page for 'biff' tells me):

http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/1/biff/
You should /definitely/ head over to reddit. Don't waste your time here. I mean, there are hardly any lolcats on HN. You'll love reddit - go for it!

Seriously. Go.
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How to do inheritance in a relational database (An Overview)
> Before you let them go, have you analysed what makes the difference between their performance being good and bad? What have you tried to motivate them? Have you asked them if there is anything that would motivate them and if there is anything that is demotivating them?

Yeah I worked on this for a while now, and if you ask them it's all personal problems (stuff I can't help unless I'm willing to take their mother to their aunty's). I think one of the reasons we are in this shape because I don't want to micro-manage, I don't want to make it company culture. Although we do have task tracking and everything so basically everyone knows what they supposed to do. We hold regular teleconferences every week (for all the team) and as much as required through out day between individuals.

I've listened stories of other companies such as 37signals how they mange to work telecommuting, how they don't need to nudge people to work and stuff which makes me wonder whether I'm an incompetent manager or most of my team are incompetent workers.

> If your employees were good at it, they wouldn't be working for you!

Interesting point maybe you right, but to be honest I don't want to spend half of my day to keep nudging people :) Also I had these 3 guys who works perfectly fine, so what about them? Are they just exceptionally good? Somehow much much more motivated than others?
I'd be surprised if this kind of data wasn't already tracked.
I am curious what kind of motivation did you try?
Also it is hard to work remotely and many people just can't do that.
So I should fire myself :) A fair point but do you really think it's a good team if the team needs a constant manager to nudge to get things done, do you think it's a good company culture to setup?

Personally I don't want such a culture in my own company.
I used to pay a hundred a month for it, though I get it free now because text boxes activate my write advice instinct, and some advice helped people out.

BCC does substantially in excess of $3.6k a year due to advice I got from Aaron. YMMV.
Erlang is a mixed paradigm language, which borrows from languages like Miranda and Prolog.
Initially it was written using Prolog syntax (relations) and VM was implemented in Prolog too. Later it's Prolog syntax was adapted to the current functional style (i.e. functions).
Apple is fighting jailbreaking, but not for the carriers. (Steve Jobs famously called them "orifices".) Apple is fighting jailbreaking to prevent piracy of App Store apps.
How often do you all sit in the same room?

How often to you pair, or simply work together physically?

First thing that struck me was the size of the team. Eight techs is a big team, especially for a start-up. I'm generalizing, obviously, as we have no idea what you are doing. It would help to know whether you are building product or service.

We need more info to offer good advice. Though it does sound like you need assistance.
> If you've not introduced automated systems to track what's being done and /help/ them

I'm not quite sure why you think we don't have these but we do have all. So everyone knows what's been done, what's need to done and what are the deadlines. (although generally we don't have strict deadlines).

> Why would you think it'll be different with new people - because you'll just "be better" at hiring this time around? Unlikely.

Well this is fair comment, I simply don't although it was my first time hiring people for me, so I'm sure I've got more experience on that now and secondly I know what our company culture and what's the good fit, based on good employees I've got in my team. So I've good reference points this time.