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I think the problem is that often when people attempt to explain "computers" they end up explaining things about the Windows operating system like the registry and the "C drive" etc.

Of course this stuff is massively complicated and the majority of HN readers probably don't really understand the whole thing so what hope would some random person have?

If people could understand a basic turing machine type system and possibly write simple assembler to run on it then they could be told "this is all your PC, your smartphone and your iPad are just they have lots and lots of window dressing".
I was expanding on the concept and seem to have fallen into a time warp.
Tsk tsk.. ruby 1.8.7 by default
Here is the clause from the OpenShift Preview Services ToS (not the site terms): https://openshift.redhat.com/app/legal/services_agreement

3.3.
Your License to Red Hat. You hereby grant to Red Hat a non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty free license to use Your trademarks, trade names and logos in connection with publicizing the Preview Services and communicating with analysts, customers or the press about the Preview Services. Your further grant to Red Hat, and any third party service provider on whose services Red Hat may depend to provide the Preview Services, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to make, use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display Content for the purpose of providing the Preview Services. Except as set forth in this Section, Red Hat obtains no rights in Content under this Agreement.
I think I just about managed level 7, I feel ok now.
That's either really bad headline phrasing, or a real attempt at linkbait.

Did you mean that this is an article on lessons from Angelpad written by a company that was rejected by YC? Because the headline you posted sounds like YC are rejecting something.
For those that are interested, the IBM Mainframe family is a fascinating architecture, completely and totally with nothing in common with modern mid-range or microcomputing.

MVS is the ancestor of a modern operating system, z/OS, also capable of running on hercules, albeit with much more by way of hardware requirements[1] (I wouldn't want to run it on a raspberry pi). IBM's licencing prohibits the installation of z/OS on anything other than IBM mainframe hardware, which in itself led to a bizarre situation where IBM, defender of open source projects and patent abuse decided to start abusing patents against an open source project[2]

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRW4iPhCDSM&feature=relat...

[2] - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/04/ibm-br...
[2]
The reason a mac is required for development is that iOS and OS X are essentially the same operating system - they just have different user interfaces. When you run your app under the iOS "simulator", it is actually running as a native OS X app, linked against a version the iOS user interface libraries that have been compiled for OS X.

For Apple to support development on other platforms, as far as I can see the only practical option would be to provide an alternative to the simulator which runs a variant of iOS inside a virtual machine. While this is certainly technically feasible to do, and you could make the argument that they should provide such a tool, it does involve a lot more than simply porting a few user-space tools to run on a different OS. Android also benefits in this regard from using Java, which already has compilers available for all major platforms.

It is also worth nothing that the Android emulator, at least last time I checked, is extremely slow to the point of being unusable. When I was developing for Android I found the only realistic option was for me to test on a real device. The speed of the iOS simulator is one of the main things I prefer about iOS development in comparison to Android.
One thing in this article I do agree with is that you should try to write "as little code as possible". But it doesn't follow that if you don't know how to code, you'll write zero code, and do well by that metric! You'll be unable to identify people who can code well, and hire poor coders to solve your problem, ending up with lots of low-quality code, in situations where an experienced programmer could have come up with a better solution ("hmm, I've seen this before...").

Even the slightest familiarity with programming here will help someone understand that when an offshore development house says "oh, sure, we'll just throw 20 more people at the project", that will not necessarily make it done better or faster. This is a Good Thing. And this has nothing to do with whether or not Mr. Bloomberg is implementing his own Ruby or .NET scripts.
An alternative, completely server-side implementation: http://adaptive-images.com/

It takes the approach of setting a cookie when the page first loads with the viewport size, determined through media queries. Every request to the server then includes this cookie.

When an img is requested (as an <img> tag or through CSS background-image) the cookie is read to determine the viewport size of the client. The PHP script then serves up the most appropriate image size to the client.

The only thing you really need to do is add the .htaccess rule (to intercept image requests and route them through the PHP script), the php script itself and the highest resolution you need for each image. The script takes care of scaling down the image for smaller screens, caching them for later use.

I like the way this requires nothing on the client side, other than a cookie being set. All the heavy lifting is done on the server.
That's what I wanted to add. Nice article and pretty well written, but the original title is better.
I think most comments here are missing Jeff's point, or maybe I interpreted it in a different way. Most skills are somehow useful in the real world: programming, plumbing, economics, chemistry, logic, critical thinking, philosophy etc. Most people don't have the time and/or the will to learn most/all of these things. I agree a basic understanding of these would help but you have to make a compromise, you can't learn everything. We think programming is really important because we are programmers but it's not more important than most other areas. You should spend your time learning things you like/find really usefull.
That is a very appealing design, but sadly it doesn't address all the use cases. In particular one thing that people want to be able to do is to display a different image depending on the viewport dimensions, for example a closer crop on a small screen compared to that shown on a larger screen.
Oy, not this again. I agree that could be written better, but it's not all that different from Heroku: "...you give Heroku a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Heroku to provide you with the Heroku Services."
Those are the terms of use for the website, not the OpenShift service aren't they?
My reason for picking it is this. Rapid way to get to MvP without concerning yourself making a site presentable. The defaults look good and most importantly most of your customers won't know or care.

Once idea is proven, and tech is built then I will move onto fixing the way it looks (most likely pay a designer)
While this is cute, a mainframe is so much more than just a CPU. The draw of a mainframe is the support for massive I/O and bulletproof hardware.
Coding doesn't necessarily involve time deadlines, and maybe cooking doesn't either, although it seems to. I agree with the rest of what you said though.
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My apologies I wasn't too specific. I was meaning a controller through express. It's not as straightforward as you would expect with code buried throughout on how to set it up. This is a typical barrier for developers to not test as much.
I am more excited about ETags support than SPDY & Websockets. Etags (when used correctly) are extremely handy.
A lot of these course systems seem to overemphasize the real-time component. It strikes me that almost all of the negatives were the result of this kid trying to "catch up" to the schedule, which was of little benefit to him since he (like the vast majority of participants, I'd imagine) couldn't participate in the real-time elements. The way they're trying to encourage these rigid course schedules just seems unnecessary, anti-learning. They could create wikis with FAQs, addenda, videos of hangouts and vastly expand the impact of each course by orders of magnitude.

If anything, it looks like Coursera and edX actively bury the finished courses. I wonder what Khan Academy's impact would be if he'd gone with this approach.

Of course, this just reveals the conflict of interest - these institutions sell degrees, so they aren't necessarily excited about offering an easily accessible, thorough directory of courses.
I don't know about "disasters". For better or worse, lots of software ships with severe bugs that are evidently rare enough never to be fixed but do happen.

For example, every few months, OSX kernel panics on my MacBook Air, with no obvious trigger. The backtrace always implicates the AHCI driver for the SATA SSD. Still, Apple evidently don't receive enough crash reports for this particular bug to actually fix it, as it's happened since I first bought the Air in November 2010.

I have no idea whether it's a threading bug like the one in the article (I'm not about to run my system in single-core mode for months just to find out) or maybe a race condition with DMA or just a simple logic error that only rarely applies. It might even be specific to the exact SSD model and revision I ended up with in my device. But that's pretty much irrelevant - there certainly hasn't been a widespread outcry about it.

Personally, as a developer, I would definitely want to fix that kind of bug in anything I'd built. But tracking it down might take weeks of costly developer time. So Apple's bug triage probably marked this one "WONTFIX" after deciding it only happened on hardware they no longer sell, so fixing it wasn't going to have a positive ROI.

(FWIW, if it sounds like I have a personal vendetta against the AHCI driver, that's because I do. ;-) It behaves erratically in ways unrelated to this crash, but that weirdness doesn't cause kernel panics, just extra work for developers of other drivers.)
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where would you find one of these?
Personally, I feel that the more people who learn to code, the better position we as members of society are placed in. While I certainly have no need for my local member of parliament to play perl golf in his/her spare time - I certainly do have a need, or at the very least, a want; for them to have some form of understanding about softare development. Informed people make informed decisions, and a higher number of people who are informed in matters that relate to things like software patents, the easier it is to garner a sympathetic ear when we say "Look - this isn't right, they shouldn't be able to do that."

I recall reading an article about the term 'programmer' and how it should be avoided when applying for jobs, rather, something like 'problem fixer' (I don't recall the actual example given, sorry) should be used, due to the negative, hermetic/wizardly air that supposedly hangs around those who program. I'm not a programmer, so I can't say if it is objectively true; but if it is, it seems logical making coding a more common skill would certainly remove some of the supposed semantics.
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I like the idea i read somewhere about "Spinning off" versions of "you" to go do/learn something, then re-integrating that version of you back into yourself! I still agree with sodiumphosphate however, in that i prefer immortality and dodging the "end" of this mind. I MUCH prefer the idea that nanites can make us better, rather than "uploading" ourselves totally.

This is also why i don't like the idea of a Star Trek style transporter. At what point do you stop being you? I'd much rather stay alive and in one piece thank you. 8)
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My first job in this field, without exaggeration: Oh, you can perform skills 1-4, great, welcome to the team and since you're a junior we can give you 35K a year. Sweet. First task, you'll need to level-up to about 8-9 as we need you to architect a Linux application server with a user panel for: hardware monitoring, firewall, application mgmt, network mgmt, license mgmt, application code obfuscation, etc.
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They've now made is possible to do "over the air" distribution, whereby you put up your .ipa file on your website and email your users a link. They can then go to this link on their iPhone or iPad and it will install from your site.

There's instructions on how to do this at: http://nachbaur.com/blog/building-ios-apps-for-over-the-air-...

Although it saves you from having to email large files, you do still need to collect your users' UDIDs and add them to your provisioning profile (embedded in the app).
Although I am not a fan of the fashion, it is indeed possible to create this effect in real life by shooting directly face on from a distance while maintaining orthogonal edges on the sheet. Like any form of forced perspective there are correct and incorrect ways to use it which is where the perceptual problem arises.

For example if the image portrayed is particularly detailed/noisy, then it's ideal to distort it to lend to the fact that the edges are curled towards the viewer (a weaker version of how a label around a cylinder appears distorted.)
I think the bigger deal (at least for most existing deployments) are the index-only scans. This is one of the only features of Oracle that I missed after switching to Postgres.
Besides paying the $99 for a dev account (that allows you to publish to the marketplace), you can pay ~$10 for a personal app account, which allows you to load 10 apps of your own creation onto your device. Much cheaper if you just want to put your own app on your own device.
An interesting article. It offers a taste of the many challenges that arise when developing a language implementation. As they say, it’s all about tradeoffs.

“…there is very little in the way of correct, current, and universal folk wisdom as to how to implement a programming language.”

Hm. I have a mind to fix that.
I once ported BCPL to the GP2X. BCPL came with an EDSAC simulator, so I used it as the test app for the BCPL port .. so for a while, I had an EDSAC in my pocket. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gp2x

XOX for the win!
I really liked the comparison with cooking, I think the same way you do! You don't learn how to code to become a professional programmer!
Thank you for posting your experience trying it with rails, I agree deployment of a non-trivial app to heroku can be a pain the first time but once you get everything working its a breeze for subsequent deployments.
How many of those machines will run visual studio?
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Never heard of Dotcloud before, anyone have experience hosting a decent size app with them?
You are forgiven ;-)

Thanks for the SBCL tip.
And I suppose then that you are one of those people who believe that advertising does not work on them because they have made up their mind not to be affected by it?
I actually just had to do some basic plumbing, with duct tape :-). I'm sure glad I understand the basics of how water flows through a pipe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs
I enjoyed taking the 11-year-old's perspective of university style lecturing because it really does force an examination of the established video-ed paradigm. I'm currently taking an online developer's course at Udemy and finding it sorely lacking in some key respects as well. They aren't the same issues as those with videotaped lectures, but in the end it shows that people have a long way to go before the new online medium is properly exploited. You have recorded lectures, structureless YouTube style videos, and 'gamification' of learning all vying to find that sweet spot of applied individual education. I just wish it was figured out already so I could learn development more efficiently...
what is stopping this approach from addressing that use case?
odesk has a rating system. It usually gives you a pretty good idea on the quality of the freelancer.
>I think it's apt. Cooking shares many qualities with coding, you're under time deadlines to produce something for a end consumer (for the most part).

A, you mean like hundreds of other professions...
I know, which is why I said '(for the most part)'. 80%+ there's some kind of tangible time limit on what you're trying to achieve. Be it self-imposed or otherwise.
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For iOS development, 360iDev (http://360idev.com, Denver, September) is very good. World class speakers, great community feel, and quite affordable.
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How can you know about the tradeoff? you remember your past lifes? nobody can, you will have to guess and often you will guess wrong. That's why very few people has great family planning skills at their 20's.
> The RDBMS space has been addressing how to do this with distributed systems for quite some time as well

So how do you do what they did with MySQL. Can you build an always available multi-master cluster that is available, partition tolerant and eventually consistent?
I would probably call myself a mediocre coder compared to the average HN'er.

But I don't think you necessarily need great coding skills to reach people. The Toolbox really is nothing more than a customized WordPress theme, and I'm sure I could find lots of similarly successful sites that are not overly complex from a technical point of view.
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Unlike most of the top comments, I actually agree with Atwood's conclusion, if not all of the arguments he uses to get there.

I don't particularly care about the accumulation of bad code. I don't particularly think that summer of code people are going to be accumulating all that much of it that will be shared.

And I do agree that learning to program is a totally worthwhile and mind-expanding skill. But I can say that about a lot of the skills I've picked up. From driving a tractor(1), to the little bit of plumbing I've learned; to playing an instrument; they all involve problem solving; they all make you a better thinker; they're all fabulous to learn in and of themselves.

If forced to choose one of these skills, I'd say programming is in fact the deepest. But they all have enough plenty of depth for someone who's only going to be exploring them casually. And I don't feel like the summer of code mentality is over-hyping programming so much as its undervaluing all those other worthwhile skills.

There's plenty of worthwhile stuff to learn in this world. It's okay if you want to learn a few of the other things instead.

(1)Yes, operating a tractor and making use of its attachments does involve a lot of problem solving. I drove one as part of a job for a year and a half, and the guy I worked under could do so much more with it than I could that I was in awe.
http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/Tiger138260.htm has a diagram of it.
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How does a programmer become a Brogrammer?
Wow, I had no idea I was so far behind the times. If desktops aren't useful anymore...
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This is great timing and a really digestible summary. There's a talk on StateManager in Ember.js tonight [1] and I was embarrassed to know nothing about state machines. Glad to be able to attend a little more knowledgeable

[1] http://www.meetup.com/Sproutcore-NYC/events/59870422/
men aren't oppressed in our society and
especially our industry

Are you sure about that? Calling people out and giving them a bad rep over silly jokes sure looks like oppression to me.

Jokes have been historically used by oppressed people to express their frustrations. Not saying it's the same thing here, but trying to ban humor, even if it is politically incorrect, is really not OK.

The world would be a much better place if we smiled more.
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Sure, but I was talking specifically about the 'don't compare coding and cooking'. We can abstract it into a reusable template.
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iCloud has developer APIs - all your code just happens to run on the OS X and iOS clients (which are distributed via the App Store, which sits in the cloud).
I don't think the comparison is apt, because learning plumbing only helps you with plumbing. Whereas coding knowledge can be applied to a lot of fields.

To me, there's an argument to be made that coding can be considered (or maybe, will one day be considered) like a life skill on par with reading, cooking, or playing music.

I agree it doesn't look like it right now, but I'm sure that a couple hundreds years ago the idea that everybody would one day know how to read seemed just as ludicrous.
Great to know I'm not the only one - I had figured it was my third world internet connection. I've pretty much given up on it because it takes so long to display anything. Often if I click a link and come back to it then it goes back to loading as if it didn't cache anything.
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That "for the sole purpose of enabling Heroku to provide you with the Heroku Services" makes quite a difference.
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None for me, because I have no interest in Visual Studio, or any Windows-related development in general.

However, at least I could make it run on all 5, by means of VMWare. That's not an option I have with XCode.