skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Absolutely! I'm 29, college drop out. Always liked computers, but never really programmed. Didn't do much for years, then just dove into php about two years ago. A year and a half ago, I got my first tech job making web site updates. That's when I really started learning a lot. After a year, the guy above me quit and now I'm the department head (though small department, lol). It feels like once I got my foot in the door, everything fell into place-- so that is the hardest part for sure.

Now I am starting to venture into other languages like Ruby and C in my spare time and I am excited to see where I'll go next. I know you are older, but its a similar story. Really, as long as you are into it, you will catch up in no time. And once you do it for a job, you will never look back. If you need a boost, take some online courses, go to meetups, sign up for a web development bootcamp. Meet other people who do web, you will find that a lot of people doing it now didn't start life as a programmer either.
Yes, absolutely! My brother has your same age and is learning programming for the first time. He started with basic HTML and CSS and now, he is enjoying learning Javascript but already looking forward for some backend coding.

He started with some really basic books, but he switched to Codecademy some weeks ago and he really likes it!

Good luck! :)
they are all made in china, don't you get it?
DITTO on manual cars. I always thought that driving stick is so much more fun, but it's impossible to get a rental car with manual transmission. The entire fleet of Zipcars has no manual gear cars, for example.

And I don't understand why... everybody is licensed driver, which means everybody can drive stick. Also manual transmission cars are cheaper. So what compels rental companies to have automatic transmission fleets?
But you're still throttled when you try to bring the data home...
Indeed. As you carry on in that direction, hiring a car when necessary may become much more attractive compared to the upkeep on a car you only use occasionally.
Same old invalid assumption error as is always made, and which underlies thinking the Fermi Paradox is a paradox. A mistake so universally made by humans that it's probably an instinctive cognitive bias - assuming 'intelligent life' implies 'intelligent species' and nothing else.

The truth is, technology is incompatible with species.
As soon as a race becomes able to competently engineer genes (or whatever serves to encode their form) suddenly there is no more 100% cohesive 'species', but also a number of self-engineering unique entities. Who's interests typically conflict violently with the remaining original species. When one or more of these entities survive they eventually become space faring individuals, wholly transcended from their original species-derived intellectual nature and physical form. Of course there are many pitfalls, and in some cases the outcome is 'everyone dies'. But in NO case, can a technology wielding species ever do so for more than a very brief period.

Space is full of intelligent life. All of whom are immortal, universe-roaming individuals, none of whom have any kind of species-survival related instinctive thought habits. There are no interstellar empires, no expand and conquer instinct-driven behavioral rubbish. Only Travelers.

And most certainly, from moral principles deriving from the fundamental nature of information, intelligence and fun, NO passing of significant information to any instances of embryonic planet-borne life forms. No more than you'd consider poking a fetus with a pointy stick. Horrible idea, nothing useful could come of such actions.

Btw, the 'Grays' are open-source gene-ware, manufactured intelligent semi-independent remote manipulator/observer peripheral units of visiting Travelers. They are not 'species', rather a range of production models. When they do interact with humans they lie about their nature and origin, since humans are not supposed to be handed the truth. It would interfere with humans' natural progression towards transcendence (or self annihilation.) The only thing that matters is that the human 'story' remains uninfluenced by exposure to external truth.
But there's nothing wrong with you working it out for yourselves.

Here's a little story: http://everist.org/texts/Fermis_Urbex_Paradox.htm
During an undergrad research project in a hospital, I had access to a medical library and found a few articles on persistent visual tracers following LSD use. I can't find them now, but I turned this up in the British Journal of Psychiatry

"A chronic impairment of colour vision in users of LSD."
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/140/5/518.short
Stop disabling Javascript, you Luddite. The entire web depends on it.
Are you asserting that a generation of people alive and working during a certain period have no effect on most socioeconomic trends of their time?
>My point is that overreliance on monetary inflation as the single systemic driver is simplistic.

Oh, but of course. I mean, it's crazy non linear system and we don't even know all the variables. Any cause in particular will be insufficient to account for the whole.

So, yeah, startups are doing so well because software is eating the world, but amidst all of the narratives most people go with rarely to people seem to consider the role that the economy is having on the industry. Of course it's non the single systemic driver, but it's certainly a catalyst if not a multiplier - and it's rarely discussed.
You might want to take a look at Dev Bootcamp. It's a 9-week intensive course that teaches its students just enough to make them employable, and then connects them with interested employers: http://devbootcamp.com/

Bloc offers a 12-week intensive online course: https://www.bloc.io/

The idea is basically to give you "minimum viable training", so that you can see whether a programming career is right for you, and then get paid to learn more while providing a valuable service to your employer.

I think Dev Bootcamp pioneered these "bootcamp"-style courses, but there are several of them now, and I've heard good things about them. Just make sure you do your due diligence, since with the recent media coverage, there are bound to be a few phoney scams trying to exploit people like you.

EDIT: Also, these courses are fairly new, and almost nobody in the industry has any experience with this style of teaching, except for the people closely involved with it. Most programmers will be useful sources of information about the things you need to know that these courses won't teach you, but we probably don't have a clue about the effectiveness of these courses. Take our opinions with a grain of salt.
Shift + right click is the shortcut to always go to the browser context menu.. No need to toggle preferences.
Can the same thing be said about desktop computers and laptops?

That's a separate can of worms but I have to say, I really don't see those form factors disappearing because of tablets. I think it's more of a "modern technology and better performance leads to longer use before replacement"- which may also apply to modern cars.
> I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either consciously or unconsciously.

I dislike Medium consciously, but not for the reasons you present. I dislike the site because I don't think its prominence here in HN was progressive, but rather very sudden (one month it was nothing special, and the next one it was always on the main page).

That tells me that either Medium is the website to end all websites, a site so popular that it took news sites by storm and whose news cannot be ignored, or that their marketing team is artificially pushing their content in HN to gain views. The fact that they have a main page article discussing how awesome the site is doesn't help either.

Of course, I have no evidence whatsoever of this, but that's how it feels for me. So as suggested by a fellow HN commenter, I just ignore everything from them.
Dow Jones data for 2000 - 2013 was directly below the graph you referenced. And in fact, a kind of important point the author made in the text...
> get paid well and work on what they're interested in

This is a common reason in pure math and theoretical computer science. There are not a whole lot of places that will give you a good job to do basic research. Tenured professor is another one, but hard to come by, and has a different set of tradeoffs.

If you do certain kinds of applied research (e.g. machine translation) you can do it at Google, but Google is not tripping over itself to hire number theorists to do actual number-theory work (maybe they would hire a number theorist, but to do something else).
Disabling Javascript isn't equivalent to installing an ad blocker. Ads not showing are just a side effect if it. If sites can't integrate ads on the server side it's not my problem. Same with analytics: you can still use regular web server logs. Everything beyond that is too invasive for my tastes.
I would suggest you talk to someone about this in person. I'm guessing you have many friends and family that are proud of and would dream to have your level accomplishments.

I've got a bit of savings but didn't co-found Instagram either. I also have many smart, extremely talented friends who, in their 30s, are finally debt free. Or not even. Suddenly things don't seem bad at all. You have a freedom and flexibility that is decades away (at best) for many people, not just starving third world strangers.

Perspective helps, and yours might be dominated by dreams of getting richer rather than something more productive. The reality might be that even if you reach some certain number that you think would satisfy you now, you might just find something else to be dissatisfied with. Still not as rich as the next guy.

I understand what you're feeling. A few things help keep me in check:

One, mentally treat "want" as a toxic impulse (like, say, overindulging in fast food). It's perfectly fine to have goals and drive, but don't let them get so out of hand as to consume you.

Two, imagine luminaries in your field and compare their accomplishments to wealth. I'm sure Vint Cerf and Linus Torvalds live comfortably -- but are not billionaires. But look how many have ridden off of their accomplishments. Wealth != societal worth.

Three, read the (apocryphal?) quote about Heller and "enough".

Finally, do talk to someone in person. I didn't know "imposter syndrome" was a thing until someone told me, for example. Talking can help in unexpected ways.
The "non-technical" user is real, in my experience. I worked tech support at a school where the teachers at the school would accidentally delete icons on their desktop and change every setting in the browser one day trying to print something. I've also volunteered as in-person support at Firefox events. Watching people bring in their computers full of crapware and with things modified all to hell before they finally asked for help. These people aren't dumb, they just lack the technical literacy sometimes. But they are most certainly not hypothetical.
Wow, thanks. Every time I learn a new shortcut, there seem to dozens more waiting to be discovered.
Yes, the current education system in America is due to a willful desire to increase the cost of college, because every American politician is a terrible person.

(One could educate oneself on the history of public college funding and the underpinning philosophies of the student loan to get a better idea of the massively complex economic situation, but I know that's not the American way...)
Latency is measured in seconds, not Hz. I can film the sun at 2, 2 thousand or 2 million images a second, but when I do that from earth, the latency will never (1) be below 8 minutes.

(1) nerd remarks: yes, it will eventually go below it, when the sun expands to become a red giant. Also, earth might be knocked out of its orbit earlier, or maybe we move it, etc.
Is there any empirical evidence that the use of AdBlock + Ghostery or WOT or whatever privacy addons you're already using are any less secure than disabling JavaScript outright?

Disabling JavaScript has a few MAJOR disadvantages to proper web usage:

1. As the blog post has said, many web sites will fail in mysterious and unexpected ways. Some web apps may be rendered completely useless. In fact, you might as well just say goodbye to the modern web if you're gonna totally disable JS.

2. Since it's a "blanket fix", disabling JavaScript is a silly way to protect yourself from data miners. Instead, why not use an extension that has been proven to work, is actually available cross-browser, and gives you MUCH finer-grained control over what is displayed?

3. Since JavaScript is not the only thing that could potentially fuck up your web experience, disabling JavaScript doesn't even fix every problem related to privacy! You'd really have to disable JS, disable all plugins (Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.), and pretty much block yourself out from a lot of the modern web just to be truly secure. At that point, you're really isolating yourself from a lot of the web's rich media, and doing so in spite of the plethora of tools available to combat the stealth data mining practices that these companies use.

Use AdBlock. Use Web Of Trust (WOT). Use Ghostery. At least know when sites are tracking you, and disable those tracking bugs when you see them. You don't need to turn off JavaScript and isolate yourself from an entire ecosystem of awesome, just to maintain control over what data you're sending out about yourself. The idea of turning off JavaScript has always been a silly concept to me, and I felt was simply there to please the more paranoid of us. But there has to be a time to face reality: It just doesn't work.
U.S. citizens did not freely elect that military machine and millions of suits around it. They only could vote for a person to extract taxes. All citizens are victims of their ruling mafia.
It really is a sum of bravado, years experience, and pay grade. These titles arrived out of pure dread. What other careers have "junior" and "senior" in the titles?
Manual transmission is but an example. The idea is that ownership rates declined before the downturn unrelated to the economy. What is declining, is the value proposition that the current set of new cars offers compared to older cars and, that many would-be car buyers just aren't finding what they want in a car. Imagine the cell phone market before the iPhone, that is the state of the car market today.
Google is in no danger. Google Now already has a head start on Siri because it presents things to me before I ask for them. Apple is never going to be able to do that because they don't have the kind of data Google has on their users. Never mind that Apple has a consistent history of failing at projects involving lots of data.

Apple ought to be worried. Every user that switches to using Google Maps/Chrome/Gmail is another user they're losing data on.
Whatever publishers think, I've started using (medium.com) on HN as a negative content filter. Was quite impressed when I first saw it, but the last few times I've clicked on something on the front page of HN on medium it's been poorly thought out link bait. This isn't unique to medium of course, but I've gone from having a high-end perception of their content to a low-end one.
There's no guarantee that the cron script and the end user would be getting the same data. So that's not really much help.
This is probably an unpopular opinion but I have the impression that like music or natural language, programming is far easier to learn when you are younger. That being said, there are lots of counter examples and it is definitely possible to get to a professional level on your own, within a few months, no matter your age.

The most crucial thing when learning programming languages is to have a very short feedback loop: build something in that language as soon as you know just enough to get by. The rest can be learned "just in time".

Go for it and good luck!
That is a terribly user-unfriendly design decision because it does not distinguish between failure modes. Maybe your site is broken because I am running noscript or maybe it broken because it is mis-configured or recently hacked or my ISP's proxy is black-holing things or a dozen other things that could go wrong.

The point is that it is relatively trivial for the developer to add automated checks for per-requisites and display warnings for the ones that are missing. It is a lot harder for each user to manually run down through the list of all the things that could go wrong.

If they are missing, tell me your site needs javascript or cookies to operate and I might enable them for your site and give it another shot. But if I just get a catastrophic failure without explanation then I'll probably hit "back" and pick another similar site out of the google search results that brought me there.

Just don't make the warnings into roadblocks. Inform the user and let them decide to proceed or not.
I'd love to hear some statements from the Norwegian Peace Prize Committee, who in a fit of Obama euphoria gave him the prize during his first presidency.
For me, this is where lyft is so exciting. It used to be, if you could depend on walking/biking/public transit for 90% of your usage, you either still had to get a car for the other 10% or suffer a 10% downgrade in lifestyle.

Services like lyft perfectly patch over that hole. The cost of taking lyft indiscriminately is still less than owning and maintaining a car and the time I spend waiting for a lyft is counterbalanced by the time I would have spent parking.
Like the health care debate... lessons learned from the rest of the world is not a topic up for debate.

That is not a particularly American phenomenon, we do it all the time in Australia... however there are often calls to stop the "Americanisation" of health care/education/workplace.
Hasn't politics taught anyone that dividing disciplines/schools of thought into two camps hardly arrives at an intelligible difference?

Junior/Senior..might as be Red and Blue.
> Is there any empirical evidence that suggests that people accidentally disabling JavaScript and then being confused as to why websites don't look right is a significant problem?

Of course not. Mozilla's agenda is determined by its main sponsor, Google, which has a vital interest for JS to be enabled. Any spin on this being somehow "for the user" is bullshit.
Much Very Confused: Ember for the inappropriately experienced
Solved by a web-page for harvesting e-mail addresses without any other information? Impressive!
I don't disagree with you whatsoever. It definitely felt more organic to me because I follow a lot of the Obvious Corp. folk on Twitter, but I think it's naive to think that any major tech-focused publication (and I'm being broad with the definition of publication here) doesn't specifically submit stuff to HN.

I have no idea how HN's ranking works, but I wish there was some sort of diminishing return bias against a given top-level URL.
Obamacare "is designed to be a fiscal transfer from the young to the old, the healthy to the sick, and the rich to the poor."

Every welfare system is designed to work that way. What should it do? Transfer from the sick to the healthy, from the poor to the rich?

The real problem in my opinion comes when the transfer isn't from the rich to the poor, but from the future generations to the current ones, through debt.
Kids’ privacy rules kick in July 1: what it means for the app industry
Some people have valuable data inside their browsers. Javascript code can access this data.

Also, browsers aren't bug-free, and enabling Javascript significantly increases the attack surface.
Small talk with strangers every single day would get boring extremely fast.
Spend 30 seconds googling to find reams of UX research that says most users don't read. Actually, I'll do it for you.

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
http://uxmyths.com/post/647473628/myth-people-read-on-the-we...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopi...
What is declining, is the value proposition that the current set of new cars offers compared to older cars

What is happening (IMO) is that "old" cars (in relative terms) are lasting longer and longer. The car I learned to drive in had a 5-digit odometer. The car I drive today can reasonably be expected to reach 250k with regular maintenance.

many would-be car buyers just aren't finding what they want in a car

Ok, what do they want? 'Cause I assure you, "it doesn't have a manual transmission" is not the complaint of the majority.
Nice!

Is it relevant/secure for heroku hubots?
It should ship with one, but otherwise see here http://mcabber.com/hg/index.cgi/file/dd8ae0abfc68/mcabber/mc...
you can absolutely pick up programming on ur free time. many of the best programmers are self-taught. i recommend completing udacity cs101 and the udacity cs253 to have a strong foundation in programming and web app development. after you complete these courses i'm sure you will be confident enough to pick up a web framework tutorial like django or ruby on rails and continue from there.

consistent learning every few days for a few months will set you to mastery in a year or so. good luck with learning!
There are more people who disable JS unintentionally than those who do it intentionally.

This is a good move. Option still exists in about:config.
TCP/IP Tools
I don't see the arrogance, nor the implication that his/her title was based on having the same background (I think it's obvious that a 2h interview is going to find out more than just that). You seem to be cherry-picking from the story.

Indeed "Yet, the CS part I could learn, ..." seems to imply an answer to your final question.
First of all, I appreciate you are still willing to learn new things.That's the key.Knowledge is everywhere, not inside in a library room of some university.If you love to go with programming choose the right technology that may make you reach somewhere.Your confidence is the key.Just go ahead.
Good luck,oh in fact there is no luck.Only hard work bring you the result.I'm not the one to give you lectures, I'm just 24 running.Go ahead and ofcourse you should be taking care of your family. :)
Well I ment that a little facetiously. However, I agree those things should be taken into account--in addition to including documents with the terms you ask for in them. Pages with my terms (in order) should be the absolute highest ranked, and it should go down from there. At least if we're talking about building an intuitive google vs. really aggravating google.
Online tool to hire coders with AV chat, Collaborative Editor and Compiler
As someone who has a similar experience to yours, I say go for it. I have found coding to be tremendously transformative and empowering.
I'll tell you the issue: politics, banks, speculation and capitalism.

Politics: For not being good enough to fix the issues we have.

Banks: For making money out of nothing: someone has to pay this. And the house credit scandal, creating the current crisis.

Speculation/Wall-street: Again making money out of little added value: someone has to pay this.

Capitalism: If money makes money, someone has to pay this, and the someone is the 99% !
I don't believe you should have a record in NCIC unless there's a very good reason, just as I don't believe the US should be collecting and storing fingerprints of visitors at the border, or collecting the phone records of every American, or the GCHQ collecting almost all the data that passes through the UK and passing it back to the NSA. The mere act of collating all that information and storing it indefinitely is incredibly dangerous, and some logging of access is not going to make it safer. So this is why I reject the premise of your question.

Not collecting all that information in a central record is the best defence against misuse - if you collect it, it will at some point in the future be misused, just as Hoover, Nixon, the GDR etc misused the far more limited powers they were given.
CoderPad
Build A Company That Attracts The Next Steve Jobs [includes vid]
Why would that be cowardice?