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Comment by moocowduckquack | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about female founders, but I always thought that given the readership, pseudocode problems placed as job adverts in some of the puzzle magazines would get a lot of interesting candidates, many of them middle aged women who have been solving a variety of logic puzzles daily for decades, entirely for their own amusement. I bet some of them could code like demons, if given the impetus.

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That doesn't address the major obstacle I see when trying to introduce programming to beginners.

Finding smart people who can think abstractly isn't actually that hard -- lots of people can do it. But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.

The layers of abstraction go very deep, and every layer leaks a bit.

But those people won't become productive programmers until they've put in thousands of hours absorbing the minutiae of how our current computing world actually works.

Depends what you define as productive programming. Not every problem requires intimate knowledge of the whole stack. Besides, I found that the most important skills for me are not in trying to memorise all the details, but to get good at using reference materials and to look for the structures rather than the nouns.

Funny you should say that. I got my first real programming job from a puzzle in MENSA magazine.

Like Lindsay - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2534733/Victorias-...

She has a CS degree.

Is there an alternative source? I have an allergy.

How about : http://www.businessinsider.com/lyndsey-scott-model-and-coder...

Thanks :)

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