celer

My motivation comes from a very different angle, though I don't know how shared it is. What I love about programming is the feeling of having to control everything. Computers don't forgive, they forget when you least want them to, and fuzziness is impossible. Writing code helps me clarify my own thoughts and ensure that I really know what I am saying. The mental state of a good hacking session is better than meditation for me, and saving time and the joy of creation are nice side benefits. Am I misunderstanding you? Are you using decimal places to indicate forceful intent rather than logical prediction?

I think that there is very strong evidence that this has been happening for a significant period of time. When I look at the length of time children are expected to be in school, I see a trend of a long rise spiking recently. If a large part of the importance of schooling is job training, that is strong evidence for a decline in low skilled jobs.

To look at a model for what is causing this, I point to automation. Scivener is an archaic term today because the job is no longer needed. A Roomba helps replace a maid. The United States manufactures more today than ever before, using fewer jobs. The last log table I saw was printed in 1906. Google Earth is more accurate than most, if not all, surveyors. All because we have technology to do our jobs for us.

On the other side, assembly line manufacturing did produce an increase in low skill jobs, Amazon's Mechanical Turk suffers no lack of customers, and some modern day sweatshops engage in gold farming and CAPTCHA breaking. I argue that new technology tends to remove more low skilled jobs than it creates, and that the pace of new technology increases over time. Is this a claim you would disagree with?

The starving masses is what I think many people will see themselves as. The lack of truth to this claim is barely relevant, and inequality has always been able to produce anger.

I wouldn't say that it is just higher math. As a high school student, here is my path of e^ix.

Physics 1 Advanced, Simple Harmonic Motion is being taught. When told to find a case where the second derivative of a function is a negative constant times the function, I think e^ix. The answer is sin(x), but Euler's equation now makes sense. The most beautiful equation now makes sense.

A month later, glancing in a book of useful mathematical equations, I see sin(x) = (e^ix - e^-ix)/2i. Hyperbolic trig suddenly makes sense, which is useful over a year after finishing it. The weird equation for the normal curve from statistics starts to make more sense, because e^(-xx)=(e^(ix))^ix, which helps explain the 1/sqrt(2pi) weirdness. I start to understand why the most beautiful equation has its name.

I think that most math is cumulative, but only some parts are hard enough to make you notice it.

I am a beginning stats student. I took the AP class in high school, and have been doing independent work since. Predicting voters, playing with data sets, using a bit of Python to try to make general solutions, and other non serious but non trivial actions. Bayesian solutions have always required more work from me, even when they seemed the optimal way to solve a problem. I still don't entirely understand how to work with continuous distributions of hypotheses, partially because I lack the deep mathematical intuition at the moment. I don't blame the math, but I do think that much of the time the Bayesian treatment can be more challenging. I suspect that this is why non-Bayesian techniques remain so popular.

I don't mean to imply that that I agree with the author. I agree that it is an amazing thing that only a fraction of the population needs to work in order for us all to live. I also agree with you that society will continue to grow richer for the foreseeable future barring massive loss of human life.

At the same time, unless something changes rapidly, unemployment will rise as low skill jobs go away. If we keep our current societal structure, or continue to cut benefits for the unemployed, we will end up with a more divided society than ever before. A wealthy elite and a starving mass is, to put it mildly, unstable. It doesn't matter that even the poorest will still have an improving standard of living. The perceived gap will be a problem because while society as a whole is "getting richer and more productive," the majority of those gains are going to the top.

Python has a design ethic that most other languages don't have. There are very few, if any, good synonyms for 'Pythonic.'

For the virtues of locking everything down, I would switch from free v not to mac v windows. These are the two dominant operating systems, dislike it as I think we do. Apple locks down everything. Apple hardware, on the iphone Apple Software, Apple plugins and addons, everything, to the greatest extent possible, is controlled by Apple. This yields benefits. Driver installs giving you problems? Not with Apple. Screen display no working properly? Not with Apple. They control everything, and they make it all perfect. Windows makes a "something for everyone and everything" strategy. It gives you more options, but it also gives you more headaches. I don't think it is possible to increase options endlessly without costs.

I use the term coder for myself, because I think it is more accurate than any other phrase. I will never be a software engineer. I don't think of myself as a Real Programmer, and I don't expect to ever publish any program that will be used by my grandmother.

I like doing stats, and making sure that I really understand how things work, and at times automating parts of my life. At most I will end up knowing three of the programming languages that currently exist, and those only to a moderate level.

Calling myself a coder is, I believe, an accurate summary of my skill set and desires. Is there a better term? Is it condescending only when applied to engineers or programmers?

Any legal system has flaws. But not having a legal system makes it an anarchy, and I would argue that that causes far more violence. The hope behind law is that it will not be violated. The theoretical underpinning of law that I support makes the point that law should reduce total violence.

If you say that violence is not OK, and context shouldn't dictate exemptions, can I believe that you think violence in self defense is wrong? If that is not your position, legal punishments seem to be that abstracted with respect to time, location, and direct facts.

People who read HN tend to be better coders than those who don't. Fizzbuzz exists because it is needed.

As a relatively normal person, I have my quirks. I read HN, I love politics, and I enjoy trying to understand the law. The fact that an average contract is impossible to comprehend is actively offensive. Most legal phrases in contracts are stock phrases. A "Google translate from law to human" would be a wonderful thing. Stick a contract in there, have all the standard parts summarized, and flag anything odd. I would adore this. This isn't about fighting battles, this is about making battles never happen in the first place. As a founder, you could run your recieved contract offers through this, just to make sure you aren't being doomed. If it can take in .doc, .docx, .odt, and .pdf files and return their translated equivalents, so much the better.

With all due respect to a fellow member, how does Java do Regex better than perl? When I attempt to use the Java Regex, I miss several features I am used to even in Python. Perl invented Regex, which helps explain why the syntax does what it should.

The difference between 2.7 and 3 is, to be honest, nothing big in terms of programming. I use both mostly without noticing the difference, because some libraries are still on old versions. For now, use import __future__ to help ease the transition and don't stress.

I would add that the material tends to be academic without requiring a great deal of prior knowledge, though you do have to deal with a bit of preaching about statistics if your focus is on cognition.

The single thing I would say Java is missing, from the perspective of a beginner, is the ability to change code while running it. Eval and Exec are useful functions, and there is no way to replicate them in Java.

Lists in Java are an unholy pain that redefine cruelty in an entirely new way. You can't make a list, to the best of my knowledge, that accepts arbitrary inputs. Does the utter lack of a slice operator count for the addition of multiple lines of code to replace what is normally three or four characters?

Please, tell me how. This is an honest question. I have been learning Java since school started, and I miss my functional techniques.

On your first paragraph, I agree completely. As a relatively new programmer this was what made me adore Python.

On your second paragraph, I disagree. HTML doesn't have the immediate feedback of "I can write something that makes my life better" in the same way that, for example, Python does. Python lets you write something you can use for your benefit six months in. Something that will actually save you significant amounts of time in some cases. There is a power and a promise there that I don't see being matched in HTML. HTML is made firstly for others to view on browsers, while the first Python script you write can be done just to make your life easier. "Scratch your own itch."

For your third paragraph, I am again in complete agreement as a relatively new(2nd year in high school) programmer.

I am working on code to do logistic regression and predict voters for a local campaign. Take in the past voting patterns from public records, and tell you who will vote this time so they can get pamphlets and volunteer visits.