sAuronas

Be like Malcolm X and read every programming book he can get. Send him PDF copies. I'm self-taught. I obviously had a computer but I spent a ton of time just reading and studying other people's code. There was a time as a kid when I wanted to play the Sax but my mom made me wait a year. I bought a book and learned the fingerings and played by air for a whole year and took first chair the next. If he is really motivated, he can do it. In fact... I'll contribute and send him books as well as advise on how to get there. Send me a message and I'll help you help him.

I was thinking the same thing. What of black swan events? They (the authors of this study) might be right for the next ten years then, BSE... we gain another 30 years on average.

This is a very good reply. Someone trying to grab a foothold in front end development should keep it simple and add tools as they require them (if applicable). I used to develop for the web until I found iOS development to be more enjoyable because of the feeling of stability of the SDK. When I did do it, I got to the point where I said, fuck all this noise and just give me Nodejs/npm, MongoDB and raw JavaScript...

Right or wrong it felt like enough at the time. Just adding Angular felt dirty. Damn, I feel for you guys.

It's not unreasonable for someone who works in SF (1000/sf+) or Oakland (500/sf+) to expect to be able to afford a home. I'm currently in Tampa for the weekend and it's not a replacement for Oakland - in any way. These places are more affordable because they are less desirable...

The real issues - in CA at least - are the property tax lock-in that incentivized NIMBYism and the gross costs of lawsuits and regulations for developers. I believe we need the regulations that protect the sensitive environments and to discourage sprawl, yet we currently make it impossible to redevelop brown and grayfield (commercial retail, etc) lots or even single-family zoned neighborhoods that could accommodate flats (2-4 units per lot).

Zoning code has become a problem in desirable cities that have a housing shortage. It's not just small housing that has value - it's any housing.

If you have the ability to borrow $1M, I'd argue you're already there. I know people who can't open a fucking checking account.

Edit: I guess with the premise being "startup [in a] weekend", I shouldn't have expected my idea to win even with the team I picked up. Perhaps a startup month would work?

My idea for a startup weekend was such a hard-tech/software problem that lost out to a couple of social weekend apps. While a lot of people got behind my idea and we put together a strong presentation, the lack of a finished app sank us. How do you compete with something launched on mobile in a weekend when your at power points and mocks?

Every time I hear him talk about Mars (placing it before curing cancer), I think "if only he had grown up wanting to eradicate poverty." Still...rather than think ill of his idea - and work - we should celebrate his innovation and the way he will inspire others.

As I thought about how he is perfecting rocket technology, I wandered off on a tangential rocket technology (thought) that would tract nuclear rockets launched from the earth's surface and curry them off into space... and return home.Is it a good idea? It is if it works. Do I plan on working on it? I don't know shit about rockets, so probably not. The point it, we need more "Mars Men" in order to discover the ideas that will change things here on earth. Maybe Musk won't cure cancer or end wars but maybe someone inspired by him will.

Thanks. I got into the industry with the expectation that I would launch a startup. Yet, I starting really writing code and decided that I wanted to do something really novel and killed my original real estate domain related ideas. Once you learn to write code you realize how weak your ideas really are. Since I love coding so much, I don't mind improving as a dev because novelty and quality my ideas seem to be improving as well. My experience is unusual but I encourage anyone I met to try it because you never know if software development might change your life's trajectory.

Old (40) geek here. I think I have two pennies-worth to share here. I came to the industry at 38. I left real estate development when I couldn't overcome the unemployment history gap in my resume, despite working for KB Home, Toll Brothers and on the largest redevelopment project in Chicago history (Stateway Gardens housing project to Park Boulevard). I was living in the Bay Area at the time I made the transition (finally). I can tell you first hand - the culture fit thing as a means to discriminate is real. I will say that I at least had interviews. Interviewing felt good after not even getting an email for - any - job applied for in real estate. I got a response for - every - job applied for the in Bay (minus FB and Pandora, you guys suck).

After 6 months of interviews in the Bay, I gave up (due to cost) and decided to try another market... less than 6 weeks and I had a job in Charlotte. I had my first iOS role at a startup another 6 months after that. Even after the startup coughed me up (thanks again Zomato), I was able to get another iOS job in a month. I won't mention (any other) names but I can say that the culture fit issue doesn't really exist outside the Bay.

And to any decision makers out there, you are making a mistake if you assume someone like me can't fit on a team of 18-30 y/o. I fit in so well, in fact, that almost all of my new connections on LinkedIn are these same 18-30 y/o. I have made more friends with interns than I did when I was the age to intern. And my 20 year-old friends have no fear in making fun of my age just as I have no fear in making fun of theirs. We even talk sH$@! about race (oh yeah, I'm also black).

The experience has been awesome for me as well as them (I believe). So, the next time you have a chance to hire an old dev who just wants to be a fu$!@E~!! DEV - just hire her.

I am trying to appreciate your position on this: the problem is, we ought to know what's right 'in the thick of it' using the two C's - choice and consent. Like discriminate-against minorities (disclosure: I am black), gays do not have a choice to be who they are. Therefore, their position, if you will, is a biological one (as is mine). You mentioned pedophiles and zoophiles, who, could also (possibly and unfortunately) have the disposition of just being who the are without choice. Yet... the difference is consent - no one should get the right to take away the rights of innocent children, or innocent animals for that matter, much less kill, enslave, or otherwise harm them (as was the case with blacks, etc). There is no harm in my being black to anyone who is white, just as there is no harm in being Aboriginal or gay. The rules didn't change. The point is that they (human rights) need to apply equally to everyone.

I thought the point of the analysis was to think of a city as a whole (I.e., MSA) and not just a downtown with surrounding neighborhoods... Chicago, for example, is very low density compared to CA cities despite having a downtown that could swallow all of CA cities' downtowns. And yet, it has miles of single-story homes, empty lots and abandoned factories. Comparing a city like Chicago using only the city and not the entire MSA to any CA city like SF and it still loses (if the game is density). I really appreciated the analysis because th baby boomer generation and their "I got mine..." attitude is keeping most urban places down: literally. Thank you prop 13, if you live in CA, for destroying affordability.

Perhaps the reason most people don't think memorization is important is because they don't realize they already did it through practice outside of school. Usually (if you will), the kids who are more successful in math and science during K-12 education and who pursue STEM in university are the ones exposed to more math early-on ...and often. Having a parent with those skills to help you - even if only ten mins a night after school - is a huge difference-maker. Those who succeed may not realize the advantage those extra ten or so minutes a day over 6 to 12 years have given them over the peers, whose parents were math illiterate and, therefore, ignorate of the process of accumulated study.

Funny because companies are still doing these things: just been asked to fizz/buzz...code with someone watching my screen, etc (as someone who was told he was inferior to whites by a HS teacher before a test, the anxiety is terrifying). Another (YC) company did the "culture" thing to me - I believe - because they just stopped calling me after telling me I would be moving on the "the lunch with the team" interview. Didn't return my emails either... This might be 2014 but it still strikes me as lacking taste to use the words "culture" and "fit" to a minority [sic] candidate.

I think this is a great point. In Oakland, places that could use six stories for a project to pencil out are hampered by 35-foot height restrictions. Reading zoning code is so depressing because it has not changed much (despite updates) in 100 years. It's amazing how fast web technology moves to accommodate the browser's API: our neighborhood API needs hacking.

Haven't gotten into diffy-q but that's next up after I grock Swift and finish my Angular app.

I thought I was imagining the static class problem...the documentation, while well-written, leaves much to be desired, especially for the above-mentioned. I've enjoyed writing in Swift so far but the playground crashes often. Xcode has not yet, so that has helped.

I would fall into your latter camp, being self-taugh. I started with the interpreted languages JS, Ruby and Python and, in the end, I didn't feel like I understood what I was doing until I got into C and even Objective-C. Therefore, it wasn't until I touched a pointer or dealt with memory management that I felt like I was really more than a coder.

Not everyone wants to learn C, or C++ for that matter, but at least taking the time to understand I/O and (in my case) POSIX systems goes a long way to writing better programs - even if they are just in Python.

They removed the need for main by making global scope the entry point.

Look into a small place downtown or downtown/Uptown Oakland which is a lot closer on Bart than many places in the city. It might be 10 mins driving but there's a lot to consider. Always visit the city and spend time getting a feel before you commit to a place.

That's because you're way out on the edge of the city in a commuter ghetto and by the looks of it you'd still be paying more than $2/SF to live in squalor (that unit is a dump, sorry). I apologize for the negativity but no one should be paying that much to commute without a nice spec (floors, kitchen and bath). You deserve better than that kitchen.

The solution won't come from the region (i.e., more Bart station apartments in Dublin will not solve The SF problem). Now Oakland...that's a different story since the Bart ride between the two downtowns is a mere 12 mins or so. Now if only Oakland can solve its historic racism and negative perception problems and, therefore, get projects funded by the banks [pause for bankers' cough]. Not to get (more) political...but prop 13 makes all that NIMYBYism possible (and economically feasible when they sue to hold up projects). Oh and it encourages people to keep their homes even when they don't live there and rent them out because rents are rising faster than the property taxes. Just saying

I'm in the same boat: 30-plus... bleeding edge tech in an industry dying to be disrupted...high capital requirements. Unlike the author (yet to be named), I've been working on being a good programmer -- first -- so that I can provide an adequate proof of concept and then seek a CTO as well as an industry cofounder. I guess I've been doing it backwards (?)...except, what was it that he built?

And semicolon insertion.

I'm sure it would be easier if I had a mentor or at least a friend...but I'm a loner so I'm taking my lumps the "hard way". It's been cool I love learning this even at my advanced age.

That was one year and 3 months... I don't do much else!

Playing Wayne Gretzky:

30 years we will (ought to) have cars that repel over the surface by a bioether [sic], possible emitted from the street - which have become (replaced as) linear parks that vehicles float over and never crash. Because of all the new park area, some kids in the suburbs (because they will be park rich) will invent a new game that stretches over a mile that involves more imagination than football, basketball and soccer - combined.

That was an awesome video. C++ == Guitar Hero

I am 3,000 hours into the DIY phase myself, so I appreciate your list.

I think Effective Objective-C and Effective JavaScript (as well as the "Good Parts" and "Secrets of a JS Ninja") were good books.

Also, the C book, since it is difficult to understand Objective-C without a firm grip on C. Although, there are certainly more recent and easier books on C to read.

This is a interesting post to me because I also started programming a year and two months ago. I took a much different approach because I wanted to be considered an engineer not just a "coder". I can say that I did not feel like one after three months of digging into Codecademy Code Year (yes, in three months). I didn't know how to build outside of their sandbox.

Then I dug deeper in Javascript, reading every book I could find until I knew all the pitfalls of the language firstclass functions, global namespacing, scopes, etc...Still did not feel like an engineer.

Dug into Objective-C (that's right...I skipped C) and struggled for three months to build my first app and launch it in the App Store (mostly because re-wrote it over and over not understanding the Core Data model issues I was having. Was I an engineer yet...NOT.

That's right, I skipped C. So, I went back and got into the C book and everything I could find on design patterns, etc.

One year in, trying to really build an app that does not suck and really get close to the metal with some assembly (yes, I know, I have been working backwards!) And do I consider myself an engineer now...? Kind of. Not a good one if I am (despite being a "hellava engineer" graduate from GaTech).

I may not consider myself one for the rest of the year. But that's me. I wish I had her feel for what she is. She posted to HN and I didn't so I give her props for that.

As a city planner/RE developer turned software developer, I am dismayed by how little attention is paid to basic innovations that would have great impact and, yet, are never or barely mentioned in these future-tomorrow vids. I won't dive into a major diatribe, but consider this one technology that has seen trivial improvements over a period of 100-plus years - the home.

I will pick on one thing: plumbing. Without being tethered to a wastewater system, we could seriously challenge development patterns and housing/urban design. I am all for what's to come in, say, bioengineering mitochondria to end aging but damn if it wouldn't be cool to recycle toilet water in a closed system and use your own feces for your lawn (planters if you live in an urban area) -- TODAY!