You let other people in the field say it. And that happens when it becomes accountable. For some it happens early in their career. For others, entire careers end and the words have never been said.
And I say this while thoroughly enjoying a quote by one of the comedy greats, George Carlin, where he was quoted a legendary cellist, Pablo Casals, who kept practicing daily into his 90s, saying "I'm beginning to notice some improvement".
Recognizing your skill while also recognizing (perhaps even immense) potential for improvement are not mutually exclusive.
I get that humility is a virtue, but at some point you have to admit that you're capable of doing a piece of work.
Humility is absolutely necessary in any skill development (and in general), but false humility - such as has been on display by various responses - is just as bad as the lack of it.
still feel like that lil kid. other ppls program humble me and teach me how little i know.
sure i understand more than i did when i started, but theres various reasons you're never 'there', and to me, i wonder if feeling you are good would even benefit you.
sure, you can still program C like in the 90s. Still write python like its on v2, or html and CSS like its 1999, but in reality to tap into the systems and their potential you need to constantly keep up. and i think its pretty much impossible to keep up with everything. there is so much, and more and more every day...
im a bad programmer. my bugs sometimes compute stuff!
If these books have a failing, it has little to do with the concept and everything to do with being poorly written.
My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.
I won’t attest to the quality of your mental software architecture, but you’ll know the language…
It was around the time C++03 came that things no longer fit in a single book and you need a bookshelf of books to know a thing.
The web circa 2001 was easy enough to build entire sites from scratch in a week with no frameworks. The web circa 2021 was a complicated mess of frameworks on frameworks rediscovering server side rendering (the OG method) again.
I’m a fan of the books that take you through a project start to finish and not chunk it up into mini exercises.
I never completed it at the time either, though it created a foundation that enabled me to learn action script (Adobe flash) with relative ease and ultimately go on to complete a computer science degree despite pressure from my high school teachers to go into mechanical engineering or similar.
On balance I got to pursue something that genuinely interested me and happened to pay well and I'll always have a fond memory of the Sam's book, as well as the free Ubuntu CDs that got me onto Linux years before we got broadband
Edit: it wasn't teach yourself in 24 hours, it was the 21 days version (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sams-Teach-Yourself-21-Days/dp/0672...)
Anyone who followed this article would've greatly threatened their chances of being hired by Google, since they would've spent their time on things other than rehearsing for the interviews.
The whole idea of the book is to get deep insight into your tech following the 10 000 hours rule which one might achieve within 10 years of practice.
It was published against the mainstream idea of that time advertised under the name "Teach Yourself Something In 24 Hours". This book is a call for hard work, mastery and is against rushing when learning.
On the other hand, mastery through 10 years of practice means and leads to a good knowledge of data structures and algorithms.
I should've given some additional context in my comment:
The author of this article was heading Google engineering (back when Google was cool), but when the Google engineering interviews seemed to have little or nothing to do with the advice in this article.
https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Greek-Years-Brian-Church/dp/960...
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39001755 - Jan 2024 (302 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33287618 - Oct 2022 (112 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27411276 - June 2021 (115 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543495 - July 2019 (87 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574248 - March 2018 (51 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395284 - April 2015 (61 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519158 - April 2013 (86 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3439772 - Jan 2012 (29 comments)
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191235 - May 2008 (19 comments)
Norvig: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243 - Aug 2007 (7 comments)
With LLMs you can iterate through a hundred thousand software development lifecycles in a month, vastly increasing your rate of project experience gain.
This article is so obsolete, it's literally from the previous century.
Yes, the LLM can produce code at a high rate, but you aren't going to learn at the same rate that it will produce code.
What is/was UseNet? Was that the precursor to php bulletin boards in way / the forums of the 90s - 2000s? Would the zoomer equivalent be discord for my generation?
(The pre-web antecedent of Discord would be IRC, latterly stuff like AOL chat rooms.)
And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
> And if you think it's weird to read conversations nearly as old as you, I'm a millennial and I've read Usenet conversations older than I.
Now, rereading as I near 50, they are surreal. The conversations, and the moon itself, have not changed one bit. But myself and the world around me are unrecognisable to the 10 year old me still reading over my shoulder.
I'm not hating on anyone, fundamentally dishonest person.
P.S. I helped develop the ARPANET and my name is mentioned in RFC 57.
P.P.S. My comment included the Wikipedia link ... so much for having something useful to add ... I did, you apparently don't. The whole idea that asking HN--a form of social media with all of its problems--is asking experts but reading Wikipedia (not a "conventional communication channel")--written/curated/edited by experts isn't is completely nuts.
Quite.
Wikipedia link is fine. Condescending snark is not.
But you seem to be just “that kind of person” so maybe you just don’t really know you’re doing it and in your quieter moments wonder why your friends talk over you all the time.
In my day the answers Google would give you would be one and the same with Wikipedia pretty much.
Wikipedia has had its credibility attacked unfairly in my opinion, probably because it flies in the face of post truth.
Anyway, Wikipedia link is a perfectly appropriate response in my opinion but the snark is not.
"this is more informative"
As someone who was on usenet before it was even called that, I can authoritatively say that it isn't. I can tell you that many of the claims here are false ... e.g., someone claimed that the name "usenet" came from news organizations in 1993/1994, but in fact the name was voted on at a 1982 USENIX conference (and I was present and voted).
There isn't a Zoomer equivalent, because the internet has been locked down since then, and anyone who attempts to offer an uncensored and uncensorable forum gets brigaded and maybe swatted, then cut off from the banking system.
But Usenet still exists.
They expressed horror, and said something to the effect of “My god! I came to discuss cats!”.
Another user commented something along the lines of “You have mistaken this forum for a place to exchange information. It is not. It is a public toilet. Jump on in.”
The big difference between those two services and the web was that most participants used text-only software (in terminals) to access them. Actually an even bigger difference is that (like all the other services on the internet back then) net news and IRC were run by volunteers.
The average IQ on the internet back then was more than 130 (whereas of course today it is in the range of 102 to 105) -- and it was 98% or 99% men and much more libertarian than today. One thing that hasn't changed is that people back then tended to spent much more time on the internet (particularly, on the newsgroups, IRC, text-only MMORPGs) than is good for them.
It was always called the newsgroups or "net news": calling it Usenet was started by the news industry when they started explaining the internet to the world in 1993 and 1994 because obviously "net news" is a horrible name (in their minds) for any service or scene that they did not control.
More precisely, the newsgroups began on what is basically a "competitor" to the internet called Usenet, then migrated to the internet, so "Usenet news", i.e., that news-like service that started on Usenet, is not a terrible name for it, but "Usenet" by itself is kind of a bad name because it already meant something different, namely, this network (now probably long gone) that carried email and other services in addition to newsgroups.
This, along with several of your other claims, is a fabrication. I actually participated in the vote on the name at the 1982 USENIX conference.
The news industry had nothing to do with the name "usenet", which came into use in 1982 as a result of a vote by the participants (I was one) at a USENIX conference. The "use" part came from USENIX (the UNIX user's organization). It was decided that "usenet" would refer just to the newsgroups, and the network itself was called UUCPNET.
There is of course no measure of the IQ of users of usenet (or of the ARPANET, or of the internet, or of the web, which again are different things). One can suspect that it was above average because the nodes were mostly universities, but not everyone going to universities is above average in intelligence.
There is also of course no measure of their political leanings, but since these were universities shortly after the invasion of VietNam and its accompanying draft and fresh from the development of the civil rights, LGBT, women's rights, and environmental movements, they tended to be quite liberal, but of course there was a spectrum and some extreme outliers (Clayton Cramer comes to mind). The most memorable libertarian I recall was Laura Creighton who, notably, was not a man. I particularly remember her saying, without any irony, that "If I thought I didn't have free will I'd shoot myself". Ah, those were the days.
In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET.
I concede my final 2 paragraphs contained errors (more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722631) and promise not to perpetuate those errors in the future.
I am very curious about the great switchover from Network Control Program (NCP) to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983. From the perspective of an ordinary user of the network with no interest in the low-level details of how the network worked, did anything change beyond maybe the appearance of the Path field in email headers?
E-mail, Telnet and FTP worked the same way before and after the switchover; did they not?
"In 1991 it was almost universally referred to as the Internet (capital I): I met only one person between then and now who called it ARPANET."
What "it"? Again, the ARPANET and the Internet are (were, since the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990) different things.
The Internet is called that because it was formed from interconnected networks, one of which was the ARPANET. The ARPANET did not become the Internet in 1983, it simply adopted the protocols that would later be the basis of the entire Internet.
This isn't worth pursuing further.
At the Internet Archive (and apparently from Kahle's own personal collection): <https://archive.org/details/matrixcomputernet00quar/page/n3/...>
I'd begun using Usenet at about the same time as the book was published, and can't personally attest to the information jibal's giving, but will vouch that their account is far more accurate than that to which they're responding.
You can learn fast today, and then continue tomorrow, and next month, and next year, and if you remain curious, half a lifetime later you are still learning.
I'll finish the article in 24 hrs - 10 years approx.
The second half is a Q&A and he directly addresses this: in the presence of errors he finds more faults in the way the prompt was worded than in how the LLM answers, and figures that LLMs are better than the alternative approaches to programming if used well.
I find it striking that this article references
Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p. 10-19.
but doesn't cite one of the more notable responses:
https://drdobbs.com/there-is-a-silver-bullet/184407534/
where that language (Objective C) coupled with the NeXT libraries/objects made possible Steve Jobs' "5-minute Word Processor Demo"
Do Swift (and SwiftUI) change this calculus?
gabrielsroka•6mo ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Teach%20Yourself%20Programming...