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Poll: Do you read Hacker News and not have any programming ability?

18 points by jeromec ↗ HN
I'm re-posting this thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056020) as a poll because some people might prefer to click an arrow than write a response. As noted: This includes being able to make pretty much any sort of computer or internet program or app, basic html not included.

20 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 56.8 ms ] thread
jeromewbrock
I'm in IT and have an interest in the edges. Have minimal programming, some scripting, ability to tie things together, (db's, code, servers and storage).
ksowocki
Where's the "I have programming ability" option?

EDIT: It's now been added!

glhaynes
Just don't vote. Clearly lots of folks here do have these skills.
BCM43
It serves as a base. The number of people with out the skills alone is not so useful without knowing how many people saw it.
ksowocki
Thanks for adding this option.
pato491
I'm trying to study programming right now, I lack motivation, sadly. But would love to do my own stuff so very much.
zacharycohn
If you would love to do your own stuff so much, why do you lack motivation?
Detrus
Where to begin. I was a designer/artist, my work from 2006 http://detrus.nivr.net/ When I seriously started at the too late(?) age of 23 I had a lot of motivation, plunged ahead into semi-serious programming projects like a Flash 3D engine, made visible progress, ultimately got overwhelmed and demotivated.

Building seemingly simple common things like flashy sites, wordpress plugins, themes with some show/hide effects, sidescrolling 2D games, image pans, charts can turn into a nightmare when you have no foundation. Simple bugs can take weeks of work to fix.

These are the kinds of projects n00bs want to do, but it can take a lot more code or effort to do these common things than most can handle. With 2D sidescrollers you can run into localToGlobal problems and if you suck at math, have no clue that you should write a separate coordinate engine instead of using the API for screen positioning, nightmare ensues.

When I strayed from the tutorials I was lost. When I saw example code, I was usually lost. There were very few examples that would give the right foundation in the context of building a thumbnail site or 2D scroller. A lot of the code was horrible and I didn't know it. I've seen people here starting with Ruby that have better luck. I've seen people starting in JS that have it worse.

Figuring out this kind of crap took months. Yes I still think it's all crap. Learning resources are usually made by people with years of experience, who have long forgotten what it's like to be clueless. Programming languages, APIs, frameworks, engines, are geared for those with years of experience. By programmers, for programmers, or at least for people with a science/math slant.

It can be fixed with effort on the scale of jQuery for every single domain. Meanwhile many people who try will lose motivation because they'll fail to accomplish anything presentable after weeks of effort.

joeguilmette
i love reading about the tech industry and entrepreneurship, work in a management role for a small business, and have leveraged many of the concepts I've learned about on hacker news in my job.

not only is hacker news my primary news source (among a field of many), it is the only news blog i comment on. in fact, besides facebook it is the only place that i leave comments or write on the Internet.

it is a great resource with an even better community. and while i dont program, everyday i find something or learn about something that i implement in the business i help run.

klbarry
+1, I work in marketing but have similar reasons.
Tautology
I use this site as a 2nd Reddit when all the links turn purple.
antics
I should say, though, that when I started reading HN, I was a first year CS student and had no practical ability to program.
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ChuckFrank
As a designer and serial entrepreneur, working closely with programmers, HN has a the best signal to noise ratio of timely, relevant & inspiring technology news. So in recognizing both my design strength and programming weaknesses, I read HN to leverage my product development and design skills, while improving my ability to understand the major issues and communicate with my technical peers.
vibe
No programming ability. But understand most of the jargon being a Telecom Engineer. So I skip over most techie posts like "Node.js v0.2.6 Released" or "Zombie.js insanely fast, full-stack, headless testing", but "What should I do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Sacalable Web Applications" is fine.
ccoop
I have none, but I am in the process of learning.

Can we add this as an option?

rringler
I have your typical C++ experience taught in an engineering curriculum and rather enjoyed it; my brain definitely works in algorithms. I'd love to try the more web-centric platforms around now (eg., perl, php, javascript, etc.) but I really don't have any idea how to start.
madifz
I have none and have started learning python. I've started reading HN primarily because of that! Plus,I've decided to take the plunge and take an introductory module in programming for my next upcoming university semester, despite being a philosophy major.