What advice would you give your 16 year old self?
I'm 16 and have interests in programming. I know HTML and in the process of learning Objective C for apps. There is so much I don't know and I want to learn as much as I can. What advice would you give?
76 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadI did design, got offered a front-end dev job, and learned HTML/CSS within 1 week after failing for 2 years.
Then I did HTML/CSS, went to a hackathon and had to dive into Rails to finish on time, and I didn't "learn Rails" but I learned a TON (and won 2nd place!)
Took up a job doing more traditional ColdFusion and XSLT sites - learned a ton in 3 days. I was also forced into learning SASS/SCSS - learned a ton within like 2 weeks.
Keep going. Get in over your head. Take on the projects that you're not sure you can finish, understand it's okay to walk away from them (jobs, too), but try your hardest not to.
Also, take CS101 at your local college ASAP. It'll get you off your feet wicked quick.
I'd love it if you'd shoot me an email at zchlatta (at) gmail.com. I'm always interested to talk to other passionate people.
I talked about writing code more than I wrote code and that was a dumb mistake.
Also, if I could do it all over again, I'd make it a point to really work with C/C++. I feel like moving to any other imperative language is pretty easy if you have a firm grasp of that language.
I would also not learn Objective-C, but that's more of an opinion than anything.
Beyond that, I'm a really big fan of putting C in the hands of people who want to learn to program on the grounds that it forces you to develop good habits. You don't get awesome, abstract data structures, inheritance, etc. to help manage your project. You kind of have to develop good habits or else you end up with a mess of a project that is unmanageable after a point. Those skills apply to even modern, high-level languages. They are of course applied a little differently, but it forces you to learn good project management skills.
But you're smarter than I [am|was], so my advice to you is don't listen to others who don't build stuff. Or in a more positive way, only listen to people who actually build stuff themselves. Why the Lucky Stiff said it best:
Wow, amazing advice. It echoes my sentiment about investment advice, which is to only listen to people who actually run money (e.g. run their own funds, and even then, be on the lookout for ulterior motives). This translates to: never listen to your "financial advisor" (which is a misnomer if there ever was one)
Fee-only financial planners, however, are unbiased.
How so? Their bias is that they need to justify their fees, and, according to many studies, their fees can't be justified:
WSJ: "Darts Top the Readers' Stock Picks": http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732423510457824...
Someone earlier suggested buying and holding an index fund -- that's good advice, for reasons given here: http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths
Unlike someone who worked for a bank or an index fund, though, he didn't have a perverse incentive to sell us one of his company's products.
Fair enough, but since this kind of general investment information is freely available online, I personally wouldn't pay someone to provide it.
> Unlike someone who worked for a bank or an index fund, though, he didn't have a perverse incentive to sell us one of his company's products.
Except his own fees as a financial advisor, presumably ongoing. Also, you may not be aware of this, but if a financial advisor steers a client toward a particular fund, he gets a commission, despite the fact that he's an independent agent, not an employee of the fund.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Persona...
What you're saying is true of most financial planners, but not fee-only planners. That's the whole point of being fee-only.
Also I will use the Internet as long as I can starting out, but things aren't always that simple. We hired an advisor this year because we received two complex inheritances (one foreign) and started drawing down college savings, all at once. My dad is a CPA and an ardent DIYer, but even he knew he was in over his head and needed to hire a professional.
tldr: buy indexed funds
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6153368
Having spent some years in bad relationships I had no business getting into, I don't agree with your statement.
Recognize that you will never be happy in a relationship until you are happy with yourself. There is plenty of time to fall in love, seize the opportunity while you are young to explore and don't let yourself be tied down to a town/province/country.
My first serious relationship didn't come along till I was 24...by that point I had lived in 3 countries, visited dozens more and had hundreds of exciting opportunities (both in work and outside of work).
I know who I am outside of a relationship and I know that is a very attractive quality in myself and others.
"Going to a school program that has more men than women is a colossal failure of the kind of intelligence that actually matters."
Oh please! Going to a school program based on anything other than the quality of schooling program is a colossal failure of the kind of intelligence that matters. Schools have more than one department. Do what you love to do and make friends (of all kinds) from all over the school (Humanities, Hard Sciences, Maths, Soft Sciences..) - Life does not end with the classroom door.
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." –Mark Twain
And recreational drugs? Learn to deal with life on your own without having to rely on crutches. I've seen too many people destroy their lives with drugs (including alcohol) and many more who need a hit/taste/boost/shot in order to deal with the stresses of life.
For the OP: Don't trust people who tell you drugs are bad when they haven't used them extensively. There are lots of ways to hurt yourself. I've seen plenty of people hurt themselves with drugs, but I've seen more of them hurt themselves in cars and on bikes and with crummy jobs. But don't over-do the drugs thing. And don't do drugs if you're not interested.
If he is telling his previous self to do them, he must have found something he enjoys in them. Judging by the average HN user, I doubt he's ruining his life with them and is instead viewing them as an alternative experience to learn rather than crutch to hide.
2. Actually play with putting together hardware. The era of building your own PC is coming to an end and you should experience that before it's gone.
3. Life advice: Treasure your older relatives while they're still alive and tell them that you love them. Try to capture as much family history as you can and write it down.
IT is one of the few jobs where you can travel/work easily. So do it.
Work out a little, girls like muscles.
Deciding on what experience will likely increase % of you working with high quality people on hopefully, meaningful work. Check out one of gazillion on going opensource projects that interest you.
Read books, learn to find good books, repeat
and of course do allow some balance in life, not everything should be about being 100% productive man.
gl
Herewith some remarks:
1. You have ADHD and are prone to clinical depression. Both are treatable. Spending decades suffering pointlessly isn't necessary to discover either of the former or the latter.
2. Go find someone who can teach you Olympic weightlifting. You love it and wish you'd started much earlier. It will teach you important lessons about persistence. Plus you are one of those lucky blokes who can gain weight by frowning at a barbell, might as well take advantage.
3. Don't go straight to university. Take some time to grow up a little first.
Yours &c &c
You.
Funnily enough, none of these are about a laundry list of technologies. When I was 16, people wrote web apps in mod_perl and DHTML was looked on as something you resorted to only occasionally.
Actually, according to recent findings, neither of those can either be reliably diagnosed or treated. Recent meta-analyses reveal that anti-depression treatments (both therapy and drugs) are in the majority of cases indistinguishable from the placebo effect. As to ADHD, diagnosis remains a very serious problem -- it's a throwaway diagnosis that anyone can either get or avoid, depending on their tastes. And, like depression, there's no meaningful treatment.
The contrarian articles you see linked here on HN or published in the NYT are not a substitute for professional psychological and psychiatric advice. They are published because they are contrarian. "Scientists still agree" is not a story.
Obtaining a diagnosis for ADHD is not "a throwaway" in most countries because the first line of pharmaceutical treatment is stimulants with addictive potential. These drugs are tightly regulated and the legal diagnostic bias is against their being prescribed.
That the mechanisms are not completely understood and that some studies show a strong placebo effect does not mean that ADHD and depression can't be diagnosed or treated. The preponderance of evidence is that for most cases a judicious combination of pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions can lead to long term improvements in quality of life for both conditions. Neither diagnosis or treatment is exact, but to throw them away for imperfection is an example of the nirvana fallacy that leads to preventable harm.
I encourage you to consider the possibility that you are deterring others from seeking help that could save their lives or significantly improve their quality of life.
In future you might consider refraining from doing so and encourage others you see struggling with mental health issues to seek out attention from a psychologist or a psychiatrist, either of whom is better versed with the current research than you or I.
Say what? Would that be why the director of the NIMH has recently decided to phase out the DSM as scientifically worthless, saying "Patients with mental disorders deserve better"?:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
> That the mechanisms are not completely understood and that some studies show a strong placebo effect does not mean that ADHD and depression can't be diagnosed or treated.
No, it only means that diagnosis and treatment claims are anecdotal, neither scientific no reliable. Surely you are aware that health service providers are rapidly moving toward an evidence-based practice model, which when fully enacted would eliminate the majority of psychological treatments across the board, both drugs and therapy?
> The preponderance of evidence is that for most cases a judicious combination of pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions can lead to long term improvements in quality of life for both conditions.
Unless you choose to count the placebo effect as a treatment success, that is absolutely false. The current literature shows that neither diagnosis nor treatment is efficacious in any scientific sense. As to cognitive-behavioral therapy, it has recently been shown to be indistinguishable from the placebo effect:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23416876
Quote: "These analyses, in combination with previous meta-analytic findings, fail to provide corroborative evidence for the conjecture that CBT is superior to bona fide non-CBT treatments."
Meaning: CBT, indistinguishable from any other therapy, is also ipso facto indistinguishable from the placebo effect.
As to antidepression drugs, a recent meta-analysis that includes studies the drug industry chose not to publish, shows them to be clinically indistinguishable from placebo in most cases:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
Quote: "Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."
> I encourage you to consider the possibility that you are deterring others from seeking help that could save their lives or significantly improve their quality of life.
I encourage you to learn science, and bring yourself up to date on the present self-inflicted plight of psychiatry and psychology. You clearly are living in denial, ironic given the fact that you may be a mental health professional.
An alternative reading is that he correctly identifies that the DSM is based on consensus and that where possible he would like to replace consensus with classifications built on additional modes of observations that have only recently become available. I see that as a positive development.
> Meaning: CBT, indistinguishable from any other therapy, is also ipso facto indistinguishable from the placebo effect.
For someone who believes in the immaculacy of science, you enjoy leaping to conclusions.
> I encourage you to learn science, and bring yourself up to date on the present self-inflicted plight of psychiatry and psychology.
Your rhetoric reminds me of some of the other anti-psychology literature I've seen circulated by various organisations holding other beliefs that might be charitably considered as "exotic".
> You clearly are living in denial, ironic given the fact that you may be a mental health professional.
I'm not, but good luck with your Skinner Box vision of psychology.
In me you seem to see the fruits of a vast conspiracy against science and the public. In you I see a person whose determination to XKCD386 is going to cause active harm to others by spreading the idea that depression or ADHD should simply be accepted and not treated.
This one can't be settled satisfactorily. Let's stop talking.
An alternative to your comments would be for someone to read the original and discover that the problem is that, in psychiatry and psychology, these conditions are only described, not explained, and any meaningful treatment requires an explanation, an identified cause. Like in science.
> ... additional modes of observations ...
The issue is not "modes of observations", the issue is a widespread move toward using the methods of neuroscience to identify the causes of these conditions, and treating causes rather than symptoms.
> Your rhetoric reminds me of some of the other anti-psychology literature I've seen circulated by various organisations holding other beliefs that might be charitably considered as "exotic".
You aren't arguing against my views. You're arguing against the views of the director of the NIMH and dozens of other qualified critics including the editor of DSM-IV, all of whom hold the same general views I do. You're arguing against a historic move toward science.
> I'm not, but good luck with your Skinner Box vision of psychology.
It's instructive that you've posted no evidence for your position. As to a Skinner-box view of mental health treatment, I direct your attention to this account of deep brain stimulation, a procedure in which a neurosurgeon was able to erase all symptoms of depression in a severely depressed person by throwing a switch:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...
Quote: "Deanna later described it in similar terms. "It was literally like a switch being turned on that had been held down for years," she said. "All of a sudden they hit the spot, and I feel so calm and so peaceful. It was overwhelming to be able to process emotion on somebody's face. I'd been numb to that for so long."
"As it turned out, 8 of the 12 patients he operated on, including Deanna, felt their depressions lift while suffering minimal side effects — an incredible rate of effectiveness in patients so immovably depressed. Nor did they just vaguely recover. Their scores on the Hamilton depression scale, a standard used to measure the severity of depression, fell from the soul-deadening high 20's to the single digits — essentially normal."
End quote.
I emphasize this is a preliminary result, and at the moment it's expensive and risky invasive surgery, unsuitable for any but the severely depressed. My point is that I doubt the severely depressed clients who received this treatment will object that they're being turned into updated versions of B. F. Skinner's lab rats.
> In me you seem to see the fruits of a vast conspiracy against science and the public.
Locate that part of my posts in which this paranoid delusion finds support. There is no vast conspiracy, there is just mediocrity, denial and shortsightedness.
> ... by spreading the idea that depression or ADHD should simply be accepted and not treated.
Another example in which, with no evidence, you invent a position for someone else. The issue before psychiatry and psychology is not whether to treat or not to treat, the issue is that there is no reliable evidence that present treatments work. This is why alternatives are being explored, and why the DSM is finally being put aside.
> This one can't be settled satisfactorily.
Of course it can. Ask the director of the NIMH. Ask those who have received meaningful scientific treatments for depression. Ask the victims of recovered memory therapy whether they think that treatment merited the public support it received. This issue...
(2) Try to get enough sleep
(3) Make a very conscious effort to get out of your comfort zone and try unfamiliar things, even if you only try them briefly.
(4) Understand and accept that sometimes it takes years before a project gives any substantial results, so don't get discouraged if a project seems impossibly hard and going nowhere at first.
A great book for facing your fears and expanding your comfort zone is the Flinch: http://www.amazon.com/The-Flinch-ebook/dp/B0062Q7S3S