Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacoblyles | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure I consumed my share of junk from the internet, but it was not all without value. I am glad that I have learned about so many technologies, old and new, from places like Hacker News. I may not be able to use them expertly, but when I run into a problem I know what tools are out there. I know about Lisp, Python, Perl, Haskell, EC2, Ruby on Rails, Django, Cocoa, Couch DB, scalability, functional programming, object oriented programming, design principles, VCS and DVCS, and a hundred other things. Sure, there's a lot of noise in there, but also a signal.

When I recently had a chance to work with some programmers not so steeped in internet lore, all they knew was Java, and not well. They also knew of PHP's existence, and considered it the wave of the future for web apps.

Now, if both of us were to start a web company, which do you think would win?

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Now, if both of us were to start a web company, which do you think would win?

I'm of the opinion that while you'd have a head start, if the other programmers have the drive and skill (for studying) that they would need to succeed in any case, they would be able to pick up on the technology and principles as they go.

It's not your previous exposure to various tech principles and "internet lore" that will make you succeed, those will only give you a small head start (and some interesting material to discuss with other hackers at meetups). It will come down to skill, determination, timing, and a fair bit of luck.

It's hard to hold constant all variables except one between persons. Is it reasonable to expect that a programmer with drive and skill wouldn't know about some internet lore, wouldn't know of resources like freenode and stackoverflow.com, and wouldn't know something about the variety of technologies that are out there?

The direction of causation is tricky to unwind. I think you're right, however. If a two programmers were of equal competence, except one only knew about Java and the other sat on Hacker News all day, the Hacker News reader would probably only have a small head start. However, it would be hard to find two programmers that met those descriptions and were of equal competence.

I recently discovered that you can pay freelancers for 2 hours work on a small problem [an edge case], and save yourself 10 hours. You don't even have to pay stock, as people are pleased to be paid $80 for an hour's work.

EDIT: However, knowing what to ask for (what you need doing) is important!

Good programmers can get far removed from the tools advocated on hacker news when they work for large companies. They tend to use a lot of internal tools. That doesn't mean they can't pick up external tools later.

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