Justine Bateman Is a College Freshman Studying Programming | Hacker News Reader

Justine Bateman Is a College Freshman Studying Programming

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60 pointstortilla25 comments

This is pretty fantastic. She's illustrating the oft-forgotten fact that you can change your passion and direction at any point.

Your fourties may not mean as much as it used to, but for the many of us that went school -> uni -> tech industry, her example proves that the decisions that defined the path of our youth do not restrict our future.

This is inspiring to anyone over 40, let alone women.

Her tech company, http://www.section5.tv/

Her links: http://flavors.me/justinebateman

Life has hardly begun by the time you're 40, and some of the best programmers I've met are women.

That's pretty cool, I hope she grants me a pull request someday

A step up from turning illusions for money.

Tricks.

On Reddit this Arrested Development reference gets 500 upvotes. Here, not so much.

May it forever be that way.

Good for her! I doubt she needs the cash so it's always fascinating to see how people pick STEM fields for non-career reasons, same way others might pick history, english lit, etc.

And at 47 she looks way better than any other girl in my eng class when I was in school!! (OK, there were only 3)

Odd to comment on appearances when they're not relevant to the news.

But anyway, I think it's great that she's talking openly about her frustrations and challenges with her classes (on http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/). Not a lot of people have the confidence to expose that, so people can get incorrect impressions about the easiness of learning and feel overly discouraged when they struggle.

Apparently this person is some celebrity I don't know about. The tumblr linked in the article [1] was more interesting than the article itself.

But it didn't contain anything I wouldn't expect to see from any other person blogging about freshman year as a CS major new to programming.

Why exactly is this HN material?

[1] http://getacollegelife.tumblr.com/

There aren't that many 47 year old female undergraduates, let alone in computer science. And, in addition to describing her own experiences at UCLA, Bateman, is publicizing stories of older women going back to school in STEM subjects, as you'll see from her twitter and esp. her tumblr, where she lets some of these women tell their stories, at length.

And it's interesting reading about her interest in computer science, what it took for her to be able to be admitted to UCLA, her experiences with the courses and projects, etc.

Additionally, if you read her stuff, you'll see she is an entrepreneur, with her own company, who was trying to get Hollywood interested in doing projects involving digital media, the internet, etc. years ago but kept getting push-back.

And that's without any of the celebrity pixie-dust.

As far as that goes: she was on a very highly rated, award-winning TV show, along with Michael J. Fox, called Family Ties, back when tens of millions of people would watch a TV show.

And: given that the newly-revived Arrested Development just came out on Netflix, she happens to be the sister of Jason Bateman, who plays Michael Bluth.

tl;dr: she's quite HN-worthy.

Neither her gender nor her age are relevant. "Wealthy celebrity dabbles in unrelated field" is a reality TV formula, not Hacker News.

>Neither her gender nor her age are relevant.

To you.

To anyone, unless we are sexists and ageists on here now.

What, we can't be interested in a celebrity studying computer science without being sexist and ageist?

Ridiculous.

The word for what she is is dilettante. Look it up.

Goodness. Time to end my interaction with you, calling her a dilettante implies you know her true motivations, something I considerably doubt. By all means, continue to judge the motivations of others without knowing anything about them.

For me, that's a worthless attitude, and not one that requires more of a response than complete disdain.

I look forward to not interacting with you in the future.

You seem pretty young. I'm 39, and when I was growing up in the 80's, she was a pretty big deal.

I think it's pretty cool to see my childhood celebrities growing up and moving on with their lives by going back to school, a good one at that, and majoring in a difficult subject. Props to her.

It's MALLORY KEATON! Her TV 'brother', Alex, is the reason I and countless others became Republicans.

I am surprised to discover that freshmen are writing code. It wasn't like that back in the day.

Apparently csense is some commenter I don't know about. The article csense was commenting on was more interesting than csense's comment itself.

But it didn't contain anything I wouldn't expect to see from any other commenter complaining about perceived off-topic articles on any other tech news site. Complaints about off-topic articles because the commenter never heard of the subject of the article are as constructive now as they were when they first started appearing after every Slashdot article ever going back to September 1997. If a similar pattern appears on HN, then we'll know it's all over and the magic is gone and we can all go back to posting on Metafilter or yelling at imaginary people on buses or whatever everyone did before they came here.

Why exactly is this HN comment material?

"It's like being a competitive runner in training. You just hammer it as hard as you can so you'll be the best you can be at your races, but damn, it would be nice to just walk there sometimes instead."

Is it? Is 'programming' really like running a lot, from one place to another (no matter what those places are, simply for the fact that one place is not the same as the first)? Is it possible that this pursuit is so fucking stupidly simple that we can dilute it to "hey, programming is like walking to the fucking grocery store, regardless of which one we were going to or what we intended to get ingredients for, or how we wanted to prepare them"?

No. No, it's not, and this person is doing everyone who actually knows what the fuck a programmer DOES a disservice. If she stays with it long enough she'll realize this, though whether she'll bother to acknowledge it or apologize is another matter.

Being a competitive runner takes a lot of work, a lot of discipline, and a lot of conditioning. It is in no way something to laugh at. What it does NOT take, however, is the mental discipline and logical aptitude to build and maintain structures and paradigms in which concepts can be realized and business can be conducted.

It's so easy to downvote. It's far harder to provide a good reason why we should be idolozing someone with the advantages most of us have absolutely no hope of enjoying should be idolized or idealized here, on a board where we supposedly worship the self-starter, the boostrapper, the one who understands the odds but still tries to beat them.

Downvote this one, too. Go for it... no one's stopping you.

Downvotes are sometimes accidental. Ignore single downvotes, they normally self-correct.

Complaining about downvotes will sometimes attract very many more downvotes than the original downvoted post.

I didn't downvote you, but your first post misunderstands a simple metaphor ("it's hard work!") and attacks it vigorously.

It's an analogy. Yes, programming is more mental and less physical than running. Yes, analogies are and can be terrible.

But you're overreacting, even if we take your stance that she's somehow trivialized an entire field that she happens to think worthwhile enough to try and get into herself. No apologies are warranted. If they were, equating competitive running with walking to the grocery store would be at least as inappropriate. Regardless of whether or not that's what you mean to do, that's what you start with when you open up with your "dilution".

Though it's not my place to say, if you're as worked up as your text would portray, I'd suggest you're doing yourself a disservice. All over an offhand quote that got the wrong adjectives on the flavor of effort and skill involved with programming, by someone new to the field, who I'd suspect was merely trying to compare it to more familiar territory.

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