82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding • Hacker News Board

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#121

Post by mehrdadn » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

Splines wrote: post #119

mehrdadn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions Uhm, the issue here is squarely on Bash's end, not your kid's. Even the Windows command prompt is far more intuitive to learn. I know because I vividly remember how much more confused I got when learning the former. In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY…

> In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY, MOVE, DEL, REN/RENAME, etc. and at least the basic commands are actually what you'd expect. At least you have a foothold somewhere that you can ground yourself, and you start learning a bit more every time. Yes, this. I recall back in the MS-DOS days that I frequently used a text-GUI help menu that showed all the commands you could do a…

> Personally, this is what I struggle with on *nix shells

It's not just the shells! ;)

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#122

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:33 AM UTC

There's a video at the end of the article where Tim Cook is discussing with Masako Wakamiya,

Tim asks specific questions on accessibility & she enthusiastically answers all of them precisely.She definitely knows what she's doing.

I wish, Tim asked her what difficulty she faced while porting to iPad as she said so.

Nevertheless, the video made me happy.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#123

Post by myaccountforhn » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

droidist2 wrote: post #41

Very inspiring, this is her website: http://marchan.travel.coocan.jp Also previous discussion and video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14995333

Although I can't read Japanese I love how simple her layout and fast to load her website is.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#124

Post by emodendroket » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:49 AM UTC

supreme_sublime wrote: post #120

emodendroket wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I can understand this mindset. Like, I think about home maintenance. Some screw-ups are no big deal and some of them I'm going to do a lot of damage and need help fixing it. I'm not exactly gung-ho about knocking walls down with a sledge hammer without knowing what I'm doing. Now, you might answer that you can't really break anything that badly with software, but I'd say that's not right. I could delete doc…

That's true, it is just difficult to know what level of expertise your users are at and what responsibility do you have to educate them?

Well, it can certainly be extremely frustrating to deal with user education, especially with users who clearly don't really want to learn. But it helps to imagine that all of us are like this in some ways. I think experience in a call center and as a junior system administrator has made me a more empathetic developer, anyway.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#125

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #114

mehrdadn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions Uhm, the issue here is squarely on Bash's end, not your kid's. Even the Windows command prompt is far more intuitive to learn. I know because I vividly remember how much more confused I got when learning the former. In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY…

Only problem is, those commands are useless. COPY won't back up a directory tree. You need XCOPY. Oops, XCOPY chokes for weird reasons and terminates with a strange error message because a path was more than 255 bytes. It needs a bazillion options to do the equivalent of GNU's "cp -a". If you go online to get help with this, the best advice you get is to download and install something called RoboCopy. Yes, MS-DOS was…

[deleted]

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#126

Post by jodrellblank » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:56 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #114

mehrdadn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same thing happens to my kids when I present them with a bash shell. They don't understand how to read the instructions Uhm, the issue here is squarely on Bash's end, not your kid's. Even the Windows command prompt is far more intuitive to learn. I know because I vividly remember how much more confused I got when learning the former. In Windows, when you type "help", it actually gives you helpful commands: COPY…

Only problem is, those commands are useless. COPY won't back up a directory tree. You need XCOPY. Oops, XCOPY chokes for weird reasons and terminates with a strange error message because a path was more than 255 bytes. It needs a bazillion options to do the equivalent of GNU's "cp -a". If you go online to get help with this, the best advice you get is to download and install something called RoboCopy. Yes, MS-DOS was…

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/87128

"copy doesn't copy directory structures, it will only copy the files, hence the error message you're encountering. To do a deep copy such as this you can enlist either the tar command and use the construct tar cvf - --files-from=... | (cd /home/tmp/test/files/; tar xvf -) or you can just use rsync."

That's so much better..

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#127

Post by giancarlostoro » Tue, May 22, 2018, 2:56 AM UTC

Something1234 wrote: post #93

droidist2 wrote: post #41

Very inspiring, this is her website: http://marchan.travel.coocan.jp Also previous discussion and video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14995333

Kind of off topic, but I've always found Japanese domain names to weird. They always seem to be subdomains of someone else's site. Why is this?

Reminds me of my early days in the web (early to mid 2000's) when people had GeoCities websites, Angelfire, etc... For the record GeoCities never closed for Japan probably due to this phenomena you mention where they just host somewhere instead of buying a domain. I wonder how many pay for hosting despite only having a subdomain.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#128

Post by gymshoes » Tue, May 22, 2018, 3:32 AM UTC

This is awesome.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#129

Post by swaggyBoatswain » Tue, May 22, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

corpMaverick wrote: post #7

I feel it is kind of sad to see old people in the casinos. They are mindless spending time. They don't even seem to enjoy it. There must be games that are more enjoyable than that. no skill needed, no creativity being developed.

My grandma only seems to enjoy playing casino games on the ipad. Ive installed puzzle games and things like angrybirds. They never get played. I think she just plays simple casino game to keep herself occupied without putting a lot of effort. I like to think of its the same reason I listen to music to take my mind off things.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#130

Post by tomateosoup » Tue, May 22, 2018, 3:37 AM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #106

jdietrich wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that openness and confidence are major factors. Having taught older adults to use computers, one of the major difficulties is getting them past the fear that they might "break" the computer and the need to memorise rote instructions rather than experiment with the interface. The body language is quite distinctive - tentatively pressing keys with an outstretched index finger as if the keyboard might jump up an…

> Having taught older adults to use computers, one of the major difficulties is getting them past the fear that they might "break" the computer This is the exact same problem I've always had many times when tinkering with electronics, so I can wholeheartedly understand it. Fortunately with computers you can pretty much promise laymen that any problem they cause fixable with no cost (except time), but in the case of e…

I've been tinkering with electronics for about 30 years. Can do some cool stuff like assembling a power supply from scratch or an amplfier, can also put together projects with arduinos, raspberries, etc. I still fry components once in a while. But it's fun! If you are a programmer one hour of your time is worth a lot more than the cost of the components of many fun projects.

A few tips: - Do not touch anything you cannot afford to lose. - Buy at least twice as many components as needed for a project, if this is too expensive, that's a good sign you might want to get more experience with more simple projects before taking on this one. - Avoid soldering as much as possible, at least at the beginning. - If you want to learn how to solder do it with very simple circuits like those that only include LEDs and resistors. Practice a lot and then use your skills on a project you like. - If possible, measure components before installing, do not trust your knowledge of color codes or nomenclature or pins configurations in the case of diodes and transistors. - When tinkering with digital circuits try to use only 5V level components, avoid 3.3V components. Of course you can use converters to interface but it's nice to avoid that complexity at the beginning.

Hope this helps.