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President Obama calls on every American to learn code

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Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#71
post #21

A lot of people are getting attached to the "every American" aspect of things, and I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Amateur programming (for lack of a better term) like basic Python for data analysis or HTML/CSS to work on Wordpress sites (Hell, one of my friends who's a Social Media Manager learned Python to create some QoL scripts for her day-to-d…

I'm actually surprised how hostile HN is in these comments, considering that I thought the popular sentiment was similar. Every other day a new "learn how to code" post hits the front page, despite, I'm sure, most people who are commenting/upvoting don't need the tutorial for themselves.

I don't think the GP intended to be hostile. I think he's saying that people should learn some coding (more than they do now), but not necessarily as much as many others are suggesting (less than a CS grad does).

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#73
I frequently disagree with the president, but he really hit the nail on the head with this one. I've been saying for a while now, if we were to replace high school and college foreign language requirements with a computer programming language class, you would propel America way ahead of everyone else (more-so than now) in terms of industry and innovation, and do wonders for the economy, all within a decade.

Think about it. Teachers, scientists, psychologists, poly sci majors, doctors, all with basic computer programming abilities. With the ability to build efficiency into their work. That would be so immensely powerful, the investment would be untold dividends. Way more than memorizing spanish vocab for a grade and then forgetting it.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#74

"When you guys are good, you should totally take a crack at healthcare.gov. That'd be awesome."

Can't they get the stuxnet guys to help with that, or even their managers who understand how to get software done? Don't tell me they don't have some overlapping skills.

To be fair, stuxnet proved that some government agencies could create code to break things; healthcare.gov is already broken, so they don't need help from the stuxnet team.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#77
post #8
post #4

The message is clear: top political donors want cheaper labor.

Yep. Can't have high-paying jobs. That would empower people. We are very rapidly moving toward a time when the labor battles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries will have to be re-fought. History is clearly showing us that the alternative to activist labor is feudalism. In "natural" markets, multiple overlapping network effects cause nearly all wealth to flow to a very tiny number of strategically positioned or…

What happens when everyone has a high paying job?

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#78
post #21

A lot of people are getting attached to the "every American" aspect of things, and I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Amateur programming (for lack of a better term) like basic Python for data analysis or HTML/CSS to work on Wordpress sites (Hell, one of my friends who's a Social Media Manager learned Python to create some QoL scripts for her day-to-d…

I'm actually surprised how hostile HN is in these comments, considering that I thought the popular sentiment was similar. Every other day a new "learn how to code" post hits the front page, despite, I'm sure, most people who are commenting/upvoting don't need the tutorial for themselves.

[deleted]

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#79
post #17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working with the congress that has the lowest approval rating in history, and the congress that has passed the least amount of bills will do that to you.

Rating Congress by "number of bills passed" is as smart as rating coders based on number of lines of code written.

I get what you're driving at, but the analogy doesn't quite work.

We want software to perform functions and we don't care about the amount of lines of code to achieve this. We also want our government to perform functions, and law is how they achieve this.

Your stance would make sense if we were in a state that didn't need improvement.

Re: President Obama calls on every American to learn code

#80
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Can't have high-paying jobs. That would empower people. We are very rapidly moving toward a time when the labor battles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries will have to be re-fought. History is clearly showing us that the alternative to activist labor is feudalism. In "natural" markets, multiple overlapping network effects cause nearly all wealth to flow to a very tiny number of strategically positioned or…

What happens when everyone has a high paying job?

I know where you're going with this. It's possible to ask the converse question: what happens when everyone has a low-paying job?

The answer is that deflation must occur. Home prices must fall, etc.

The problem is that deflation is incredibly painful, more painful than inflation. Activist labor is highly inflationary, which in today's debt-overburdened environment is exactly what we (meaning about 99.5% of the population) need.

You can make shoulda-coulda-woulda arguments about how we got ourselves into this mess with too much debt, but there's two problems with that. The first is the pragmatic fact that we are here and that populist-driven inflation is the least painful way out. The second is a bit deeper. One thing that's becoming clear from history is that "trickle down" economics does not work. Money does trickle down, but it trickles down in the form of debt. Why engage in entrepreneurial ventures or pay higher salaries when you can lend money at interest with less work required on your end and more assurance of repayment? There's a direct balance sheet correlation between the rich getting richer and everyone else going deeper into debt, since the savings of the rich become the debt of everyone else.

I am not, by the way, advocating "socialism" in any dogmatic sense. That IMHO is another discredited dogma. I am advocating pragmatism in lieu of a better idea, since I think all political dogmas are discredited at this point. If you don't have a systematic approach to solving a problem, the only choice you have is between winging it and doing nothing. Doing nothing here will lead back to feudalism.

Edit: one more point: Silicon Valley folks have a distorted picture of the rich. California's neuvo riche tech elite are not in the mainstream for their class. In short, your rich people are better than everyone else's rich people.

The mere existence of folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shows by virtue of comparison that the vast majority of their socioeconomic contemporaries are merely lucky gamblers who have rationalized their ascent as meritocratic via survivorship bias. If being in the 1% were truly meritocratic we would have a ton of Elon Musks launching a ton of world-changing ventures all the time. Instead we have a bunch of mediocre rich people putting their money in dumb Wall St. funds that do nothing with it but buy government bonds or create more debt (and me-too herd-driven bubbles) for the masses.

Heh... I guess another solution would be much smarter and more creative rich people. :P

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