I have to admit that I'm not familiar with this problem. I mean, I understand if we're taking about those forms where you get 20 minutes of half an hour, but it seems to me that you are talking about those cases where you get a few days or a week.
This makes me think you might be in that small space where you are a decent programmer, but still don't have enough experience to be confident.
If that's the case, don't worry, it gets easier in time, at least in my case it did.
Even though I have an account for years now, I just recently got hooked on HN. I still don't have an estimate on how much time I spend on it, but I don't even care. Ok, I use it as a news aggregator and I'll probably forget about most of it in a few days, weeks or whatever, but more importantly, I use it to find out about resources too.
Resources for learning and for my job in general, for my own products or for my day job. I think it currently might be one of best places to stay informed and on top of latest technologies.
I don't think HN and Facebook belong in the same category here, at least not for most of people. Somebody can still use Facebook to get informed about the technology, but most people don't.
There is also "Ask HN" section, original question would be a good example for it. You would put "Ask HN: " in front of your title and it would go to that section.
It's a generally good way to learn something through available resources (which are accessible as never before), do an Open Source project of your own and then look for a junior position to apply and widen that knowledge.
This is simply not correct in the age of automation.
You are basically saying that your apartment does not get vacuumed because Roomba is doing the job.
And the amount of effort being exerted by the company is not the same thing as the amount of effort being exerted by the employees. All these companies have huge profit margins and owners can easily make their employees' lives more decent instead of treating them this way, like sociopaths they are.
You simply help him widen his horizons in areas that interest him, engineering in this particular case. Provide him with support and logistics.
Get him smart toys as he's growing, like the thing you mentioned, like Lego, like Makeblock (http://www.makeblock.cc/), toys that encourage creativity.
I'm sure you can find great resources for kids to learn how to code, that's where you come in. He expresses the wish to learn how to code, you find out what's best out there to do it in his age.
This makes me think you might be in that small space where you are a decent programmer, but still don't have enough experience to be confident.
If that's the case, don't worry, it gets easier in time, at least in my case it did.