Those are, by and large, not useless skills to have but most of them have nothing to do with software engineering or just "coding". Morse code and listening to my hard drive??? If the data is worth anything to me, I should have backups anyway and should not have to worry about what sound my hard disk arm makes also considering that modern hard drives might not have an arm at all.
And I think they left out the most basic and fundamental skill or understanding: there are no silver bullets. A lot of programmers nowadays seem to religiously follow whatever new language is being hyped and try to fit their problems and tasks to the language instead of the other way around... a bit of critical thinking and seeing a bigger picture than "thisandthat is THE SH*T (right now)!!" would work wonders.
In the real world, real coders could not care less how god-like the latest scripting languages or NO-SQL-but-relax-data-maps are because chances are very good that my customers use Java and Oracle or a few other big names and since they are paying me, who am I to push religious plugs about the latest fads on them?
Bottom line is: real coders (should) just know enough about computers, hardware, software and networks to make educated decisions and guesses and typically they don't care that much which language they are getting paid to develop in... pretty much all languages "suck" in the way that they ALL have their short-comings and it is up to the engineer to understand them and work with them.
I just want to point out context. This is HackerNews where a sizeable percentage of participants are either business owners, involved in a startup, or acting on side projects. As such, they have a lot of latitude in deciding what technologies they use.
Yes, if you're a J.P. Morgan specialist, you don't get to decide what tech you use. Yes, if you're a freelancer working for clients, you have to use the database of their choice, with pre-existing settings.
However, we aren't necessarily those people and we are certainly "real coders" in the "real world".
P.S.
J.P. Morgan has a group using GHC Haskell, and Gemstone Smaltalk in production so they aren't as 'uncool' as some may presume. ;)
You do realise that once upon a time pushing Java was pretty much a "religous" activity and indeed the same applies to SQL. All technologies have got to start somewhere....
Edit: I know, I was an evangelical Java fanatic from about '95 to '00 or so.
Once relational databases were considered to be "academic" because of their mathematical underpinnings. What was considered practical was flat files, or graph databases.
And I think they left out the most basic and fundamental skill or understanding: there are no silver bullets. A lot of programmers nowadays seem to religiously follow whatever new language is being hyped and try to fit their problems and tasks to the language instead of the other way around... a bit of critical thinking and seeing a bigger picture than "thisandthat is THE SH*T (right now)!!" would work wonders.
In the real world, real coders could not care less how god-like the latest scripting languages or NO-SQL-but-relax-data-maps are because chances are very good that my customers use Java and Oracle or a few other big names and since they are paying me, who am I to push religious plugs about the latest fads on them?
Bottom line is: real coders (should) just know enough about computers, hardware, software and networks to make educated decisions and guesses and typically they don't care that much which language they are getting paid to develop in... pretty much all languages "suck" in the way that they ALL have their short-comings and it is up to the engineer to understand them and work with them.