skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me summarize what I believe to be mostly uncontroversial.

1. All else equal, and looking at the industry as a whole, having a college degree in CS is an advantage in getting hired over being self-taught. Things get more fuzzy if your degree is in math/physics/etc., but those still confer some advantage.

2. The advantage is very large for entry-level roles but diminishes greatly with experience. The advantage is even larger if you went to an elite school. The advantage is small if the school is mediocre, and negative if it's a diploma mill.

3. The advantage varies greatly with the company. Google definitely cares more than most startups.

4. The advantage virtually goes to 0 within a decade but never completely goes away, simply because of effects like your-interviewer-went-to-the-same-school, alumni networks, and the fact that more people irrationally care about CS degrees in senior devs than are irrationally biased against them.

5. Whether the advantage is worth the cost is a very complicated issue. This advantage is almost certainly not worth it if you have to go 100-250k in debt (private schools). The opportunity cost is also quite large, but this is complicated because what self-taught job you get depends on your own background. Coding bootcamps also complicate things. At a certain point depending on scholarships / parents paying / going to an in-state school, it makes sense.
"Btw, 2. Though they hold God-like stature, Google is like any other company. They mostly use the same technology and a lot of the same tools as everybody else."

As a Google employee, no, not true. Yes, we use the same _languages_ and compilers and editors... but beyond that most everything else is unique to Google. Build tools, libraries, deployment environment, web servers, databases, it's all unique to Google.
I was watching the stream and I think they said Windows console host will, in fact, directly support VT-100.
Japan has had deflation so even a stagnating wage translates into a rising standard of living. That said, Japan has a generational gap whereby the younger people face worse challenges, but that is different from what is typically understood as income inequalities.
It's already working as shown in the video demo: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/P488
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If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.
"There’s a long-lived myth that Silicon Valley and the technology industry are meritocracies where all that matters is the caliber of your code."

Maybe because applicants with degrees are, statistically speaking, better than those without?

I've always said that getting a job takes two things:

1) Be good

2) Prove you're good

A degree achieves neither. But it helps a lot. Not having a degree doesn't preclude either. But it doesn't help at all.
Technically speaking all the plastic used is made from fossil fuels, but taking fossil fuels and turning them into something that we'll bury in holes in the ground instead of burning them probably isn't a bad thing when talking about global warming.
That's it exactly
Insect–computer hybrid robot with user-adjustable speed, step length and gait
I'd highly recommend contributing back "build features" to projects like cmake if it doesn't already exist so that you can simply enable a feature rather than hard-coding gcc-specific flags. Even something like clang takes a little work to shoehorn into a project that is enabling many gcc specific features. Abstracting the feature out means compiler front-ends don't have to mimic gcc to have a chance of working, and even allows more easily adapting to other POSIX platforms where gcc/clang are not the default compilers. E.g. if cmake doesn't support a robust enough way to specify LTO the way you need to in a project, consider helping add it. (Just picked some random feature)
Only on Slashdot during the '90s ;-)
Emma Smith on the Best Plays of Shakespeare
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I appreciate your observations. I may be defeatist it seems too late to stop climate change. The last time political gridlock at the federal level was this bad, the U.S. had a Civil War, so I find it hard to envision a federal solution that happens soon enough. So instead, I'd like to know, "What comes next?"
Demo Delgado Sings Buju Banton's ''Close One Yesterday'' on Acoustic Guitar
You kind of are a slave aren't you?

After all you can only auto update microsoft and store apps. Other apps will either handle updates themselves probably with an annoying UAC prompt and possibly at inconvenient times when you actually want to use the apps. Some have processes that constantly sit in the background sucking up your resources to pop up annoying prompts to update application foo during which you must watch for them changing your browser preferences and installing adware. Others you will simply have to go to their website and download an exe or msi.

Meanwhile you are missing the fact that people don't want to avoid automatic updates to fix security holes. They want to avoid updating to the next undesirable update foisted on the users before its ready and much to peoples annoyance. Example the windows 8 UI change.

Unbelievably staying on an older still supported platform until you are ready to update is a feature you have to pay money for!

Lest you misunderstand I'm not talking about clinging to windows xp till they claw it from your cold dead hands 3 years after end of life I'm talking about the future equivalent of staying with windows 7 and upgrading to windows 10 because 8 sucks.
> isn't attained through extreme heroic efforts

"heroic" is ill-defined, so don't know about that, but the effort was arguably extreme, in the sense that Linux and git are among the best at what they do. Lots of other people who might have the same experience and abilities did not achieve things like that. I just don't see why you would want to minimize the achievement in any way.
Wasn't Moldbug's mention of genetics in reference to physical attributes?
Yes, and heat stroke can give you chills. If we just keep giving the pendulum a boost, eventually the difference between extremes will become untenable.
Is he? Company spokespeople tend to be extremely well-trained to say certain things just the right way.

Note that the spokesperson in question could have started that sentence with, "We don't have any backdoors in our products and..."

But they didn't.
I wonder what percentage of the employees in the HR departments have a college degree. My guess it is close to 100% at 100% of top companies.

Even if you do get hired, HR might undermine your career and prospects for promotion if you don't have a college degree. I don't have data but I reluctantly suspect it is true. Hopefully I'll get down votes by someone who knows this isn't the case.
I've found CVs contain almost no actionable information beyond an indication of what the candidate is interested in doing, technologically - ten years of Java isn't great, for example.

A simple 10 minute coding problem on Codility is a more useful filter - just to see if they can read and write code at all.
I'm not sure how useful SQL is without joins though... I can see that this might be interesting to test against, but don't think SQL is much simpler than a lot of the query engines for non-sql databases... Until you get to joins, and similar operations.

Right now, I'm most interested in seeing RethinkDB see more traction... it seems to have most of the features I look for, and I, for one don't mind more programmatic queries, and the management interface is really second to none at this point... MS-SQL, I'd probably consider a close second.
Users are also very nearly pathalogically averse to new tech and devices. The suggestion has been made however.
In the same boat: I bought an MacBookPro bacause I wanted a nice (new) machine with a decent keyboard/touchpad that didn't force me to purchase Windows. And the keyboard and touchpad on these things are phenomenal.
This works for me, and is generally how I've dealt with high pressure situations throughout my life. I just sort of go into "eh, don't give a fuck" mode, and try to joke around with people about how I don't give a fuck about the outcome (if comfort level with said people is appropriate, like fellow students). It's just a way that I calm myself so that my brain can effectively recall my practice / training to help me execute better at the critical moment.

Interviews are much like tests in school. The pressure is high, you only have a moment to recall the information and act correctly, you have very little leverage over the situation... and in both cases they are probably poor indicators of what is being measured :-)

Maybe the similarity to tests in schools is the origin of programming interviews came to be the way they are...
As someone with no degree who's done OK in the software industry, I would hands-down go back and get one if I could turn back the clock. Not because it would necessarily translate to more money, but because I've been giving myself ulcers worrying about it for the last 20 years. YMMV
You DO know who you work for, right?

No matter what good you believe you're doing, it's just in the end going to be used to extinguish competition.
The assumption underlying a lot of the recommendations for actions in response to climate change is that the overwhelmingly dominant factor is CO2 emissions, and that reducing CO2 emissions is the only and/or best way to walk back from the consequences. Neither is true. For one, CO2 emissions reductions may not be realistically possible with our current technology and geopolitical situation. More importantly, there are other factors at play (such as soot changing the albedo on snow/ice covered arctic areas) and it's likely that there are dynamic effects at play which cannot simply be walked back by reducing CO2 atmospheric concentrations.

It's very likely that we're already locked into a certain level of sea level rise over the next few hundred years due to the breakup of antarctic ice sheets. This may not be something we can stop even if we could reduce atmospheric CO2 to whatever level we chose tomorrow. We need to look at ways of mitigating the impact of climate change and environmental change (whatever the cause) in the future even as we look at ways to try to reduce the negative impact of human activity on the climate and biosphere in general.

There are far too many people who look at pollution and climate change through an essentially religious lens. As though CO2 emissions are sin, and the only thing to do when caught sinning is to stop sinning, or at least sin less. This is an incredibly immature way to handle the complex relationship between mankind and Earth's environment.
My comments on HN get shadowbanned for no discernable reason. Does that count?
It's not my product, but I think it's slightly less simple than Mint; making it more powerful. Saying it's less simple might sound like a deterrent, but it should be thought of as a huge advantage, especially on the budgeting side. It's easier to create budgets that are easy to follow and make necessary changes to your budget as unexpected expenses pop up.

I'm also a huge fan of the insights/data. I think Everwealth has done a great job displaying data in a way that makes it easy to identify patterns and trends in your spending.
My primary interest was pointing out how the number was calculated, I'm not real worried about characterizing it.
You can't fix it "locally". Without global solution the sea level will just go higher and higher, and you will have to relocate all major coastal cities in a matter of centuries. Seawalls by themselves can only delay the inevitable.

NYC alone has real estate price of ~$1 trillion.
Patent Analysis APIs- a New Direction for IP Street
It should also be noted that this will not be actually inhabited by the resident astronauts - it contains a heap of sensors to monitor retention of pressure and atmosphere etc, and astronauts will enter it a handful of times (wikipedia suggested around 30-40 times during its mission last time I looked) - so it's just laying the groundwork for a potential further attachment in the future
Probably one of the most insensitive posts I've ever seen written on here.
There are many people who have crippling anxiety and social phobias, and your post chalks that up to them having an "attitude".
The difference between force accumulation and energy storage is ... that gravitational potential energy just doesn't give you that much. The practical instanciation of your idea would be pumped-storage hydro.

Another avenue is compressed-air energy storage (CAES). Here the problem is Boyle's Law: compressing a gas heats it. Over time, that heat will leak out through containment walls (even in underground spent gas field storage). Releasing the gas cools it, to the point that icing over of equipment is a problem. One solution is to introduce a natural gas (or biogas) jet to the release stream, with additional heat of combustion not for energy so much as to prevent icing.

This scales in theory, though it's still a tad complicated.
He is asking why you believe something if there is no proof. Rationally proof should precede belief, but suspicion is better suited to describe your position. I understand your use of the word "belief" but I think I do prefer his usage.
My first rodeo, my existing options were worth about $40k on buyout day. That's chump change, even counting inflation, but I was a kid so that more than doubled my assets. Everybody was pretty happy. Five months later we were all almost under water, and half our raises were more stock options (I don't know what kind of psychadelic drugs come up with that plan). Nobody was happy and productivity tanked. And still we were doing a better job than our new masters. By the end of the lockup period our options were worth 60% of the strike price.

In the end I learned the hard way about a bizarre strategy for keeping your company going. First, have a high valuation. Second, find a small company with liquid assets. Third, buy out the company with a stock swap and only a little cash. And now you have more capital on hand so you can lie to your investors for a few extra months.

Not that I'm bitter.
>Does that then run under port 80 in Windows?

Yes, they demonstrated that localhost is the same localhost under both environments.
They did release Safari for Windows and virtually nobody used it so Apple discontinued it. What are they supposed to do?
Last month I created some facial recognition software in 24 hrs at a hackathon
This seems to be about job ads. Job ads almost always list a bachelor's degree as a requirement, but I don't think it's a hard and fast rule for most places.
While likelihood of being hired and the expense of college are factors in deciding whether to attend, they should definitely not be the only ones, and maybe not even a major factor in your decision. To view things this way is to take an extremely narrow view of the benefits of attending a good university. It's not for everyone, but I personally took so much more out of the experience than just a notch on my belt for getting a job.
Recruiting 101 for Startups: The ultimate guide for hiring your first 10 people
And never run eval() on any user input.
I think the lack of linux gui software was a comment on why a linux user wouldn't find this a compelling reason to switch not a comparison of the software available on each platform.

Personally I think someone interested in graphics/cad/audio production might find something compelling even if alternatives exist on linux for the above. I don't see much in the way of gui softare that anyone would care for as a developer. You can bring up visual studio if you like but I don't find it compelling.
Study: Prolonged Antibiotic Treatment Gave No Relief for Lasting Lyme Symptoms
Dont forget Genode project https://genode.org/ and Crash safe http://www.crash-safe.org/
I've never been rejected for a job because of it, but have experienced other things: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-software-developers-s...

TLDR version: you may have to deal with lower salaries, less respect, lower quality organizations or departments, lots of free time catching up/keeping current, more questioning compared to degreed peers, and occasional culture shock. Not everyone deals with all/any of those, but chances are higher with no degree.
Been watching this DB for a while. Glad to see it enter beta. I recommend including https://github.com/mauricio/postgresql-async on https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/install-client-drivers.ht... (it's my favorite Postgres client, it's very fast).
>This is true, and the unfortunate effect of treating all software engineers as equal. However, if PhDs are not expected to write code, don't call them software engineers, call them "researchers".

Generally, they aren't called "engineers". They'd be computer scientists. But I say that as someone who lives in a place (Canada) where "engineer" is a protected term, of sorts. You can't just slap the title on anyone.
Supposedly there's actually an industry standard translation of work experience to years of college. I think it's 4:1, so 16 years of experience is worth a bachelors degree.
Without hardware keystore for the key encryption key it's sort of pointless as you can extract and brute force with any PBKDF2 round count that will be acceptable for a mobile user.
I can see many of the exploratory data analytic can be done without joins. Well, my experience could be too specific though.
> When I was a student (undergrad and postgrad) I liked the constant judgement and competition. It can be quite addictive if you're good at it

The problem is that you're never good enough. Considering research is global competition, it's likely that there will be a bunch of people much better than you, in more prestigious institutions. They will be very critical of your work. Some will dismiss your work publicly in conferences or seminars and so on... not my idea of fun :)

> In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.

It's possible to do both. Some researchers do try to solve real-world problems :)
The Feds' ability to acquire signals has not changed. Their ability to process signals has changed drastically.
I don't know many details about Asia, but I wouldn't wonder if the picture is similar as in the rest of the 'developing' world.

Check out the unfolding 1MDB scandal in Malaysia.
China's Biggest Automaker Just Invested in This Used Car Startup
Something similar was available years ago on sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/line/

("Line is not an emulator")

Hard to tell from the article, but I'd guess they just made an MS version of what this project does. The "mapping syscalls" sounds like implementing the ABI, similar to how Line did it.
In light of how hard of a problem the global solution is (stopping greenhouse gas emissions), which one do you think is cheaper and easier? The global solution costs trillions of dollars as well, and has much more difficult coordination problems.

The local solution in this context at least has the benefit of having well defined goals where individual agents act out of there own easy to understand best interest. i.e: My house in Florida is flooding- I'm going to move to a different state. i.e: New York City is flooding and I'm a property developer- I'm going to build high rises somewhere close to NYC but at +30 m elevation.
It's bleeding through to the corporate world too. What an amazing time to be alive!
>as well as UTF-8.

UTF-8 was always available as codepage 65001.
I'd be very interested in a story about a technology device manufacturer employee--a U.S. citizen--who was disappeared by the U.S. federal government for discussing a national security letter or any other attempt to access information. I've never heard of one, or even the allegation of one.
Oh, I see. Yes, just poor wording on my part

thanks
Expa opens up Expa Labs giving companies $500K in funding
Just the thought of what could happen if you receive one such letter is probably enough to deter most people from not complying.
Reading the article, several of these points are addressed.

As with electricity, hydraulic circuits are high-pressure, low-flow, and are largely self-contained. An advantage of water-based hydraulic systems over synthetic hydraulic fluids is that the water can be bled from the system without contamination. But these are pressure rather than throughput systems. Actual water draw is minimal.

Pipelines themselves are small -- an inch or two in diameter. Not much larger, if that, than electrical conduit.

You're almost certainly right that there would be ongoing maintenance issues over time. Subcircuit isolation would have to be part of this, as well as perhaps redundant pressure circuits.

Early designs were widely distributed because prime movers / energy sources were scarce. We do use hydraulic systems extensively today, but they're largely small and self-contained. An automobile braking system, front-end loaders or other construction equipment, elevator systems, and the like.

A thought is that such systems would be useful, on a localised scale, where energy inputs are variable, but uses are relatively occasional. A home or factory power hydraulic system could operate small or occasional machinery (lifts, presses, punches, door mechanisms) without requiring 24/7 electrical supply.

I also recall that the Amish make use of air-powered tools in certain situations, possibly not unlike those described here.
Testing for NoSQL injection
If you've done well, why are you worrying about it?

You've bet on yourself to pull through these past 20 years and you've won. You're going to be fine without it.
Totally agree.

Facebook - good luck having a news feed algorithm with no actual stories and status updates

Google - good luck having a search algorithm with no actual search index

Amazon - good luck recommending products to others if you zero data on what others are recommending.

With all 3, you can at least create a minimum viable algorithm if you have the data.
> Google definitely cares more than a startup

According to whom? Multiple Google recruiters have quite explicitly told me that they don't care that I don't have a degree.
Yes, some of us have been doing this for a long time.
This is neat.
Many moons ago, I remember using Interix and SFU on Windows XP (also tried coLinux and of course Cygwin and mingw as they became available).
What I did notice with SFU/Interix is that they were extremely sluggish, when compared to an actual POSIX system. It will be interesting to see the performance of this on Windows 10.
If they win all appeals, can they sue the government for lost revenue?
I don't see the big surprise...a degree doesn't mean that you're automatically more competent, but competence -- the kind that is valuable to a company with many moving parts -- can't be measured on a single scale. Pure mastery of C and assembly may not outweigh your ability to work within and communicate in a team. A degree implicitly confers a few social milestones:

- You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford putting you through college. Or, you know what it's like to be responsible for paying off a large loan.

- You've been thrown into a melting pot for ~4 years and have managed not to freak out and/or commit a felony.

- You've been able to commit to and meet arbitrary deadlines (i.e. finals week) and goals.

No, having a college degree doesn't guarantee that you're a fine upstanding person...it's just one useful metric for an employer to have when they have little else to go on.
You say that, but we're the same a--holes who say to our family: "we'll only provide tech support for Apple devices"...