skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ransomware maker TeslaCrypt shuts down after releasing master key
Ask HN: Longest you've spent debugging a single issue?
Along the lines of this other HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729806

What is the longest you have spent in any code base, debugging a single issue. What was it?

I personally spent approximately 15 days finding and fixing a race condition in a custom multiprocessor enabled 3d rendering engine, that I was not part of writing. It was reasonably early in my career but I feel would still take many back to back days to find a solution today. Difference being I know the problem domain a lot better now to know how to break up the problem and where to look for issues.

In the last year, I think the longest is about 3 straight days on an embedded project tracking down bad values getting set seemingly at random (no JTAG etc).
Being interesting is fine. But being misleading with a title is not. I can't imagine the backlash a title like "Brand new programming language from Google" would get if it was talking about Go.
//I work with Splunk currently and have been interested in looking at the capabilities of the ELK stack. have any recommended places to start?
It's hard to measure hunger. My intuition is that it plays a big role when it comes to finding success after going through a bootcamp.
Call me a cynic, but I have to believe this goes on all the time. Friends talk. Employees of public companies talk at bars about what they are working on. Being successful in the stock market is all about news/information and how fast you can get it.

In terms of what Phil did, why isn't this illegal? He knew the information he got was inside... He acted on the information... He made money, yet he get's no real punishment... "I promise I won't do that again."
Before word processors, it was routine for people, possibly including teenagers, to learn it as vocational training for clerical positions, and it used to be essential for journalists. I was once interviewed by a shorthand-taking journalist about a decade ago.
> Where are they now 5 years later? Their loans are mostly paid off and they're in better jobs.

not so sure about all of that
"A recent study in the journal Criminal Justice Ethics notes that in North Carolina, state and local law-enforcement agencies operating crime labs are compensated $600 for DNA analysis that results in a conviction"

This was by far the best and funniest part. What would happen if a suspect offered to pay the same lab $600 if there wasn't a conviction?
Those folks are already using Alt+<arrow keys>, because that is guaranteed to work no matter what element is focused.
I suspect that since the 9th century CE was 1200 years ago, he added an extra hundred years in the wrong direction when thinking about the 15th century (i.e., he thought 1427 was in the 14th century, which is seven centuries before the 21st century).
Mads Torgersen and Dustin Campbell on the Future of C#
Hey, I wrote an algorithms book aimed at bootcampers! The epub is out today, print book to follow: http://amzn.com/1617292230

I'm hoping this will be an easy to read algorithms book for bootcamp grads. Here's a sample chapter for anyone interested:
https://manning-content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/f/a75f93d-...
One of my close friends said it best: "savrajsingh, Lebron James doesn't care if you start playing basketball."
I'm not sure if the function call could be optimized out across module boundaries, that's really the only justification for this to be dedicated syntax I can see. It's somewhat obsoleted in Swift 3 regardless as SPM uses static linking, where it should be able to be optimized.
I think the issue is that in our everyday lives, we see people doing things that appear to require collection, storage, retrieval, and processing of information. Honestly, I'd want to see an explanation for how I can do something like drive from home to work without doing some combination of those four things. The article doesn't do that, and in many cases, the examples of human behavior seem to specifically contradict the author's claims.
Of course employers love bootcamps - they need business logic monkeys who lack the fundamentals and therefore don't increase in value over time as much as the people who actually put in the time with said fundamentals.

It's cheaper to have somebody who doesn't have a real education.
Neat idea. I think a general trend toward "Demystifying and streamlining government agencies" would do well for the business community.
I look at these rankings, and can't help but notice that it's basically whatever school has a club that really cares. Looking at the American schools, no one is going to rank the computer science program at the Illinois Institute of Technology above the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Swift is not perfect but I've been writing it a bunch recently and it's hands down one of the most productive languages I've written in. Fundamentally I believe that it might be one of the most important languages because it's relatively close to the metal, it's a 'modern language' (i.e. functional, has a pretty good type system), open source, and a major company and platform behind it. I think that if Swift 4.0 adds concurrency to the language (as hinted), that we could see it defeat Go on the web.
Linkedins support site URLs (hosted by custhelp.com) used to look something like this http://linkedin.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/*linkedin.cfg*/php/endu...

I know custhelp used to be particularly insecure right around when this hack happened, as I myself discovered several vulnerabilities back then.

>Also, when you say '"confusion"', do you mean it was feigned?

Partly. From what I recall it took them quite a while to own up to this very easily verifiable hack, which could very well have been because they couldn't figure out why it happened because it didn't actually happen on their systems.
Perhaps. The TSA is obviously a big problem for American airports. I'm just saying that I can't think of a major airport that I've used and felt like it was a good experience, and the major airports I've been in outside of the US have not been substantially better, with the large and notable exception of the [lack of] TSA presence.
> Another point to consider is that many young people believe their parents (and their parents generation as a whole) signed up to pay these costs: both when they chose to become parents and when they collectively chose to slash public funding to universities.

Your parents have no obligation to pay for you through college. Nice parents do so. But there's certainly no "obligation".

And if your parents cosign a loan for you, I would hope that you would at least have the personal honor to help your parents with the financial issue, rather than run away to Germany.

Or at very least, run away WITH your parents, together. The fact that he's separated from his parents speaks volumes about the situation. His relationship with his family has been likely stressed due to this debt issue.

-----------------

I think I'm mostly on the side of the students throughout the article. But in this particular case, the person's behavior is so egregious I felt like it needed to be pointed out.
> What a load of crap.

> What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college?

> I've had to deal with this kind of idiotic commentary

Please edit this sort of name-calling and abrasiveness out of your comments to HN. It breaks the site rules, degrades the discussion, and provokes worse. Your comment would be much better without it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732185.
No, they didn't. They just buried it behind a setting.
Yes, Superbad is something entirely different: http://superbad.com/1/trunk/trunk.html
> I've gone further, faster, than most of them.

I'd like to believe there's a trend where CS grads think that because they got their degree, they're done learning. I have a handful of friends — with their CS degree — who did exactly this.

But when you're self-taught, it's often out of a mix of passion and curiosity, and sometimes desperation ("man if I could just automate this, I'd have a killer startup!").

While I've spent only a few minutes in a post-secondary classroom, I think it'd be hard to find those qualities in the minds of students.
GM's Self-Driving Car Startup Settles Co-Founder Dispute
> doubt there are many self-taught programmers who've actually spent hours drawing out trees and solving recurrences and so on

I am a self-taught programmer that has done exactly this. What good is reading the material if you don't pound some of that stuff into your brain? I never did homework in school, but I have done tons of it for myself.
I'm not sure I'd want "bottom-tier" coders period, even if it were bottom-tier Stanford grads, or bottom-tier Googlers. Bottom-tier is typically really bad.

That said, bootcamps (at least the ones with good reputations) are usually much more aggressive than colleges are about kicking out students who can't do the work or have serious attitude problems. So the floor is probably higher when it comes to bootcamp grads vs. CS grads.
That is a very very important piece of information that I didn't see (or understand). Organic integration is going. Thanks to all them, be it the grsec team or Mr Cook.
Thanks for answering a question I had been worried about for ages -- did changes to robot.txt make the internet archive delete it's history, or just hide it.
And fuck those who don't have [ and ] in keys of their own.
Changing PostgreSQL Version Numbering
I can't reply to you post below but do agree that cost control is the key. But giving free tuition is not the answer to cost control. It needs to be something more.
So Economics might fit the definition of a modern mythology because the theories are stories told to explain the order of the world. (and because economics is so difficult to tie to real world, controlled experiments...)
I happen to think that if you want to maximize human potential across the board, you need to take away the threats to existence at the individual level - meaning a place to live, food, healthcare, education. If your basic needs are met, theoretically, you're free to explore and innovate (or sit on your ass, but I think the propensity for that is overblown). That's not just to help poor people either, that could boost your middle class output as well - use me for an example, I'm educated, relatively advanced in my career for my age, but I'd probably be doing something different if I didn't have to worry about student loans to repay and a roof over my family's head. Maybe that something different would be more impactful, maybe it wouldn't, but it'd be different. I digress. I really hope to see UBI attempted somewhere to see if it works.

We do already tax land in most (all?) of the developed world. I honestly have no idea of the tax structure on land in 15th century Florence, but I'm inclined to check that out after work today.

Of course, goals vary across humans. Advancing the whole at the relative expense of another makes the people who are already ahead a bit nervous. That's not wrong, either, it's just human nature. Advance the baseline far enough and it begins to matter less.
I read the book two weeks ago. It was decent I guess made me more aware of some things I've been thinking about peripherally anyway.

Pretty light overall though. If anyone wants I can mail them my copy for cost of shipping.
It's fascinating to me to think about C# living outside of the Microsoft world. I really have no idea what that is going to look like in the future, but I'm excited to watch.
Chromium already puts heroic effort into maintaining form state. Note that, a lot of the time, it works great. For example, here on HN, if you enter half a comment, go back, and then forward, your comment will be preserved.

But it is hard. No browser has succeeded in serializing full tab state: dom, forms, js, pending requests, etc. Chromium has been working on it and has large pieces of it but it is very very hard to get even close to fully correct.

You're letting perfect be the enemy of better.
.. if you're right handed.
Again? Linkedin security sucks
Definitely agree with you here...as a current faculty member, but someone who has been largely self-taught in recent years, I have to keep reminding myself that I myself needed the structure and artificial deadlines of homework and finals to get into the groove, to get to the point where I could get a job in which I learned more skills at a significantly faster rate (daily professional deadlines tend to do that to you). Not everyone starts out as a self-learner.

Recently, a guy named Haseeb made some news for scoring a job worth $250K at Airbnb even though he was an English major who was not even a year removed from his bootcamp entry date. People were pissed but if you read the guy's story, you'd see that he's not your regular bootcamper...he was a millionaire as a teenager after teaching himself how to play poker...and this is how he describes his bootcamp experience:

http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...

> Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.

How many students at even the best colleges can describe themselves as working that hard on anything (well, other than athletes)?
> These keyboards are ergonomically awful: an undifferentiated mass of completely flat buttons, with crappy keyswitches.

You'd think they could splurge a little on keyswitches given that it costs $20k a year to use one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal).

Though it was kinda funny watching the guy in the video hunting-and-pecking on a 80s chiclet keyboard that could've come from a TRS-80.
Mom Called, She Hates Your Homepage Carousel
Degrees Embassy Attestation in Kuwait – Akonter
From the article:

> For nearly a century, Gregg was an essential part of American society. As recently as the 1970s, almost every high school in the country taught Gregg. Certainly, every business school and most colleges offered Gregg-certified shorthand courses. But Gregg’s decline began when McGraw-Hill bought Gregg Publishing, shortly after John Robert Gregg’s death. [...] The real death knell for Gregg, though, was the arrival of the personal computer in the 1980s. Even high-level executives no longer dictated letters to their secretaries; they wrote them themselves on their desktop computers. Companies that used to have scores of skilled shorthand writers eliminated their steno pools entirely.
This is unfortunate, but I can sort of understand why. Customers are frequently mistaken on what's wrong with their connection, example, the customer thinks they're seeing 0.5% packet loss and high jitter consistently to something that's 3 hops upstream of their default gateway, when in fact there's something messed up in their home Wifi which is on channel 1 the same as their four neighbors.

It takes a lot of time (time = money) to train first tier customer service reps how to recognize what needs to be escalated to the people who have 'enable' on the network equipment 2 to 4 hops upstream of a typical cablemodem/DSL customer. And then the management decision to empower them to do so if necessary. And a method for the NOC of filtering through the crap to discover that "Yes, this customer really has discovered some service impacting issue that has not been automatically reported by our NMS".
http://www.pyvmmonitor.com also provides a nice visual profiler.
Sure. But for some number of trees planted, you WILL eventually displace the carbon.
I like this idea, but I feel like it would be hard to make sense of in practice. Many things that people would think of as "plain web pages" might have to be classified as applications just because they have some AJAX components. That would satisfy some curmudgeons who don't like what JavaScript has done to the Web, but it would be confusing to the point of worthlessness for everyone else. The alternative is to be extremely liberal about what you classify as a "page," which seems like it would basically be the status quo.
Casting a college education as a matter of life and death is an excellent example of the kind of rhetoric which produces results like those under discussion.
Eh, I disagree with the generalization that all new hires are a drain for a significant time period. In my experience, the rate at which they come up to speed is extremely varied.
Hopefully we'll see a lot more ARM-based (and why not, AMD-based) Chromebooks as well going forward. No need for an Intel monopoly in the architecture agnostic Chrome OS world, so hopefully Google and its partners won't encourage it either (as they have so far).

Cortex A72/Snapdragon 820 have Core M-level performance. If Core M is good enough for a $400 Chromebook, then those are also good for a $300 touch-enabled Chromebook. AMD's Zen would also bring interesting competition with quad-core versions for $500 Chromebooks.
Sure, you can live in rural tx, but good luck getting a job that pays $100k there. Remote employees can do it, but you're almost certainly not going to get that straight out of university. And this is the first time I've seen someone claim kids net save money =P . That would be, ah, different from the experiences of everyone I know.

Also, your calculations ignored interest. Even 5-8% interest on private student loans adds up in a hurry.
I'd love to see some more mathematical analysis of these differences. In particular, I suspect that while the averages are similar, the distributions look extremely different.

Specifically, the average engineer out of either a bootcamp or college is pretty mediocre. But the top 10% of engineers are mostly college graduates and are definitely not bootcampers. This is because the best developers are overwhelmingly passionate about development and have been doing it since high school. If you love programming, you might go to college to get a firmer academic standing. You definitely won't go to a bootcamp—if you've been programming for 5 years, a 3 week bootcamp makes no sense.

On the other hand, when it comes to the bottom tier I suspect bootcampers are a lot better. This is mostly because the bottom tier of CS graduates are atrociously bad. Regrettably, it is possible to graduate with a degree in CS without ever having written a single program by yourself. They slink by mostly through cramming for exams and "collaborating" with peers. My impression is that bootcamps are actually less tolerant of this behavior: you won't make it through a bootcamp without ever programming autonomously.
Yeah, Chromium on Linux comes without the backspace history navigation for quite some time and I configured it to do the right thing for me: going back in history.
Seagate Innov8 8TB Bus-Powered External Hard Drive Review
http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/unemployment-rates-by-educa...

Employment situation directly leads to living situations. Unemployed? You're going to be in poverty or homeless.

Its hard enough to get a job today with a bachelors degree. Without one? Much harder, if at all.

Getting a degree is truly a life or death situation. With proper social safety nets, single payer healthcare, and so forth, it would not be. But the way things are today, it is.
It depends on the school. Some bootcamps have very low acceptance rates to keep their placement numbers high - as that is their main marketing point. They bring in people who can demonstrate they already have the mindset but don't have the knowledge.

Other bootcamps just need you to be able to use your computer and you're in.
This is actually a no brainer, many times I have accidentally tapped on my mousepad while typing and took the focus away from a textarea then noticed a typo and tried to delete it and baaam you're no longer on that page and possibly all the text you typed has gone into the abyss.
I'm well aware. I'm saying that the tab should appear to close but persist in the background for a short period of time so that I can Ctrl-Shift-T and get my untouched context back.
Algorithms are a pretty one to one representation of abstraction. I'm not contradicting the article at all.

I would also expect this gap to widen significantly if you paired top schools to top boot camps.

I've been to a terrible state school and I've been to a top 10 school. At the state school I frequently thought I'd be better served by a boot camp. At the top 10 I never had a week where I wasn't challenged.

Also the level of internships was vastly different. I think a grad who did a coop at a good school would pull ahead in every metric.
Ditto! I went to a bootcamp after having worked in aerospace for 6+ years and, I had a mechanical engineering degree. I had programmed for a long time and had no problem with basic algorithm exercises (of the kind they spend the early part of these camps on). [1]

The problem is, there was no easy way -- for someone like me wanting to go into software -- to (convincingly) say, "Hey, I can code and think abstractly. Give me a chance?"

(If you're going to say, "just contribute to an open source project", there's actually a big gap between being able to code and being able to debug the zillion things that can go wrong in just setting up the builds for a given project. The Open Hatch project c. 2011 was specifically dedicated to helping people contribute, and yet following their instructions would still dump you in a an unnamed text editor with no way to exit.)

[1] Frustratingly, the instructors were very unhelpful at the stuff I needed help with the most -- forming a mental model of how and why Rails works.
So it takes 51 versions before common sense kicks in?

Have a pat on the back.
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I think it's more that the abstract thought takes longer than 12 weeks or so to coalesce. If you start from nothing and spend a couple months cramming syntax details into your head, there's little time to ponder the mysteries of pointers. If you have four years to get acclimated to it by seeing it used in different courses in a variety of different courses, you probably have a better chance of understanding it.

Not that spending four years at college is a guarantee you understand it, plenty of people don't. But all else being equal, it's a higher probability.
Given lol is in your username I can't tell if you're trolling or serious...
Couldn't agree more but I think bootcamps could probably steal some of the magic that CS has.

I spent years programming as an amateur/hobbyist and I thought I knew it all. When I started studying discrete maths and functional programming at the university level it opened my eyes to a lot of things. Suddenly computers weren't hardware they were just implementations of a theoretical idea where many more things were actually possible than I had ever thought of before.

Once you know even elementary discrete math such as sets and logic programming becomes more of an exercise in seeing if you can realize abstract ideas and models.

I do wish CS gave me a better more practical mindset around real world problem solving though. Maybe there are some things you can only learn in the industry but it took me awhile to adjust my attitude and really become a productive programmer.
My concept of abstraction evolved significantly during my time in school.
Blue Feed, Red Feed
Wouldn't it be great if Apple had to fix vulns in older iOS versions? Than I wouldn't have to keep buying new devices.

I don't buy new devices because of cool features or faster speed. I buy them because my current device is vulnerable and can't handle the new iOS updates.
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