skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Their loans are mostly paid off"

I'm not sure what bubble you're living in, but some of my tech colleagues (making six figures) have enough student debt that they'll be paying it back for the rest of their working lives.

For less well-off people, a single misstep (or illness) can throw them into insolvency. This is an insane price for individuals to shoulder just to get on a level playing field (aka getting an education).
Whiny deadbeats.
That's interesting. Four different trading philosophies, four traders. They're aware of their fallibility. They contract and pour their earnings into an escrow account every pay period. They each receive a basic stipend. At the terminus of the agreement (e.g., 2 years), all earnings are distributed evenly.
Hmm, I've not been particularly impressed by the massive proofs I've seen recently, e.g. the "Wikipedia-sized proof"[1] that's been doing the rounds. I don't know about this particular proof, but the blowup in size can often come from using a severely limited representation.

For example, the "Wikipedia-sized proof" seems to be the variable assignment for a SAT solver, i.e. the problem was reduced to a boolean formula of the form "a AND (b OR c) OR d AND ..." which, because it's such an inexpressive language, requires exponentially more symbols than an equivalent encoding in, say, first-order or higher-order logic. The proof is then an assignment of the form "a = true, b = true, c = false, ..." such that the whole formula evaluates to "true", and this proof is massive precisely because it must encode so many bits.

The reason this is a little underwhelming is that mathematicians do not tend to work in terms of boolean satisfiability. Adding just a little expressiveness to the language can make statements and proofs much shorter, and mathematicians tend to work at very high levels of abstraction.

Another reason why such proofs are underwhelming is that they don't really give us any insights which we could re-use to perform other proofs; we'd just have to start the solver from scratch on the new problem.

All they really tell us is that a proof exists, and hence the statement is true rather than false. So, in effect, these "huge" proofs only really contain a single bit of information. This can be made rigorous using algorithmic information theory: given some encoding of the problem (allowed axioms and deduction rules, plus the theorem statement) we only need a constant number of bits to make a proof-searching program which enumerates all allowed rules applied to all allowed axioms in all allowed ways, and halts when one satisfies the theorem statement. The only unknown is whether the program will halt, and that's the bit given by the proof. All of the rest of the proof is redundant, since it can be generated (i.e. decompressed) by running the program, since we know that it halts.

Anything else is basically a time/space tradeoff, to avoid having to wait for such an enumerating program to finish. I'm pretty sure such gigantic proofs are not pareto-optimal though (i.e. there's probably another proof out there which is both shorter and faster to "decompress").

Of course, there's also the point that it's trivial to construct theorems which require ridiculously long proofs (in some particular representation, no matter how powerful) [2].

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25068-wikipedia-size-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_speed-up_theore...
College is far from a panacea for becoming accustomed to how an adult lives and interacts with other adults. American society encourages taking on massive debt, moving away from a support base, and tying social interaction to practices that are often deeply unhealthy. It took me three years of attending myself to realize my mistake—it nearly drove me to suicide. Dropping out and actually trying to interact with real adults was what got me humming again.
Scoring points, or not. Humans are in fact technically animals. To write about a scientific endeavor in nontechnical/ambiguous or inaccurate terms is disingenuous or worse, negligent.

By the way, I believe you were attempting to 'score points' by pointing out the op's intentionality.
> If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.

Not everyone uses a mouse all the time.
Speaking solely from too much experience on HN: they're a problem when:

1. They consume a disproportionate amount of the thread. Even collapsible comments don't totally fix this problem, because relevant subthreads sometimes sneak their way into sprawling digressions.

2. They become hostile. In fact, the real issue here is subtle: digressions and the original topic compete for attention, and whichever subthread is more hostile will tend to win.

It's not a problem that "needs to be corrected"; there have been some fantastic digressions on HN threads over the years! But it's helpful for thread participants to acknowledge that they're tacking the thread away from the article, and important that digressions not become contentious.
Sadly enough, I tend to agree with you.

I will note, however, that you display some naiveté about grandmothers ;)
I came here to critique the same thing... Reminding people that humans are animals and thus, part of, connected to and dependent on nature is important.
I think this quote from the first segment sums it up

"I think at this point I owe about $40,000. I really, truly, honestly don't want to pay it back. Sure, I realize the responsibility I took on when I signed the papers and agreed to take out the loans, but I should have never had to do it in the first place. I feel some sort of civic duty not to pay them back, as if my small protest will make any kind of difference."

Emphasis added.

I am sympathetic however - people under 35 were sold a bill of goods - we were told "go to college, get a degree, and they will be a good job waiting for you" which turned out to be a load of malarkey - the problem isn't that you need to take loans out, its that student loans are not dischargeable - if normal lending standard applied, you'd see a whole lot less student debt, and the cost of education would likely drop precipitously.

But most of these examples in this piece have small amount of debt, something along the size of a car loan, with generous and long repayment terms - its much harder for me to accept someone crying hardship when they owe less than 40k. Even if the amounts were larger, once you take on the debt, it's yours, you own it, no matter if you want to pay it back or not.
I'm not clear how @stepvhen's is comment is a "progressive perspective". It seems entirely factual.
Absolutely. I'm glad to have been hired by a company who had experience with bootcampers before.

They gave me a smooth and solid ramp-up to the mid/senior I am now.

Being thrown in on the deep end with the expectations that the guy with 3 months experience is somehow wellrounded with the basics of CS is just foolish.

Also, of course, not all bootcamps are equal, nor are all students.
The space bar is large and easy to reach. It's also present on some keyboards that don't have a discrete Page Down key (e.g, Apple laptops).
Cumulative time wasted using 'Command+[': none.
Cumulative time wasted due to overloading of the backspace key: hours.

Relying on current context to determine the behavior of backspace was a terrible idea from the start. To hell with your muscle memory. Re-learn a shortcut that makes sense, and which will save you time one day, rather than insisting with hacker-machismo that you've never lost data in a form.
If you consider that the life of a software product is 5 years, it would typically take the first 3 months to build v1. So coding vs debugging would pretty much be in the same proportion. 3:60 in this case.
I've been building web-based frontends for my entire professional career, and my systems architecture skills have been invaluable throughout. Web frontends don't stand alone; they run on server, they make use of networks and networking hardware, they talk to other services on the same server and other server, and they interact with the operating system. Being able to understand all of those moving parts is crucial to producing a high-quality frontend that's not going to fall apart as soon as it gets put under stress, and that will be maintainable and extensible over time.
True, but one measure Linux is not the best at is security. By many accounts, OpenBSD leads the pack there.
Brooklyn's Internet Bonsai Kingpin
among all the other well articulated complaints in the comments here I have to ask a question...

is the result of this article the conclusion that computers are just boring, uncreative, overly logical brains? Who woulda thunk?
Have you guys ever thought about selling a solar recharger for the boards, or is that completely impractical (like, it would take all day or something)?

I ask because a board like this would be pretty neat for long boarding long distance like my brother and me have planned this summer (riding from Miami to Key West), where you might want to just rest while the board does the work for a few miles, every once in a while. If it could solar charge while manually riding in a matter of 90 min or something, that would be pretty epic.
Well done Chrome. While it's the way that I go back and I now need to change my habits, this is the kind of hard decision that you need to make to have a really great product. They weighed the upsides and downsides, and pissed off a small subset of people (esp on HN who are likely to be the backspace-as-back users) to make a better experience. Bravo!
The government has the right to use force in an investigation.

Things you have in your mind or - in some cases - in an extension of your mind (you're secretly actually guilty, you know where incriminating evidence is, or a safe combination or password that you haven't forgotten) cannot be compelled.

Things you possess (the contents of your home or gun safe, the thumb drive clenched in your fist, the robots.txt file on your server) can be compelled with a search warrant or subpoena. They are your things, and they could incriminate you, but that's not what the 5th Amendment is for.

Laconic.net is a resource I have enjoyed. Here is the 5th amendment passage: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2470 or go back for a history lesson.
I can't see how I have issues because a webapp I use wasn't perfectly coded. Remember the majority of browser users are, for a lack of a better word, browsers, not site developers. We can't affect the technology choices of the sites much, as choosing a site by tech purity instead of usefullnes is a losing proposition.
I had exactly the same reaction: higher education is overpriced and has perverse incentives, but these individuals hardly seem like the most deserving of compassion for their circumstances.

> I think at this point I owe about $40,000. I really, truly, honestly don't want to pay it back.

No shit

> Sure, I realize the responsibility I took on when I signed the papers and agreed to take out the loans, but I should have never had to do it in the first place. I feel some sort of civic duty not to pay them back, as if my small protest will make any kind of difference.

He didn't have to; it was a choice.

Let's change the system of higher education, but lets also get some better standard-bearers.
Because the guys who made Mosiac had no idea what they were doing because everything was so new. At first there was this idea that you'd constantly be going back and forth between pages, similarly to how people used gopher back then. You'd always have your hands on the arrow keys and you'd fly past various pages to find what you wanted. But, of course, terminals didn't really have scrolling, but GUI windows do, so html pages were just written longer and longer and we got used to scrolling down instead of moving between pages.

Recently, Andreeson said that he never expected the forward and back buttons to last this long. He assumed they were temporary measures until something better came along. Nothing ever did it seems.

Worse, I tried MS's Edge browser and found that the spacebar is now a back button. I am completely baffled by this. I am so used to the space bar as a scroll down, I can't think what misappropriation of ideas and user testing must be going on at MS right now to make this change. Its truly bizarre and really killed my faith in MS finally getting browsers right.
Do not look at laser with remaining eye.
I'm not familiar with WebRTC. What's the use case there? I can't remember ever wanting to create an in-browser p2p connection on my local network. What would it be used for?
BangFit: The fitness method gyms don’t want you to know about
Competitive Programming is a sport where teams(or individuals in some instances) compete with each other to solve a set of algorithmic questions in the shortest time. This generally happens on a system called the Online Judge which is basically a system for code evaluation.

ACM ICPC is basically the Olympics of Competitive Programming.

The significance can vary from person to person but sometimes Universities and Companies look favourably at good results in such competitions.
> If your interview includes Practical programming, Web system Design, Algorithms and Low level system design...

> What in the nine hells are you hiring for?

Someone who can solve a business problem effectively.

It's not too difficult to shove data into a database, pull it out, and render it to a screen. Nor is it too difficult to pull data out of the db and send it in JSON format.

What do you do when your the performance of your API server doesn't meet customer demands, or you get written up by re//code and get a 1000x spike in traffic?

Let me turn the question around: if you can only hire one person, why would you choose a bootcamp graduate over a CS graduate?

------

Personally, I think the idea of bootcamps are great, and I root pretty hard for anyone who wants to better their situation by going back and learning a new set of skills.

But I have to be skeptical and look at the bootcamp craze, like the outsourcing craze from a decade ago--a way for companies to hire cheap programmers, and a way for bootcamp operators to cash in on the unmet demand.
> The Hurd is firstly a collection of protocols formalizing how different components may interact. The protocols are designed to reduce the mutual trust requirements of the actors thereby permitting a more extensible system.

This is great, but what protection do I have against on silicon trust?
A bunch of time planning the change and reading through the current version of the code, so that I can add things without breaking everything else (and/or understand the current behavior and the desired behavior, so I can repair the bug). About half as long actually writing new code, and then debugging iterations until the tests work again. Some time writing new tests for the feature. Some time fixing integration issues (occasionally). A fair amount of time dealing with customer escalations (usually tiny edge cases really messing stuff up at a customer's site).

So, they're all bugs, and in a sense, all coding is debugging. New-feature, regression, existing (from previous release), and escalation bugs. They're all basically the same thing: Identify the deficit, write a fix (includes what you might have meant by "debugging"), write tests to cover the changed behavior, check it in, deploy/release.
A large percentage of the people in my bootcamp already had STEM or law degrees or many years of experience in another technical field (like myself)...and in a few cases both.

I do way more than just CRUD apps - I basically own all of the business logic/processes here at my company. My bosses on a regular basis make it clear that I'm invaluable to the organization.

I think this view is fairly myopic and basically credentialism. As someone who has to interview and make hiring decisions, I swing way in the other direction -- credentials make up maybe 5% of my opinion of a candidate. At best.
> Bootcamp grads match or beat college grads on practical skills, and lose on deep knowledge.

I feel as though you are attempting to lower the bar of what is acceptable in order to sell something :). The word 'practical' is thrown around in this article without much of a definition. Are we talking about making simple web pages?

I've just finished conducting a round of interviews for a junior level position, and based on this experience I highly doubt I will be considering bootcamp graduates in the future. As an example, for a question which involved sorting an integer array, and providing a method GetElementAt(index)....95% of the bootcamp applicants implemented sort within the GetElementAt method so that the entire array is sorted with every single call. A handful of CS grads made the same mistake, but most of them did not. Is this sort of oversight excused in the idea of 'practical' programming? Or in your definition, is this considered deep knowledge?
> "animals" are always considered a superset of "humans"

technically, humans are a subset of animals, not the other way around.
sorry but this will inevitably come off as pedantic...knowing how to code quick sort may not be germane how to apply quick sort, what quick sort does and why, and how to evaluate whether quick sort is appropriate are all nested within that 'standard' developer archetype in different ways. Not saying you aren't true, just trying to argue for a less digital approach to interpreting or assessing education in the realm of hiring.
> Try using Go or Rust (love both, x2 for Go) to allocate say a hundred GB of memory for some huge/fast in-memory data processing. Let me know how far you get.

I'm currently working on a couple of bugfixes for a Rust program I wrote last year which regularly allocates north of 500GB of RAM per-node on a cluster. It's wicked fast (regularly matching or beating comparable workloads implemented in C/C++), and Rust's ergonomics and safety guarantees made it very easy to extract much greater amounts of parallelism than the previous C++ version had, while never once having to chase down a bug from memory corruption, data races, or iterator invalidation.
I would say no... It's a prestigious name to have on the piece of paper, but I'm not sure that's worth starting out in life with a full mortgage-worth of debt... I think I'd have had to double down and go through the I-banking/consulting/doctor/lawyer track to try to dig out, rather than go into something I actually kind of enjoy.

I was poor enough that the financial aid made it a better decision - something like 3-5k more per year than going to my state university, which doesn't look anywhere near as good on a resume.
Definitely. I had a wide range of classmates. We had several people that were project managers looking to gain some technical knowledge/communication skills. They had no intention of becoming programmers. A good chunk were designers who had html/css knowledge that were looking to expand their reach. A couple were a drain on my education. My greatest criticism of the programs is that it's an educational boom, so there isn't a stronger filtering process in place yet.
I guess you have a point. I, too, grew up before all these things were "the standard" (heck, I didn't have internet at home until I was 22 for crying out loud) so even though it is annoying when they aren't there, I can totally picture a life without them.
Also interesting that he neglected to mention GTA V which has several heist missions that seem inspired by a few real life LA heists (including the hole through the vault floor via sewer caper).
Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study
i shutter to think that someone assumes if i say i use a computer to collaborate on mathematics research they think i mean with either powerpoint or pdfs?!?

'interactivity and dynamicism of the chalkboard' reads like laughably obstinate bias

http://acko.net/blog/mathbox2/ is a great example of what interactivity and dynamicism really can be

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=acko.net&sort=byPopularity&pre...

your msri videos are perfect examples of what i think is wrong with academia

one person standing in front of a group of silent onlookers making incomprehensible scribbles on a medium that the onlookers are unable to interact with or permute

then to take that presentation and put it online raw and unedited

i picked a random video: https://www.msri.org/workshops/705/schedules/20915 ; feel free to watch its 51 minutes or skip around.. i challenge anyone to go jump straight to minute 9 and read what is written there, i have worse handwriting than this professor and i know you would be unable to read this comment if i were required to write it by hand

how much of the video is actionable information?

how much time is the viewer just sitting, silently, waiting for the professor to finish writing words just spoken? what benefit is there for me to watch someone as they write?

http://www.3blue1brown.com/ is a great example of well edited content

i'd rather professors make edited versions of their intended presentations, give them to students, and then this lecture hall could be filled with conversation and imagination stead the sound of chalk being dragged across slate
Nature Biotech is a pretty prestigious journal in its own right.
Inside Nuclear’s Core: Unraveling a Ransomware-As-a-Service Infrastructure
He's not being a hypocrite.
>or there's RF interference and the remote momentarily loses connection (which is pretty rare and usually in the same location every time)

o_O if the remote loses connection it doesn't default to gently applying the brakes?

Considering how everyone raves about how much thought has been put into these boards, that seems like a really big oversight!
Jimi Hendrix had a lot of influences and that's part of why he sounds so unique, and ended up being so influential.

However, he wasn't formed out of a vacuum. :) If I had to pick "most influential style", I'd pick the blues, not rock. In particular, to my ears, there's a lot of Muddy Waters and especially Buddy Guy in Jimi's style.
I agree that this is big, bad, and infrequent.

What I keep asking though, is where were the employees in all this? I also spent over a decade in the device industry, and everyone I worked with, from biochemists to engineers to Regulatory Affairs people would have been screaming loudly. We took patient safety very seriously. Any suggestion that our instrumentation was defective was immediately investigated. This is typical in the medical device industry. I can't believe that the rank and file people working at Theranos were really any different.

So where are their voices?
Thank you. Honestly I can't tell you just how much I've loathed this default behaviour. I wrote a chrome extension to disable it.
1) That's not really a "bootcamp" issue as it is with a candidate who can't be bothered to learn basic programming concepts or open a book on their own. Almost every book I've read on programming covers OOP in most languages. You can even hack it together in BASH (http://lab.madscience.nl/oo.sh.txt), not that you should.

2) LAMP stack is still probably the safest bet (substitute PHP for Python maybe), but yeah, just because it's the current hotness for a few startups doesn't mean it'll get you hired to know the most hyped tech.

3) Stop looking for candidates from Manhattan, or only hire those looking to move who have done just a little bit of research? CNN's COL calculator shows $100K in NYC is equal to about $54K in NJ so you don't seem too far off base for what you're looking for (http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/). From personal experience their calculations were accurate when I made my move from the midwest to SF. Regardless, again that doesn't sound like a "bootcamp" issue so much as "candidates who can't be bothered to do basic googling/research issue."