skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: 100% Exam DIY BS Computer Science Degree for Less Than $5,000?
I want to do a DIY BS degree in Computer Science. I have 12 years work experience in IT so I am confident I have most of the knowledge already. I just want the piece of paper to prove it.

- I'm not interested in the teaching

- I want to keep this as cheap as possible (under $5,000)

- I'm looking for a 100% exam assessed course

- I want to take the exams at my own pace (ideally complete within 9 months)

According to this website there are at least 3 colleges that offer this:
http://www.doityourselfdegree.com/get-started/

- Excelsior: BS in Computer Technologies

- Thomas Edison: BA in Computer Science

- Charter Oak: BS in Computer Science

Questions:

- does anyone have any experience doing a DIY degree?

- does anyone have experience with the 3 colleges listed above?

- can anyone recommend other USA colleges/Universities that offer accredited BS computer science degrees that match the above criteria?

- any other advice/recommendations welcome
Todd Park, the ex-CTO of the United States, started to process of pulling in Silicon Valley talent. We were called "Todd's kids" for the longest time :)

Todd reached out to the CEO of Civis Analytis (Dan Wagner I believe?), who had pitched in with the Obama campaign. Through him Todd reached Mikey Dickerson, who was at Google at the time (Mikey is now the head of USDS). Mikey looped in a few other googlers...and so it spread.

I found the MPL team through friends in the startup world, many of whom were ex YC founders
I'd say that coming up with a 10x architecture is also a matter of luck. Sometimes your architecture pans out, sometimes it doesn't. It's hard to anticipate future requirements.

Where good people win is that they adapt quickly when there are signs that the design doesn't work. A lot of people just "stick to the plan" although everybody knows that it won't work.
>You have docs for accessing it but I can't find any for me building an api endpoint. The docs also seem to suggest I use a client library called "kittn", which I'm pretty sure is wrong.

No you are absolutely right. The docs are not built out yet and you are seeing the template data. We will curate this process and provide documentation. But a quick overview is as follows.

The API endpoint is static.

POST https://macgyver.services

The payload is a dynamic JSON object that has the following properties.

program id, user key, program_data (as defined on the program input page)

It would look something like this -

{
id: "9s9z6J6b",
key: "private-live-6w9c2p10G5p3b6y"
program_data: {}
}

As far as how the program should function I can just show you the addition program as example.

The program should be called "main" with a file extension that corresponds to the run time you want macgyver to call.

So the addition program is a javascript file called "main.js"

// user specified data format

var data = '';

var sum =0;

data = JSON.parse(data);

for(var i=0; i<data.values.length; i++){
sum += data.values[i];
}

var result = {
"sum" : sum
}

// This gets returned to the client

console.log(JSON.stringify(result));

The variable 'data' will have it's string content be populated with the clients payload send data at the time of execution.

https://askmacgyver.com/explore/program/addition/2c2c5w7W

There is some information on that here.

https://askmacgyver.com/how-it-works
Pretty cool. How do you bulk query .com availability?
only on ios
How much pushback have you seen from contractors and others who benefit from the current system?
Hemingway agrees:

"I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." -A Moveable Feast
How credible is this story I wonder? Feels a bit like a plug. 3 noobs brought in to replace a broken system built by CGI run on a single VM in the Verizon Terremark cloud? All as Google, Red Hat, and Oracle were called in? They couldn't get permission to use AWS yet it was already running on a similar cloud provider? Something doesn't smell right.
These are side projects of mine. All had well-received Show HN threads (thank you), but none have really gone anywhere:

https://www.takeitapart.com TakeItApart is coasting, and not really supporting itself. We had high hopes that our easy guide creation wizard would lead to new content, but sadly it has not.

http://artfulmac.com Artful pays for itself and a little more (an extra meal or two a month), but it is in need of an update to better support El Capitan. Sadly the shift to Swift 2 broke much of the code and with my day job I haven't yet had an opportunity to dig in and fix it.

MadBlocker, my ad blocker for iOS 8 based on a hack of the VPN subsystem, worked well as a proof of concept but was completely superseded by much better as blockers made possible by iOS 9.
I've bookmarked your website for future use. I have lost count of the number of hours I've spent in coming up with unique names for my web projects, and your software would surely help me in the name brainstorming process.
There is a nuance here that many of you are missing. Up until 18F, the government procurement process was so byzantine that navigating it was core competency of a government contractors and one of their main competitive advantages.

What the lobbyists are complaining about is that 18F doesn't have to go through that process while everyone else does. OR more specifically, they believe that 18F is skipping the process but they don't know because of lack of transparency.

They want the playing field to be even -- either make 18F follow all the same rules or allow them to skirt the same rules.

Part of the reason those government contracts are worth so much is because of all the forms and paperwork you have to file just to get one.

So the issue isn't as black and white as all of us engineers want it to be.

Honestly, I'm all in favor of dropping all the regs for the contractors, but the downside to that is that the regs were put into place to stop corruption -- i.e all the contracts were just going to the (typically white rich male) friends of the government agents. A lot of those government regulations are there to make sure that women and minority owned businesses get some of those contracts (although there is a ton of corruption around pass through entities there, but that's a different issue).
Dispatch Here DoulCi Activator V_2.3
Interesting, does anybody know how or if this relates to 18F? Is there a correlation? I ask because there is currently another post on HN today about 18F.
In this case you get balls which are exchanged for a "prize". And then you go elsewhere to get money for it.
And design transponders so they never go wrong and need to be turned off, and electrical supplies that never need to be turned off, and electrical generators and transfer switches that never go wrong such that shedding the load of the transponder is useful in an emergency, and redesign the parts of the radar system that assume that pilots turn off their transponders when nearby.
Thus, you are not in this group of unemployed spaniards that was the reason of this post in the first time. Congratulations, you are neither in the first group, nor in the second. (And if your spanish is "crappy" after 8 years living in Spain you should wonder if there is a hidden reason for this that you didn't noticed before. What if your company moves or if the job of your dreams opens in Mexico DF, Buenos Aires or Sevilla in the next year?)

Again, It depends on the context and the job; and for some context, provinces and jobs, to speak three languages or more is required for a spaniard trying to find a job, because you can't have a degree otherwise.
Where is this rush to hire 10x people taking place? I asked the last 10 recruiters who called me if they know what a 10x developer is, and they had no idea.
Casino chips are just proxies for cash and they exchange 1:1. They are not an "underground" currency at all.

Also you are (presumably) verified to be 18 (or 21?) years of age to gamble in a casino.
I too experienced several million dollar efforts that went nowhere. Governments in general are not geared to think about returns on investment, but our current one is quite terrible.
Honestly, I am surprised real online casinos don't try and play the same game. The could not allow you to cash out winnings, but allow you to purchase things with your winnings through their own site including "virtual tokens" which you could trade with "unaffiliated" third party sites for real money. Change the slot machines to never payout 0.00$ and boom you have a fully "legal" slot machine business.

Gambling is a vice like any other and adults should have the freedom to engage in it but I find it disgusting that Valve has supported a practice that so obviously promotes addictive behaviour..in games marketed towards those who are most vulnerable to it (young adults).

These lottery sites are just a product of the opportunity Valve created and its not surprising they are being used in fraudulent and immoral ways. It is sad, but not surprising that eSports is again being destroyed by ignorant game companies and shady opportunists.
I'm not sure what would be so special or difficult about writing unit tests for Ms Paint.
>AWS is a data center of supercomputers

How the hell was this published?
>You have to accept the conclusion of a study as true. You can't accept the study as true and then keep believing in the thing the study just disproved.

People doing that weren't who Kahneman addressed there though. It was people thinking the study was BS/fishy/wrong.
Here's the code to my IG application, for those not interested in the story: https://github.com/pawel2105/fuck-instagram
Most people who haven't been exposed to AAVE don't realize that it has rules, and grammar, just like Standard English.

That's why when people who don't speak AAVE try and "fake it", it doesn't sound right at all. It's not just an accent with some slang words thrown in.
I'm curious- do you mean to say those two tropes are in respective order to the "good students" and the "okay students"?
Class action lawyers will have a field day with these guys. Especially their attempts to coverup, add disclaimers, etc, after the fact.

IANAL, but business fraud statutes are extremely broad. For consumers in California for example,
"any unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice" or "unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising" have a civil penalty of $2,500 per incident (for example, if 100,000 people were persuaded to visit their website, that might be $250,000,000 in damages). These are civil claims, where only a simple majority of the jury is needed.

When someone has to say their actions are "perfectly legal", they're usually running afoul of several laws they aren't aware of. Especially in an Internet business where you have potential exposure to so many jurisdictions.

[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&gr...
Yeah, I have to think that the only reason this story exists is because there was a very public humiliation for the Administration, and that the original project is business as usual 99% of the time. I highly doubt billions of gov't contracts are now being rerouted to "young people," and in fact (on a parallel track), the last 18F headline I saw was that they came out with a to-do list.
Yes and no.

I think that generally I'm maybe a 5x programmer when it comes to architecture. Architecture is what I'm good at.

But when I come onto a team for the first time, they don't just give me the keys to the kingdom. I don't get to make large-scale architectural decisions immediately. Instead, they have me work on smaller sections of the application. And when I'm working on smaller sections, the attributes that make me good at architecture work against me. I generally work slowly, taking a step back to understand the problem from the user's perspective, and modeling that understanding in code rather than writing code that short-sightedly solves only the problem at hand. That works well for architecture, but in smaller sections it just appears slow, like I'm not producing. It does have positive effects in the long term even for small sections of code, but those benefits aren't seen until long enough later that I don't really get credit for them. The result is that I don't make a good impression at first and it takes me a long time at a new job before I'm given authority to make architectural decisions.

It would be easy for me to blame other people for not seeing my "genius" here but the truth is that this is only a problem I can work on--I need the flexibility to be able to demonstrate productivity early on and make a good impression, otherwise my poor self-presentation gets in the way of me contributing to the team in the most effective way possible.

So I guess what I'm saying here is, you need both. It's not enough to just have elegant architecture, you also have to have quick programming skills.
There are so many of these sites, some sit behind a proxy because they are somewhat illegal in a lot of countries, e.g https://ezskinz.org/. It's basically the wild west for these sites, no regulation, no liability, just people making a load of money off of kids, it's sickening.
> It's hard to anticipate future requirements.

It's not about that, it's about keeping what you do nimble enough to always be ready for change when it comes. That means not having duplication in the system, having things well factored and encapsulated so there's a distinction between the abstract and the implementation so at any time any component can be made a change point and become pluggable. What makes a good architecture good is that it can be changed without scrapping the whole thing or breaking the whole thing.

> Where good people win is that they adapt quickly when there are signs that the design doesn't work.

It's not that they do adapt quickly, it's that they "can".

> A lot of people just "stick to the plan" although everybody knows that it won't work.

Because they're stuck with a bad design that can't be changed due to issues like bad factoring, lots of code duplication and copy pasting, etc.
Like others here, I don't consider 10x programmers to be someone who writes 10x the amount of code. In fact, most 10x programmers actually write less code but get more done with it.

Personally I think the narrative works better when you think there are 1x programmers and 0.1x programmers. And a very large number of developers are actually between 1.0 and 0.1. These 0.1x programmers somehow manage to solve problems by simply puttering away at it over time. For example, these programmers might start out reading a web service into an XML file, re-opening that XML file to process the result, copying that file someone else that is never read again, taking the result and inserting it into a database table, reading the table to create an aggregate result, and then finally inserting that result into another system. And they do this all day long every day for every problem they come across.

Not everyone is quite that bad, there are 0.5x programmers who know better than that but still manage to write 6 classes to solve a problem that could be done in a single 2-screen long function.

Tools and processes can help and code reviews are pretty invaluable. Any good process will have weeded out 0.1x programmers already and they will settle in those places without them.
This is a hard problem to solve perfectly. I'm still stuck at the ID verification step, after sending in my documents. Never heard back. I'm the perfect corner case though, having gotten a green card recently, left a job, moved to another state, so on so forth...
I asked this separately but since you are offering. What is the relationship between Nava and 18F?
I'm going to ask again, aside from the word "moronic" which I called an opinion, not a person. What exactly is uncivil? I gave a cogent argument about the issue at hand. If you have issue with a single word as a moderator, it would fit to specifically point that out, rather than call my entire post uncivil. This is clearly a decisive issue with strong opinions.
Second Careers of the Healthy Elderly
>The central thesis of the essay is this: elites dismiss AAVE as simplified or "street-talk" English. But it isn't: its rules are rigorous and intricate. You can't simply simplify Standard English and arrive at AAVE. You have to learn it, like any other dialect.

Maybe, but the fact that you have to learn it, or that it has "rigorous rules" does't mean it's not a simpler variety of English. It's both a variety of English, and simpler.
Recruiting and Social Engineering
> Clever and elegant architecture will always beat clever programming.

And clever elegant architecture and clever programming will beat either alone. It's not an either or situation, you want them all.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that based on the way IRS defines "income" (it doesn't have to be cash... it's anything of value) that gambling to win anything of real value would be illegal if not properly licensed.
this is an older version -- the actual book this is excerpted from uses Intel mostly now (the canonical CSPP book) and also has many revisions to 'modernize' it, such as reducing the x86 sections in favor of x64
That is obviously true - double the codebase and you need four time the resources to maintain it.
Small, frequent releases are a great idea for web applications and (to a lesser extent) mobile and desktop consumer apps where updates are automatically pushed through some sort of app store. But this totally doesn't work for software licensed to enterprise customers for on-premises use. Every upgrade you release means your customers now have to incur an expense to test your update with the rest of their environment, retrain their users, and roll out the update. Release too often and your customers will be unhappy. So the tolerance for defects goes way down.
I too remember this, though not from HN... and I remember thinking, "wow, what a glorious and probably doomed project!"

Glad to hear it's doing well.
Landsburg says it's naive environmentalists that are similar to religious fundamentalists (which I fully agree). Those are the kind of people who don't care about e.g. the cost-benefit analysis of recycling and simply believe recycling is A Right Thing To Do and attack people who don't share their view.

I don't want to call myself an environmentalist for the simple reason that I want to distance myself from those naive environmentalists (I view these people very negatively).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mojiBJ55G2g

But you are right that economists (and people who apply economic thinking to policy matters) are usually the best kind of environmentalists. I don't think we need a separate category called "environmentalists". We need people who can do calm and cold cost-benefit analysis of given policies (environmental or otherwise), which most people who identify as "environmentalists" can't seem to do.
I came to NPR and to Prairie Home Companion in college, after a childhood filled with moves, losses, and failures. I greatly enjoyed the music and the stories, to the point where I once had a Powdermilk Biscuits t-shirt, and still have a PHC tie. However, the dedications they read at intermission really made the show for me; in the notes people wrote to each other celebrating their various graduations, anniversaries, relationships, and communities, I saw a real-world analog to Lake Wobegon's strong women, good looking men and above average children. I think believing something like that was out there, somewhere, helped me reshape my life to transmute the moves, losses, and failures into relationship. community, and hope.
I find Lake Wobegon to be sentimental, but in a way that matched my sentimentality. I'm really grateful for the part Mr. Keillor's show has played in my ife.
As many as make sense. These compromises aren't given out of the love in the heart of the EU to the Brits, they're given because they seem like a good idea by the people whose job it is to make that judgement.
>A friend argued that it's still the same language, so you can understand what others are saying even with a different dialect. Please.

Even if you cannot understand it, it remains the same language. Language is defined by the syntax rules and vocabulary, not the exact way those are pronounced (which can vary even between the same dialect).

>The only reason people have a problem with AAVE is some sort of racial pretentiousness. Even the use of the phrase "Standard English" in this article is pretentious. Standard to whom? Brits certainly have a different perspective of what "Standard English" is from Americans.

There are still majorities and minorities, and the first define what's "standard". Besides, even the Brits have their standard and their not so standard English.
So create some vague laws to save the [women and] children? This mentality worries me. There's no problem here besides some privileged kids losing almost nothing in exchange for a less than healthy activity. Is this really a big enough deal that we should devote public time and add complexity into a very impactful domain in order to have a mere attempt at solving this perceived problem?
They've got a pretty large audience, as it appears, large enough to bring enough attention to this, so while it definitely was a risk they must've been weighing heavily to publish this (being so different from their usual stuff), I'm glad they did.
ThinkPwn UEFI Zero-Day flaw allows hackers to disable security features
Marketing Myths Part 7
The price of launching a set of satellites that covers that area divided by the number of customers that will use it over the number of years that's in service? That's a price.
This is likely related, I wouldn't be surprised if the son in question was buying CSGO or DOTA 2 skins.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/04/congressman-blames-son...
Every study I've ever seen has found that some programmers are dramatically more productive than others (10x is a vague estimate). I don't think it's a controversial 'paradigm' at all.

It also matches with the fact that skill in general is an exponential distribution, not a bell curve.
> Some of the best US cities have European-like features

Careful with calling it "best". Not everyone likes that kind of thing in a city.

I don't. I hate those types of cities, I feel very stressed and oppressed ("squished" if you get what I mean) when I go to cities designed in that way. I can handle it for a visit, but I would never want to live there.

Different people like different things, that's why we have a variety of cities in the US, you can live in a place that matches what you like. But don't call it "best" just because it happens to be what you like.
P≡p Security (pretty Easy privacy) is launching its first products on 04.07.2016
When you're brought in to fix something, are you able to just throw out the "requirements" that are usually given to contractors?
CSRF Worms
In 2001, Russia shot down civil plane approaching it border because of it transporder was turned off (then blamed Ukraine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
GitAlias http://gitalias.com launched here in June, and now has hundreds of stars on GitHub.

The project is a free repo of handy git commands, and so far it's working really well with teams. Ideas are welcome!

Repo is https://github.com/gitalias/gitalias
In 2014, I posted a chrome extension called UX Check (http://uxcheck.co) as a Show HN. It didn't get any traction, but a month later, somebody reposted it and it hit the front page. I received an amazing amount of encouragement and support, with tons of great feedback. I rolled a lot of that feedback into an update a month or two later, and within 6 months, I had decided to leave my job to work full time on building a related product. Still working on that product and not ready to share it yet, but thank you to everyone!
Neural Network that was build in pure SQL
Are you able to talk about the changes you had to make to the login service? Would be interested in knowing what the scaling issues were.