skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am pretty much self taught since the age of 14 (back in the early 80's). Started using BASIC on an old TRS-80 and then a Vic-20 after that before moving to an IBM PC/XT.

I bought a copy of Turbo Pascal when it first came out and that was really my first foray into the world of 'real' programming. I think I made my first $$ from a software sale from a Turbo Pascal simple point of sale system I wrote for a pharmacy.

Since then, I've pretty much taught myself several other languages over the years. I find books and video courses to be of low value (NOTE: To ME, others may find opposite results). Latest work is in Ruby and Javascript etc. using SQL backends.

I've found the best way for me to really get to grips with any language is to start building small 'real world' projects with it and experience all the triumphs and pitfalls along the way.

Having said that, I do struggle with some new concepts these days. NoSQL still baffles me, and I never got the hang of Ruby on Rails (my latest web app is 25,000+ lines of Ruby but in a Sinatra based framework).

So, no formal software development training, but I have the love for creating stuff out of code that keeps me motivated to constantly learn.
I read this piece and was very saddened. Take it from someone who has been around a few more years than many others who contribute to this site. There is nothing good - long-term - about sitting around idle for extended periods. It kills your initiative. It kills your character. It kills your options in life. It kills your soul. I saw this happen to several people who were very close to me growing up and I still grieve at what they suffered in later years as the price paid for the extreme short cuts and high life of their youth. And this survey fact as reported in this piece - that is, of one in five non-college-educated young men in their twenties being so very much out of work for sustained periods - is not cause for celebration or for launching into philosophical discussions about the value of leisure in a developed society. It is instead a real tragedy, and I don’t care how many survey participants check a box attesting that, for the moment, they can say they have had lots of fun doing pretty much nothing beyond partying and playing games over the past 12 months or more. I know that today it can often happen that there are very limited options in the workplace and this so-called leisure is really an enforced leisure not of people’s own choosing. But that does not mean we should rationalize this to say that, after all, they do seem to be satisfied in their leisure. That is nothing more than a superficial covering-up of a bad situation. It is decidedly unhealthy for the individuals involved and for society as a whole to have large numbers of young men involuntarily idled for sustained periods in this way (wasn’t that what we used to call the Great Depression). Work is not an evil. It is a big part of how we grow and develop as people. It is a big part of how we negotiate life. Let us hope there comes a day ahead when enforced “leisure” is no longer a norm and the leisure people enjoy is of their own choosing.
Saw that people I was working with were doing cool things in VBA in my early 20s, so I started using the macro recorder and then backing into things from there.

Now I'm okay-ish with c++, python, and a little bit of matlab. I need to do some serious work with learning design patterns and study more algorithms before I'd really consider myself a good programmer.
You don't have to have ADHD to hate open offices and find that setup distracting, but it's certainly a possible factor. I know this is boring / dissatisfying advice but going to a doctor could probably add more context to your self-assessment.
In my view: Technology. Without that first $10M, you'd never have had the opportunity to make $1B in real estate. When I think "source" I'm digging down to root cause.
> Do they just simply wait until the stock is at a high point, and sell a lot? Maybe move that money to other investments?

Pretty much. If they own shares in a public company, they can just sell them on the open market.

You can see director's dealings on the company's 'Insider Transactions': (i.e. Apple: http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL)

If the company's not public — they can receive cash through salary/bonus/dividends. If they're privately financed (i.e. VC's) they can liquidate some of their shares during a funding round (they sell some of their shares to the VC).

(This is a total ELI5 — sorry to any financiers/accounts reading this)
I use Outlook.com for a lot and it confuses people. I say the first part and they immediately start typing @gmail.com. I even had a guy at my mechanic's shop tell me Outlook was the program I used to check my email, but Gmail was the actual address.
Not disagreeing with anything you said.

> This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom.

Me neither. But there isn't a skilled immigrant visa which has that feature. HR 213 [1] tries to provide some improvements, but is a far from what you seem to be asking for.

My point was that the wage distortion caused by top-tier companies hiring employees on H-1B is small to nil. This thread started off from a mention of Microsoft, and then elsewhere down there is mention of overseas consulting firms too. These are very different market segments and the dynamics are different.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/213
The article did not discuss the advantages that my cat(s) obtain from not being crushed beneath the wheels of passing traffic on a more regular basis. [note to purists: "our cats" are kept strictly inside, but there are stray cats that we feed, and have survived for many years without auto crushing on a cul-de-sac].
I don't know any except my subjective experience with Xpra and pure X forwarding. Xpra was a little cumbersome to setup and use. Some programs benefited a lot from using it (Firefox), some actually got less responsive (Geany). This was roughly one year ago, so it's possible Xpra got better since then.
As a small-a atheist, I find all of the capital-A Athiests so irritating that I have considered Catholicism.
When self driving cars take over, Get ready for the revival of suburbia.

Whatever progress migration toward densely populated urban areas has made in recent year (due to traffic and high gas prices) is going to rescind.
I feel like the millennia and holy and sacro-saint tradition of beating people at the ATM to steal their cash will match a very potent reaction in the land of the gun-totters.
Could These Intersections Make Us Safer? (2013)
My brother went to a computer camp and brought back a folder with an introduction to BASIC printed using that purple ink tech they had before photocopiers. (What's that called again?)

We didn't have a computer but I read that and loved it. A friend had an Apple II and I got to try out some of the stuff round at his house. Later on when I was in year 9 (1985) I got my first computer ,an Apple //c and I did more BASIC and some assembler. Then uni in 1989 where we learnt Miranda, Modula-2, etc etc. Made the transition to Java in 1997.
Age 16 or so, Boy Scout explorer post at the local bank in 1969. The person teaching us (a programmer at the bank) gave us a brief intro to the RPG (Report Program Generator) language, then said "Now, think of something you'd like the computer to do, and write a program to do it. Here are the manuals, and I'm here to answer any questions you might have." First "real" experience was at Univ. of Illinois, CS 101, with PL/I as the language.
Why do the Boston and Washington Beltways have the same number (495)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_495_(Massachusetts)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_495_(Capital_Beltwa...
I wonder if my theory explains why games are so popular these days (and so lucrative).

Our economic system is taking away opportunities from poor people and giving them to rich people - Games are like a drug to keep poor people sedated and docile.
QBasic when I was 10 (on my own). Then I did some VB tinkering after that. Java in high school. In university the floodgates opened. C# / Python / C / C++ / JS / HTML & CSS.

It's always been about creating something.
I think the difference is, in a suburb a kid can safely ride a bicycle. That's great, if your goal is to ride. If your goal is to go to somewhere specific (movie theater? soccer game? swimming pool?), kid probably needs a ride in a car, because those places aren't within biking distance for a kid.
Funny how many "self made" millionaires and billionaires, when you dig down to root cause, owe it to birth and family connections.
I started by borrowing my mom's login for the HP2000 at the local college when I was 9 (that's 1976). Amazingly, the college let me take Fortran and PL/I classes for real. Other than that, was self-taught through high school, then got a CS degree at CMU and paid attention to at least some of the classes.

As for why...what on earth is more fun than coding?!

(edit: I see there's an HP laptop called the HP 2000. I mean this one: http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=411)
Self taught. Started programming at the age of 7. It was a programming book designed for kids. It taught BASIC on the Commodore 64. I later went to learn assembly at age 11 because I was interested in video game development and assembly was the only way to get access to additional functionality / performance. Moved on to C and x86 Assembly in my early teenage years (again motivated by making video games). Moved more to general purpose / web technologies once the Internet started becoming more popular. PHP, Java, Rails, Node.
What they did? Yet another interface wrapper to Stanford Core NLP for over hyped chat bots?
A CS education maybe, a programming education probably not. A lot of it depends on how self-motivated and auto-didactic you are. I've taught CS at universities and programming as well.

I taught full time at a community college for half a decade in a vocational programming degree. I tried to slip as much useful theory into the courses as I could, but ultimately they were terminal voc-tech degrees like welding and auto mechanic that enabled the graduates to go to work at entry level developers at local employers (primarily state government).

I often wondered "what is it that we do here?" since everything I would teach was available online, and more, and better, and free! But many students just need someone to be there and guide them through things (this is why the online courses our department tried to do were a disaster). For a self motivated independent learner, they would no doubt go crazy in the on-the-rails structured courses.

For computer science, the science part, where you primarily investigate computational-related mathematics, I think a formal education from a university is invaluable. But only a small fraction of software development jobs (if that's what you want to do) need that level of rigor.
Fortran, early 1970s; dozens of other languages from books until 10y ago, thereafter from web
Same for me, had a TI-85 when I was 13 (which now I wish I hadn't sold, it's a collector's item! Never giving up my 89!) Friend and I wrote a Drug Wars clone and a bunch of math solvers. Then we got into websites in the same way. Also had an old Windows machine, on which I pored through every DOS man page (didn't turn onto *nix till way later).

Took AP CS in high school on a whim just for the credit and haven't looked back since, been at it for 18 years now. Thinking about a sabbatical though as of late.
Knockout is stall my goto, ember seems pretty similar to this. I still don't see what angular react bring to the table that isn't mush simpler with these tools.
Legally correct, but irrelevant. Defamation is not the only thing which is wrong, and there is also a wide gulf between "legally wrong" and "morally wrong".

I'll defend your right to make racist comments with one hand while I call you out for making them with the other.
U.S. Issues Rules of the Road for Self-Driving Vehicles
As a former Calgarian I feel obligated to provide an example of this:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Calgary,+AB,+Canada/@51.14...
Is your question about Computer Science or programming?
Self-Driving Car Guidelines Call for Information Sharing
U.S. may seek power to pre-approve self-driving car technology
I feel like most all of us (and especially those of us in the USA) have a fairly decent "trampoline" to fall back on. Most of us have enough skills to go out and get a decent job whenever we need to. Most of us can trade Netflix for side projects and the costs of starting out are so low that there is virtually no risk.

It's basically our duty to take that risk.
My dad and I used to build those Radio Shack kits where you could make a simple radio with a breadboard. This was probably when I was 5 or 6?

It was clear that I enjoyed that, and I enjoyed the old DOS games at the time, and my dad had a bit of an IS background at the time, so he encouraged me and together we did some BASIC programming together. I also eventually got one of those Lego Mindstorms kits as one of the other commenters mentioned when they came out, which probably would've been around age 7 or 8.

I just took off by myself after that. Playing around more with basic, eventually learning some basic frontend stuff so I could show off webpages to my friends, and then moving on to some Java after that.

It's been a passion ever since.
I'm another member of the TI-83 club. Shoutouts to the little L who made it all possible.

Initially I used it in math to avoid having to do the rote computations, but eventually I started building other stuff. I built a simple game that had you navigating an ASCII character to collect the pi while another ASCII character chased you. Frames would advance on input, sort of like a rogue-like.

Eventually I made a text-based RPG combat game, where you would select enemies to battle, and gain XP to increase your stats which would allow you to fight higher level enemies, etc. The final boss's selection code was '666' and he was orders of magnitude more difficult than the next-hardest enemy.

I also had a book about learning to program in C++, it was p bare bones and I didn't learn very much from it.
Thank you. I think I needed to hear that.
https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/

Just received an email the other day about the alpha.
U.S. Federal Auto Regulators Signal Backing for Self-Driving Vehicles
I'm pretty firmly in the "market urbanism" camp: I accept that people have different preferences, but please don't foist them on me. If you want to live in a suburb, fine: pay for it (all that infrastructure has a lot of costs associated with it), and stop trying to make things like corner stores or denser housing illegal.

http://marketurbanism.com/
Convert your blog into a Facebook messenger bot using RSS feed
I'd argue that this isn't especially "for beginners". I know I'm a special case, but you cover more concepts in 18 exercises than I cover in my entire first book (Learn Java the Hard Way; 58 exercises and 250 pages).

Maybe people who already know how to code in other languages but are just trying to Learn Python?
"I do remember constantly daydreaming, loosing things and forgetting to do my homework as a child."

Oh, you mean you were behaving like a child?

I don't have ADHD and I hate open spaces.
In Massachusetts both in suburb and city we have almost complete chaos.

I'm almost sure we do no have the "grid" nor "curvilinear" nor "cul-de-sac" (my house is older than all of those designs by ~130 years). What we have is streets that follow natural features (e.g. the Charles River).

The irony is Massachusetts despite its urban legend of having horrible drivers is one of the safest states to drive in [1] (there are many more references).

[1]: http://www.autoblog.com/2014/07/23/traffic-accident-death-od...
Can you back that up? The first link I found disputed your contention: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ne/omaha/crime/

According to this site, Omaha is 2x as violent per capita then the rest of the state.
> Repeat yourself. It's good for you, and makes you code faster.

Maintainable goes out the window...
Advertise on Google – # 1 Google Adwords Certified Partner – SA
And the number of Aurelia users is rapidly rising not only because it's new and shiny and easier to build complex web apps, but also because it's more natural and standards-compliant than frameworks such as Angular. A natural reaction to seeing what's missing or going down the wrong path (as in the case of Angular 2).
House panel looking into Reddit post about Clinton's email server
Genuine question: is that quote an example of this?

>Guanxi largely originates from the Chinese social philosophy of Confucianism, which stresses the importance of associating oneself with others in a hierarchical manner, in order to maintain social and economic order. Particularly, there is an emphasis on implicit mutual obligations, reciprocity, and trust, which are the foundations of guanxi and guanxi networks.

The "hierarchical" part seems to be crucially lacking in your example.

A good example imo of Guanxi networks in the West are College Alumni Networks, as well as the more recent but analogous Startup Accelerator Network. The "older/younger class" relationship makes these Hierarchical.
> I thought they were saying that culs-de-sac screwed up transportation networks, but now I don't know why.

I think there's some truth to that as well. Government roads in suburbs obviously drive down the population density and encourage the use of cars, which definitely makes mass transportation less viable.
Yeah, why not?

(Holy f* s*)
Build a facebook messenger Bot for your media publication in 2 minutes
My parents bought the family a ZX Spectrum, which came with a BASIC manual and a summary of machine code instructions. I was 12 years old and it was the 1980s and there wasn't anything better to do.
I would add to NOT practice DRY in your test cases/code. More often than not this will get you in trouble.
Could you elaborate on those encounters?
We have an epidemic of deeply flawed meta-analyses, says John Ioannidis
Affiliate links pretending to be a useful site. No "About Us" on the site and Whois information blocked by 3rd party service. So much web noise making a fast buck instead of producing a real product or service.
I've lived in a suburban setting most of my life until a few years. Sure, there are advantages, but all in all not worth it.

I've spend way more time doing stuff out of the house than what I would spend in my garage or extra large home office. And most of this stuff would not be possible or would be really hard if I lived further away, in an area with less pop. density.
I've tried teaching myself C at age 10-11 in order to do embark on creating a Heroes of Might and Magic clone with Incas, because. Never got besides the paper planning. Didn't have a computer yet then, had to time-share on my dad's from his office. Was getting in late to try things.

In high school I was extremely lucky to have an amazing teacher that taught us C++ by throwing away the standard state-provided manual (this was Romania) and using her own methods, problems and curricula.

Next, coding interactive visualisations kept me going (there were cool enough to attract attention of well, umm... girls. I was a teenager, mind you). My high school graduation project was a 3d engine coded up from scratch in actionscript.

I took a break for two years while studying architecture, but then discovered all the amazing things you can do with space, geometry, networks and code. I am still discovering new avenues. I'm am a fully licensed architect (read buildings, not software) yet I now find myself coding all the time.
Very excited to play with these new updates. They were much needed! It'll be nice to get rid of the duplicated logic between stacks. Also, comments!
The beatings and firebombing were by fellow Romas.
Back in 7th grade - about 5 years ago - I first found python. I had no idea what programming was, but i saw a game that I wanted to create and it said this is how.

I read the elusive documentation (to a 12 year old me, very elusive) word for word and just went with it.

At the time, I didnt't know what a compiler or an interpreter was so I just wrote it all down on paper and did the calculations/instructions in my head and wrote down the results. (I couldn't tell if I had an error or not)

After about 2-3 weeks, I quit. I couldn't understand anything really. I had no idea what a class was or what a method did. About a year later, I heard of minecraft and started playing that. I heard it was made with java so I went on youtube (which I recently found existed) and watched java game development tutorials.

Needless to say, it was hard and I didn't udnerstand anything. I didn't know java or anything.

After about 2 months or so of frustration, I found the official tutorial on oracle and started learning from that.
It was hard and I did not learn anything.

in 9th grade - 3 years ago - I took computer science as a math elective class. I learn java a bit slowly but I understand almost everything due to my past failed attemps giving me some foundation.

During the summer after 9th grade, I started learning python again. I got all the way up to classes and such and stopped because I couldn't understand OOP in python because noone could even begin to teach OOP with python. I felt inadequate so I temporary stopped (quit).

During 10th grade, I started to really learn java. I bought tons of books and used the official tutorial with various other websites, and after all of my hard work. I understand the basics of java.

Skip to now - 12th grade - I'm learning extensive OOP programming concepts with java and learn how to create GUI applications with awt and swing (holding off javafx for now).

I'm mostly self-taught despite going to classes for 2 years of computer science in highschool.

I just really want to say, through all of my 4-5 years of experience on and off of learning programming: If you don't understand something, come back to it later.
(2009) Media multitaskers pay mental price, Stanford study shows
Is there a good reason we can't implement the same system for other types of emissions, such as, say, CO2?
> And don't forget that even with the driving, everything takes less time.

What do you mean by "take less time"?

My experience doesn't bare that out, but we might be thinking about very different things.

For context: I live in a fairly residential area now, where I drive to get groceries or to get food. I used to live in San Francisco, where I had four grocery stores and a whole bunch of restaurants and bars within four block.
Seems very short on explanation. I believe that "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" (http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/thinkcspy/toc....) gives better explanation plus allows testing code in the browser.
I'm not really interested in serving as the adjudicator of racist comments.
You are downloading an application, arguably installing one temporarily too.

Is this that much more efficient than "apt-get install foo"?
These are the sample bots which get created using the platform

Example #1: Check out the bot that we created for the Disney YouTube channel here.
Bot Link: https://www.messenger.com/t/1773551439597171/

Example #2: A bot created to aggregate news Political News from BBC, Sports News from ESPN and Tech News from TechCrunch.
Bot Link: https://www.messenger.com/t/180877825654853/

Example #3: We used the RSS feeds of Times of India to create a sample News bot.
Bot Link: https://www.messenger.com/t/1772749859662311
A word of warning to the sleep deprived
You are right but it's not like the startup is not paying you anything. So it's not exactly the same odds of a lottery. Most startups pay from 100-125k and Google is not that far off from that range.
Read this blog to know more

https://blog.mindiq.in/build-a-bot-for-your-media-publicatio...
3 tactics I used to get 5,000 visitors to my startup in the first month