skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[College drop-out here]

TLDR: A degree is not completely relevant, but it gives you an edge.

Im my experience, a degree is not necessary, but demonstrating skills is harder than it sounds; a lot of interviewers at non-tech companies are not technical and rely on typical CS material for interviews (algorithms and the like). As a self-thought, I rarely paid attention to this sort of stuff (I started as a web developer) until I had a few interviews. Salary has an impact as well; even though Ive performed better than colleagues, my salary was ALWAYS lower.
Succeed is not just getting a job. I have not finished a bachelor. And I had no problem getting in jobs requiring a degree. But the future is unknown. Am I just a good cheap worker? How about career progress? How about when I'm 45 with less energy/interest and stuck in some low uninteresting position? Because although many companies relax on hiring they might not on promotion. I am definitely considering long term finishing my bachelor at least.
I'm not using the extension, it is the remote server that is redirecting to https, not the local browser.
I can't disagree with you there. In this context you're probably right 99% of the time
I think the situation today is different because the "bad" content can spread much more rapidly and broadly than it could before. Back in the day, you could judge the authority and value of the content you were getting because you knew the source, and sources that produced content which most people judged poorly couldn't spread their content much beyond a small group of core believers. But today this content spreads without clear links back to its source, which makes it hard to judge, and it spreads so widely and rapidly that there's no opportunity to discredit it before the next bit of content comes zooming by.

This "bad" content is coming from everywhere, too. Recently, most of the factually-inaccurate content has been coming from, or has been in support of, the alt-right. But in the past a lot came from the far-left as well, and there's always inflammatory agenda-driven propagandist content come from extremist groups of all types. Every group with an agenda to push can easily slide from fact-based content to exaggerated content to outright false content in an attempt to be heard, and that's much easier today than it ever used to be.

Education would help, but only if the sources of the content people are seeing can be identified and judged by them. I have an even more difficult solution: integrity, self-control, and professional restraint on the part of the content producers. I think we lost that when news became entertainment, and I have little hope that we'll ever get it back.
I've never been asked for GPA or transcripts (been graduated since 2012). YMMV, depends on where you apply I guess.
That's an anecdotal photo and an off-the-cuff rationale.

Here's data:

https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tec...

~50% Windows, 26% OSX, 22% Linux, for the average "developer-who-fills-a-survey-on-stackoverflow".

And I doubt anybody will argue that the masses of developers who don't frequent StackOverflow are less likely to run Windows.
> The people I know who do improve tend to stop looking and start doing (exercise, learning new things, etc.).

Ironically this probably isn't only because doing things brings happiness, but because more experience means more context, and more context means more understanding. The only way to gain a better understanding of your life is to have more types of experiences, sitting there and thinking about it within the framework of the experiences you've already had generally isn't that useful.

E.g. the best way to understand why a previous relationship didn't work out is to have more relationships.
Oracle and SQL Server ADO.NET drivers still don't work on .NET Core.
I think most young engineers are surprised to find that after they've navigated the hiring guantlet at BigCorp, they were never interviewing for a specific position to begin with. They were interviewing to be thrown into a pool of new hires.

When they show up for their first day of work, then they basically role the dice to determine whether you go to team A (interesting work) or team B (shit work).
Reflections on Susan Flower's Reflections
I guess that really depends on whether you define ñ and n as two seperate letters or the same letter with an accent of some kind
One of the much-downplayed things that degrees are more likely to indicate than personal projects is foundational knowledge. When you work exclusively on Wordpress sites, this is irrelevant. When you work on distributed systems or cryptography, then foundational knowledge gets pretty important.

It is completely possible for any person to learn foundational knowledge outside of a formal instructional setting. I personally know excellent developers who have done so. It's unquestionably possible. I firmly believe that given sufficient time and determination and help, it's possible for any person to learn any subject to any level.

It is, however, possibly true that not all people learn discrete mathematics, relational algebra, and computer architecture in an ideal manner when entirely self-directed. Or perhaps even all developers.
That's a whole lot of correlation without causation
But on the other hand, everyone assumed that because that's how MS and Amazon do it...
Yeah, unfortunately looking at your friends' pictures gets old pretty fast, and you're not gonna do that every hour of the day.

I'd be happy if a Facebook2 came around to only do what Facebook did, but I'm pretty sure no one would sign up since everyone is already on Facebook anyway.

These days I try only to connect to messenger, there I can keep in touch with friends without the "news feed" functionality.
DbUnit, JUnit extension for database tests
That's a gross simplification. It is used to shutdown opposing viewpoints, particularly on college campuses.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/what-it...
Its the Giraffe from Madagascar.

Maybe.
Need? no.

Do you need a good working knowledge of what a degree covers? Ideally yes, in practice only parts.

Do people with degrees come out "knowing" what they covered in their degree? often partially, bits are almost completely forgotten as the significance of concepts wasn't really understood till much later.... even if you got A's

But, ideally, if you go in to a degree, highly engage with the content, it gives you a structured approach to many ideas and is a great basis for many kinds of programming applications.

Can you get the same through being self taught? sure. Though I do see that people won't teach themselves things that don't seem relevant, perhaps some of the mathematical foundations, etc. Which they often don't directly need, but it does limit the brains innovations about possible ways to attack various problems (to be fair, this is the stuff some people with degrees tend to forget). Then, of course, some people teach themselves many things, beyond what a degree would give them.
Have you even read the article you're commenting under?
SENORITA is acceptable in the English-language Scrabble dictionary. Its other anagram is NOTARISE.
haha. that's an awesome cabin! :) never thought I would end up reading about your cabin project when I clicked on the link about Signal :D

good luck for v2. Hope to read about it on your page.
The democratic party is to the left of the GOP but to the right of anything else, including the American people.

I'm assuming you mean big-D Democratic Party. When you say American people, what do you mean? A majority? How much of one? What are you basing this on? Polls? If so, which ones? Something else?

I'm pushing a little because the statement seems to lack nuance, which is something I think we so desperately need in American political discourse.
The key here is "developer". A web developer can learn to write code for a pretty website. This only requires very basic knowledge and essentially no math is involved.

In contrast, an engineer or computer scientist capable of working as an applied mathematician definitely requires an advance degree. I laugh when webdevs call themselves engineers.
Rhetorical question: Am I the only one who did get a degree to actually learn stuff?

I was self-taught, had programmed as a job for 4 years but wanted to make a leap in my skills. Dedicating 5 years to just focus on learning stuff, practicing, all in a structured way (courses) was really, in hindsight, pretty amazing in terms of accelerating my learning. I did get an MSc in CS, but the main motivation was to learn stuff, not to get a degree on paper.

Disclaimer: EU-citizen. Studied in Sweden. No tuition fee.
Much as I dislike BuzzFeed's clickbait headlines and articles, they are using their considerable profits to fund serious journalism: https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investiga...
Why is it subtle, and not blatant? Regular people does not / will not notice things like that unless it's in-your-face obvious.
No. The letter referenced is from Senator Wyden to the Secretary of Homeland Security, and was delivered that same night. It contains a list of questions with a deadline for response, and states the Senator's intention to introduce legislation in the near future. It probably took a staffer less than an hour, and it will be received at DHS with more weight than all of our combined cynicism.
FWIW, jails have been a compliment in this context since the turn of the century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail

It's not what's being referred to here, but there's no weirdness in the language.
A lot of content is not from the sites you visit. Ads, often videos, things that your cdn hosts etc.

You can use css to draw anything on the screen. Inside the viewport of course. The garbled text us clever but otherwise it's just a typical scam to make you install Spyware.

Heck, majority of ad networks run these things. You have 5 viruses, download this thing.
IIRC, the article says that a whopping 56% of developers don't have a degree. Given that the majority of developers don't have a degree, I'm not sure I'd agree with saying " without one, your options are very limited". Maybe "somewhat limited"?

My anecdotal evidence, looking at both my own career and a lot of developers I've worked with over the past 17 years, is that having a degree, or not, isn't a big deal.
> Do you know a single person --regardless of religion-- who supports honor killing?

Presumably at the very least the people who are doing the honor killings support honor killings.
That's strange, none of my interviewers there had any objection to my using Python. This was a few years back; perhaps things have changed.
No, they don't. They do however need to invest a lot of time into learning and must be willing to for the remaining of their career. I don't have a degree and I have been at this for 15 years making above middle class wages for the past 10. I know many other developers in similar situations. The common factor is self motivation and the willingness to always learn.
Elon Musk started a space and a car company. I'd say nah you don't need the degree.
I love being able to use .NET Core on my GNU/Linux netbook, and I prefer .NET projects to Java ones, I just don't believe Fortune 500 customer will suddenly change to it.

They don't have any reason to switch to GNU/Linux VM instances instead of Windows ones, the infrastructure costs are a tiny portion of the overall project costs.
I don't really know what "smart" means, but, yes, I am very lucky in a lot of ways, some of which are hereditary.
It would be good to examine this assumption.

A ripe, and quite fair ground, might be the 2 recent Women's Marches.

- The (leftist) Women's March (for abortion, LGBT rights, etc.)

- The conservative Women's March for Life (against abortion)

Do we see equal amounts of slurs and vitriol at each march? One might examine the signs held by protesters, the videos taken, the violence that occurred.
For what it's worth, I'm not "deployed" here. And as I've said on this forum numerous times: we offer real, paid support for Google Cloud.
I've seen degrees actually set people up for failure, or not prepare them enough.. My brother went to school for 'interactive design/dev' and 2 years later hasn't found work.. they taught php/javascript -vanilla no frameworks, he learned css/html but no bootstrap. For basic web dev, I think if you're a go-getter and self-taught you're more likely to succeed than a college grad w/ the basic college curriculum.
Agreed. In addition, we know that pretty much every Central and South Asian influence (Buddhist or otherwise) certainly arrived in Japan and Korea via China and the Silk Road. Given this reality, it probably makes sense to point out that when we look at China's achievements in this period, Japan and Korea are extremely humbled. See their capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27an their second largest city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luoyang one major Buddhist monument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leshan_Giant_Buddha astrological maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunhuang_Star_Chart and general technological achievement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_of_the_... ...
Gotcha. I'm not sure I agree, but I understand :)
No, but it helps. Autodidacts are rare (possibly not on this site, but in general), and few people who haven't been to college even know what they don't know. Unfortunately a large proportion of college grads are equally clueless. College is a place where you can get an education, but nobody's going to insist, and neither degree nor GPA is any indication one way or another. What's worse, people who learned next-to-nothing in college don't even know that they don't know anything, and they can interview quite well. As the numerous HN threads about hiring and interviews attest, it's murderously difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.
We have several similar Zojirushi products at home (SM-KHE48BA) and I'm convinced that they violate the laws of physics somehow. I've never had a vacuum flask that works so well.
>In contrast, an engineer or computer scientist capable of working as an applied mathematician definitely requires an advance degree. I laugh when webdevs call themselves engineers.

Why would you think this? Do you think everyone who has a degree in CS understands algorithms, compilers, type theory, PL design, or operating systems at a deep level?

Why would it be impossible for a self taught dev to learn these things? I've been in the industry for over twelve years and have found no correlation between degrees and deep understanding of CS concepts. Some with degrees have it, some without... shrug
Thanks! This is my site :) At some point I'll take the time to make it more beginner-friendly and have a better landing page/etc. Any suggestions welcome :)
Continuing on to college back in 2000 was a big deal. A college education was the underpinning of the American dream, the promise is that it leads to a stable and steady job, which leads to stable payments of a house mortgage, which leads to a stable marriage, which leads to a family.

Then you die.

The promise was bolstered by the returning GIs of WW2 who took advantage of the GI Bill to go back to school. Every generation there after took to that prototyping.

Earn a degree, get a job, buy a house. Repeat.

But in 1996 a very curious thing happened.

The folks that commercialized the works of academics and scientists started to take off and get attention.

Thereafter the work in the industry started to outpace the output from academia.

You want to build a dot-com business? School wasn't going to teach you that. You have to go learn it yourself. You would be stupid to stay in school.

This held true so much that in the early 2000s, when the risk of NOT having a college degree made dropping out to pursue your tech dreams an actual proposition.

But we're flipped now.

In 2017, schooling has caught up. What's discussed in the latest industry is discussed in the class rooms. And not only caught up but been condensed to mere months. You want to build a website? It makes more sense to go to a technical school or college, participate in the college level entrepreneur safe space, or leverage networking.

You would be stupid to not have a college degree.

But now the high cost of college is more of a privilege than anything else.

Good luck.
UPS Tests Drone-Based Package Deliveries
This was probably supposed to be a comment on the Anagram article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696196
Usually the first question during the phone screen is "Do you know Quick Sort; What is its time complexity?". At that point it's a quick thank you and phone drop. I am in no mood to solve the formal equations of the time-complexity of quicksort on my cell-phone.
> Do you know a single person --regardless of religion-- who supports honor killing? Of course not. This is just an excuse to engage in fear mongering about Islam, and no good will come of that.

Bad logic, I don't know a single person who supports White Nationalism but that doesn't mean they are not there.

Also most honor killing isn't really a calm and rational following of a religious edict like "Today is Sabbath so I should go to Mosque" or "My daughter slept with a married man, looks like to keep my family's honor I need to kill her', rather it comes out as the same rage as when husbands who catch their wives cheating get when they kill them.

Also there is wide statistical proofs of support for Honor killings among Muslims, if I were you I wouldn't claim that there are literally no Muslims who support this.
> mandate that people aren't allowed to say these things

If you are rude or disrespectful to people at your job then you are negatively effecting your job performance and you will be fired due to that. This is anywhere. I haven't heard anyone (though there is probably someone out there, there always is) recommend jailing or otherwise punishing anyone beyond losing their job.
Oh please, just making 10% of the ads something educational would be so great :( I never understood why TV channels have all these dumb shows where they could make us learn so many interesting things.
I guess "it's good". With the traction they were having, I think they could have raised more money and stay independent. So I don't think it's "it got scooped up", but more Trello decided to sell to someone they liked.
There are some nice online book recommendations website. Most of the time I use Good Reads [0] or What Should I Read Next [1]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com

[1] http://whatshouldireadnext.com
The Barrelfish Operating System
You really think that the majority of failures on Steam and app stores are due to lack of basic algorithm performance knowledge?

A project can die a thousand deaths before performance becomes its death knell.
See Burkaman's answer.
Just the first hurdle though. It took me a year of serious effort to land my first dev job. The second one came to me: I was contacted by a recruiter and asked to interview and ended up accepting that offer about a year after starting in my first position.

I dropped out of high school ten years ago and did nothing of note between then and teaching myself to code.

Just stick with it until you land the first one and you'll be fine.
It could simply be a badly written bit of APL. Although I don't know APL, I have some experience with J and I think the `:while` construct used here suggest more or less literal translation of the Python code.
Isso: A Commenting Server Similar to Disqus
I'm not disagreeing with you, you may very well be correct.

The alternative, however, is that Senator Wyden simply "accepts defeat" and does nothing. That's not what I prefer.
Sorry, I should have been less flippant here.

That was the only prep I did for the interview. I was a senior software engineer at EA at the time, with about a decade of professional software experience.

I don't have much of an academic background, but I had written and shipped quite a lot of code by that point in time.

The cramming did help—several of the algorithms I read about were either new to me or I hadn't seen in ages—and some of them did come up on the interview. (I've also used almost everyone of them at my work at Google since, strangely enough.)

My point was just, if you are already a good enough engineer to be successful at Google but don't "interview well" because of whiteboard experience or algorithms it's pretty easy to shore up those two things. You don't need to spend a decade at a monastery meditating on Knuth.

If you're a decent coder, you've already done way harder things. Breaking down a big messy problem into pieces you can code and test is hard. Shipping applications is hard. Breadth-first search is not hard.
What about intercepting SSL decryption in the workplace with Fireeye and Palo Alto type devices?
Will you learn more in college than you otherwise would on your own? Probably, especially if you dedicate the same amount of effort in each.

Will having a college degree hurt your chances for getting a job? Not likely.

I'm a developer, and I have a post-grad EE degree in addition to undergrad CS. It's surprising to me how often the EE material and math is useful in my job.

I wouldn't tell anyone to go get a Masters in EE in order to be a good dev, but if you have a realistic option to get a degree without saddling yourself with crippling debt, get the degree.

It's likely to help and unlikely to hurt.
You are not alone in that thought.
I think that makes our profession pretty amazing rather than weird. Although, I don't think it's easy.
Want an energy efficient datacenter? Build it underwater
Understandable, but BuzzFeed's considerable profits from clickbait articles are being used to fund serious journalism: https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investiga...
Thanks, actually that is Apollo client, but the schema uses relay because that's what scaffold.io uses.
The reason for that is cities are becoming the core centers of production over time. As distributed production centers like factories become more and more automated, the social reactors of cities need to operate well for states to be successful.

That's no excuse for ignoring smaller towns but to be fair voters outside of cities have tilted hard toward Republican representation since the 80's. Should Democrats try to win them back? Yes, of course. Should they abandon their metropolitan base to do so? Depends on the party's goals. Should liberal policies be blamed for every shitty economic situation outside of cities? No, not when the representatives they vote for generally make life harder for them.

I also disagree when it comes to gerrymandering affecting state elections. Gerrymandered states are "brainwashed" by their representatives into voting for similar politicians. They assume everyone around them thinks a certain way because why else would Republicans (or Democrats) keep being elected? Obviously that party is better! They also implement voting restrictions, education policies, economic systems, etc. that benefit their parties. Lobbyists from industries that their parties support them in elections. The entire power infrastructure of that state is organized to promote the continued dominance of that party. It's a gross abuse of democracy.
> Detecting it as a security problem is moronic. In fact, I'd argue it's actually a security improvement

By definition a jailbroken device is vulnerable to something as that is how it was jailbroken in the first place. Having the most up to date version is usually the safest thing for a user.
I've had interviewers try to school me on something that I wasn't super well versed on, and my internal thought process was "If I wanted to learn the finer points of xsd, I'd go dig in on my own and learn it. Right now I'm not that interested in you teaching it to me."

Maybe not the healthiest attitude ...