skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently visited Berlin to research about the German Freelance Visa [1] after being rejected by multiple local startups that were looking for Software Engineers with +3 years of work experience. I asked for feedback to one of them and was told that I should not consider myself an "engineer" because I don't have an university degree in the field, even with +9 years of work experience. I asked more people about the topic and most of them agreed that I should call myself a Software Developer instead since I am self-taught. What do you think about it?

EDIT: To add a bit more, I don't mind the title, you always end up doing more or less the same things, many companies love the titles though. Some of my friends have titles like "Lead Developer", "Senior Software Engineer", "CTO", "Back-End Developer", etc and they all do pretty much the same thing that I do, so I don't see the point on nitpicking my resume. I will surely take the advice and start calling myself a "Software Developer" instead of "Software Engineer" because I agree that calling myself an engineer without a formal education is misleading.

[1] https://service.berlin.de/dienstleistung/305249/en/
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Profiling a Running JVM: tools you should know
Building Tic-Tac-Toe in a Google spreadsheet [video]
Engineers are people who hold engineering degrees. I'm not sure how it became otherwise.
i totally disagree with your view. Python 3 of today is fantastic and the community is fully behind it.

Yes there will be legacy code that will remain on python2 for ever, but this is normal.

I am personally loving the new features of python 3.6 in particular and would not want to look back.

Google has a lot of code in python2 they want to move to go. It would be bizarre to see anyone start a new project in python 2 because of grumpy.

Love the python community. The future is python3. Enjoy!
I was hoping for an erroneous "in" ;)
Have you ever tried a trackpoint? It seems like it'd be right up your alley.
What's the difference between 100 ARM CPUs @ 1 watt versus one Intel CPU @ 100 watt, except that you need a bigger data center for the ARMs?
It is hard not to be cynical about this, coming from an organisation that called the cops on Aaron Swartz and let the attorneys hound him to his death.
It looks like a belated PR exercise to ease their conscience or public image. If they at least named the prize after him, then it might come across as more genuine.
A must read, from Alan Kay himself: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...

"The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its
modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and
behaviors should be."
There'll be desktop-style GUI toolkits that render to webGL not long after webassembly starts seeing serious adoption, I'd guess.
I have a degree that says I'm an engineer, so I'll call myself an engineer thank you very much.
Why would the inverse of the United States be other countries or Americans?

Couldn't it just as well be fluffy cats, Saharan sand or an Aztec deity?
PyCharm Edu: Python IDE to Learn Programming Quickly and Efficiently
The Dangerous Safety of College
Title to me doesnt matter. I dont have degree either .Software arena moved to quick with lots of framework and new platform mobile. Most university will teach basic and some lecturer dont even understand what they teach at all.
True, but it's more likely to happen in an OOP setting. Especially if functions are not first class objects. Then you start wrapping things in classes and turning them into methods when you otherwise wouldn't, and that's how you eventually go down the road of FactoryFactoryFactoryFactories if you're not careful.
Where I'm from, you can't call yourself an "Engineer" without holding an engineering degree...
How recurrent attention forms short-term memories
While I don't much like software developers calling themselves engineers either, it was hard not to read this and think that about a week ago I was reading all about a dam that seemed poised to fail and thousands of people had to be evacuated; or about a miracle of engineering, a skyscraper in SF that appears to be sinking (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/us/san-francisco-millenni... or, oh, here's an entire Wikipedia page just for structural collapses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_structural_failures_an...

My point, if I have one, is that Ashley Madison getting hacked (specifically mentioned in the article) was a pretty embarrassing calamity, sure, but I don't think anyone died as a result of a lack of proper collaboration and regulation in software development.
Engineers are people who build and operate engines. I'm not sure how it became otherwise.
> But sharing digital content with your own intended audience could be achieved in a distributed manner.

We almost have the tools now:

* cheap or free blog hosting with easy markup and non-public posts

* self-hosted commenting with a URL field for commenters, enabling discoverability

* friendly RSS readers (I use NetNewsWire)

* password management built into most systems and/or browsers, to keep track of individual logins

There's work to be done to make it more user-friendly, but all the tools are there.
The web needs more anarchy, not less. Less spoon-feeding people with the truth, let them bear the brunt of their failures. All the problems he mentions are political, stemming from too much power in governments which makes political candidates ruthless.
But the law only works with companies.

The Internet as whole never forgets
Computers are people who add together table of math facts to be used in artillery calculations. Not sure how it became otherwise.
They're basically completely separate projects at this point.
I don't see how you can say you're a Software Engineer when you don't have a national accreditation or standards body and peer review processes. Backed by research studies via Empirical evidence.

Electronic Engineer, Aircraft Engineer, ect... Have more standards and accreditation backing them up.

In other words half the fun is trying to figure out what they want.
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Funny, I tend to go the opposite way (immutable value types, stateful-as-needed behavior classes). I wonder how you argue that you have less stateful objects considering data objects are usually instantiated more than logic objects?
Two seconds of Googling would have led you to this:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140...

Which I'm sure you'll find credible since it's a left-leaning source.
Check out the classic Andy Grove "High Output Management"
https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/d...

And Google's work with OKRs is a good practical model to follow. Also, humans being human, I find that my programmers like using practices that Google follows/pioneered. If you start using OKRs milk that "we're gonna do what Google does" mantra as a way to get buy in. https://library.gv.com/how-google-sets-goals-okrs-a1f69b0b72...
Maybe degrees became less relevant (and even less feasible) for the burgeoning engineering practices. That is, assuming you buy into software as an engineering practice.
My engineering school deliver engineers diploma certified by the Engineering Titles Commission, which is the only thing in France able to allow a school to make engineers out of its students. Thank you goodbye, do not make generalizations from how it is in your country.
GC does have unavoidable overhead, in particular, it makes the execution times of your binary extremely unstable and high-variance. Not to mention, it has no idea how your program uses memory, such that it is bound to use a generic approach while with manual management, you can get real and high performance.
My title says Senior Software Engineer. I didn't choose it. In fact it said Lead Software Engineer in my offer letter but a reorganization changed a lot of people's title to be more generic. I don't get to choose my title. I have always considered myself a programmer but what my employer calls me is their business.
I call myself a Software Engineer specifically because I see it as different to being a programmer. I don't just write code, I try to solve problems in a rigorous and maintainable way, while being aware of the wider implications of my work to the business, our customers, and anyone else who might be affected by it. Sure we don't have the same regulation as civil engineers, but I try to do my work in the same spirit.

As part of this, I have a "masters of engineering" in computer science, which again, while not the same as civil engineers, still had a lot more wider study than a standard computer science degree.

I think programmers should do more engineering, and I think they should be recognised as engineers when they do.
Convertible and SAFE notes
How about trying pypy? It has different GC/memory allocator and the 2.7-compatible branch is pretty much drop-in replacement (Unless you need something like PyQt).
https://www.reddit.com/r/gatekeeping/
That undotree plugin looks sweet! Do I understand correctly that if I do N undos, then fat-finger an edit instead of a yank, I can still get back to where I was before the N undos? This would solve my only big gripe with vim's undo.

(Well, the other big gripe is that when I'm forced to use a program with crippled undo, e.g. any Microsoft product ever, I'm frustrated up the wall. The worst-in-class award goes to Word with Endnote, where many Endnote commands wipe your entire undo history. How people can use that on a permanent basis is beyond me.)
H-1B Visa Petitions Exploratory Data Analysis
This is what you can find on the wikipedia entry on engineers [0]:

> The foundation education of an engineer is typically a 4-year bachelor's degree or in some countries, a master's degree in an engineering discipline..

I would add further that, following the above, a software engineer is someone who has a formal higher education in engineering applied to the design and implementation of software systems. Under these definitions, a developer without formal university education is not a software engineer, although he may be technical competent to design and implement software systems. In a nutshell, the difference is not on "competence" or "skills" but the lack of formal education..

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer
There's people here claiming that the problem is OOP done wrong. Let's talk about stuff that pretty much every OO language shares:

* syntax that favours inheritance over composition
* inability to specify polymorphism over two input types
* inability to specify polymorphism over return type
(Both of these are symptoms of close identification of type and table)
* Syntax that makes generics unwieldy to the point that many think they're just for collections
* Inability to make third-party types expose your own interfaces (Clojure manages this. Some languages manage this through monkey-patching, but that's a cure worse than the disease.)

OO is broken. The biggest problem is that we're all so invested in it we have trouble seeing there's another way.
1: there exists argument against X

2: lots of humans don't believe X

Maybe there is a third kind of "discredited."
- If you do primarily do work that involves making decisions about data structures and algorithms, then you might be an engineer.

- If you primarily do the work of figuring out how to make business processes scale using software (and then implementing those ideas) then you might be a developer.

- If you primarily implement tickets then you might be a programmer or coder.

The idea of calling everyone who writes software an engineer is ridiculous, but so is the idea of saying that no one who writes software is an engineer.
Thanks, that's a good message. In this case, though, the original article came from AP News, so I don't think there's anything wrong with reading it there.
I only call software developers "engineers" when they are in the upper echelon of skill level
And yet, it's what a search engine is supposed to do: link you to someone else's site.
I'm going to plug my dispswitch program (https://github.com/tom-seddon/dispswitch - Windows only. You run it from a hotkey manager such as AutoHotKey). It does a better job of preserving monitor-relative size and position when you've got monitors with work rects of different sizes.

For tiling windows, try align_window3 (https://github.com/tom-seddon/align_window3 - again, it's for Windows, and use AutoHotKey). It gives you more portrait-friendly options than the Windows default stuff.
Intel to mislead press on Xpoint next week
I doubt it. I think the opposite will happen: JS will become the defacto UI language for web, mobile, and desktop.

The ongoing effort to improve the language has hit some stumbling blocks and made some outright mistakes, but overall has improved the language significantly.

Competitors like Elm and Dart are certainly compelling, but I don't think they have enough weight to entice UI platforms to converge.

The major players seem to agree that incremental improvements are easier than getting a huge amount of diverse vendors to converge on an entirely new/different platform.
Yes, German companies love their degrees...

I work as a Freelancer too and all the German contract jobs 'require' a degree 'or similar experience'.

In the end, explaining 'similar experience' is a struggle.

You even have to pay less taxes if you do 'consulting of higher value' as a freelancer (called freiberufler status) but explaining this without a degree is a struggle too.

In the end I'm happy about my B.Sc. in Computer Science. When I tell people I have it, I get no more questions asked...
Struggling with Japan’s Nuclear Waste, Six Years After Disaster
I could argue that sometimes you won't find anything interesting, but that's probably interesting, defeating my example.
9 Keys to Measuring Your Social Media Campaign ROI
Just to address a few comments, I meant it's hard to beat the market i.e. have your investments grow faster than the benchmark index. That's a different matter than 'growing rich' or 'doing well'. Sure, you can and in fact, after burning my fingers, all my investments are in index funds too.

But, my point referred to the original comment that the system isn't rigged. There's a high probability it is and because of how capital and information flows work, there's a select few who will benefit instead of a wider majority.
You could probably also do something similar to the article, providing your document is XML-valid, using XSLT. This would keep the advantage that you just load your document in a browser (having added a temporary stylesheet link either manually or dynamically) but would support more powerful validation. It could be made into a browser extension so you're just a one-click away from validation with in-page feedback.
Practice Problems Recommender (Competitive Programming)
It's the Atlantic, of course they will take about the U.S. unless eplicitly mentioned otherwise.

Is the French software engineering diploma as rigorous as other engineering diplomas?
Having been a programmer before OO was invented (or at least available to all) I would have to say no. Was LISP a failure since generations of descendent languages have replaced it? Was Fortran a failure because I don't write iOS apps in it today? Of course not, all of these things are tools you can choose to use or not. Whether something is a failure is up to the programmer and how you wield them. If there was one single language/framework/concept/idea/tool that was perfect we'd all use it - there isn't so we pick something and make use of it.
http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com

Specialized in compressive sensing, matrix factorization and machine learning.

Don't let the blue color put you of, the author reads and reviews an unbelievable amount of research every week and maintains a huge repository of papers, implementations, talks and video's.
Engineers have a way of falling on their swords when they #$%^ up that (at least in my experience) tech bros don't...

http://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article42065382.html
I have a degree that says I'm an scientists, do I have to call myself a Software Scientist now? :D
It's almost the same in Quebec and I believe everywhere in Canada. Thanks for making this point clear!
Should I consider buying dash coins
Hearing a lot about dash coins.
Has anyone bought any/considering buying any soon?
Unfortunately my browser won't run The Atlantic's malware so I can't read the article.
What about failures in medical software, airplane safety software, or military software?
There are a number of well known software bugs that killed people. For example the Therac-25 is mentioned in every software engineering course.
They've also done some interesting research on I/O scheduling and storage in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WqOLolj5EU. They seem to frequently present at BSD conferences and I think are genuinely interested in advancing FreeBSD from what I can see.
Indeed, but what is more disappointing are the high-skilled, well-informed people who believe these things. In particular that "functional" is automatically equivalent to "better quality code".

It's dogma either way. There is no single true religion just advantages and disadvantages
There are laws for everything :D
A simple web app to help small projects get up to speed (no account/download)
This misses the point that all other types of engineering are regulated and licensed.
In Poland at least you have Physics and Math that you have to pass like on other engineering fields.

And you have to create thesis work that you have to defend in front of jury to get your degree.

I'd expect it would be similar in France.
...or at least ignores it without a reason.
To say that an argument is discredited usually implies that there's a clear balance of expert opinion against it.

That's not really the case with the cosmological argument, or with the (similar but not identical) argument given by Aristotle for an unmoved mover.
OTOH, it allows public authorities to bypass these regulations for "criminal purposes" and does not define any absolute safe haven rights from that.
For what it's worth, in Germany the title of Engineer is regulated and the correct term for those who write software (which goes in the contract) is "Software Entwickler" (Entwicklung means "development"). There's a few more complications here that I don't know very well.

I don't completely agree with this because serious engineering work on software happens in many industries. But most software jobs clearly do not fit the description nor the implied seriousness of an engineering role.

Other things that grind my gears:

1. The way the "Data Scientist" title is casually thrown around for those who are neither scientists nor know statistics. Everyone has a different idea of what the term means and (worst of all) feel that it probably applies to them.

2. "Tech" is a contraction for technology but people in the software industry (especially Americans) seem to use the term solely for Software.
> It's not an assumption that it must, it's a recognition that very likely, it will.

To add to everything you just said, the NLRA sets very rigid rules regarding how unions can form and how employees and employers can interact with them. So you can't just charter it however you want and assume all the problems are solved - the NLRA imposes a number of requirements and protections for the union (not the members, but the union itself as a corporate structure) which way be at odds with the employees.

As a result, once a union forms, it's very difficult (practically) for its members to deunionize, even if a majority of the membership opposes the union representing them.

So people are very hesitant to go down a road which is essentially seen as a one-way street, except as a last resort.
I read Gruber. I like Gruber. But I think he is sometimes not critical enough of Apple.

But he is much better than people like Rene Ritchie. I simply cannot read anything he writes.
Berners-Lee seems to want to stay relevant, I mean he invented the web but does that give credibility to his announcments and concerns and predictions now? I mean we all know how the semantic web turned out.
This doesn't really fit as the discpline of Engineering was generally licensed and regulated where, in many countries, you could only call yourself an Engineer if you adheered to certain standards and got the respective diploma/license. Gatekeeping (in the pejorative sense) is about not clearly defined groups that members want to make exclusive against certain people/groups, e.g. being a fan of something ("you are only a true fan if you can name the last five albums in chronological order")

When you compare the rigour (esp. in testing) of nomrla engineering disciplines and software engineering, you should be able to spot a difference
if you do work that's considered engineering, how can you not be an engineer?

A fancy degree doesn't dictate what type of work you do.
Just my two cents :)
Many schools in the US also require physics and math for a CS degree. It's not the degree that's at issue, it's professional licensing and regulations.
>I don't think anyone died as a result of a lack of proper collaboration and regulation in software development.

Come work in healthcare, you may change your mind.

In healthcare, a lack of domain expertise, rigor, collaboration, and regulation kills people every day. And inhibits our science. And is the root cause of billions a week in waste.

Yes, most web content and it's delivery we could do well, or be better off, without. But in many jobs, the software constrains or enables behaviors that have real consequences.
Palo Alto Real Esate vs. Everywhere Else
There's a real risk of storytelling with 'why'. You can construct a narrative that explains anything - this is probably the primary thing our consciousness does when communicating to other people - but there's no necessary relationship between the story and the world, and humans are great at believing the stories they tell themselves.

Interesting events outside of abstract, simplified, theoretical scenarios normally have multiple probabilistic causes, and while the causes could be analyzed at multiple levels - atomic, mechanical, emotional, symbolic - only the atomic is real. The others are complex webs of stories we tell ourselves, stories using symbols that hide details because we cannot understand the world as it is, we can only cope with it in a simplified form. Only as a story.

Our choice of symbols and abstraction level to tell our story creates artificial entities and forces to explain things. But the boundaries of these entities are a fiction. The world has no ontology; it's a giant bucket of interacting particles. The problem with getting serious with this kind of a principle is that it will break down. When you try and zoom in on the referents of the symbols, you'll find that they're a lot blurrier than your stories told you.
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