skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Ehhhh, it is possible to learn just about anything on your own if you are
interested enough.

Not really. There are several fields that have two types of learning material
available: most basic and trivial stuff only good for showing off at parties
and academic books and papers, too difficult to learn from without guidance.
Unless "interested enough" means "you're ready to put in enormous effort".

> I have a coworker who didn't go to college but who has been working through those little yellow Springer-Verlag math books for fun for 30 years

Of course there are exceptions. Who do you think developed all these fields
if not untrained researchers?
I'd say the best developers are self taught and by that I mean autodidacts. Those few courses in college are great but if you don't keep "schooling yourself" you won't ever be very good.

Something I do think is great about formal education is that you are forced to metaphorically, "eat your vegetables" i.e. learn some fundamental things that aren't interesting or aren't as interesting as some other things you would study if it wasn't for a test.
stop exposing functions ment to run in private networks (LAN) to the internet. please make stuff secure by default.
The search bar at the bottom of news.ycombinator.com also takes you to that site.
The plaintiff pays costs in these cases (filing fees, motion fees, etc) and, if it gets thrown out (most likely, as it would be considered frivolous)/you win, you owe nothing. It's really a stupid action for a company to try and take.
> largely unemployable

FWIW, the math major graduates at the college where I teach, to my knowledge, have never had serious trouble getting employment.
how much do you think it would cost Microsoft to support XP forever?
An interesting take on that:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/24/xerox_parc_an...
it detracts from the conversation, and meaningful responses (ie why did the classifier classify it as blockchain?)
I want to make it clear:

Automation is good for everybody if we rethink our assumption that wages are the best way to get everyone money to live on.

Many capitalists however are religiously attached to that idea.
Yes, except those two ideas are strikingly compatible :)
They didn't leave Xp users out to dry. Remember those forced free windows 10 updates they pushed out?

The xp support schedule was available from day one. These companies knew exactly what they were getting into. Microsoft even extended the support period for xp on several occasions. It's galling that we as software professionals see this as malfeasance by the entities running xp still. They've had close to a decade to upgrade. Software is not a durable asset, it comes with an expiration date on the box.

This isn't just about security patches there are pieces of xp that fundamentally insecure, which is partially Microsoft's fault, but on the other hand the driver model which is one of the weakest parts of xp is the thing that kept many of these companies from upgrading.
Pretty sure this is a highly targeted piece of PR designed to shift the blame from Microsofts appallingly poor operating system design especially when it comes to security. Are the NSA a deceptive, anti-humanist organisation that performs atrocious acts against people - yes - I absolutely believe so and they play a HUGE part in this, but Microsoft - they are the irresponsible software vendor here and do they reimburse people that have PAID for their software? No.
Any chance you've got a source on that? Most everything I've read said Win10 was protected since March.

Edit: I'm dumb, misread the above comment as saying "Win10 was affected even with the patch in March."
If you look at cybersecpolitics, a blog written by a former NSA, he specifically says the "we hacked into a server box" story for how these tools got leaked is implausible.
As a self taught guitar/piano player, programmer, and investment trader I couldn't agree more. I learnt by reading and playing/coding/investing as much as I could when I could.

As to how to get a job as a self taught anything? Being persistent.
A friend of mine has a weighted blanket, and it's been a godsend for her anxiety. But she's autistic. Temple Grandin wrote quite a lot about the therapeutic value of pressure for autistic people, but I haven't heard of it for neurotypicals before.
Or FeedTheBeast
Advantages for whom? If a growing number of people live in poverty, perhaps they should have a say in how society is run?
>I just don't believe there's some cliff of automation effectiveness where it goes from a good thing to a bad thing. Greater productivity always means making more for less.

Only if we think if only in first-order effects. But there are always second and third order effects.

Environmental costs is one of these.

The desirability (from a societal standpoint) of having more of X (whatever X is, e.g. cheaper more plenty fast food for a controversial example) is also another matter.

The impact of the jobs that replaced the deprecated ones is another issue (a third order effect).

And lots of other considerations...
>ShellShock - Heartbleed - etc

How many systems where actually compromised in an unrecoverable manner costing thousands or millions, maybe even billions of damage due to any of those Vulnerabilities?

All of them combined to not even come close to the damage that occured over the weekend

Shellshock, heartbleed were a inconvenience for some sysadmins and click bait for the tech press
It would be naively optimistic to think the FCC is going to just remove the spam from their counts willingly. At best they may remove from their counts any cases where someone's name was confirmed to have been used fraudulently. But how many of those 440,000 comments would that end up happening for?

Unless the FCC fears public backlash, I think they're going to aggressively exercise plausible deniability on the spam counts, and push through their agenda using those counts as justification.
They do support XP, they just charge a king's ransom for it. Thanks to Microsoft's policies, XP is also a kind of ransomware.
New versions of Windows also work slower (especially on old hardware), require more disk storage, contain spyware (telemetry) and advertisement that user cannot disable. And contain no new useful features. No wonder people don't want to upgrade. I think Microsoft should have stopped developing new OS with Windows 7 and release only security and bug fixes.
While there are more than 100 million users of it they should continue to supply security updates for it. Otherwise a widespread virus like this is 100% inevitable.
Well, you can do all that until you cannot anymore. The systems are designed in such a way that Google only has to flip a switch, and all Chromebook securely turn into bricks (presumably only the ones that haven't had developer mode enabled).

On top of that, Chromebooks are mostly used in an education environment where they are in fact locked down to Chrome OS for specific email address domains. Then the domain administrator can conveniently switch it into a brick.
Let's be clear on this. No matter how secure the operating system initially, if it stays unpatched then over time it will become more and more vulnerable as uncovered exploits go unfixed.

The reason a machine might go unpatched is because it might support some critical hardware (eg medical) for which there is only one or two vendors and only a particular combination of HW and SW are supported (eg due to a specific custom hardware driver).

To lay the blame for this at a single vendor's feet is naive.
a) telemetry

b) I'm worried my fairly nicely working Win7 environment will not work so well after updating to 10, as much as I want to get current with some genuinely useful features.

I'm generally a Microsoft "fan", but this is one of the many reasons I hate on them as much as Linux fans.
We use TinyPulse to keep team / upward feedback regular (weekly basis). I've also found that co-locating as much as possible is very effective to build a culture of natural flowing 1-1 feedback... strong relationships have always been better than any app I've used.
I don't entirely like this picture of self-taught developer. A self-taught developer should teach themselves necessary theory as well, not just build things. Otherwise one will be biased towards learning only the things that are fun or easy (theory is seldom fun) - and there will be gaps.
Yep, too many companies still use the Ring Fence approach to security, in a day where Mobile Devices and laptops are moving all the time this is very very very bad.

All it takes is one infected machine to get behind the permitter defenses and it is game over.
The Bing search engine is about as bad.

A close friend used IE to get Google Chrome. They clicked the first result and luckily I was able to stop them before starting the install on some crapware.

So I asked them to be careful to ensure the download site is correct and left them to it.

I came back to find they had downloaded some other crapware.

I checked the search results. The ENTIRE first one and a half page of results were advertisements for versions of crapware which may or may not have been Chromium or Chrome lookalikes with lots of malware.
There is definitely software made for one version of Windows that won't run on another, regardless of bit count. Not a lot of it, but it's there.

In my experience, industrial software is often pretty poorly designed, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's more common in a hospital environment.
When I type "the power of context" into Google, the front page is dominated by Malcom Gladwell and your essay is absent, sadly.

Fortunately, it looks like the PDF is now linked from the talk: https://www.dropbox.com/s/knngq11tzdi0tdh/Alan%20Kay%20-%20T...
(Badger author) We have tried huge prefetch size, using one Goroutine for each key; hence 100K concurrent goroutines doing value prefetching. But, in practice, throughput stabilizes after a very small number of goroutines (like 10). I suspect it's the SSD read latency that's causing range iteration to be slow; unless we're dealing with some slowness inherent to Go. A good way to test it out would be to write fio in Go, simulate async behavior using Goroutines, and see if you can achieve the same throughput.

If one would like to contribute to Badger, happy to help someone dig deeper in this direction.
Just because the media (including Microsoft) tagged those projects (that were maintained by small groups of core develops and are free (unpaid) software) with fancy names - those problems weren't anything like the massive, global impact of just one of Microsoft's ticking timebombs due to poor software design and lack of emphasis on security in their products. OpenSSL doesn't and didn't have the PR powerhouse of Microsoft and people didn't pay for their software let alone fund its development.
I agree even though there are several ways, having a portedolio is the best.

The first method I personally used was to work for the guy one week with ludicrously low pay. He said yes at 7$/h, but I would have gone down even more. This kick started my carrier enough to not worry about searching for jobs anymore.

Second method I employed to get to the place I wanted to be was to build something that would impress them and publish it. It took 2 years and it worked.

This is all anecdotal but it worked for me.
I think the lesson is to have less uniform, opaque bloatware controlled by disinterested parties whether through proprietary technologies, walled gardens, OR paternalistic update policies. Have some diversity in the network, let people really know and choose what they want on and off, and have the minimum of what is needed for the job turned on by that endowed choice, and half of these problems go away.
You mean Naive Bayes? Because it can't account for interactions between the effects of multiple words.
There is a frustration among developers, I guess. But are there really a significant number of overqualified developers stuck in underpaid jobs? If so, is it because they undervalue themselves, or because there are too few employers willing to pay a lot of money? It seems if there were many employers willing to pay a lot for great developers, at least some of them would be able to recognize a given candidate? (Meaning, suppose there was an undervalued developer and he/she would apply to 100 companies, would none of the 100 recognize the greatness of the developer?)
Are you sure this is enough? At least on WinXp, port 445 is opened by a kernel driver and is still opened after stopping the SMB service.
Virtual reality meets Tibetan Buddhism
IMHO, best approach is to use a (hypothetical) system where all apps are sandboxed by default.
I always negotiate. Not a redlined version, but I make a list of points I have questions about or disagree with, and call them to discuss it. If they won't budge, I look elsewhere.

Of course I have the advantage of living in a place where there's plenty of work. If jobs are scarce where you live, that significantly changes the labour market.
Indeed. Little icons inside the square can also be imitated by ads and do something quite different.
Does it mean anything "written natively"?
well, that has already happened. While Qualcomm is widely credited for creating the early wireless standards (eg, CDMA) single-handedly, their customers like Samsung and LG for instance stepped up their R&D and have contributed significantly to the recent 4G standard -- so much so they are now neck and neck in terms of patent counts.

In spite of this, under their contract with Qualcomm, Samsung has limited ability to market and sell their own basebands/APs in the US.
There's a big argument for only releasing evergreen style software, and giving the middle finger to IT orgs that want more control
Is Spanner free/open source software? Can we look at the code?
From the article: "Airbus says automation has improved safety significantly, giving pilots more support, alerting them to abnormal situations and enabling more precise flying. "Control of the aircraft remains and will remain at all times in the hands of the crew who are the last safety net," a spokesman says. "The Airbus design philosophy is that pilots should be able to take over at all times, as the crew did with QF72."

Either the article is wrong on some crucial facts about the event, or the Airbus spokesman's statement quoted above is a complacent, self-serving and presumably deliberate misrepresentation of what happened. If the article is to be believed, the rogue system prevented the pilots from making command inputs, and only stopped doing so because it crashed before the airplane did.
I'm generally much in favor of holding vendors accountable when they abandon users, but Microsoft always had clearly communicated timelines for support, and in the case of XP even extended them later (due to Vista being crap). Windows 7 was out for 5 years or so when XP supported ended, as everyone knew beforehand. It's known you wont get support, it's known Windows XP is going to have security issues, what do you expect to happen when you don't take appropriate measures?(options include: replacing it, increased network isolation, virtualization, ..., depending on why you're still running it. Even just a really good backup strategy makes a difference right now).

Customers like this is why we now have Windows 10 where you're force-fed updates and the OS will change under you instead of the change being an upgrade to a new major version that you can delay for years. (Which I'm not happy about, but I can see its benefits on that scale)

The best argument for Microsoft doing wrong here might be that they limit their (expensive) super-extended support to large organizations. Since they do the work, keeping a few boxes with special hardware patched should be an option for smaller shops as well (and is IMHO easier to defend than keeping a large network full of XP desktops running because ?)
I always had auto updates turned on until Windows' malicious behaviors in recent years:

https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2015/09/11/microsoft-is-aut...

This one consumes me several gigabytes on my C drive without my permission.

https://www.tenforums.com/windows-updates-activation/55185-w...

This one acts like malware.

And this one: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3039827/windows/7-ways-window...

I don't know why I'd choose a operating system does that.

It pushed some telemetry updates, which arouses some privacy concerns (only after Microsoft's aggressive attitudes about Windows 10 promotion, before that I was OK with its telemetry updates. I'm aware sometimes telemetry tracking means good.)

And much more.

All of these behaviors make me think that I'd rather lose my data than suffer from these "features".
Invalidating the whole contract is not good. You still want to get paid and get all the other benefits from the contract.
Answering the HN title, as a self-taught developer, I did some full-stack web development work (pro bono) for a small company and built my reputation up there over 2-3 months. From there that company introduced me to a staffing agency which has placed me in interviews with above-market offers (starting my next project through them soon!)

I have had no recruiters or clients question my lack of formal education (I'm 2 history classes away from an associates) except for a health care organization who's insurer required their workers (direct-hire/contractor) have a degree by their definition of being HIPPA compliant.

I've built relationships up over time and have proven myself to others that I can deliver and solve technical problems - really, they're sponsors... I mean, isn't that all a degree is, someone trusted saying you can do something?
Works great on Android too.
Sure, Sam Altman is impressive, but seems like you are underplaying Brown's actual experience--and I am not sure why it'd comparable anyway?

As the son of a beloved governor, Brown not only grew up in state politics, but also devoted his career to law & government. After winning a few Democratic party elections, he ran for & served on LA Community College Board (which had just been created...coincidentally, his father actually created the UC system when he was governor) & then ran for & won the statewide office that would best prepare him to serve as governor.

Altman has no law degree or legislative experience, no background or education in government, and has never run for office. Founding a company and running an incubator is fantastic, but not sure why it'd be comparable to the legal, government or legislative experience Brown had when he first ran for governor.
Maybe they should not have connected all of the computers across the country into a single network.
And the thing your example doesn't consider is that in human societies wealth is relative. We don't think a family living in a trailer is doing great just because the average house in 1860 used to be worse and have less amenities (no electricity for one).

Hence, it's not the volume of the slice one gets that matters but its relation to the overall size of the pie (e.g. whether your share grew, not whether the slice grew).

And the situation we have is that while the pie is getting larger, the common people's slices are getting either only slightly larger (not as much as the change in the pie size), and they need to work a lot than they did in the 50s and 60s to get a basic slice.

In other words, the society produces e.g. 2x or even 10x more wealth, but they only get, say, 2x larger share of that or worse, despite working harder than ever.
The NSA did not cause this particular problem. The NSA may have identified the vulnerability, however there is certainly an argument that their other responsibilities outweigh any responsibility that they might have to act as a free security investigation team and report a security vulnerability to an outside corporation.

If Russian government intelligence agency security researchers found that bug first would you say that they have a responsibility to disclose it to Microsoft (notably a United States company)? Would you be surprised if they felt and acted differently?
Why not use Linux or MacOS?
Reddit has been used to point to C&C servers in the past[0], so I wouldn't be surprised if some malware does send commands directly via Reddit.

[0] https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/iworm-botnet-uses-r...
That's what the lawsuit is to determine.

I'm guessing Qualcomm will lose.
Rebuilding HN in some fashion if a yearly thing. I rebuilt it nearly 5 years ago, and even then people told me it's a yearly occurrence haha.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4376184
You can still ace the theory.. plenty of online courses that emphasize the fundamentals... without a degree you will trade at a discount at first. But that's moneyball. Plenty of companies will hire you if you know your stuff. lots of levels to this. Don't sweat the small stuff. Work hard, learn, apply. Know your algorithms and data structures.
Consider a Dell Optiplex FX160 Instead of a Raspberry Pi
Sounds reasonable, thanks for replying!
Yeah I tend to be pretty meticulous about this too, but it takes a large amount of effort and there's no incentive for most people to do it unfortunately.

I've been writing Makefiles too, but I don't feel like I can explain with a straight face to others that they should do it too...
There's a lot of blame being thrown around, and I think it's all merited, but an inordinate amount needs to be on the users. I don't know how many times I've heard things like: "I don't think I'll update to Windows 10" or "That update has been nagging me for months" or even security advocates saying "Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare, I'll stay on 7". Being on the latest secure upstream isn't a nicety, it's what you have to do if you want any semblance of a secure environment. If you don't like upstream, jump to another.

It's definitely not end-users either. There's a grocery store that just went up nearby that I saw Windows XP splash screen on when one of the cashiers rebooted. No joke, new store, Windows XP computers that handle money. Microsoft may have cultivated this nightmare, but it seems everyone wants to live in it.
Try etsy, there are a lot of small shops on there that make weighted blankets with all kinds of fabrics and sizes.
Nearly 20 years in now as a self-taught developer.. and I agree with most of what the post says. I would just add that a young person should continually keep trying to get a job, any job, building software. The process of applying for these kinds of jobs helps you identify areas to focus on.

I think the biggest thing that keeps people from being successful is the assumption that, even with all the effort they are putting in, their potential peers are better at the job. In some strict sense that is true but delivering customer value is number one. Keep your focus on that, people will want to work with you. Ignore any feelings of being an imposter.

I got my first contract development gig at 14, first salaried position at 17. Stick with it and make it happen. Be confident. Don't be a dick.

Also, the original question talked about using Java. There is nothing wrong with Java and there are a lot of jobs in that space but I can't imagine a harder place to come in as a young untrained programmer than Java Enterprise development.
Maybe newer OS do not have any useful features for those customers? Maybe they are even worse for them because work slower, are not compatible with old drivers, contain spyware (telemetry)?
Global ransomware cyberattack halted by a young engineer's domain registration
Humor is not allowed on HN.
It's the 2-hour lunch break that I don't understand. why not half that, so that folks can go home and spend that extra hour relaxing into the night?
>Who cares what somebody else's science says about it?

People that dislike snake oil salesmen and don't think there is "my science" and "somebody else's science", but just one science?
the problem is intentions? how can people tell what your CIA desires are?