skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is nobody else concerned with the implications of what losing sleep does to the doctor going through residency? I've always thought that was insane. The author even admits to having observed the detrimental effects first-hand, yet never suggests that this practice should be abandoned - why is that!?

I as a patient have enough of a problem giving myself into the care of a doctor-in-training, why does s/he have to sleep-deprived on top of not being fully trained? Is this some sort of macho thing, or a "well, I went through this hazing, so you gotta do it, too" kind of thing?

Somebody please enlighten me as to what the point of this seemingly counter-productive practice is!
Even 5-bit Baudot-type codes were not standardized. A-Z and 0-9 are the same on all Teletype machines, but there's (at least) ITA2, USTTY, Fractions (⅛,¼,⅜,½,⅝,¾,⅞ only, for stock market use) and Weather Symbols (8 direction arrows and 4 cloud cover symbols). I own five Teletype machines and only two of them are 100% compatible.
At my university, most of the profs that teach our entry level programming courses use MOSS. One prof I had said that it's really good at detecting plagiarism and he automatically refers any infractions to SJA.

I always work alone so I've never been caught, but looking at the grade sheets, it seemed like almost 25% of the students were referred every assignment. I can understand the desire to catch cheaters because as I've progressed into my more advanced classes there's always a few students that really shouldn't be there because they didn't learn anything in the prereq classes.
An undergraduate degree demonstrates to you what the characteristic activities of a field are like, and to observers that you can do those characteristic activities to some minimum standard.

Almost no one proceeds under the illusion that it's a comprehensive education. At best, you'll master a subfield in graduate school.

Continuous grading provides a valuable signal when you need to step up your game, transition to a different field, or drop out. I know several people whose poor CS grades sent them to tracks where they're now much happier and more successful.
True it would be probably be better. But we live in a culture that glorifies the slick salesman who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Think Leonardo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street. This is going to continue to happen with a large host of products. And the very same community we are currently posting in helped build it.
Woah, thanks so much for itch.io - I'm a big fan of indie games and your site is amazing.
In fact, I am an unusual case and I do not consciously choose to use those Google, Microsoft or Apple offerings, nor do I value and rely on the ones I occasionally come in contact with. In many cases I view those are necessary evils, not high quality stuff.

I use TCP/IP but I did not choose it. There were many competing protocols. It just became the default.

I am not going to argue about this but many of the folks who wrote the software that I actively seek out and value had degrees in Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and/or Physics. I might use different software than most users.

The authors were not CS majors. It is what it is. Maybe this means nothing. But to me it means, at least, CS is not a prerequisite.

I am not denying the contribution of Computer Science as a field or the work computer scientists. And I understand why kids major in CS. All good.

I am just referring to the practice of writing software. I would question anyone who argued one must have a CS degree to write great software.
Mossberg Final Column: The Disappearing Computer
For various reasons, people want to be able to evaluate students against each other, which requires a total ordering ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order )

For example, I didn't want to go to grad school or work for a megacorp, so I didn't have to worry about my grades. But a lot of my classmates did want those things, which require large scale impersonal evaluation, so they had to sweat about their grades.
In germany, what you call cheating isnt even considered cheating.

On homework, we openly collaborated and handed in near duplicates without trying to hide it. Some students would just copy the work of others. None of this mattered. Nobody "went after" it. It just gets graded, you get your points and you move on.

Most people accept the fact that grades don't matter, but you need them for your resume. For some reason, universities have moved on from being institutions of knowledge-production to being diploma mills, and grades are their way of succumbing to societies need to make shit measurable. The way we cope with this is to just hand out grades that are utterly meaningless, but keep the system alive.

In the meantime, people carry on with their lives. Some people in university want to learn things, some are just enrolled because its a cheap livestyle choice.

In the end, nobody cares about grades. Whether I actually know my stuff is my problem. Not my professors. No company hires you based on your grades, but a lot of HR personnel will reject you based on them. So you need good grades. But good grades alone wont get you shit. We live in this weird limbo of grades being a necessity but beyond that, dont mean shit. They are the shittiest heuristic known to man.

If grades were a scientific theory, those who came up with them would be ostracized crackpots. Neither meaningful nor in any way falsifiable.

A written exam on quantum field theory can only test so many things. Since its written, you have to ask for things that can be produced in a given timeframe. That leaves you with memoizable calculations. Any professor will tell you that such an exam will tell you nothing about whether the student actually understands the subject matter. A 2 minute discussion of the topic in very high level terms is probably more useful to assess actual aptitude.

Professors KNOW that they cant possibly measure the ability of individuals in classes of more than 15 students. Why would they care about cheating? They are part of a system that doesnt make sense just as much as everyone else.
Can you detect the difference between no one else renting the bike vs one person hoarding it in some way? If you can't, then it only takes a couple stories in the news of some innocent being charged fines to generate ill will.
Here's the trajectory:

Fake your way through basic CS courses.

Find your way into group-work heavy projects in later years, possibly doing enough ancillary aspects of the work to be semi-useful. It will be likely that your other group members will find it easier to grin and bear it.

Optionally: do a Masters or PhD. Plagiarize your work, or potentially hire someone to do it for you.

Continue into the work force, focusing on office politics, group projects, putting your name on things that you weren't really a contributor to, etc. Write a lot of reports.

This is why we're not a profession, folks. I'm amazed at the number of people who got on here to theorize about every goddamn thing ('grade inflation!' 'what are marks good for anyway?' 'I use the web all the time to remind me of things I've forgotten!') aside from the content of the article, which is that there are tons of people going through coding classes who are apparently aiming to get through without learning any code and want to cheat.

Every time you get dragged through some pointless, patronizing and degrading interview process that assumes that you don't know your stuff - you can thank the cheaters and fakers, and the fact that our industry doesn't have the will to root them out.
Funny you say that -- engineers are one of Zapier's best customer personas. Quicker and easier to implement functionality than deploying code to the cloud. Plus, non-engineers can take over maintenance so engineers can work on more interesting things.

We also have code/scripting steps -- https://zapier.com/help/code/ or https://zapier.com/help/code-python/.
What is revealing is that a former office furniture CEO from sleepy West Michigan is apparently much more hip on Silicon Valley technology than the whole of Ford.

This is how entire industries get disintermediated.
What part is the sunk cost? Interviewing applicants takes time out of a lot of peoples' busy days. They don't have to spend that time if the company doesn't bring the applicant in for an interview.
How much do you hear at all about plumbing or other trades? A few minutes on Google turns up links like http://womeninconstructionconference.com/, http://www.new-nyc.org/, http://www.explorethetrades.org/women-in-trades/, etc. so I think it's most likely that you're seeing a combination of selection bias and the fact that software development is both a popular field getting general attention and one with an abnormal diversity rates compared with similar fields.

That's not saying that those fields are perfect but, say, a female/Hispanic/etc. accountant, paralegal, etc. won't be the only person fitting that description at most meetings. Skilled trades often have skewed gender, ethnicity, etc. ratios but they also don't get anything like as much attention so most of us are unaware of the problem or efforts to improve things.
Care to expand? This isn't exactly a helpful answer
Yeah, Zapier has multi-step workflows https://zapier.com/learn/getting-started-guide/multi-step-za....
At least its happening here in the form of blog posts and not in a retirement home with phones ringing off the hook.
Show HN: Graph Paper Programming
IANACPA, but based on your "In short form" sentence, I guess I see what you mean and how it could be treated as capex. Still, from a layman's point of view, it seems sketchy as hell to me in that the primary goal looks to be making the operating budget look more profitable than it really is if the AWS spend can be amortized over a couple years.
I don't recall any really heavy math in my Comp. Sci in the 1980s. There were required math courses yes -- calculus, linear algebra, etc. but none of that really was applied in the computer science classes. So I guess I would say don't let a poor math background stop you from learning programming. I have not used math much beyond arithmetic and basic boolean logic as a professional programmer.

Edit: certainly there are programming jobs that require a solid competency in mathematics. However there are many that do not.
Haha, well, I feel that one's easy too if you know that sometimes characters are used as phonetics for words in other languages. Just like English! Although you might not expect that at first from a non-phonetically written language.

Every language has exceptions to "rules". In fact, there are few hard and fast rules for any language, since every language is a mix of another.

But, once you get comfortable with a language, you can appreciate the differences and make interesting guesses about the exceptions' origins. It can be fun.

I like http://www.hanzicraft.com/ because it breaks down the characters into parts you can click on to get their definitions or origins. Hacking chinese also has a cool resources section here [1], categorized, so you can browse through dictionaries, listening tools, practice tests, browser add-ons, etc. etc.

[1] http://challenges.hackingchinese.com/resources/Beginner
The solution is effective hiring. Work sample or project based hiring methods get people to demonstrate their skill-sets. I once had a candidate refer to resume/conversation based hiring as 'ritualized lying'. I think that's bang on.

This isn't directly in response to your comment, but...

There's an elitist under(over?)-tone within HackerNews that asserts any less-than-engineer technical role is inferior and attracting of undesirable character. There's a particular disdain for project managers, often for good reason. Few things are more aggravating than a poor non-technical PM. But, in many organizations they're essential and valuable members of a team. Skilled people can have an immense degree of technical talent and no interest in programming or engineering culture.
I imagine smooshing could be thought about like pulling off packets of cards from the deck and interleaving them randomly with other packets. Assuming your hand moves a clump of cards at a time and smooshes them with another clump.

I wonder how this simple model might represent something close to real life smooshing.
This is mostly out of date -- Zapier has lots of ways to do this without custom connectors:

* Formatter -- https://zapier.com/help/formatter/

* Filters -- https://zapier.com/help/filter/

* Webhooks -- https://zapier.com/help/webhooks/

* Code (JS/Py) -- https://zapier.com/help/code/ or https://zapier.com/help/code-python/

Plus if you want -- those custom developed apps can be added by anyone, for free: https://zapier.com/developer/.
You should be provided enough time to explore things you are interested in. Better?
Oh don't worry it's happening there too
I remember hearing that the scheduler will indeed pre-empt occasionally if none of the active goroutines are attempting to perform blocking calls.
> He also said that since students could use the regret clause, instructors felt more comfortable going to the honor council when students had passed up that chance.

This is very interesting: the clause that apparently gives a way out to the student is never/seldom used, but it gives the teachers more confidence and easiness to report their students. Its a measure that literally just makes it harder on the students, even if it appears the opposite.

Economics is truly magic.
ARIANA GRANDE’S CONCERT TERROR
It's not sitting that is the biggest damage but the amount of life lost doing things you don't care about as much as other things you could be doing with your life.
Also consider RimWorld (has a contractor now).
>As long as it wasn't an actual violation of the law

But it is a violation of Academic Integrity, which is sort of a law you agreed to when signing up for a class. At least at my school it was like that.
That's obvious enough. Any recruiting funnel will have a criteria of requirements that the prospect needs to fulfill.

Then they're brought in for a technical interview. There's no escaping that. You don't give automatically give them a job because they listed a 4.0 GPA on their CV and were nice on the phone.
In that case even with millions you would hit a roadblock. Even the prospect of a huge reward doesn't always cure burnout.
Adding multi-process support is the single biggest change ever made to Firefox. It was enormous. That's why it took so long.
How the Humble CPU Launched NASA’s Golden Age of Space Exploration – Motherboard
How to earn Gems in clash of clain(Hindi)
I taught computing for a short time, and some of what went on between instructors and students was quite astonishing. In fact I'll go as far as saying that some instructors were complicit in the cheating, either by tacitly encouraging it or deliberately making the material easier or shorter/lowering grading standards to keep "student approval", and grades, high. I didn't --- I was pretty much the exact opposite --- but for every one who didn't, there was probably at least 2-3 others who did (and perhaps not so surprisingly, those were the student favourites.)

Then it's no wonder that, on the other side, we see things like https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
>even things like how to secure production servers

You might find this, for old versions of Windows Server, in a trade-school IT degree program. You're certainly not going to find it for Linux in a regular Computer Science program.
Even at the highest marginal tax rate, you walk away with about $60k after tax.
I've always had a personal explanation that I have nothing but anecdotal evidence to back up. The most important skills that make someone a good coder are that they enjoy solving problems, and are willing to work single-mindedly on something until it is done. If you have those skills, there's really no reason to go to college to learn anything.

In fact, I would bet that the graph in the article corresponds inversely to how easy it has become to learn programming on your own. From manually copying code out of a magazine when I was a kid, to stackoverflow today.

I submit that the coders who DO get degrees are people who really enjoyed school (for reasons unrelated to learning), people who didn't really know what they wanted to do in life and school was expected of them and/or the path of least resistance, and people who are much more into research than the average developer.
Ask HN: How to leave a startup when you own a third of it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14357379

12 days ago
Nanometric holograms based on a topological insulator material
"1) New federal laws"
Never going to happen in the US with the political climate. I can see the re-election adds now.

"2) A gradual slide"
Somewhat possibility. I think these days the US Military Complex is pretty much metric now. I have seen some of the terms bleed into civilian live and in movies (ie: "klick").

"3) State-by-state mandates"
never going to happen, see 1 above.
If you weed out a large percent due to low GPA, then you've saved time interviewing those people.
Is cheating also a problem at coding bootcamps?
Maybe. And that's totally valid choice. But hardly compatible with high-risk high-reward culture that most startups - at least initially - are. I mean, you certainly can run a startup on 9-to-5 40 days off per yer schedule. It just the chances of it succeeding will be somewhat less than one where people are willing to put 70 hour weeks in. If these diminished chances are enough for you - great. But overall the model would have less prolific startup scene - which is what, I think, we do observe.
Yeah, I think this is one of those things where if you get yourself into an "Asian languages are hard" mindset, you unnecessarily complicate things. I don't speak Chinese, but I speak Japanese, which I learned primarily from free reading (mostly manga, which is great because it is almost completely conversational Japanese).

While it is true that you can't guess the meaning of characters that you don't know without any context, you definitely can lean the mean of characters that you don't know with context. In the same way, while I might understand the Greek and Roman roots for words in English, if I see the work by itself without any context, I'm not going to be able to understand it. With context, I can usually puzzle it out.

However, it is a huge mistake to ignore the benefits of learning Chinese characters. It is the reverse that is most beneficial. In Chinese the 3600 most common characters cover some insane percentage of the common words in use (only 2200 for Japanese!). These characters form a powerful mnemonic for learning vocabulary. I can easily learn to read the characters for a word and the word faster than I can learn the word by itself. As you learn more characters, it only accelerates your progress.

2-3 thousand characters seems like a daunting task, but as I always point out in these threads, adult level proficiency in a language requires somewhere around 15,000 word families (1 family = a word, all its inflections/conjugations/etc, and all related compound words). People telling you that you can be "fluent" with 2000 words are selling you something (2000 word families is the level of a toddler -- and then people are disappointed that they can only speak like a toddler...).

The absolute best thing you can do for learning a language that has Chinese characters in its writing is to learn those characters. I recommend learning them at the same time as the vocabulary. And to get back to the original comment: even now if I hear an unfamiliar word, I will usually trace what I think the characters are on my hand. Often people will correct me and once I get the correct characters the meaning is almost always obvious.
I had a lecturer as a close friend in college. He was only a lecturer because he refused to do a dissertation to complete his doctorate. He was the best teacher in the department. So it goes.

Anyway, he would get up in front of the staff meetings and say, the school is graduating students who do not know how to code. The school didn't care; they got paid. Every class of any import had team projects because "that's what the real world is like". And every team would have the one person just skating by. The only exceptions in my entire undergrad education was in the graduate level course I took with a friend, which thankfully had two-person teams. And the one elective I took with the aforementioned lecturer, who actively kept tabs on who was doing real work through surveys and looking at the source repositories.
I care if engineers fake the learning required for their degrees because I don't want to cross bridges that collapse, take airplanes that crash, live next to leaky or explosive industrial facilities, or rely on faulty medical equipment. Engineering carries a lot of responsibility.
If you're starting from nothing, you may not have the budget to outsource everything...or even anything. Admittedly, with services like Fiverr, Mechanical Turk, various code outsourcing sites, and whatever else, the price of outsourcing is pretty low. But, I've found the odds of getting good work are pretty low. I wouldn't want to have to rely on it. And, costs skyrocket on development when you have to have it done more than once by shitty developers (there are great developers on all of those sites...but, being able to assess them is not a skill that is in most non-developers tool chest).

But, I think that's kind of semantics. Is a "one-person company" not a one-person company anymore if they hire an accountant to do their taxes? I doubt anyone would argue it's now a two-person company. Likewise, if you get a lawyer to help with a contract or something, it's still a one-person shop by most people's measure.

I suspect OP just wanted to rule out folks who were coming into it already wielding significant capital. That's a major limiting factor for a lot of people who might want to build an outsourced company.

I get the feeling OP wants to have some inspiration that doesn't require a team and doesn't require significant capital; probably because OP doesn't have access to either. There are lots of places in the world where that would be true even for someone with talent and ambition.
> You are assuming the system is perfect.

chose to use the word "many" to imply the current process is imperfect.

> Why do you care?

I'm a recipient of freshly graduating (and interning) engineers who got past the hiring committee.

The project roadmap puts a burden on the other team members when one member is underperforming and/or not forthcoming with their abilities.
Is the work sample done in person or take home? If it's take home, then they can just cheat on that by hiring someone else to do it.
Airbus versus iPad running SkyDemon
What's that mean? As in you have time to just learn on your own, without lectures or structured study? I never had trouble finding time to do that at university. How much is enough in your book? And you could always just take fewer credit hours per semester or something.
How to write scientific and technical grant proposals as a non-specialist
Could have been understanding the culture as much as the tech. Cuts both ways though. Google isn't great at selling into non-tech Fortune 500 companies.
Have you by chance found how to do that with babel-node?

It seems that after introducing a built-in chrome protocol debugger node-inspector was abandoned and now I can't figure out how to use the built-in debugger with babel-node.
If you want to type characters from parts, decomposing and recomposing from radicals, I made

http://pingtype.github.io
On overall, probably not. There's a difference though between average load and peak load. Virtually nobody could sustain a 80 hour work weak for an extended time. A lot of people could do it for a short time, provided the possibility of a large reward.
Somewhat off topic, but I doubt very much there are any professors at state schools specializing in research that spend anywhere near 55 hours a week on their classes. Maybe he meant per month.