skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went to Dev Bootcamp in 2012. I was self taught beforehand, and had done a little bit of contracting work.

They focused pretty heavily on soft skills, like communication and pairing, and also somewhat on generic software construction ideas, on thinking through a problem and breaking it down into its component pieces. The curriculum used JS and Rails, although I didn’t feel that I had much more than a surface familiarity of either by the end of the cohort.

I think that, in general, if a bootcamp has a decent focus on software construction and doesn't totally fall down on teaching you the technical stuff, you’ll probably be prepared to work, at least, as a junior dev. But, you can't just rely on a bootcamp. You really have to spend a lot of time (like, a ton of time) learning on your own, writing code and reading code others have written.

Since then, I’ve been working steadily as a mostly front-end and sometimes full-stack developer.

My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps. But, I believe most of the people who wanted to be devs are still doing just that!
Every few days we have an article here in HN about a relatively big company, and people throw the classic comment that they don't understand how they need hundreds/thousands of programmers to do what they do, when the prototype of their website can be done by 2 people over a weekend. What you are doing is just a slightly more complex version of this, but the answer is still the same, scale.

Software is easier to copy and replace than many other things, but make no mistake: The amount of engineering done at the largest software companies is massive, and has gone way past the point of being easy to replicate. Let's talk someone smaller, like Twitter. Building a Twitter for 100 people is trivial. Scaling it to work well for serious volumes, building all the pieces that make it have actual revenue, and not be just a giant money pit, and all the effort required to build the userbase itself is just enormous. When we go past Twitter, and we think Facebook and Google, serious disruption of their core businesses is really, really hard, because every single user they have is an efficiency you don't.

In practice, every large software company today is running a whole lot of machine learning under the hood. Whether it's figuring out which ads to send you, just get you to stay on the site longer, or just have great fraud protection, the difference in data matters. Imagine your machine learning model is trying to sell ads. How much of a disadvantage are you in vs a company that is the user's default search engine, and has analytics hooks in the websites that your target person is on 75% of the time? What if they also have their text messages, know their friends, and their friends' purchases? You can have much better algorithms, but they have such an insane data advantage that you have to be orders of magnitude better to even compete with them!

So I'd definitely bet highly on those services, because they've spent years building moats. That doesn't mean they are unbeatable: We all remember the time when Microsoft and IBM looked unbeatable, and we all know what happened, but I don't think anyone without massive funding and a completely new, must have product has a prayer of entering their space and not be swallowed whole.
It requires tons of high performance custom parts.

Yes. Which is the big problem with robotics. No volume and high tooling cost. With enough money, something like Big Dog or Atlas can be built, with large numbers of custom moving parts. But the price tag is in 8 figures.

Other than the industrial robot arm people and the vacuum cleaner people, nobody is making money in robotics. (Well, the individuals who were bought out by Google exited OK, but overall, the Google thing was a lose.)
So are new grads though, this is typically learnt on the job.
Attended a local bootcamp-like program in my area. Afterwards started working at a local startup as a jr dev. The pay increase wasn't as astronomical as they hype at the time suggested but I knew it was expanding my opportunities way more than my previous gig.

The startup then got acquired and I got experience working with a larger company. Left that after a while and now have my dream job as a Developer Advocate! Literally the job I have wanted ever since I got into programming and attended my first hackathon. Can't believe where I am now.

To answer your other questions:

1) Did the bootcamp prepare me for the job?
Yes, but only in that it taught me Rails and I could begin working at this startup that did mostly Rails. The startup took a chance on me, I think that's what really prepared me to succeed.

2) What about my cohort?
During the program me and some other devs worked on projects outside of the class. We attended community events, hackathons, and worked on OSS with local devs. All of those that participated in stuff like that with me all went on to have successful careers. Those that didn't? I think they're still taking classes or interviewing for jobs.
So, Wordpress basically?
A whole class of problems you wouldn't have in the first place with MobX. So much code in the article for doing so little - where good design could solve the issues much more elegantly using plain function composition and JS concepts.
Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.
Www.bisesahiwal.edu.pk – BISE Sahiwal Board
that is correct, plex cloud is not the preferred solution for data hoarders using plex. plex cloud only supported amazon drive until jan 1st of this year[1] and all existing accounts were grandfathered in. that was a pretty short period of time but probably enough to create a problem. plex cloud is beside the point, though, because it isn't what people use for this. they used amazon cloud drive with fuse.

regarding fuse:

> you need a computer for it

well, not really, only to the extent that a VPS is a computer.

> I would say that's an outlier solution

an outlier solution for an outlier problem (can we agree to call that people storing 100+ TB of files?). except the problem was seemingly large enough that they had to get rid of it, so maybe it's not fair to call it an outlier. I don't think "first class" is a concern for people with such ridiculous amounts of data. plex cloud just makes things simpler, but running plex on a VPS takes two commands and there are some pretty detailed guides out there for people who don't know what ssh or digitalocean is. it's at a point now where there's even a platform for automating this stuff, complete with fancy dashboard etc.[2] needing to use things like fuse and encfs is hardly a barrier.

people talk about this stuff a lot more publicly than I would have thought, in places like /r/datahoarders, /r/plex, as well as the lowendbox, quickbox, and torrent tracker forums.

1. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/203082447-Supporte...

2. https://quickbox.io/
It might be wrongly implying Google is selling the content of your Gmail - but between Google Analytics and stuff like: https://www.google.com/insights/ Google certainly helps tracking users?
It allows you to compose types and avoid the issues (complications not necessarily problems) of multiple inheritance.

For example, where in your hierarchy do you stick the AbstractSerializable class? If it's an interface like ISerializable you just implement it at whatever level you're at.

With multiple inheritance you don't need interfaces because you can just inherit from multiple base classes.
company that sells ads says it will develop an ad blocker. why not stop selling ads as well? what is the goal?
From my understanding, there is no way for ProtonMail's operators to decrypt your mail storage, it requires your own private key. Whereas FastMail is not much different from Gmail in terms of "company's access", except it's privacy policy prohibits it from using it for anything but customer service on request.
I don't think there are too many products that you can make money from buying. The few I can think of are things like bee hives (paid to remove it and paid for the bees), dirt/sand in abundance areas (I'm not sure they sell it), and other natural resources. Most of them you're getting paid for removal and not buying though.
For an example of how storing a UTC datetime for a future event can go wrong, see my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12988092
What's it like to code in this environment?
When I started meditating more often, I kept getting distracted by miscellaneous thoughts. At first I fought it to get back to the "quiet mind" but that was frustrating. And I would angrily judge myself for the distraction. I got tired of beating myself up and then I recognized that these distractions were the short and long term problems such as conflicts at work within the last few days, or deep seated trauma, like experiencing ongoing racism and violence as a kid during school.

I stopped resisting the distractions and just allowed myself to think about them while at the same time trying to focus on my breath. As the distraction faded my focus on my breath returned.

I've gotten better at this and I feel like I've rewired my mind into being able to maintain a "quiet mind" and self-awareness, at the same as talking to myself either in my mind or out loud. And so when I get anxiety I can stay grounded and now I just think about what is giving me anxiety instead of letting it go or forgetting it. It's helped me to get rid of generalized anxiety that I've been stuck with for a long time.
> as they already do on Android!

This is exclusionary detailing, wouldn't you say? Chrome on Android doesn't have an extensions platform.
This product change is mainly about the majority of people who don't use an adblocker.
I do this as well for my personal email. It's good to decouple your front end from your back end.

The main concern I still have is that I'd lose gchat if I swapped out my email host from Google apps.
I'm in the works on a start up as well. I think the best way to avoid stagnation is to challenge yourself. Back when I was looking for a job I had the option of two. One with a small company basically being the whole IT department and one with a big name company doing menial work. I picked the big company and kind of regret not going with the small to learn as much as I could have from the challenge.
Gamer chat tool Discord secretly raised ~$50M as insiders cashed out
Facebook widgets are used for tracking user across the web too. So one cannot protect user from being tracked without breaking those widgets.
Hiring three people at $40k/yr each at the beginning is safer than hiring one experienced person at $120k/yr. Maybe one or two of the three don't pan out but, at least, you didn't invest all your time into one person who might ultimately be the wrong fit.
How can I download the docs for offline reading?
SoftBank Unit to Buy Boston Dynamics from Alphabet Inc
> The biggest threat seems to be that the government will have my data and I'll be advertised at, but having my own domain doesn't help either way. Am I missing something?

The biggest threat is that Google removes or locks you out of your gmail account.
You should mention here that salary payments are only in "tokens".
That is not reliable. Storing in UTC is optional, and can be used for easier comparisons, but you must store the local timezone and timestamp to be 100% reliable.

The local TZ => UTC formula may change for any reason, whether it's daylight saving time or any other random situation. It might be relatively stable in some locations (although it can change even within a global timezone like EST based on location) but there are constant updates being made. You can look at the IANA and Microsoft timezone database updates yourself. Why create risk when not necessary?
Is this some sort of attempt to claim Facebook and Google are somehow worse than Ajit Pai's FCC?

I'm specifically objecting to the phrase "closed internet". It sounds like the opposite of net neutrality, but in reality, any privacy options within Facebook and Google have been user-driven.

The focus should be on removing Pai. Regarding Facebook and Google, you can simply choose to not use them if you wish.

You only have one choice for broadband, and Pai wants to extend ISPs' monopolies. Let's not let that happen without a fight.
Are there not reasonable ARM options?

There seem to be ARM tablets that run Android decently. I mean, they're not a replacement for a monster desktop PC, but I'd think that they could take over a lot of your day-to-day (non-gaming/engineering/etc) needs. If there was an iPad with a Surface style physically connected keyboard, that would be my bet for most secure computer. (Wirelessly connected keyboards have issues, though.)

I'm hoping to see more out of the Zynq SoCs, but who knows if Xilinx has a backdoor. (Though, it's partially mitigated if you have an appropriate circuit around it -- and they definitely do make some secure components.)
I'm convinced of something surprising -- that walled gardens are actually the result of limitations in ... HTTP! And to prove it, I've implemented a replacement for HTTP called Statebus that adds power to HTTP and breaks down walled gardens: https://stateb.us Check it out!

Statebus makes web programming wayyyy easier, and opens up the insides of websites -- you can go to any page, hit a hotkey, and edit the code live to add a feature, or incorporate state from a different site, or re-use the state or code from somewhere else, just as easily as you use your own site's state and code! Because it puts the insides of sites onto the web protocol itself. In Statebus, every piece of state has a URL! And you can synchronize with it as easily as <a href="state://..."> today!

This breaks up walled gardens like Facebook! Today, we have monopolies at the level of websites, because each different website is implemented with a different proprietary stack of web gunk -- MVC server frameworks, reactive view frameworks, networking frameworks, babel, webpack, and -- YUCK! Statebus replaces all this gunk with the web protocol itself -- the statebus protocol -- which opens the state, and itself automatically synchronizes all this state together!

Statebus transforms HTTP from State Transfer to Synchronization:

HTTP: Hypertext *Transfer* Protocol
REST: REpresentational State *Transfer*
Statebus: State *Synchronization* Protocol

It turns out that all web frameworks are really just state synchronization libraries, and we only need them because HTTP doesn't know how to synchronize! By adding synchronization to the web protocol itself, we eliminate the need for all these frameworks, and put all the internal state of a website onto the web protocol itself, making it open for other websites to use!

Statebus makes websites wayyy easier to program, and this means that the easiest way to program websites is now the most open way. This changes the economics of the web, and is going to break up the walled garden monopolies that have arisen around websites -- just like the web itself broke up the AOL walled garden in 1995!

Remember AOL? It provided a lot of the same features as the web -- shopping, chat rooms, forums -- but then was outcompeted by the open web around 1995! Why? Because programmers found it was easier to put their content online with HTTP and HTML than by convincing CEO Steve Case to add their content to AOL's garden! In the same way, Statebus is going to make it easier to build social content than by going through Facebook's walled garden! The future will be a diverse, realtime, synchronous symphony of social state!

You can find technical docs here: https://github.com/invisible-college/statebus/
And a demo video here: https://stateb.us
WRT Itanium and all VLIW processors for that mater, you have to compile for the microarchitecture of the processor to fully take advantage of it. Which sinks the x86 binary portability that we've all come to know and love. Which leads to the fundamental ease that ubiquity brings to working with x86 as an end user or any software dev that doesn't really care about processor internals.

It sure would be interesting to see something else challenge x86, but since ARM/Power/RISC-V are all within the same architectural tradition I doubt they will provide it. SIMD as used by GPUs is useful only when you have very structured parallelism like arithmetic on large data sets.

I think if we're going to see a challenger worth noting they'll look like they're crazy with the hard uphill battle and novel tech they will have to produce.
Yes, it is trivial extra work and storage for a timezone + timestamp (along with optional UTC) to get 100% reliable calculations.

Timezones, especially globally, have enough updates being made that they are not something worth the risk just to save a few bytes.
A lot of people who attend programming bootcamps seem to be coming from other backgrounds or relatively new to programming.

Interested to hear the experience from anyone who was already a developer and took a bootcamp. Was it was worth it?
I've played with the vis.js timelines a bit and quite like them: http://visjs.org/timeline_examples.html
Pretend there's someone listening who is both unconditionally neutral about and unconditionally interested in everything you say.

The idea is not to conceptualize an imaginary person, but to lower the hesitancy of "but there's noone there". Trying it in an empty house may be helpful.

I found myself pacing after a mildly stressful event a few years ago, and the practice stuck as a way to help myself wind down. I'm not actually sure when I started talking to myself too, I think it was around that point. I do both on a virtually daily basis, it's how I figure many things out.
> My cohort was a little weird, people went on to do other stuff, like start their own bootcamps

I think that's really funny about the first ~3 DBC cohorts. A few grads of those first cohorts went on to start App Academy, Hack Reactor, and Hackbright Academy (I think) and others like it.
I graduated from App Academy NYC in January 2014.

I'm in my 2nd post-bootcamp developer job at a small-ish company, making double my previous salary before a/A. I love what I do and attending the bootcamp was the hardest and most rewarding thing I've done in my professional life.

I keep in touch with some friends of the bootcamp (my cohort and others), and they have gone to work at various companies like Spotify, Google, Thoughtbot, Bloomberg, Capital One, Vimeo, Tumlbr, WeWork, and lots of smaller companies.
Many of them left. Some are still there working on things related to robotics, such as Verb Surgical. I'm sure a few became more traditional software engineers, although I don't know any personally.
The fox is in the henhouse, but he brought along a hammer and some nails and he really really doesn't like coyotes, so it's all good.

Part of the article was a bit confusing, though:
"According to the Financial Times, Google will allow publishers what it’s calling 'Funding Choices.' The publisher could charge the consumer a set price per page view to use third-party sites that block all advertising. Google would do the tracking of how many pages users view, and then charge them. Users could then 'white list' particular sites, allowing ads to be shown on them and removing the charge. If users decided to pay to block ads, Google would receive a portion of that payment, sharing it with the publisher."

Third-party sites that block all advertising? I think the author has this confused with third-party ad blockers. And the part where Google does the tracking means that now is certainly the time to switch to Firefox and keep ajax.googleapis.com, google-syndication.com, google-analytics.com, and all the rest of them firmly on the banned list.

At times I almost feel nostalgic for the bad old days of Internet Explorer 6... (But then I remember what IE6 was actually like, and the feeling passes.)
I agree with you (I don't use unix timestamps), but if you're using a good calendar library you can certainly get the result as a unix timestamp.
I see, thank for the clarification.
SoftBank Acquires Boston Dynamics and Schaft
Without microsoft, they have nothing. I for one welcome our new RISC overlords.
I've never done an AWS class or have any certs, so I can't say for sure if its worth doing. In my case, I've mainly learned on the job and have had some really fantastic mentors to work with who have trusted me to make decisions and let me run with them.

I also read a ton of books on design patterns, architecture, deployment, ops, etc.
Any claims about scalability or testability mean nothing without concrete code examples to back them up. Any tool that makes claims such as these without a sufficiently complex example in the docs, alongside a baseline implementation for comparison, is a huge red flag IMO.
The fact that you have chosen to quote the combined state and local taxes rather than the states themselves in a conversation where I have focused exclusively on state budgets makes me doubt your sincerity. And to the original point, high levels of deficit spending by states are by themselves an indicator of reliance on spending by the federal government, which is the guarantor of state debts. I'm not going to re-find the state tax receipt number; you can do that yourself, and you should have already considering the amount of numbers you've bothered to find.
Piet Hein wrote a "grook" on just this:

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP

Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No -- not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping.
Are there any other Japanese companies serving as US defense contractors? IIRC that was a big part of why they didn't jive well with Google.
Why #5: Why is my data all over my too many PM tools? Oh
By slowly withdrawing from the internet entirely. Cancelled my facebook and twitter accounts; the variety of websites I visit has dwindled to just a handful; I use a blackberry and will likely go to a flip-phone when I can find a decent cheap one (recommendations welcome). I read more books now.

"filter bubbles, walled gardens, emotional manipulation" are things I no longer think about
1. Latex does all of this.
2. Latex is user friendly....seriously. have you used latex for anything? Latex is incredibly easy to learn.
Why isn't there an open sourced version of google and facebook similar to what ubuntu is to os x and windows alternatives.
Another top HN news item today is that Andy Rubin's new startup, "Essential", raised $300m today.

Fun fact and by coincidence, Andy Rubin's last official gig prior to this startup was head of Google's robotics division and oversaw Boston Dynamics.

Larry Page convinced Rubin to run the division after moving Sundar Pichai (Now Google's CEO) to takeover the Android project.

And so the tech world turns!

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin

Edited per comment below for clarity
Yeah, right when that future I've been hearing out for like a decade where everyone just uses an iPad for everything comes around then they are in real trouble (I imagine that will be a year or two after the Year of the Linux Desktop).
Almost none of the computer standards people actually use are ideal, so that hardly makes x86 unique.