skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Takeo Igarashi, Tomer Moscovich, John F. Hughes, "As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation",
ACM Transactions on Computer Graphics, Vol.24, No.3, ACM SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angels, USA, 2005.

[The PDF is here.](http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/rigid.pdf)
Craigslist's Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers
I have used and recommend TrustCommerce. And they have a feature specifically designed for recurring payments which can be implemented in your software (some solutions require you to log into their control panel to make a payment recurring). Lots of APIs for every language too.

http://www.trustcommerce.com/citadel.php
fill the hole with the best that they can easily ascertain.

I as an employer and employee of other organizations in the past - I can tell you that filling the hole with what is available lowers standards. While this does happen, it is not something to aspire too.

I can tell you from doing hiring in the past that people have gotten very good at filling their resume's with bullshit.

I agree. But how is this relevant to our discussion. I have not said that the resume is a criteria.

The last time I hired someone for a Senior Developer position, I had to filter through almost 500 resume submissions. Of those, I did a telephone technical interview with about 200 applicants. We did face to face interviews with the 6 applicants who passed an incredibly simple technical interview - Things that any programmer who has done any real work would almost be insulted by.

Apparently, your filters arent effective.

Any available filter to help sort the wheat from the chaff is helpful, and a degree is one of those filters.

A degree may be one of those ineffective filters that you are already using. Perhaps it is just a segmentation factor like gender or age. If all one seeks to do is reduce the number of resumes/candidates one has to meet, then one might as well use gender or age or anything else.

That being said, I do not have a degree in anything, I got into the industry at 17 and haven't had time to go to school. But, I've been able to get far by working harder than everyone else; in the conversation of degrees making a difference, I'd like to have one, sure. But I've never needed one. I think it's come up in one interview once, and it ended up being a nonpoint.

And see you turned out to be alright :)
I went to college and was a semester away from graduating.

Here is my education history. I studied music and philosophy not computers. Anyway I was self taught enough that in my senior year contemporary philosophy of mind class (which I studied independently because it was my interest before the class was offered), the professor asked me to proofread and critique the final rather then take it. I never took notes but I could correct other peoples notes from memory. I also taught myself composition and music theory up to the 400 level before dropping out of school. In high school, I got perfect scores on AP tests for classes I skipped almost every day (I got 15 college english credits for a class I failed). I did knowledge bows and was the knowledge bowl coaches TA, where he gave me old questions and encyclopedias on various topics and we got 2nd at state. (we were a poor public school). I had more AP credits then the saludictorian and valedictorian but I sat in the back with the pregnant girls and delinquents at graduation. I don't think I learned things from class, and think all that was self taught. I always got in trouble for reading ahead or hiding a book.

School is, in general, good. But for certain bright people, putting them like that in classes with people of normal intelligence is exactly like putting normal kids in classes with severely mentally disabled kids, and limiting the normal kids potential to the mentally disabled kids potential. On balance school is good, but there is a class of people for whom school is devastatingly confining and intellectually restricting. Depending on early experiences, these people are going to hate school early, become self taught college dropouts or never go to college (who can blame them?) and teach themselves skills like this guy is saying. Because these people's dropout status is related to their high intelligence, excluding them with barriers based on degrees is a great way to protecting yourself from some of the most creative, intelligent, original thinkers our planet has to offer.
That's weird.. I just had an SML class and we never learned it was call folding... It was just being recursive on a list.

Also, the way the website is made the list seems to be infinite (stream) which is impossible in SML only in Haskell.
In my experience hiring software engineers, possession of an undergrad CS degree was not a helpful filter for resumes. I did find that candidates with advanced degrees or undergrad EECS degrees tended to be a little bit stronger than the average candidate. So did candidates with unrelated undergrad degrees, and a few years of job experience.

I never figured out how to look at a resume and meaningfully select for extremely good hackers who were within our ability to attract (although it was easy to identify them in interviews). The ones for whom that was obvious from their resume had better opportunities.

One thing that I find interesting about this conversation is how much more often it comes up in software than elsewhere. Why are there so many autodidact hackers out there? I think it might be that computers are such excellent, affordable learning environments. The quick feedback loop you can get actually working with a computer is unlike anything available for most fields.

On the other side, academic CS programs are relatively new, and possibly don't do such a great job yet. Or maybe it's just that they've been attracting large numbers of the wrong people in recent years.
Getting with the boyfriend
Pretty impressive how some people insist SO MUCH to fuck things up for everyone just to make a couple dollars (and some even do so for free!).
sigh

I was wondering who was removing my "Daniel"s...

Fine. I'll try. I can't promise one won't slip in sometimes. As I've said in another comment on this exciting topic, I've been signing my posts "Daniel" for over ten years now, so there's bound to be times when I forget not to sign when commenting here. But I'll try my best.
I haven't met self-taught programmers who learned much theory (CS, math, physics, etc). I bet there are some, but I guess they are rare.

Theory gets useful if you want to tackle harder problems. If you aren't aware of the theory, you often don't know what you are missing. As an ex-dropout, I was in that position for a long time.

Going out on a limb now, big company with little respect for theory -> Microsoft, big company with healthy respect for theory -> Google.

You can do fine without theory, but its getting harder (and will continue to).
Because these people's dropout status is related to their high intelligence, excluding them with barriers based on degrees is a great way to protecting yourself from some of the most creative, intelligent, original thinkers our planet has to offer.

Thank you LPTS, that's pretty much exactly what I wanted to say. A lot of people have gone off on tangents discussing the merits of a degree, where I actually agree with them for the most part.

The point I was actually trying to make, you've conveyed very well. Don't judge our intelligence or ability on such a unrelated subject as having a degree or not.

Hopefully a few people will have read this thread who will be employing in the future, and the information contained may influence their decision when they're deciding to write the "Degree required" line on their job advert.
"normal people who want to learn such things choose to go to school"

That's a load of crap. Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. Only very young people consider "going to school" a viable option. Normal people have jobs, kids, and responsibilities and don't have time to go to school every time they pick up a new interest.
Sometimes it takes someone's ESL to get the best bulletin board material:

"if you work hard for something, in the moment you stand in front of your challenges you’ll feel stronger than ever"

Bravo!

I'd wish you luck, Simone, but no need. Looks like you already know how to make your own.
It's not true -- my local Linux user group distinguishes itself from the majority by doing things that are rational (running Linux), and believing what's true (Linux is, for many tasks, better than proprietary OSes).
Bootstrap doesn't mean "minority share". It means "low salary".
It took me ten seconds to find this:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/w4m/693380090.html

...and this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Simultaneously+with+it+I+d...

(27 re-submissions of the same thing all over the place.)

Whatever craigslist is doing, they aren't doing it very well. Google should sell an api to allow a count(*) return on text.
I don't understand most of the arguments centering around "single point of failure."

Part of the problem is that the terminology is misleading. You can, in fact, have multiple "single points of failure".

A better term is "central point of failure". Your email account is a central point of failure -- once it is compromised, an energetic black hat can use "forgotten password" links all over the web to compromise many other things. (Assuming that your usernames are guessable, which they often are.)

If you only have one central point of failure, it's also a "single" point of failure. Unfortunately, once you link a bunch of logins to your OpenID provider it becomes a second central point of failure. The black hat can compromise a slew of accounts by either getting your OpenID password or your email password.

Now, at some point, mud is mud, and you can't make it muddier by dumping mud on it. And, at some point, insecure is insecure, so it really may be silly to object to OpenID on central-point-of-failure grounds, because you've already got an even bigger problem with email. But I think it depends on the details. And, at best, you're playing for a tie: "OpenID -- at least as secure as the insecure thing you're using now." is not a great rallying cry.
I quit and went on it full-time. It made a reasonable amount of money, and then it failed due to a major misunderstanding between me and my business partner about the goals of the business. I'm now working on another online business, though the first one is still running and making some modest amount of money.

I still occasionally use half-pills of 100mg Modafinils (ie 50mg doses), rarely, when I'm tired for some reason but I want or need to get some solid work done. Normally, though, I've reverted back to caffeine, for better or for worse. Occasionally, I also get bored of caffeine and go back to taking Modafinil regularly for a week or two.

I wouldn't recommend what I did - but not because of the Modafinil. Chronic lack of sleep just isn't good for you, drugs or no drugs. If I was teleported back in time to that point and offered that choice under the same circumstances, but with today's knowledge, I would definitely do it again.
I believe in people who execute. The tasks you have to do in a standard job are for the most part VERY similar to those in school. Little creativity is required, just follow the rules and deliver. People who cannot finish a college degree may be geniuses, but what use is a genius to a big company if the genius never finishes a project but gets bored after a few weeks?

University is a free place. Come and go as you please, just write the exams. Those geniuses should have no problem doing that, no?

A company needs a good mix of the following:

1. Slow and steady worker
2. Charming and friendly people
3. People with clever ideas who know how to explain their ideas properly

Some helter skelter genius with strong opinions and a low ability to complete projects is exactly the wrong type of person for a company.

And the right kind of person to start an own business.
"I would be happy to tell you more off-line"

I would be happy to hear more off-line. My email address in is my profile.
I can see requiring a degree if you want someone from a good university...Stanford, MIT...that way you know from the get go that you are getting a smart person.

But in reality neither that, nor job experience really matters. Why? Because a person can write anything they want on their resume and you'll never know that they are BSing
This Princeton U alumni page http://www.ee.princeton.edu/people/alumni/iss/?id=77bc6af36d... has a nice write up on some of his other efforts like jambav.com and his efforts to improve higher education in India. I've been following Sridhar's blog for quite some time since his adventnet days. What I like about him, other than the fact the we both went to the same high school :-), is the fact that his talent and energy is directed at solving some of the local business/social needs and thus creating unique products and a whole new cycle of innovation.
It's a false assumption that not going to college means a person can't finish something. Fact is, MOST people don't go to college and many of them don't do it for financial or family reasons. College isn't like high school, it's not available to everyone for free. Many many smart people skip college and that's not going to change any time soon.
the thing about Yahoo Pipes [from my experience] is that it only refreshes a couple times a day, so a feed could sit for hours before it's fetched through your pipe. Urg.
its cheaper than paypal, and you actually look professional. "Please pay us via paypal/google checkout" just sounds so amateurish.
People who can self teach well are the minority, and many of those people still go to university/college. I am not shortchanging the value whatsoever.

I think being autodidactic is incredibly valuable - but I don't believe whether or not you have a degree is a good indicator of that. That skill is also incredibly hard to determine from a resume or interview. When you are hiring commonly you have once piece of paper to look at and then a 30 minute interview to evaluate the person. Whether you like it or not, the majority of people doing this will filter by degree and institution. If you can think of a better process, create a HR startup I am sure it would be amazingly successful! Many companies realize that the hiring process is flawed but there currently are few options.

I also disagree that educational institutions "calcify mediocrity".
Of course I don't think that people who don't go to college can't finish something. I ABSOLUTELY would hire a person who did not go to college if he was qualified. But a person who drops out of college because he felt the classes where holding him back is for me a person who cannot complete stuff.

If he dropped out to execute something (like start a business), then it is a major plus point. If he dropped out to go work in a dead end job, or to become an 'artist' then this is a sign of a person who cannot complete projects.

I mean, why would you drop out of college to go earn $3000 a month when you could just finish college and earn more than that?

I would NEVER discriminate against a person because financially they had trouble going to college. But I would see it as very negative if a person complained about college not being the right thing for them. Learning is learning, there is no right or wrong way. Everyone does it his way.
As someone who has developed FB apps, I have to agree, and add that not only are most users (myself included) jaded to the Facebook Apps and their diarrhea of invitations and notifications, but facebook app developers themselves are wary of trusting facebook with their time, effort, etc.

There's a few reasons:
- The main point of developing a facebook app was to reach a lot of users very quickly and cheaply. Now that Facebook has mercilessly nerfed all the viral features of applications, is there any point in tying your app to FB?
- The FB platform has proved notoriously unreliable and requiring constant tweaking and oversight by app developers to keep their apps working with the latest backwards-incompatible changes that FB brought in.
- The FB platform features themselves have fairly often been unreliable, with the standard error displayed to users blaming the application developers even when it was facebook's fault (e.g. when they broke their own FBJS)

These and many things mean that myself and a number of people I know who used to develop FB apps would not consider doing so in the future.
So what stopped you from absorbing all of the narrow focus and then discovering more by reading on the side?
Not going to university was an option, I made a decision, got on with it, and I haven't lost anything in the pace of my career as a result. If anything its instilled an attitude that has well prepared me for running my own company, in the ability to think different and break the rules.

Therefore I don't see it that I failed to complete a project, or have a lacking ability to execute. Not going the normal path, where you're not guided through, the route isn't clear, you have to make decisions, and take actions on your own accord.

Does that not demonstrate an ability to execute?

I have always encountered jobs on the standard job market that require degrees, and I just thought that was how it was. I found other jobs, and made my way despite that.

The reason for starting this thread was because I thought people starting their own companies, especially many of them being from a technical background themselves, would have a different line of thinking..
If you really want an "editor", you could check out the graphical JSON editor included with the ruby json package: http://json.rubyforge.org/screenshots.html
Nitpick #2, Jeff Han references that he's implementing this rigid as possible paper at about 8:20. Jeff is a big fan of research and implements a lot of existing techniques invented by others in his demos.

I work in the same lab as Tomer who did this paper, Big Ups Tomer!
Merb: Routing 201
correct. if you make your customer use a paypal account, you won't have to deal with the storage of the information which makes the whole process easier on your end (but harder for your customers).
I call it efficiency.
Wow, TC is getting you to do free PR for them. Pay no mind. I doubt TechCrunch would have written about the site to start with, If you want users then then target publications in your service's niche (user numbers count, everything else is fluff). TechCrunch desperately wants to be 'the place' to launch, but the dirty secret is that the traffic they drive isn't sticky.
When you were 16 did you know that employers use a college degree as a coarse filter when trying to get a manageable applicant pool? It would seem that your answer was most likely one of two. You were either ignorant of reality when making a huge decision, or you were the type to want to fight reality because it felt like injustice and you 'knew better'. Of course at 16 we all 'knew better' and if that's how it went down I'm sorry you didn't get better advice... but it's a personality trait that some folks don't grow out of, and if you've ever managed a team you know they aren't the ones you want to have around.

Anyway, this is not to make any sort of judgment on you personally, you have probably done more awesome things than most 24 year olds and may be nothing like what I described, but you asked: when an employer sees a resume without a degree that's a snap decision thought process they might go through.

The situation actually isn't that bad... most of the best jobs aren't "resume" jobs, they're "hey I know a guy" jobs. Networking is much more important than resume to getting a good job - especially at startups!
"but with full content on the site"

I think that republishing someone else's RSS feed in full on your site is at best bad etiquette, at worst it's just plain stealing. I left a comment about it on the drupal page you linked to.
For those following along at home, the unpretentious word for "autodidact" is "self-taught"
<shrug>

Well, at least there's a lot more sense there than in most of your posts :-)
Great article, we need people unmasking from time to time articles without any clue that may sound reasonable just because the blog publishing them has N*million users/month.
Then you don't like people who can't finish things, stop equating that with college, they are unrelated. Successfully completing college does not mean you are good at finishing things. It may be an indicator, it's certainly not a qualifier.

Many jocks finish college while barely being able to read, many students cheat their way through, or barely make it through with low grades. Going to college is much more an indicator of your social values rather than your skills.

Most people tend to go to college because they're expected to, it has a lot to do with the values your parent instill. Many people skip college because it never occurred to them they should go, their families simply didn't instill those values in them.

College is nothing more than a place where one can learn, it does not mean one does learn. People who enjoy learning don't ever stop learning and self learning eventually becomes a requirement for all who want to continue to grow. College is nothing more than a kick start for a minority of society, there are many other paths that are just as successful.

Many of the most successful companies in the world were started by college dropouts who realized school was getting in their way. Classrooms are good for teaching the masses, people who learn faster than average will absolutely feel like they're being held back and turn to self directed learning as the superior method it is.
I had to look at the url to check if it was the onion.
Are you proposing that they lower the standards?
VideoLectures.net - YouTube for hackers
I'd advise them to read my article here, which covers just that:

http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-...
The degree is seen as a benchmark, an easy early filter - you know someone with a degree has had the focus to knuckle down and study a subject in depth for a period of time. Frustrating for those who don't have a degree but have done the same amount of studying, if not more. But that's the way it goes.

You're only 24. If it's bothering you, go get a degree. Otherwise, make sure you produce work that demonstrates your abilities. Check out this article - 'How I got hired by Amazon' http://www.brunozzi.com/en/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-ama... - a great example of not needing to care whether the person has a degree or not.

I don't have a degree and I ended up working at Microsoft. But it would never have happened if I had tried applying through their recruitment channel, due to the degree filter. I was headhunted based on performance.