skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And what is the reason you did not want to study? Just trying to understand... Obviously, it is a money issue (earning 3 years vs paying 3 years). But if you enjoy the stuff, wouldn't it be natural to study it?

For example, personally I am bored by now by web programming, and university really wasn't so much about practical programming. I liked the theory, complexity of algorithms and so on. in your self-taught curriculum, did you ever come across those kinds of things? Do you/did you care? If you are truly interested in that stuff, but don't want to spend the money, why not do it in a remote learning course or something? I mean, you want to learn the stuff anyway, why not get credit for it?

Obviously it is better to create a new distributed hashing algorithm by creating something like bittorrent, rather than doing theoretical work about it at university. But university is not so bad, and some results from academia do spill over into the real world.

Just today a friend told me about a program he got to analyze that did user authentication on the client. It is amazing to me that people can be able to program such Java clients, yet be unable to understand the security issue. They can program, yet they can not program. Maybe it is because it is so easy to learn programming, and bad code actually runs, too, that employers like to see some additional verification like a CS degree (and of course the CS degree is not guarantee stuff like that won't happen).
Agreed completely. But how do you get more information cheaply?

Remember, all you know is P(qualified| resume says autodidactic)= P(qualified | autodidactic) * P(autodidactic | resume says autodidactic) . The second term can easily kill you. Do you trust everything people put on their resume?

On the other hand, P(degree | resume says degree) is probably close to 1, since a degree is so easy for an HR person to check.

Look, I've got nothing against hiring good people who have no degree, and I certainly don't think a degree proves much (my current students prove that conclusively). If you know you have such a good person, hire them, ignore the degree.

I'm just pointing out that the game is to find the good people. And that's a bit tricky to do.

[edit: by this way, in the interest of clarifying, what you want to optimize is not candidate quality, but (candidate quality - search costs). Don't ignore the search costs term.]
Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it.

I would be very surprised to find very many "normal people" who have the drive to learn, say, probability theory or statistics to any reasonable depth by self-study. Of course such people exist, but they are neither typical nor common.
maybe for my parents it is, but I thought IM / texting was #1 for gen x and y
This is a reason why having a boss at work helps. If you know your web browsing may be examined you save (nearly) all the distracting reading for home and you get something like your 7 hours of work done but you can still search the web for unit test guidance or whatever.

I've never had a television and reddit is blocked in my home squid proxy (which I can bypass) as a reminder not to be there too much.
I wouldn't say the value of TC is traffic, but more so an introduction to the VC/Tech community. TC posts so much each day that your post will be bumped off the front page in no time. However if just the right person is reading TC or picking up the feed, it can lead to good things for your startup.

Also, the posts that really seem to draw comments and the most buzz are all about the titans of the industry (Facebook, Yahoo, Google, MS) They don't exactly need the PR but that's what people love to discuss and rant about.
I've read why they don't, but I really wish they included some sort of pricing information (even for an example industry/volume) on their site. Even if they're great, it makes it difficult for me to judge if it's even worth our time to investigate further. Anyone who's used them want to share feedback as to how they compare rate-wise with other providers?
F|R Crib Sheet: The Term Sheet Glossary
I tend to disagree, an "intelligent news aggregator" adds value to a story (by bringing in more sources) and increases circulation for the source. If you construct your RSS properly you can utilize splogs, and aggregators to expand your reach.
" Why? Because a person can write anything they want on their resume and you'll never know that they are BSing"

Unless you pick up the phone and make a few calls. There are many things that are trivial to check, such as whether someone actually attended a given school or worked at a given company.

Certainly people can and do BS on their resume and get away with it, but its not because resumes are inherently unverifiable.
I said normal people who want. Now it's true that normal people don't generally want to learn probability theory, but if they do, they'll turn to books and self teaching long before school unless they're extremely young and still think of school as life.

Once you've been in the real world for a while, the idea of going back to school is generally the last option, not the first. The only thing school has to offer over self directed learning is very smart people to learn from, but if you look around, you can find those people in the real world as well. Mentors tent to show up just when you're sincerely looking for them.
Will Polyglotism and DSLs make Java the Last Big Language?
I have lecture videos from this class. The man probably wouldn't like it if I posted them. If you really want them, i.e. will watch them, you can snail mail me 5GB in flash and I'll mail them back to you.

(a la http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/moving_a_petabyte_of_dat...)
Kayak has a MUCH better name. Not only is it a plain english word, but it is also a palindrome.
Are you saying that a technology that has been working for the past 20+ years, that is simple to use, simple to implement, and does what it says on the tin is the Internet's killer app?

Why, I never....

</sarcasm>
I don't think that this site is going to "increase circulation for the source".

If you look at it, it is far from obvious that the content is being aggregated from other sources. Looking at the front page one might easily assume that this is all the sites own content.

There are no mentions of sources or links to sources on the frontpage. When you click on a link, you are not brought to the source, but instead to another page on the site which republishes the content from the source in full. Again it looks like this is the sites own content.

If you scroll down below the fold you eventually find a link to source but on the articles I checked this just links the the source sites main page and not to the individual article at the source site.
There are lots of other cheap filters that companies do not use. For example, "Have you read Ayn Rand?" This question may well have better predictive power than a degree. And it's not hard to verify if the person is lying about whether they've read some at all.

Or, "how many blog posts do you have about programming?" Again this is easy to verify.
In the programming industry, it's not really that hard to filter out bad candidates. You shouldn't waste time talking to any programmer not willing to submit to some simplistic programming test in lieu of a resume. Resumes are crap and have no place in hiring programmers. Code is all that matters, either they can do it or they can't and if they can, they'll accept your challenge.

Nothing makes for a better interview than doing a code review and critique of the candidates own code. Something simple but telling like write a little slot machine that lets you bet money, spin the wheel, and win or lose with the game ending when you run out of money.

Anyone who refuses such a test isn't a programmer you want anyway, and you can tell an enormous amount about a potential candidate by simply looking at the quality of the code submitted. Don't bother interviewing anyone who's code you can't stand. You can see everything you need to know about their skills in that code.

You wouldn't hire a graphic designer who refused to submit samples of his designs, nor should you hire a programmer who refuses to submit samples of his code. Merely by having such a test, you'll weed out all the fakers because they won't bother with it, they'll submit their fake resumes elsewhere.
reminds me of some simpsons episode
(238. The Mansion Family) google tells me
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3976079/THE_SIMPSONS_SEASON_11_b...
"Don't quit, even when you know your stuff sucks" - Ira Glass on Storytelling
I normally wouldn't post stuff on here from youtube, but I was watching stuff on "This American Life", and I ran across this clip. TAL is a weekly radio show. Regardless of what you might think about the show, here, the host of the show talks about getting better at what you do, and how many people quit when they can tell their stuff sucks. I thought it applicable to builders that frequent this forum as well, as well as being in line with PG's essay about a taste for makers.
Not that glamorous.

I actually use it for reminding me which one is foldr and which is foldl in Haskell. I always forget.

I can not remember how I found it originally, though. Perhaps via Lambda the Ultimate.
Regarding tail-recursion and optimization: In Haskell I guess it is the other way round - foldr is the more 'natural' function when you consider lazy evaluation.
Lots of people have probably read these, but Steve Yegge wrote some great posts about interview loops on his old Amazon blog.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/why-phone-screens-matter

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/what-you-need-to-know

Here's an excerpt from that last one that is on point:

"My point today is that although I don't feel you need to have a Computer Science degree in order to be a good developer, I do believe that there is a set of learnings, which you normally acquire in the course of a CS degree, that I would consider to be part of the core set of ideas that are 'software common sense'. If you don't know them, then I will feel that you lack common sense.

"In our CS degree, we saw a lot of proofs, and had to work through many of them by hand. I feel that this was to some extent unnecessary, since it obscured the importance of the things we were proving by putting us all to sleep. Being able to prove something does allow you to reason through it to assure yourself of its correctness, and to derive it from first principles if you've forgotten it. But in everyday programming, you don't need to do proofs. You ought to have a feel for the outline of the proof, the sort of intuitive derivation of a rule, so you can reason through it with yourself and with others. But you don't need to be ultra-formal about it unless you happen to love proofs, as some folks do.

"Instead, you need to be aware of the major findings and learnings of Computer Science, and the rough reasons for them. I realize this opinion is going to displease two audiences: CS theory folks, who will think it's too weak, and professional programmers with no CS degree, who will think it's too strong. But it's my opinion and I'll stick with it."
they'll turn to books and self teaching long before school unless they're extremely young and still think of school as life.

On the contrary, many people take classes and attend conferences, workshops and seminars at many different ages. You could learn cooking by self study, but cooking classes continue to be popular, despite being more expensive.

The only thing school has to offer over self directed learning is very smart people to learn from

Hardly the only thing: a lot of things are easier to learn when you're in a group of intelligent people all interested in approximately the same thing, and all trying to learn the same subject matter (I'm thinking mostly of graduate seminar classes here, not 300-student undergrad lectures).
Perhaps you do! ;)
Having been linked from both Mashable and TC, TC drives >10x the traffic. This is worth considering when announcing a launch.

It's short sighted to not consider that a blog like TC wants to be the first to cover something; there's enough of an echo in the blogosphere already.
Is autodidact such an unusual word in English?

(I would find a perfectly acceptable - but I am not a native speaker though. That's why I am asking.)
I didn't say adults don't go to school, only that it's usually not the first option.

You second point just echo's what I already said, smart people to learn from, that includes your teachers and peers.
That may work better than a resume.

Can you imagine a test for the ability to work on larger programs?
Is there any way we as the users can look at who voted for an item?
I have the opposite experience. Lisp puts the operator on the far left, and has no penalty for a newline, so I find it much easier to keep lines shorter.

In Algol-based languages, I end up with "something_something [op] something_something" and then if I need to do something else, my next line starts 20 chars from the left edge, to line up with the op. So I have to choose between really long lines, or really short identifiers, or breaking one expression into several using temporary variables -- all of these make me feel dirty.
You may want to join http://www.this-page-intentionally-left-blank.org/
how do you know the phone # someone gives you is their ex-boss' phone # and not their buddy's
Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Or my short restatement: Everything that's free is abused.
There's nothing wrong with doing things that way. I know a bunch of smart people who did that.

But if you're going to be teaching yourself on the side anyway, part of the value of being in school in the first place is reduced. Depending on your financial situation, it might make sense to just teach yourself full-time, or to do your reading on the side while working.

I hated school. After a while I decided that I was better off without it. Ten years later, I still feel that way.
Seth's Blog: Rough edges and attention
Good code is good code, I don't agree that it takes a vastly different skill set to work on different sized programs. During the interview you can simply ask questions such as "How would you provide the ability to configure various strategies for different users interfaces for this slot machine? Say a web UI, a command line UI, and a native app UI?". "How might you make the randomizer for spinning the slots configurable?". The discussions these open up will tell you a lot about their knowledge of making flexible software.

Again, the test is just to weed out the bad candidates and allow you to only interview worthy people, everything else you'll find out in the actual interview. Interviews will be rare, few people will submit code you'll find acceptable at all. The vast majority of people applying for programming jobs, can't program, it's sad, but true.
To suggest that the only major difference betweeen humans and chimps is social seems kind of stupid to me. The human brain is obviously more advanced and capabile of more complex resoning beyond that of simple social interactions.
I've not watched to video, but I think of a woodworking page I read a long time ago following the paths of a power tool guy and a hand tool guy learning their craft. Through enough practice, they eventually converge on a generally common set of tools, mix of hand and power. Through the progression of skill development were milestones of

make stuff that sucks that no one wants, throw it out.

make stuff that sucks that you can use, keep it for a while.

make stuff that sucks less, keep it for longer.

make stuff and hey, someone actually wants you to make stuff for them

make stuff better

and so on...

To me, its about making mistakes and learning from them, trying not to repeat the same mistake twice. Then you are bound to get better. There was some quote I heard that if you make enough mistakes and don't repeat them, you will run out of mistakes. It was a bit satirical, but I like the general line of thinking.
The "scaling twitter" discussions got me thinking, what if everybody would be hosting their own microblog, just as people do with full blown blogs? Some people could still use Twitter or whatever, just as people still use wordpress.com or blogspot.com.

To me it certainly seems desirable to do so, but scaling problems would probably still apply, if servers would poll each other at will.

Another problem would be the free SMS that Twitter "donates". Maybe not so easy to provide an easy to set up solution for individuals.
Dealing with bullshit. That's what it all comes down to.

In the academic world, you invariably run into people who not only have explicit control over your success, but are possibly unreasonable and malicious. The fact that someone has a degree proves that he had enough dedication to stick with it and conquer (or at least fare) the propagators of bullshit.

Anyone intelligent can sit in the library and learn to code; not everyone intelligent can code AND deal with adversity.
Sure - a smaller search space will not enhance the value of the maximum your are searching for.

But the cost of searching my lower drastically.

And as another poster pointed out it is the total of (quality of candidate - search cost) that you want to maximize.
Well, you said that "normal people" would read a book "long before" going to school, which I think is not true in many domains.

My second point was not just that you can learn from your peers, but that there is a social environment at a school that is important, and not readily replicated in self-study. You don't learn much from your peers at a typical cooking class, but they still contribute to why many people choose to take classes rather than self-study.
Its the first time i've ever seen autodidact(ic). I assumed it meant self-taught based on context, probably like most of the others.
Math should also be very self-teachable. Though it takes a lot of discipline or (better) passion.

Almost all ground-breaking mathematics was done at a very young age.
Self-spamming?
Freedom to do what I want to do I guess. In the UK there's a 5 year gap between finishing secondary school, and finishing university (2 years of college in between).

During that 5 years, I've lived in 3 completely different locations within England, and lived in another country for a few years too. I've worked for big companies, small companies, startup companies and now myself.

It was a personal decision, that I took, and I don't regret it one bit. I'm not even in the market to get a job, I just had an old annoyance come back when I noticed a few startups requiring degree's for their jobs on here, I thought startups would be different to the usual useless HR departments in that they should be able to tell good developers to bad, without filtering on whether they have a degree or not..
Gmail just became really good
The stats on college attendance would seem to be against you since about 70% of the population doesn't do it or doesn't finish a 4 year degree. Those are normal people. The 30% that do attend college and finish with at least a Bachelor's are the minority.

Yes, school is a social environment for learning, that has value, but it's hardly the only way to obtain that. Outside of school, there are local clubs and hobbie groups, forums and blogs such as this on the Internet, alternate paths such as the military, etc. There are all kinds of ways to be around people who enjoy the same things you do, or are trying to learn the same things you are without going to school.

By saying thats a benefit of school you're implying that it's not obtainable elsewhere. School just isn't that important if you really want to learn, it's more valuable for those that lack motivation and need someone to make them learn.
Has anyone here downloaded and read the book? Is it worth the time?
Perhaps markets are.
OK, probably I only know all the weird words you never actually use.
Ask YC: what inspired you to develop technology
Maybe because father's day is around the corner...

I was reflecting on some wondrous moments in my life that have led me to here in my career, what I do as a tech visionary. I realized that working along side my Dad helping him take steel rods, engine parts and create a Dragster to race over the weekend at Sears Point, CA made a huge impact on how I see and communicate technology with my business partner. I also was fortunate in working with my Grandfather in the fruit orchards. Understand the patterns of agriculture. Each of these life experiences has influenced my work in technology.

I'm curious, what inspired other hackers.
Adobe After Effects CS3 uses the algorithm or something very very similar in it's Puppet tool. I used it quite extensively last summer doing this animation for the Heinz "Top This" commercial competition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DJQ9PuT4I8

We didn't win, but my wife (the director) did get a personalized bottle of ketchup out of the deal.

If you want to see more of the Puppet tool, there's a tutorial here: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_af...

Video of puppet tool in use start around minute 2:45
Sleeping Aids Review (diphenhydramine, doxylamine)
A question...

From the page:

"Bear in mind: liquidation multiples and participating preferreds are most common in high-risk, troubled company situations. If your VCs are using these terms, be careful."

I understand the risk and why VCs would use those terms. What can entrepreneurs do/react when these terms being asked for?
That actually happens a fair amount with non-native speakers, since our uncommon words are sometimes very similar to their common words. For example, an italian recently called me ascetic, and I had to look it up.
The only thing pretentious about 'autodidact' is the use of the word 'pretentious' to characterize a common vocabulary word.
Computer programming is something that you have to do for a long time to be good at. Almost all good programmers started well before college, and a lot of them go on to study something other than CS. My BS is in Electrical Engineering, and I have an MS in Math, yet I still consider myself a desirable candidate for programming jobs.
The AP is a wire service. They deal in commodity news. But it is very common for newspapers and magazines to agree to cover stories in return for an exclusive.
So, cross-domain restrictions are easily bypassed by creating a <script> tag with document.createElement and setting its src property to whatever you want. I am surprised that I didn't know about this simple trick. Javascript dynamicness strikes again!

The author's upset about this, but the legitimate uses seem pretty exciting.
It's not really that common, most people wouldn't know what it meant so it is a bit pretentious. Most people really would just say "self taught".
Why isn’t .mac a hub for my social stuff?
FreeBSD the most distributed Linux in the World
I took a furniture making class and Dan, the experienced woodworker, who taught the class told me something important when I was struggling with my table. He said "Do you think master woodworkers don't make mistakes? They do, they shim* stuff up. You can't tell when it's done". Another woodworker also told me 'there's no such thing as the right way. there's only smarter, safer, faster" e.g. if you run into a problem, you work around it with a creative solution.

A shim is a small piece of wood, chipped to fit into a joint and glued in place so that the joint is snug.
It's not at all pretentious to use a well-defined word whose meaning is precisely appropriate. To anyone who needs convincing of this I recommend a large stack of Christopher Hitchens.

What's pretentious is using big words to impress others. Most people who do this actually end up not using such words correctly, since nuances of meaning are hardly their primary concern.

Edit: what I really object to is your implied criterion that anything beyond what "most people" would say must be pretentious. Lord help us if we're supposed to go by "most people".