skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So then the logical answer is that self taught programmers lack the confidence to realize that they are just as good as formally educated programmers. :)
Heh. Yeah, that's because a good portion of all the lines listed are rush-hour-only express variants of the main lines, or late-hours skeleton service (for the lettered LRV routes). I'm working on adding information on when each line is scheduled to run and what its expected headway is, so look for the inactive lines to disappear and for info on those that are running to get more accurate!
As a high school student, I prefer email for some things and IRC for others. I despise twitter and facebook and don't have accounts for them. However, my stubborn clinging to not having a facebook account has gotten painful, as that is where most of my peers communicate and I know no one else my age who regularly checks their email. For IRC, no one my age could tell you what it is. I agree; it is a sad situation.
Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Dr. Laurence J. Peter
The new Ubuntu Desktop: Unity
Once you have money does it matter, unless you actually care for the company?
It's called "imposter syndrome", and you are not alone. It's a powerful motivation, but don't let it make you suffer.
A much more thoughtful article on Living Social vs Groupon which the TC article references - http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/livingsocial-chief-ra...
I'm also saddened to see such a misguided stereotype on the front page here. It's damaging in the same way as the old question, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

To my mind, this question, and the answers given, would only begin to make sense if it were phrased "What skills do people who are not interested in Computer Science commonly lack?"

And pointers? Really? That would make sense if the question was "What skills do people who have never used a language with pointers commonly lack?"
Surprised it took Twitter this long to monetize this.
I never did say thanks for pushing my beta up. If I'd known that you'd appear whenever I invoked your name though, I would have figured out a way to sell these invites. ;-)
DotCloud might be my favorite company in 2011. It's definitely solving a big problem of mine. From account creation to production level deployment of my Django app took me less than an hour. Offloading sysadmin work has been a great pleasure for me for the last couple of days.
It doesn't. Money is everything. Once you sell it's like getting a divorce. You enjoyed the good times, the rest is history. Unless there's an earnout.
This is one of the rare cases where I think sparklines might add a lot to the user experience. A sea of informationless icons doesn't invite me in.
People should value truth and authenticity. It's far more valuable than attributing inaccuracies to persons or events simply to manipulate the emotions and aspirations of mankind. If I discovered that the Moon landing was falsified, I wouldn't simply continue with a lie, because it makes me feel better to believe we really achieved such a feat. I also don't think that the truth is something one should belittle as "random facts".

I'm sure this is an argument that people like Nixon would solidly support and probably did.

(Note, I'm not a Moon landing conspiracist -- it was just an example.)
Have they shipped replacement power adapters yet? They emailed me to tell me not to use mine because it might catch on fire, but I haven't gotten a replacement or heard any news about that. Anyone know the status on those?
I'm just curious. This structure is pretty easy to follow if you are really passionate about what you do.. but just asking if you happen to be in a relationship like being engaged would you have any idea how to give time to everything? Or is that where the line gets drawn? (No not applicable to me... yet..)
I didn't know you were self-taught — I wasn't projecting, but literally confessing my agreement toward the bias you described. As to the parent, envy is typically felt from a position of disadvantage or inferiority.
Once you take into account that Facebook traffic tends to start out at ~$1 a click and the fact that the people clicking it are just browsing(instead of searching like they do on Google)...you'll realize that Facebook traffic is the most expensive traffic you can buy.

Most people who make money off craigslist are the affiliate spammers who get paid something like $3 for every email submission form they get.
HN should have a feature to flag entire profiles for deletion.
Excuse #2 - Writing tests is too hard
Agreed. But silicon valley seems to have its own reality distortion field around it.
Building a HA Cluster on Linode [Blog Post][Series]
I would say that it is definitely a power or over buy. I would agree that the purchasing price could be a good bit lower. Now I'm not trying to demean Nat in anyway they are in no way a garage operation, but they have not been doing that well in the past few years. I don't know if it is a downturn in markets or competition but their stock price isn't where it was 5 years ago.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=National+Semiconductor&o...

But it sure as hell will be tomorrow look at that after hours!
Wait wait, your transit operator has an API? How fucked is that?
Rob Pike: Concurrency/message passing (with Newsqueak)
In fairness, once pointers clicked for me, a heaping pile of computing made sense. I banged my head on x86 assembly for a few weeks when I was 14, went back to C and got pointers, then reapproached assembly later and was delighted at how easily it fell into place.

It's my personal belief that a firm grasp of C and any processor's assembly -- protected-mode Intel is a can of worms, there's easier architectures like ARM -- is crucial to success as a programmer. Crucial. Enough so that I weigh a CS program based on their application of it, and so far I've been mostly disappointed. Hence why I remain an autodidact.
ScalaSTM is hardly experimental. Its reference implementation is based on CCSTM, which has been around for a while now. CCSTM was built by Nathan Bronson, who spent a good chunk of his working life building several transactional memory systems for use in the financial industry. Now he's at Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab, where he's built CCSTM and is part of the ScalaSTM expert group. I would have no qualms using ScalaSTM in production today.

Whether it is or isn't shipped with the "base library" seems like a red herring. Scala, today, supports the language features necessary to support ScalaSTM. Whether that's packaged and distributed with the language seems superfluous.

I never said Clojure won't let you use Actors. I said Clojure won't let you do things it considers to be wrong (e.g., mutable state shared between threads).

Like I said, this blog post was a comparison between Actors and STM, and I would have been more interested in seeing a comparison between Clojure's STM and ScalaSTM.
Yeah, it's comforting to have a label for it. I had a bit of a catharsis with imposter syndrome in this blog post I wrote for my esteemed employer:

http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-for-iphone-post-mortem
I had no clue what "Muni" was Googling led me to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.

Most of the routes referenced are here:
http://www.sfmta.com/cms/asystem/routelist.php
This is rad. Anyone on here see "Is the L Train Fucked" (http://istheltrainfucked.com)? I hacked that together a month or two ago. I hope we start to see more apps built on public transpo APIs!

edit: also on github --> http://github.com/jgv/is-the-l-train-fucked
There's a comment there where someone says you go to school to learn how to learn. Clearly self-taught programmers already have this part mastered.

It leads me to wonder why we aren't asking, "What skills do school-taught programmers commonly lack?"
"What is it with the recent campaign to slam Gandhi?"

Perhaps it's that, even with his flaws, Gandhi raises the bar really high. He reminds us that we have much more internal power and potential than we want to admit to ourselves and that we have a responsibility to others.
Not surprising. That is a list of things 99% of working developers do not do on a daily basis. And I'm not sure most of that will help 99% of developers on a day to day basis.

I once had a project to extract customer contact information from an Excel spredsheet. I use Bayesian probability to determine if a column was a first or last name and trained it using US census data. Then used Levenshtein distance to find names that were possible misspellings. It worked great, but on the POS computers that most people in the company had it took so long they usually just gave up. I would have been better off just sticking a DDL and letting them select what each column was.

Oh well, maybe If I was actually trained I would have figured out how to do it by writing my own compiler or Excel extraction DSL
Outside the US e-book business is still in its infancy (and Kindle is absent)
OK, I'm probably misunderstanding the cellular details...

I do however expect the issues alluded to here:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/FGCNS.20...
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1095972
http://doc.utwente.nl/62891/

To have some strong bearing on me seeing crap performance like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigiain/5222203911/
Poll: Paypal or Credit Card for payment processing on webapp
So I have been looking into launching a few web apps with cheap simple payments, either one time $10 signups, or $5-10/month recurring. I am trying to decide, from a user/UX standpoint, if paypal payments or a CC form is less signup friction. Does anyone have any experience? As a customer what are your views?
Credit Card form
Something should be done about all caps on link titles.
Your first point is very useful. Still way slower than the Windows way but way quicker than mousing it.

I already knew the alert dialog trick. It doesn't work consistently though which is rather annoying (Apple's own apps rarely seem to support it)
We are still working on a solution for the replacement chargers, but unfortunately it is a lengthy process. Don't worry we didn't forget about it and will be in touch once we have a solution!
Hacker News Guidelines:

In Submissions

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase ...
I'm a self taught programmer and have been doing a lot of interviews with developers, both self taught and schooled lately. In general, self taught programmers seem to fall in to two categories.

1. They learned one language (PHP or C#), just enough to be productive, and manage to get jobs and make a career out of small "programming" jobs. Sharepoint monkeys, small consulting gigs for web development clients, etc.

2. They have an insatiable appetite for programming and never have stopped learning or expanding their skill set. I fall in this category. I'm constantly reading books, learning from coworkers and never settle for my skill set. I've also gone back and taken some college-level CS courses, which have helped me greatly as well. I'm currently in the process of reading all the seminal computer science books (currently reading the gang of four design patterns book).

In general though, having a CS background doesn't make you a good developer any more than getting an MBA makes you good at business. It's about how you apply it. Plus, you can be a good developer and valuable employee for lots of other reasons besides being book smarts: dependable, productive, smart instincts, etc.
Beware the Company Killer
I think the more valuable lesson is that you don't need to white-wash history to paint a figure as better than they were (especially if they were not particularly good at all in some cases), simply to uphold the value of the things we associate with them. Society doesn't have to confuse the two. A worthy idea or concept can stand on its own, even if we uncover unpleasant truths about the people involved.
The question must have been typoed. Given that list, I think the question was supposed to be, "What skills do novice programmers commonly lack?"

Anyway, I know first hand (from interviewing quite a number of people) that a lot of university graduates lack the listed skills. Sure, they might be familiar with the term "compiler," but that doesn't mean that they have the skills to actually write one.

Don't get me wrong -- for some people, a university education is perfect. There are plenty of grads that know what the hell they're doing. But getting a degree is far from the only way to learn what you need to know to be a decent programmer, and it certainly doesn't guarantee that you'll be one.
At least put that its an old April fools in the title! That way I can quickly decide if its worth reading or just skimming.
I have a feeling this might be a bluff. This scare might just be politics as usual. It just doesn't make sense to cut this, especially if they're saving money.
I would argue the trend is towards smaller screens if anything (small, light laptops, netbooks, tablets etc.).

I always either maximise or snap Windows to some sensible half/third of the screen layout.

I don't want to manually juggle Windows as my OCD kicks in and I start fiddling with them to get them exactly lined up. The Mac's 'sort of maximised but with a bit of the desktop showing round the edges' gives me the shakes...
Awesome. Your site was my inspiration!
Someone doing work with no business value for another party doesn't make much sense to me. Sure perhaps it benefits the worker in some way. Perhaps he learns the value of coming to work on time and obeying arbitrary orders to do work that everyone agrees is useless and unneeded (which is the premise you have made - I am presuming it for the sake of argument here). I postulate though that it would be even more valuable experience to do work that everyone agrees is useful and needed. It's not like there is a shortage of that. In development, there's tons of valuable software that needs to be written. The state of practice in this industry is quite poor, especially of much corporate produced software titles compared to indie releases. Why not write valuable software instead of useless when there is so much valuable software to write? Writing useless software for the purpose of experience seems a not optimal choice when one could just as easily write useful valuable software.

And now, given that one is writing useful valuable software that is of benefit to others, of course the developer should be paid for their work.
To me these patents seem less transparently silly than many of those often at issue in high-profile cases, and yet they end up providing an even harsher argument against software patents. With the silly patents a couple tweaks to the system might get them thrown out, but I don't think any patent system that accepts software patents could find a basis for rejecting these. From that starker viewpoint its as crazy an idea as ever that the person who typed these abstract descriptions and made these shoddy diagrams deserves more ownership than Apple, who actually made the concepts real.
Cool! Would love to see sites using transit APIs spread to other cities.
It isn't the SFMTA themselves -- they contract with an operation called NextBus. NextBus installs GPS tracking devices on the transit vehicles, which radio their route, direction, and position back to a central system that then computes ETAs for all the stops on the route. That info is then exposed via a website, an SMS gateway, custom digital signs at the stops themselves, and via the API. It's incredibly useful to have, and there are half a dozen apps out for iOS and Android that show this info to you on the go.
Yes. I've been meaning to update the aima-python code to the third edition and finish the unfinished bits. Volunteers to help would be greatly appreciated.
one of the thing's I've learned is that the assumptions I make nearly always come back and bite me. I think that's what's happening to you here.

The assumption you appear to be making is that a self taught programmer is one who tries but fails to gain acceptance to a CS course, so then has to teach themselves.

I'd classify myself as self taught because I've been writing code since my pre-teen years in the 80's. I also did an engineering degree which helped give me a much better theoretical grounding
> the only way to win against piracy is to compete with it in ease of acquisition.

I purchase music and tv on itunes because it's even easier that torrenting. I think they were bang on with that. Although it doesn't consider the people who are against paying for things, but they're always a lost cause.
If by fucked you mean fucking cool, then very.
See also: SCTP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTP
Paypal for both one time and recurring as I don't have to worry whether my cc number will end up in some underground hacker ring and it is easier for me to log onto paypal to cancel a sub as opposed to hunting for a unsub page on your site
Those lists are sourced from industry, they are not independently compiled by government employees. If Canada isn't playing ball with the MPAA/RIAA, they can get them on that list. It's essentially meaningless.
Oops, this was not the comment I meant to reply to.
Related discussion for git workflow/branching

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826279
The ability to manage a college loan.
IT'S OFFICIAL: AOL Fires Freelancers*
Quoting Robert Harper: 'Concurrency is concerned with nondeterministic composition of programs (or their components).' [1]

Threads can be a very efficient way of introducing non-determinism (preferable to incurring IPC overhead). Writing correct code then boils down to controlling interactions between threads. Actor architectures can be very helpful in such settings. Key to safe implementations are type-enforced isolation and immutability. More experimentally, STMs offer the promise of high-level composition of actors. My 2p.

[1] http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/parallelism-...
Interestingly enough, in the opposite direction. ICQ chose to do their protocol over UDP, but basically re-implemented TCP into their protocol.
I'm not sure what version to trust on that particular story[1], but read on. It's more an attack on the movie (and an establishment's propaganda) than on the man.

I'm Indian, and I grew up steeped in the legend of Gandhi. I've always had a close identification with him. His birthday is adjacent to mine, and I used to wear these round glasses as an adolescent. I say these things to show that I should dislike this essay. And yet I find myself unable to. It's a good, balanced, exquisitely written essay.

And having read it and pondered it and enjoyed it I find my opinion of Gandhi hasn't materially changed. He had the hustle of an entrepreneur.

"Gandhi was erratic, irrational, tyrannical, obstinate. He sometimes verged on lunacy. He believed in a religion whose ideas I find somewhat repugnant. He worshipped cows. But I will say this: he was brave. He feared no one."

Even the attack on Hinduism is interesting (I assume that's the part http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2409364 referred to as looney-land. I call it 'things you can't say'). It's cathartic to find that there's as much to criticize about Hinduism as about any of the other major religions, something I hadn't quite focused on until now. Perhaps I'm losing my roots.

---

[1] http://www.hark.com/clips/fcxrvdvphc-who-cares, http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0068895
This category "self-taught programmers" is an insidious over-generalization. Used in this context, it seems intended to conjure the image of an undisciplined hack who learned how to cobble code together from an "In 21 Days" book.

This belies the fact that programming and computing have a long and rich tradition of attracting brilliant individuals who, despite taking alternative paths, still manage to go very deep by virtue of their own drives and all-consuming interests.

I've worked closely with many dozens of CS grads in my career. I haven't detected much correspondence between "has degree" and "knows what they are doing." I've seen an overwhelming correspondence between "is truly passionate about programming/computing topics" and "knows what they are doing."

I would have somewhat more sympathy for the dichotomy implied by this question, if all CS grads graduated at the top of their class from a very good CS school.
So wait, isn't it the same as Shelfari (bought by Amazon, if I remember correctly)? Even the design seems to be similar.
Really neat way to sell vulnerabilities.
One would also need to instantiate Chrome with the command line flag --enable-experimental-extension-apis. I think I should have picked a shorter flag name.
Similar to why TCP over any medium subject to packet loss for reasons other than contention is a bad idea... say random radio noise on wireless. You'll end up with TCP slowing down to a crawl trying to correct for what it was designed for - contention, when it's really just random loss - so the best move would be to just keep going.
I'm always amazed at people's desire to disparage those who have had a positive impact on the world.

Ghandi obviously wasn't perfect, but he did plenty of good things.

It's easy to be a critic, but before you decide you need to criticize something, ask yourself "what good have I done lately?"

Then shutup and get to work.
I agree with your point of view, but TAOCP isn't really a work to be completed, and I'm willing to wager that anybody who says they have completed it flipped through it and put it back on the shelf.
I read your comment 4 times but i still dont understand its relevance.Bragging about being an early adopter is one of those ''Guy Things'', think ''My gun is bigger then yours''
The most common I have seen is to obsess over code as an ends in itself. Writing pretty code when the solution doesn't really require it. The other is premature optimization, where all code must be fast, regardless of whether the problem requires it. These both lead to lacking a "get it done" attitude that I've seen in the self-taughts.
The biggest problem with FB ads of course, is having a product that is sale-able to the facebook audience. I.e. entertainment/interest products, not needs-based products
Good call. Wordpress is also pretty thick with lots of people paying for extensions. I'd even narrow it down further- perhaps bootstrapped, wordpress-built companies of 3 or more, where speed and customer relationship really matters. $40/month may be a little high, but the market will pay if it provides that much value.

The link really helps with "seeing" what the product can do. The video is a good start as well. I'd change it a bit, though. For a great example and a good laugh watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuReA-AGa8

Within 30 seconds you know:

-Company/product name

-Elevator pitch (The easy way to fix, fill, and seal virtually anything fast, and make it last). Yours needs to be as short and succinct as this.

-What's not/what makes it awesome.

-Why competitors are bad, and why this product is good.

-How to use it.

The rest is all ways to use this cool new thing that you were just introduced. 90 seconds of continuously reinforcing the initial 30 seconds. Then the price: "only $x for all of this great value that you just watched for 2 minutes."

The video you have right now is ambiguous until the end. If you're trying to quickly explain your product to a site visitor, you have to get to the point ASAP.
I'm scared to start developing my first Android app since I have no idea how it would work across the myriad of devices there are
The new StartupLi.st [mockup]
Assuming other companies can figure out how to monetize the tweets and be able to keep paying to access the firehouse.
I wasn't disagreeing with the importance of pointers at all. And I agree strongly that a firm grasp of C and assembly is extremely valuable. My disbelief was with the notion that self-taught programmers wouldn't understand pointers. I was saying that the only way you could get away without knowing pointers would be if you'd avoided programming in asm/C/C++/etc.