skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m 59, and I still learn new stuff, every day. It’s difficult, humbling, time-consuming, and often frustrating.

And more exciting than I ever imagined.

Also, I’m a high school dropout with a GED. I ran a pretty intense engineering team, for one of the top imaging corporations in the world. I had Ph.Ds on my team, and regularly worked with some of the top engineers and scientists in the world (and wanted to strangle some of them).

I actually feel like I’m just getting started, now.
Which toxic world have we built that let people think that tinkering, exploring different facade of life, and not being able to find a programming job at 22 is called failing?

The glorification of 400k packages right after graduation, of founders becoming paper billionaires before they have their first gray hair, the lack of representation of various software dev career paths... All this (and more) is giving an unrealistic and fake vision of what we do and become as software engineers.

Many of us here like to look down on what social media does to the life of teenagers, creating insecurities and disturbing development, but we’re doing the same exact thing in our industry.

The last sentence in the post gives a glimpse of hope, but the general tone resonates with something I’ve heard too many times around me. Life is short, yes, YOLO if you want, but no, not being a top software dev at 22 is not “having failed”.
Because their job posting say they want you to have a degree. Applying for a job and just ignoring that requirement and making a remark like "yoU dIdN't ask!" in the interview is as good as lying in a lot of people's eyes. They asked in the job posting.

Honesty is the best policy. If they are willing to interview you with that knowledge up front then you're more than halfway there.
You may find this talk[1] interesting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLt_yDvdeLQ&ab_channel=TEDxT...
I don't agree with this. Even though the attempt fails, the experience stays with you.

Could you explain your reasoning?
22 years old is young man. I don’t know how many bad decisions I’ve made at that age

You’re not failing, that’s just consequences of repeated bad decisions.

Software engineers never stop learning, so it’s a mistake thinking there’s nothing else to learn in colleague. There’s a reason why reputable universities have try to structure curriculums and subjects to earn that degree. Many people said that you don’t need uni, but there’s a reason why we (human) created education system, evolve, and try to get better for hundreds of years

With that said, many other software engineers doesn’t have a degree as well. Go finish up cool personal projects, work as junior SE, enhance your skill, and climb the way up

Enjoy the drill my friend. It’ll be fun and hard at the same time
Ah, man, kid, try being 43 with a Github profile full of half-finished repos.

You haven't failed. Part of what's pathetic about the tech industry and culture, and why I've mostly bowed out of it, is that it makes you feel like you're a failure at 22. Christ, even rock singers get until they're 30 to feel that way.

You're fine, man. You just need to decide what you really want. If that means being a coder, it's easy - figure out the framework du jour, learn it, get paid to build stuff with it. You'll probably be able to keep up for about another fifteen years before you realize you have no idea what the hell this new thing is that all the 22 year olds are clamoring about that runs entirely contrary to every good habit you've ever learned. (Say, separation of code and presentation - I'm looking at you, JSX. )

But you can do a lot in fifteen years. My advice is to have something else after you age out of tech, though, which you're nowhere near doing yet. Me, I'm a writer and musician, and though neither pay as well as they used to, it's still something to do other than my part time Node coding day job.

You got this, man. Sky's the limit. Just be smart about your choices, because that time moves much faster than you would ever believe. Nobody believes that until it happens to them, but nonetheless, it's true. Make the most of these days.

And for God's sake, don't spend all of your best physical years sitting behind a laptop. There are hot singles in your area, my dude. Go find some. Life is too short and this industry does not love you the way you think it will. Find a person to do that instead.
> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

I made this exact mistake at 17/18 and even had a very similar line of thinking as OP, but my decision was not to go to school at all.

I ended up in the industry a few years later, but have had a mostly crippled career. It was unfortunately drilled in my head around the time that people were handing out six figure salaries to anyone who could remotely program regardless of education.
Eugene Wei on the az16 podcast speaks about TikTok’s use of music in a social media experience. Of course, this is an extension of the capabilities of the iPhone to consume media, and also create and share it. Stunning.

https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/algorithm-friendly-design-c...
You only "failed" in the sense that you picked the wrong major, lost interest or will-power, and hit the eject button against the will of your parents. It's not really a failure, it a common dilemma for people your age.

Take some time to discover yourself. 22 is very young. It's probably a good idea to finish the university degree, find some work, and get yourself to another country as soon as possible.
You haven't failed at all. There's nothing wrong with being a generalist. Everybody who is into programming has a bazillion empty and half-finished Git repos with ideas that went nowhere. It shows you have been exploring, experimenting and learning a lot in the process. It may be a bummer that you don't have an official piece of paper to prove it, but any employer willing to look past this will see that you have a lot of potential.

In my opinion specializing in only one skill early in life is only going to limit your possibilities later on in life. Right now it's important that you have broad interests and are able to learn new skills quickly, and to me it sounds like that's exactly the case. College doesn't really fully prepare you for working life anyway; personally I wish I had spent a little less time on college and started my career just a little bit earlier.

Finding that first job is going to be a challenge without a degree but once you find a company willing to take a chance on you, you'll likely find that you have more than enough knowledge to do the job and are flexible enough to adjust yourself to whatever the needs of the company are. Once you've got that first bit of work experience, any missteps you may have made during your college years will simply stop mattering.
Anyone know how/if Alacritty is supported? Doesn't seem to work for me.
US and UK subs run at 93-97%. Other countries use 20-50%.
Conversely, the analogous social factors in humans that caused a population decline in rats in these experiments are already at work on humans in the postindustrial Internet-connected world.
I've heard google would guess with bounce rate. Or another way, if the user clicks on LinkedIn website A, after a few moments keeps trying other linksw/related search. It would mean it was not valuable.
Exposure time was 1/640 of a second[1]. Must say I’m surprised it was that fast, but you fight both blurriness from the motion and the quite intense light reflected by a full moon.

So first manually focus, then I aimed a bit ahead along its path and waited a few seconds. Remote trigger and tripod is necessary to avoid any camera movement.

[1] f/9, Iso 400, -3 step
Tôi muốn tăng like
Crazy idea, some employees take certain days off while others take different days off.

You know, like how every other critical industry operates operates, and how public transportation works in countries that don't shut it down once a week.
hi !

You could try to find apprenticeships.

Some companies are smart, and specialize in hiring qualified workers that don't have the right degrees, because other companies wouldn't and hence they're cheap.
I'm working for a company like that

It's frustrating for the above-mentioned reasons, and because you know you're just disposable once your internship ends and they would have to pay for your work

But at least you can get virtually any kind of job you would like through internships, if you want to do dev, security, devops, ...
It's also a first experience to write on your resume, and you will meet contacts who can recommend you.
Because once you have experience, degrees become irrelevant
Ahh that sucks royally. I've been in similar and it's soul sucking!

<flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances>
The job market's great right now
</flippant-comment-from-a-random-hn-poster-who-doesnt-know-your-circumstances>

:-)

Hopefully more usefully as a comment - browsers are super hackable, you might be able to use a javascript bookmarklet to effect some improvements. Something like this https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ (there are others) makes life easier for creating these.
> Your mistake was thinking you could go into, say, a CS degree and have nothing to learn.

Thousand times this. I'm 33, programming since 8, working in the industry since 18, and can confidently call myself at least a senior, with a lot of leadership experience. And yet, I routinely go through CS courses from Stanford, MIT and CMU on YouTube (intro to databases by Andy Pavlo right now), and really envy people who have got to go learn at those institutions.

There's a lot of knowledge to be gained by doing projects and tutorials and working. But there's so much "hard CS" stuff that is just not that easy to learn on your own.
> I'm just about to finish Uni and I feel like I haven't really learnt anything over the last 4 years. I've worked on projects that I feel demonstrate I know what I'm doing more than most people in my year

Lol I’ve done a little over 4 years in the industry and feel like this.
Great write up, thank you for posting.

A while back I heard there’s one more piece to the arithmetic: the depreciation expense lowers net income so the rental company is able to proportionally lower taxes this way as well.
"We value case-by-case reasoning over general principles."
> I joined GitLab as a Service Engineer in October, 2014 as its 9th employee.

There’s a good chance the stock was diluted since then
People who work at very rich companies get very, very spoiled.

I was in Apple R&D for four years (during that period after Jobs left and before he returned). No one was hungry, few people I met were ambitious. I left mainly because they decided to treat software testers as second class citizens, and had no interest in supporting my attempts to innovate in the testing realm. I went to Borland, where morale was high and everyone wanted to beat Microsoft (until they gave up and basically bought our team).

The weird thing is that Apple worked really hard training its managers about the law and about good management practices in those days. I suspect they still do. I suspect that it has simply been overwhelmed by youngsters who expect mommy and daddy to fix everything up for their maximum comfort.
I got fired at 22 from visiting WikiLeaks on a bank computer. That, and changing the printer status messages to display "Out of ink: Please insert more blood" via the telnet HP JPL hack.

Young and stupid, I thought my life was over especially explaining to parents what Wikileaks was. Now 32 and still employed; just another 50 to go until I can retire.
IdeaOnce: Graphic Designing Platform
Most of the time you come back from a vacation, it’s a task to find a photo frame that goes with your picture. IdeaOnce helps you with that. Just open the app, select your picture and add a nice frame to make your picture look awesome.

visit://design.ideaonce.com
The sino-soviet split was not an inevitable result of geography.
Does this interoperate with Session (and perhaps other forks)?
Also, another thing worth mentioning is that the miniature preview of the screensaver from the OP blog post will show a black screen and nothing else. But it runs perfectly fine other than that. Don't know what to make of that, or how to get it to show the miniature preview.
Taiwan would be gone, Korea unified under Kim Jong Un. The soviet union would not have fallen. The world would be radically different.
Milk is both. Reusable delivered glass bottles are pints. Small supermarket plastic bottles are 568ml (1pt). Larger ones are either 1136ml (2pt) or 1l. Big ones are 2l and 3l.
From the article of this thread:

> Late on Thursday, Efood drivers, which the company claimed had lower ratings, received a message stating that, in the hopes of “increasing the productivity of the fleet” of drivers, and in the company’s “broader strategy,”
Dude, most developers who come from Uni are also totally clueless. They have to spend a week getting started with Rails/Django and three months getting fast at throwing together mediocre software using their framework de jour.

You've been coding since you were a teenager - and I assume that you understand the stack from bottom up?

Are your age, ability and willingness to learn + attitude is, in almost all cases, is the important factor. That's why a lot of graduates fail (or spend 5 years making the same little websites then move to management). They never had the interest to learn in the first place.

Get a job, find your limit, and surpass it. Do things that force you to learn something - they'll seem impossible at first, but you' d be surprised how fast you develop. The resources are so insanely good nowadays, you can literally follow a top class CS bachelors at home.

I'm almost twice your age, I didn't go to uni - I didn't need to, I have no trouble learning. I've remained as close to the code as I can, and have always been in the top couple of % of my profession. The only thing that really holds you back is having kids - you can't throw weekends into doing geeky things and 5-10 years of chronic lack of sleep is a killer.
I'm never anxious during job interviews, or anything else really: I just take things as they come and I'm fairly stable under most pressures.

Last week I was doing a video interview, and at the end they asked me to solve a simple problem and they were going to record it. I felt an incredible pressure to do it right and fast, which lead to basically screwing it up on the first attempt on account of not actually reading the question carefully (or at all really; it was a piece of code where I had to fill in some things, and I misunderstood because I barely skimmed the comments in the perceived pressure). I then a had state of near-panic where I almost just ended the call, from which I just barely managed to recover to stumble towards a solution. It's the closes I've ever come to an anxiety attack by far, which was an entirely novel experience and very much unlike me. I did end up solving it in a reasonable amount of time, but the way I got there was ... roundabout.

The question was to square a value in-place with a pointer: not very hard at all, literally one line of code. In the moment however I was genuinely doubting if I even knew what "squared" means; I really blanked in a way I don't recall ever having done before in my life :-/ I don't know why, but being watched by someone judging you just makes a huge difference for some reason. I've actually never had to write code while someone was watching before in an interview setting (plenty of verbal questions, "take-home tests", and the like, but never any actual code writing).

I had my second interview already with the third planned, so I guess I didn't do as dramatically bad as I felt I did after the interview, but still... If it had been the wrong day I might have outright failed.

It was a very weird experience and I'm not yet sure what exactly to make of it since it was fairly recent, but I gained some new appreciation on how some people might flunk simple interview questions I didn't have before.
22 and talking about failing at life, there is more then enough time to straighten out life.

Just be that kid that does the introductory course of python and help your fellow students get up to speed that experience alone might set you up to become a good team mate. Just because you had 8 years of hobby coding doesn't mean you know how to finish a multi year or multi team project, finishing a degree/internship is like a persons first big project they will finish in life. Professional coding is more about planning and communicating with other people then it is about writing coding.
> How much does peace cost? Has anybody ever costed it?

In the end these are jobs programs, as you mention the infamous "military industrial complex". They become part of a nation's economic engine.

The media will fret about deficit spending, healthcare, "socialists", inflation etc. when in reality there are bodies charged with ensuring that all remains sane .... at least on the monetary side (in the US, the Federal Reserve).

Nobody needs a new fighter jet or submarine when a few nations have enough weapons to obliterate civilization 50 times over.
Maybe there is a bare minimum on comfort what people are willing to accept? I lived in Asia for a while. There were some many options. From a 3m2 room (if you wanted to sit, you had to open the door and sit on your bed) to a full mansion. I'm back in a major capital in Europe and there is pretty much nothing you can rent under 1000EUR (70-80% of minimum wage)
Not sure how to contact you in case of possible bugs/problems, just going to drop a comment here. Was trying a bunch of "define:" queries and noticed something small;

This works https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=define%3Ahallucina...
This doesn't, or at least it's empty https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=define%3Ahallucina...
csound? pd?
Twenty years and one week ago, I lost everything I'd worked for. As far as I could tell at the time several patents, millions of dollars in funding, Ivy League degrees, a fortune in equity, all lost with no hope I could see for the future. I couldn't talk to anyone about it for a long time. In fact, my podcast episode of last week tearfully revisiting the situation was some of my first facing some of it https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo....

Friends and family heard some of those things for the first time. It hadn't hit me then that I would still be recovering from the calamity over two decades later.
> After awhile, generally the person realizes they’ve spent a lot of time talking about themselves and begin to ask you questions about yourself

They do not. After they are done talking, they notice "boy it's getting late, we should wrap this up". And next time they meet, they are full of new stories.
The beer context still applies in other more metric countries too. The 250ml glass is known as the 'demi' in French, meaning half a (metricated) pint.
For people not familiar with Rickover, videos of his interviews like [0] are useful for understanding his personality.

[0] https://vimeo.com/56270169
I used to work with a great infra team that I would wind up at the bar with frequently. I think you're onto something with people having families, maybe intentionally seek out a workplace with younger people who are still partying a lot. All those people I worked with back then don't hit the bar too much anymore (including me now I guess).

Part of it is just covid too I think. Not just the current situation but the muscle memory built up of not going out.
It depends on how far away the shipping is being interdicted. And ISR platforms are potentially more useful further away, too.
You have not failed. You don't need a degree to be successful in this industry. Just a computer, time, and focus. I am a developer and my son was never interested in what I did as a boy. At age 22, he decided he didn't want to serve drinks anymore and built an app watching a course on Pluralsight. Took him 4 months, but he learned enough to be able to say he had experience at each layer in the software stack and had a project he could show and reference in an interview. He then went to a Google hangout in his local area and spoke to the sponsors who were looking for new job candidates. He went for an interview the next week and got the job. He was the only one that showed up. He started out at $65k his first year, stayed focused, and 1.5 years later is now earning $150k with full benefits. If you think this story is unique to him, you're wrong. It's how this industry works. Dig in and good luck to you. Post back here when you are making bank!
Show HN: Global tech job search, the easy way
Of course. Nuclear powered submarines ( with ballistic missiles more so than attack ones, but still) are a very powerful deterrent. An enemy can't know where they are, and is afraid of them, and has to spend considerable resources to counter them.
The 1/3 figure is from a different time. For people who don't have tech (or equivalent) income I think it's frequently closer to 50%, of course depending a lot on location, too.
Best mini games to play online
Yeah. Virtually everyone is there at 22.

The problem here is metacognitive skills: knowing what you don't know.

The parents are right: "Parents went ugly, they said I was a careless, stupid, ignorant boy. I know they are not right." Acknowledging that is the first step. The second step is understanding that's true of most 22-year-olds. Age 0-12, you worship your parents. Age 13-19, ego really grows. You rebel, and do the opposite of what your parents want since you believe you know better. Early twenties is when you start to understand that you are, indeed, a careless, stupid, ignorant boy, and start to take advice from others. That's growing up in a nutshell.

Most of the more successful people I know get really good at taking advice from others, putting ego aside, filtering advice (not all of it is good!), and keeping an open mind. The executive version of that is delegating, and knowing whom to delegate to.

Constantly shifting focus is 100% standard for that age, and it's a fine way to grow. People at that age also really do mimic (usually stupid) role models. The "I want to be the cool computer wiz without a degree" is completely standard (only insert "rock musician" "soldier" "goth" etc). It's how your brain is wired.

I know this sounds like dime store psychoanalysis, but it's helpful to know you're not alone, and it's just how people are wired.

A few thoughts:

1) A CS degree should not be easy. If you're where you think you are, you can test out of the freshman CS courses. If you're a hotshot, you can start with a graduate-level class on sublinear-time algorithms or something. More likely, you can start with junior and senior classes. Those foundations are important, though.

2) Getting good at math is important. Social sciences degree was a mistake.

3) At 22, optimize for growth, not for profits. Profits can come later. There is an order of magnitude difference between a principal at Google and an entry-level coder. You don't get there incrementally.

4) There's plenty of part-time work, contract work, etc. available if you hunt around. A good path might be work half-time and school half-time. Both grow you in different ways.

5) It sounds like you have a good foundation to get wherever you're going. It doesn't feel like it, but you're on the right track.
"Legacy system" has negative connotations among developers, but really it just means a system which works and have been working for a long time.
Okay.

Then learn from your failures and go on.