skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alan Kay uses an interesting analogy to explain the distinction between "Computer Science" and "Software Engineering":

UCLA has one computer science department, but 25 full departments of biology (not counting medical school stuff). Why? Biologists are smarter then we are. When things are bogging down, the best thing to do is to go create a new department. (http://www.windley.com/cgi-bin/printthis.pl?url=http://www.w...)

I think the pharmacy:"software engineering"::biology:"computer science" metaphor is pretty insightful. So to answer your question - people discount a formal education in CS because it isn't necessary to write good code, just like pharmacists don't need the formal education that research biologists go through.
To parse a single CSV file with well defined rules is easy. However, different spreadsheet vendors handle escaped characters and various issues differently. http://www.rtraction.com/blog/devit/excel-csv-to-mysql-hell.... speaks of one problem that can occur. If you're trying to give example code that will work with a random CSV in the wild, it's going to be more than five lines. I'm guessing such a discussion was probably edited out as non-germane.
A classical education is more about technique than material or school. The standard education model is that students are told what is true and what is not, and then they need to regurgitate what they've been told. The classical approach is for a student to try to understand the material themselves, then interact with a teacher and fellow classmates through a discussion format based on the Socratic method to develop their understanding.

Here is an example of this technique at work with elementary school children, teaching them binary numbers:
http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
Educational product? Do you have a demo/pitch? I'm generally very interested in educational software.

Of course, I'd be more than happy to tell you all about the education-related product I'm working on...

thelevybreaks@gmail.com
The field is very young. If you want to build bridges, you major in Civil Engineering. You have to learn a lot of physics along the way, but make no mistake: the point of your education is to prepare you to build things.

Computer Science is a mish-mash of many things, and only part of that is how to build software. Sure, just about anything outside of pure CS theory requires programming, but producing the working program is not the end in itself. A big problem is that we really don't know how to build good software. This does not mean good software does not exist. It means that we don't have reliable methodology to produce good software. In contrast, we have reliable methodologies to build good bridges.

The ACM studied this with the IEEE in 2000, and came to this conclusion (http://www.cs.wm.edu/~coppit/csci690-spring2004/papers/selep...): "Following a study by a blue ribbon panel of prominent software engineers,
the ACM Council decided in May 1999 that it could not support licensing of software engineers. ACM's position is that our state of knowledge and practice in software engineering is too immature to warrant licensing."

I think it's important to differentiate between Computer Science and Software Engineering. That is, the difference between someone whose goal is contributing to the base of knowledge in their field, and someone whose goal is a stable, working system. There is, of course, overlap, but I think the distinction is still there.

I think that in the future, there will be separate CS and SE degrees. Much of what they learn will be the same, but the focus will be different. A CS education will prepare you to be a researcher; a SE education will prepare you to build software. (I know SE degrees exist, but most schools only have a CS program.) I don't think this split will happen until SE is mature enough to be licensed.

What does this have to do with your question?

We don't have reliable methodologies to build good software, and the only formal education people receive that involves building software isn't necessarily focused on actually building software. This is a nice way of saying "we don't know what we're doing." If even the best people in the field don't know what we're doing, then you can learn that on your own.

Personally, I still think a CS degree is the best preparation right now to be a professional SE. You will probably be exposed to more things than you would find on your own. But I also recognize that there are probably many professional developers without degrees who are better at what they do than people with degrees.

Also note that if you actually want to do research, then you need to get a degree.
The article, abridged:

1) Key people start to leave.

2) The company loses focus.

3) The technology is great, but no one is using it.

4) There are public disagreements between the founders and the VCs.

5) There are competitors that have more buzz (and an audience).
It also sounds like he REALLY isn't apple's market anyway.
Good luck to you. I hope things go well for you. If you didn't like consulting though, just wait until you have to deal with school administration!
I'm a busy guy. I have ideas that have nothing to do with what I'm working on. I'd LOVE to just tell someone and let them do the work. Credit would also be nice :)
Bigger Than 4 Football Fields: Toyota Completes 242,000 Square Feet Solar Power Array
I just recently went 100% FF again, after using chrome for 2 weeks or so. Chrome crashed and made pandora stutter, plus the lack of add ons.... I'll give it another shot when it gets out of beta
McCain, Obama headed to Washington for bailout talks
CAREFUL.

See: http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33ActRls/rule501.html

In the WSGR Stock Purchase Agreement template you've linked to, the investor warrants that they are an "accredited investor", which long story short means they're a millionaire or have roughly a millionaire's typical annual income.

So far as I know, and having been involved in one minor legal spat involving accreditation (a former employer got bought by another private company, and a valuation negotiation pivoted on the fact that the new company couldn't simply issue me stock), you can't simply give someone 25k and "be an angel investor". There's more to it than that.
"Microsoft already has financial ties to Digg. The software maker sells online ads for Digg under a three-year deal that expires in 2010."

So Digg is controlled by microsoft?
No wonder all the xbox love and zero wii or psp news.

Talk about fair and balanced!
Goldsmith has a point. The following excerpts are from the AOL search logs. One user, sequence of search as listed. Judge for yourself:

geeks do you know where mal&spware-viruses are hard drive or memory

geeks do you know where mal&spware-viruses are hard drive or memory

anybody know where malware and spyware live in my laptop

geeks do you know where mal&spware-viruses are hard drive or memory

mal&spware-viruses are they in hard drive or memory

mal&spware-viruses are they in harddrive or memory

support error doctor

support error doctor

support error doctor

chase user account information

larger than 20gb inexpensive cpu fpr dell c600 laptop

free shiping sites for 40 to 80 gb dell laptop cpu harddrives

sites with free shiping that have;40gb tiwan cpu hard drive for c600 dell laptop

how to jump cpu to erase everything

do you use jumper on cpu to erase everything

do you use jumper on cpu to erase everything

cpu how to erase everything and start empty

cpu how to erase everything and start empty

cpu how to erase everything and start empty
ibm travelstar cpu

how to erase everything and start empty
where to get internal cpu replscement disk

who stocks internal parts for travelstar cpu 's

who stocks internal parts for travelstar cpus

actual individual internal parts for travelstar cpu

free ship latitude 600 remanufactured travelstar cpu

dellc600 remanufactured travelstar cpu

dell c600 remanufactured travelstar cpu

remanufactured hard drives with trade in core

remanufactured hard drives

aftermarket hard drives for dell laptops

show picture of hard drive for dell c600 wireless laptop

what name has the omand intererter

what name has the comand intererter

what name has the command interpreter

what name has the command interpreter

virus infection remove with send me a cleaner please i will be forced to camcil

aol's-free virus infection remove with send me a cleaner please i will be forced to camcil

mal spy viruses where are they harddrive or memory

stored mail spy viruses where are they hiding

stored mal spy viruses wher are they hiding

if i replade harddrive wil i loose all stored mal spy viruses

new hard drive or memory to rid all virus bugs patches

new hard drive or memory to rid all virus bugs patches

new harddrive or memory to rid all virus bugs patches

support erorrordoctor.com

support erorrordoctor.com

support erorrordoctor.com

support erorrordoctor.com

support erorrordoctor.com

anybody know where malware and spyware live in my laptop

suppor errordoctor

support error doctor

aol don't you have a -free virus infection remove disk for colateral damage during sign-up

aol don't you have a -free virus infection remove disk for colateral damage during sign-up

aol's-free virus infection remove with send me a cleaner please i will be forced to camcil

aol dosn't have a site for damage to computers during sign up

computer animated cartoon sex pictures
I'd love for someone with more legal experience to start chiming in here about the legalities of accepting investment money from random friends and family. I concede that I don't really know what I'm talking about here --- that's why we pay lawyers --- but my understanding is that taking angel money is not as simple as getting the right purchase agreement in place. Not everyone is legally allowed to buy your stock.

Anyone else with actual experience or data on this? The YC boilerplate has a "must be an accredited investor" clause, and here's the SEC rule it references:

http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/33ActRls/rule501.html
I say "Go for it" too. Find a lawyer before promising anything, even if it is a close friend who doesn't mind doing things informally. I don't know of startup attorneys in the Bay Area, but plenty of people here should. (If you don't get any responses, I'd directly email 5-6 YC startups in the area and ask who they use.) Your attorney will probably want to do a few things:

1. Button up your legal structure and organizational documents, if they need work.

2. Prepare a term sheet, subscription agreement, and other paperwork for the investor to sign.

3. Verify that the investor is an accredited investor (which I think means $1M net worth, or $200K salary for the last two years). You can take investment from non-accredited investors, but it is a lot messier, and may not be a good idea.

Money from family and friends is a time-honored way to bootstrap a business. You seem aware of the main risks (good chance of 100% loss, relationships can turn sour).

One more to consider is your independence. When you're working for yourself, you're only accountable to yourself. When you take on an investor, even a minority one, you need to think about your work through his or her eyes. If a better opportunity comes along in 6 weeks, you might not be able to jump on it because you now have a responsibility to your investor.
That's a good point, but the same occurs with programming. We generally can't catch every corner case. Of course, this is much more devastating in a mathematical proof, i.e. the proof is invalid. However, it is still very possible to develop good mathematical skills without a degree.

Also, this is somewhat unorthodox, but I've read that Godel proposed a new method of doing mathematics based on the experimental method, due to the implications of his incompleteness theorem. If that were the case, then math becomes more like computer science, or perhaps computer science is this new way of doing math.
It's no help to our company to hire someone based on a skill or to get stuff done.

I can see this being hard to justify...
Let's Play "WALLSTREET BAILOUT" The Rules Are...
BBC on Credit Default Swaps the Next Big Crisis
The field of CS is still too new that people can't tell the difference between someone who can spell PHP, a good software engineer, and a theoretical computer scientist.

In other professions, they'd have titles like: lab assistant, chemical engineer, chemist.

In CS, they just have CS. So people talk about the minimal requirements to fall into that (overly broad) label.
I can see how picking a different delimiter character is a simple solution, but it's not practical... The point of CSV is that it is easy to export directly from a spreadsheet program, so that you can handle large amounts of data automatically. If you have to scour your spreadsheet each time to make sure your chosen delimiter is not present in the data, this defeats the purpose of an automated approach. (And some spreadsheet programs will not let you choose the export delimiter. And your code will still not handle, say, a cell with a quotation mark in it.)

It's OK for a quick-and-dirty solution and a limited amount of data, but it's not much harder to write a solution that correctly handles all input using the Python library.
Certainly. Mathematics is a bad example, but the theory holds for other concepts.

Math, like CS and say, any of the arts, live on their own. I think then what we have is perhaps an improper classification: Math and Computer Science are arts! :-0
> Rahim Fazal, co-founder of Involver, started his first business when he was in high school, and actually told his parents he was dealing drugs

Um, dealing drugs is a biz. Some dealers are owners. Some are employees. Some are contractors.

And, a lot of dealers in the owner/contractor categories are under 30.
I know of various attempts to get this sort of functionality in Vim but I've never been able to get it to work very well. The bottom line IMO is that Vim is not designed for this sort of thing while Emacs is.
What metaphor would we use to explain the guy who did this on our production line?

http://imagesocket.com/view/lol100b69.PNG
Just one thing to add - I know that you have already decided to take the money, but I know of people who were in the same situation. And they had two observations:

1) They took some money from a good friend and worked really hard to pay it back quickly. Their good friend thought that they were paying them back quickly to push them out of having a stake in the business (eg, she thought they were hiding large profits from her).

2) Every time they bought small things (eg, nice clothes for their kids), they wondered if their friend would think they were misusing the investment....

F&F investments can and do work well, but you have to be extra careful on how you navigate the personal minefields that may result.
I have made the switch to Chrome for straight browsing, I like the simplicity of the UI, and find its much easier to navigate from site to site.
Do you think the Fed is the economy? Those notes the Fed is churning out are promises against the future work of Americans. Just printing without profit makes you Zimbabwe.

Government is broke and always has been. It spends what it takes. A government rescue is a private rescue at second hand.
A lot of disciplines are organized into strata, where once you are on a particular stratum in terms of what you know, you can get a lot done without learning new things. The truly new ideas tend to occur in corner cases or logical extremes, and generally people discount such things as being too focused on insignificant details. However, these corner cases often lead to new strata. I suspect corner cases define the history of ideas.

So, when working on practical problems, since they are the general case, it is hard to see the value of special, stratifying issues.
relax guys. we just want smart people. that's all. if you are smart, please apply. simple as that. why all the fuss? stanford has an amazing cs program and has been where some of today's greatest companies started (google, yahoo, etc). But of course not all of the great engineers out there go to these schools.

maybe this was all a test. do you only apply to jobs where you fit the description perfectly? When it says 3-5 years experience, do you skip over it? if i had followed all the rules, i wouldn't be where i am today. "video experience required" - ok so much for final cut pro. "discounted computers 1 per person only" - gee, i paid for college by selling many of those on ebay since I couldn't afford it otherwise. "cs degree required" - my cousin didn't even get a cs degree (he's EE from UCSB) and now he's a director at yahoo.

some people want to be challenged. they want to take positions that are above them, and then work hard.
Thanks for adding that. I really wish the YC documents came with some explanation or overview of what the terms mean. I really don't understand them very well.
Just because somebody can get a program to compile and run doesn't mean that it was done right. Keep in mind, I don't really disagree with what you're saying, cause it's the mentality lots of coders have.

I also think that the discipline is so new that there are a good number of schools that don't teach it very well.
Of all of these I only knew about PuTTYtray (which I'm using) and PocketPuTTY (which never ran on my non-touchscreen Windows Mobile).

Cool stuff.
this is interesting. basically offering the accounting department of a company as a package deal?

I can definitely see something like this working in a tech dense area.
Progress in mathematics comes from research. To contribute something new, you often need a lot of background knowledge and university is the place for this. As with all things, there are exceptions - Ramanujan for example.

To be a financially successful programmer, you often just need a few books, courage to step outside your comfort zone, and a good idea. There are lots of examples of this, but for me the embodiment is Ken Williams of Sierra fame who made out pretty well, and I don't recall that he had a degree in CS.
Digg has been around for a while and it seems a little odd that they would still need such a cash injection if they were to be self-sustaining at any point in the future. Are they hiring a lot of new people and moving into new areas?

If they're using this money to cover operating costs for another finite period of time, it points to a failure of their business model since they aren't able to sustain their costs based on their revenue.

Digg has a wide reach, but they don't have great engagement of their users. Going off compete.com's data: Digg users hit 4-5 pages per visit and visit the site less than three times per month. So, their monthly uniques are high at 20-25M, but their total visits are low at 70M.

Digg is a decently impressive service, but community is hard. Google deals with hard issues, but nothing is harder to figure out than people.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome (pics)
I'm not sure I see the difference between an "umbrella company" and every private consulting company in the US.

* I assume the difference is, the "employee" in the umbrella scenario has to do their own sales and marketing? If so, how does some other company pay them a salary? They don't know what the revenue from the consultant is going to be.

* If the umbrella just provides invoicing, you can already outsource invoicing without changing your employment status.

* In the US, your "employer" is responsible for a portion of your payroll taxes, which adds financial risk and overhead.

* If you do the kind of high-end work most HN readers do, the major corp-to-corp relationship problem can't be outsourced --- the negotiation of a master services agreement. Are you working on some F-500 company's own paper? You're a sucker.

* If you're a contractor that plans to continue contracting, this isn't necessarilly a win: you've outsourced the corp-to-corp stuff to someone else, who now owns the paper for the deal and thus a chunk of the relationship. How do you resolve channel conflicts?
every lobbyist who spouts "for the good of the children" or other nonsense. self-interest hides behind altruism. If humanity would just grow the fuck up and recognize it for what it is we could stop pussy-footing around the moral issues and come up with solutions that actually work.
No, the article doesn't make a valid point.

It relies on the bogus assumption people should distinguish sponsored from "earned" search results.

Objectively, the value of a search result does NOT depend on whether it was sponsored or "earned". Subjectively, some people do care, but they're economically irrational so it's unclear why one would fault people who don't care.
macports gives OSX a decent enough package management system; port install ocaml, port install erlang, what more could you ask for? I guess using system libraries would be a bonus, but it's really quite usable as-is.
actually, empathy is simply the most effective way of convincing others that you care about their interests. this perceived commonality of interests is what holds society together. but the motivation is ultimately selfish because we only want to band together to increase our own chances for survival and the survival of our offspring.
Because of the empirical observations of the performance of "qualified" people in real dev teams.
Digg is also valuable for the page views it creates on other sites as well.
There is a psychological effect called "Choice-supportive bias" which I find sometimes explains the positions that people take when describing CS degrees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
This isn't exactly new. It was also one of the first projects like this done with Turk (ie, an art project and not just menial data entry).
Ramanujan: exception proving the rule.

A huge chunk --- maybe 30-40% --- of dev practitioners aren't degreed in CS.
Substitute "Computer Engineering" or "Software Engineering" for "Computer Science" and the argument remains valid and interesting.
Matt Groening really does just have that one joke setup --- "The X: parody parody! The Y: parody parody!" --- doesn't he?
But alexa does?
Ask HN SanFran: Good places to work in the Mission?
I just moved to the Mission last week(off 23rd Street).

Currently I am working from home on a startup, alongside 3 other roommates who all are doing other startups(though none of the others are computer related).

It's a great environment, but I'd like to change it up every now and then.

Can anyone recommend any hangouts/coffee shops/co-working spaces nearby that are full of other startup hackers?
My thought exactly. Who, of all the users on IE, has even heard of a different browser? And then of these users, they decide that IE is still better? Is this like some .001% that I can't find anywhere?
"You can also write an email to a mailing list or newsgroup. While you will not have the acoustic feedback in this case, at least it forces you to bring your thoughts into order. So in 90% you will not need to send the email because you've already found the solution. In the remaining 10% you can just send your posting."

So very true. I'm endlessly annoyed by coworkers who come up with questions when they haven't yet worked through the problem in their mind. Regularly in the process of writing out an e-mail containing my question, I notice an assumption I made or step I ignored. Failing that, the process gives me time to think of a way to figure out the problem my self, with a test program or scenario.

The nice thing about externalizing the process is that it almost inspires you to ask questions that 'someone else' might ask, but that you almost certainly wouldn't! Schizoid? Perhaps - but quite useful.