skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The blog entry should end with the guy waking up in a cold sweat, tripping over his bedlinen to get to his laptop, fumbling for his 2-factor authentication fob, and checking his bank account. Inputs the second factor key. Navigates to total in all accounts. Counts the figures, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and some cents. Counts them again. Breathes deep, and goes back to sleep.

Thank God, that job interview was just a nightmare.
I suspect that people are interested in an article about Valve's culture not (just) because they'd want to work at Valve, but also to take its good ideas and use them elsewhere. I think talking about how one of those ideas worked well or poorly at another company fits perfectly with this discussion.
Oh no, it will be cyclical. Programming is all about attaining higher abstractions, hiding more technology under a simple interface. Every now and then some new set of abstractions will be useful enough that we'll need a bunch of people to explore a field of opportunity. These explorers are called entrepreneurs.

Maybe in 2016, you're going to need deep credentials to be a useful web dev, but none whatsoever to start something useful with 3-D printing.

EDIT: that said, nothing makes you more employable than knowing things at a deep level. A friend of mine, a former Plan 9 kernel contributor, quit the tech industry after the first bubble to become a wildlands firefighter. Returned to the tech industry in 2008 and resumed being a highly-paid infrastructure geek like nothing had happened.
oh, sorry for the terminology glitch. Know about turing completeness, have used it for optimizing execution speed of programs and making TAs go insane.
In four years you will. If not before then.
This is absolute and utter nonsense.

Firstly a tiny amount of people know C, C++, Java, Python & Ruby. If you found someone with that lot I'd probably hire them on the spot. That shows some real skill, multi-linguists are actually pretty rare, discounting the obligatory uni taught LISP and Javascript.

Secondly there's a constant need for people who make CRUD apps. Constant. Almost every business can benefit from a totally custom app with it's own special workflow. We tried RAD tools, we tried auto-generate tools, we tried plugin workflow that would be 'user' edited. Turns out if you don't involve a programmer it all goes very wrong.

After 20 years of promises from Delphi, VB6, Java, Rails, etc. the reality is it's getting harder to make good apps because everyone's expectations only go up. Bottom line is to make a CRUD app you still need a programmer. Almost every business is realising they need a programmer.

The market's only going to get bigger, much, much bigger.

This reads like it's from a person who's never been out of the ivory towers, hasn't actually been inside a real business.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382
Nice job Andy and team!! This rocks!
I've recently switched from a MBP to a System76 laptop, after about 5 years of running MacOS X, and I couldn't be much happier. The new MBPs are extremely harsh to type on between the sharp edge and the keyboard. I ultimately had to buy a Kinesis just to use it because the MBP destroyed my fingers. Most people don't have that problem, but it's nice to be able to actually use my laptop as a portable device again.

I also really don't like the direction Apple is taking MacOS. Lion chugs resources and does odd things like disable my second monitor when apps go into fullscreen mode. I don't really care much for the direction of the Mac app store, too.

LinuxMint has been great. It's the first time I've really run a Linux desktop since about 2003. What I miss is the polished apps. E.g., Adium is much better than Pidgin and Postbox or Sparrow are much better than Thunderbird. But, overall, I've been pleasantly surprised. Plus, I have 16 GB RAM now (could've gone up to 32 GB) and the OS consumes a lot less of RAM in general.
Thing stories
You'll get down voted for it but its completely true. Anyone who thinks they are helping the environment by still using their ancient P4 instead of junking it is kidding themselves.
Great article, but one caveat:

The underlying concepts in computer science ARE simple, but the problem is that your average developer deals less with them and more with higher level concepts. In fact, you might argue that at this point computer science is ALL about the complexities we have introduced. We are not writing assembly anymore, and we kind of have to deal with the unfortunate reality that computer science is going to be needlessly complex for some time to come, thanks to poor (or lack of) standardization (yes, I would throw every web standard in this bucket). Needless to say though, I agree that we should find a way to simplify things (if that is possible).
Thank you so much for taking the time to check it out :)
This really depends on what combination of Linux distro and laptop you use.

If you install a user friendly distro like Ubuntu 12.04 yes, everything or almost everything works as expected.

Try to install CentOS on a shiny new laptop and let me know if everything works without messing with a lot of configuration files.
Thanks for your feedback. As far as the meaning of the article, I wasn't trying to prove a point as much as elucidate something I was thinking about yesterday: the skills you pick up through entrepreneurship.

For the past 4-5 years of my life (starting in high school and continuing through college) I've been concentrating a lot of my time learning how to be a better entrepreneur. That's to the detriment of almost everything else in my life. And it's worth it to me because I love it. Even better still, it seems like a pretty safe bet because worse comes to worse and I completely fail over the next few years I'll still be able to get a job as a coder somewhere.

But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area. And so something I was thinking about is the potential consequences of this decision on my life. This is what I came up with.
Wrong, wrong wrong wrong.

It's so easy to forget how much we had to learn to build websites. It's incredibly easy to forget how much time getting the event loop or even MVC to click took. It's easy to fail to remember how hard it was to learn the 5 different languages required to build the app we made in a couple of weeks over the summer. But those are skills, as challenging to learn as algorithms and big data.

As someone who has had to learn data warehousing very quickly, before being shown the joy of such things as MapReduce, before being slung into serious number crunching performance eeking territory, I can say with absolute certainty that, as "web scripters" or entrepreneurs, we have a huge advantage - we're the people who taught ourselves how to make things instead of regurgitating what a CS program teaches us.

I started a CS program at a decent university. While I think it's true that ivy league and extremely competitive programs might force one to think about this stuff the right way, State University absolutely do not. Most of the kids coming out of there will not be as qualified as someone who has taught themselves how to build a business.

Most importantly, If you're coming out of college, there is approximately a 0% chance the folks hiring you will have any expectation that you will be useful for several weeks while you get up to speed, which is plenty of time to become competent enough to be dangerous.
Ever tried editing some multimedia? From editing some video to doing some MIDI/audio project? Nearly impossibru (sic) without much much fiddling and inferior to the Mac/Win situation. Certain kinds of development also demand those tasks frequently (from game to multimedia, to web, to mobile development).
I didn't see anything in the handbook about PIPs.
When I Stopped Believing - And Started Growing Up
Let’s Build a Future Without Cars
> thoughts on programming, startups and entrepeneurship by a college sophomore

Well, at least he's honest about it. As a student you might hope the stuff that you learned was worth anything I have serious doubts now.
Nice. Thanks for sharing. Looks like hacker news crashed your site.
People have been saying this for 15 years now, at least.
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Every job I have interviewed for in the past five years had "C, C++, Java, Python & Ruby" or a close equivalent as a basic requirement, not hire on the spot. (Before then, Python and Ruby weren't as widespread, and Java wasn't totally universal yet) But yeah, it is on the higher end (large web companies paying top quartile compensation) of the industry.
I'm of two minds on this one. Part of me agrees completely with what you say. Further tools will exist that automate a lot of what the code-monkey does. The level of work done by a lot of us will be push-button, or "plug these couple of things together".

On the other hand, in 1998 as a nerdy guy getting out of high school, with minimal html, javascript and programming experience, and running linux on a pentium pro I faced a big choice. I went to the local ISP to pick up a "real modem" (vs a winmodem) to connect my awesome unix box to the internet. The guy there asked why I wanted these modems vs going to circuit city for some amazing sale they were having for a faster winmodem. When I told him I was running linux I was offered a $40K/yr job on the spot - just for getting linux installed on a computer and understanding the basics (quote "we can teach you anything else you need to know, you got the spark"). I was 18, and that was a HUGE deal. Anyway this wasn't uncommon, at the time wired was running stories about "HTML factories" where people were making pages and pages by hand all the time. Minimal programming skills got you a job.

Some of this was just normal boom-time labor shortage. There were lots of stories about how after the crash these guys would never work again. Some aspect of this was true, but some of it was bunk. The 2000 version of this story would be "sure you can do html, and you can do CGI, and you understand http headers and can whip up a server, but we need people who understand SQL and how to work with record objects and how to do live updates to a system, stuff you need a real degree for. It's 2005 not 2000"

So basically I am suggesting that while Rails may be a non-skill (like HTML has become) and maybe good REST APIs will be auto generated, and some Backbone.js future version or successor will do most of our tricky js stuff, there will likely be good toolkits that allow people to plug together data-mining and data-management without needing super deep algorithmic understanding, we are already seeing the emergence of such tools.

So the other part of me disagrees, the code-monkey will be needed, just that they will be putting together different bits than they are today.
Rob Pike on designing a concurrent lexer in Go
I disagree.

There's a huge confusion between the movement as a whole, and the movement at the individual level. What exactly is stupid: the fact that some people sell bullshit seminars about a new fancy programming paradigma or the fact that some people try to improve themselves by looking at the new tools out there?

Movements are just the inevitable by-product of an underlying phenomenon: people are attracted to the next shiny things. Note that I said "people", not just Hackers/Programmers. Actually, a lot of the hype around the new tools does not come just from the Programmers, but is carried by management as buzzwords.

But complaining about "movement" misses the point. Those who currently wrap these concepts around layers of bullshit in order to sell books and certifications are not going to stop doing it anytime soon. Should we stop buying the books? Well that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As the OP said, there often is a kernel of truth in these new methods, and although it is annoying for us to have to skim through all that noise, I don't think that ignoring everything new is the right thing to do.

"...very little of what I've learned that's genuinely important wasn't known about and written about before I was even born."

The problem here is to know what is genuinely important. I guess the only thing that's genuinely important is what makes a turing machine: the rest is just some extra layers. But detail matters a lot. The reason why there are so many different languages / paradigmas is because different tools are more adapted to different problems. I'm not a big fan of OOP, and I never use it ... unless I think that it is absolutely obvious that objects are the right thing to do (which is pretty rare).
If I will do maths and algorithms, what will all smart people of this world will do ? I am stupid by intention and not by chance.
Website covering China's Bo Xilai scandal hacked
"As I walked out of the interview and stepped back into my time portal device, destined for 2012, I couldn't help but wonder - Why was she using a pencil on that 'Gorrila Glass' screen...

Could it be that she was still hanging on to a corporate process or HR career that was as obsolete and irrelevant as the 'handbook criteria' she was trying judge me by?

Or was it just that she was destroying her iPad as fast as the guy (with the beard and john lennon glasses) on the cover of my CS101 course book was turning in his grave.

Then I kicked myself for not short-selling my Apple stock back in 2012... but wait, I thought... I guess I still can!"

Wrrrrrrrrr--ZZZZzzzzzapppp!!!
You are definitely not talking about the jobs this kid will be interviewing for 2 years out of college, which is the context of the piece.
People are Letting Their Domain Names Expire To Get An Idea of Its Value
I think people are missing the point of the article -- I think that what the author is getting at is the market might be soon flooded with CS graduates with a nice set of accomplishments. Probably not by 2016, but at some point its going to become more competitive I am sure.
Yes. This is pretty obvious.
I agree. The notion that we've already peaked in the number of profitable places to apply software is ridiculous. And that's what it will take for them to have "too many qualified candidates".

In the mid-80s people tried to tell me that software was too crowded, that there were too many people going into it and that I was unlikely to have the career my dad had. They were partly right: I've been even more in demand than he was.

Software development salaries are crazy high right now, which is a sign of a ton of suppressed demand. The web is far from done. Mobile is still rising. We are just getting started on the "internet of things". And that's only on the consumer side. Business is not going to be less dependent on software, and the ever-more-networked world is shortening cycles and increasing competitive pressure, meaning business software needs to change more often.

Yes, by all means, people should keep on learning. But the "gosh you'll be fucked in a few years if you don't go back for your CS degree right now" thing is BS.
I used to hate mowing the lawn until I decided to see how fast I could do it. I started at 4:00 hours. Later I had raised the mower's gearing, added a gas pedal, used gps logging to refine the path, trimmed branches, and got it to under 30 minutes.

The best part was it turned a boring chore into a game.
I'm by no means suggesting that a CS degree is the only way to get good at this stuff. In fact, I think that most of the best programmers I know didn't graduate. The difference is concentrating on being an entrepreneur vs concentrating on being a coder.

This part is reposted from another comment because I think it's important to your point:

As far as the meaning of the article, I wasn't trying to prove a point as much as elucidate something I was thinking about yesterday: the skills you pick up through entrepreneurship.

For the past 4-5 years of my life (starting in high school and continuing through college) I've been concentrating a lot of my time learning how to be a better entrepreneur. That's to the detriment of almost everything else in my life. And it's worth it to me because I love it. Even better still, it seems like a pretty safe bet because worse comes to worse and I completely fail over the next few years I'll still be able to get a job as a coder somewhere.

But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area. And so something I was thinking about is the potential consequences of this decision on my life. This is what I came up with.
Yes. It's amazing how I can quick pick up my new job's random DSL and special secret sauce algorithm and know house toolchain, and fix bugs in them immediately, whereas 10 years ago I was mindblown for weeks trying to understand how he Y Combinator and call/cc where even theoretically possible. Same with pointers before that, and the whole concept of a computer program drawing a picture on the screen before that.
Hm. So is this a leak or a "not strictly public but if it fell into the hands of a bunch of people we want to hire then I guess we'll just have to deal with it" sort of thing?

With this and the recent Michael Abrash blog post, I get the feeling that Valve is putting a bit more attention into making themselves attractive to developers. Frankly, I think it's working.
> But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area.

Being marginally good at many things show that no matter what gets thrown at you, you'll pick it up fast. This is necessary in entrepreneurship and it becomes ever more necessary elsewhere as the pace of software development increases.

There's no such thing as "algorithms" skills anyway. No matter what skills you have, you'll probably need to adapt them heavily to whatever new job you find yourself in.

Yes, we're mainly startup-ish people around here, but I'm pretty sure that even if I wasn't on, I'd hire a jack of all trades with a proven track record over skills in "math" and "algorithms", whatever that means.
Interesting. My angle of approach is opposite what the OP describes. I say this as someone who studied math as an undergrad, and has a pretty solid grasp of algorithms and the mathematical principles, but who's had a weak point in the front end for a long time, that I'm now working to remedy, because presentation is just as important as algorithmic excellence and efficiency.

Currently, I'm studying Play (the Scala web framework) and, at the same time, having to ramp up on JavaScript, CSS, HTML... and getting an appreciation for how much there is to learn (MVC, database configuration, integrating a web app with a typical build system). It's not mathematically hard, but it's difficult in the way that biology is: there's a lot to learn, and between the concepts are equally important and intricate relationships.

For my part, I think that people who can present complex ideas well will always be employable. I think anyone who doesn't learn basic front-end programming concepts is doing himself a serious injustice.

The challenge of 2016 won't be solving hard mathematical problems. Yes, there will be high demand for people with those kinds of talents, and that kind of work will be (as it always has been) important. However, I think the biggest challenge is going to be educational in nature. It won't be enough to build great software; you'll have to teach people (who are too busy to learn and compare the intricacies of 35 technical assets just to do their jobs) how to use what you've built.
Thank you for using the term "risk". That's how I view it.

Risk of legal exposure. Risk of significant expense to defend myself.

Risk of the individual (me) and his limited resources, versus that of the business with perhaps considerably greater resources. (And in legal disputes, financial resources often trump other positions.)

So no, I'm not interested in your NDA, unless there is something quite tangible and the NDA is carefully limited in scope. AND... it had better be worth my considerable time and effort to confirm this.
Google and James Cameron to hunt for natural resources on asteroids
It would certainly be nice if someone improved on the Lucas-Lehmer test, or if someone found another "pattern" that unreliably produces primes like the Mersenne numbers. So in some sense, this search encourages both of those things, although regrettably it's not been enough encouragement for a discovery to be made :-(
Well, if you want to be trouble free and use your machine for coding I a think Mac is a good choice. But I would wait for 1-2 months to see what the new Macs will offer.

You really need to consider what kind of work are you going to do with your new machine. If for e.g. you are interested in GPU computing then, at least for now, a Mac computer is not a good choice.

If you are interested in having the best SSD and RAM on your laptop you can buy your Mac with the default configuration and simply buy more RAM and a SSD from Crucial, for example. From a economical point of view is cheaper to buy a 512 GB SSD from Crucial than to buy your Mac with a 512 GB SSD, same goes for RAM.
I feel that no self-respecting person would use that term, especially on the semi-professional HN site. It's distracting from your technical advice and overly dismissive opinion of people who do things differently from you.
You could be right here, but he will be developing code on his pc, so for majority of us who don't deal with audio/video this is a non-issue. Still, for simple non-professional video editing http://www.openshotvideo.com/ - should be more than enough. I have no idea about audio, but http://ardour.org/ looks good.

Also when we are at professional tools, things like Autodesk Flare, Flame etc. all run EXCLUSIVELY on linux - so thats not true that you are only left with mac or windows for "real work". Although I admit that most cheap tools will not often have no native versions for linux.

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php - LMMS is also worth noting - mean those tools might not fit your needs but it unfair to make impression there will be problems with general multimedia tools.