skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Credentialism, like it or not, is still a huge factor when you have no work experience."

Uh, yeah. that's what your parents always say. I can't tell you how many people told me I'd be working at gas stations if I didn't get good grades and go to college. By 20, my wages were competitive with my parents.

If you don't have education, you need experience. Get a job as a windows monkey/cable bitch at an office or an ISP. Work for people who are better than you are. Yeah, you have a few years of getting ridiculously underpaid ahead of you. I remember getting paid $7/hr to fix computers, when customers were billed for my time at $80/hr.

move up to a better job every year or two. Linux pays better than windows, so as soon as you can make that jump, do so.

That said, you are going to be working shit jobs until the recession is over. just remember it is the experience you are after, not the money. But as soon as the economy picks up, if you have been doing the job for peanuts, you will be able to get paid real money.

But the important thing is to have jobs that count. small companies are good, because the owner cares about money, and if you get hired on as a level 1 windows monkey, if you can, it's usually pretty easy to get them to let you take on more responsibility, work on the linux servers, etc..

I started doing that at 15. By the time I was 20, I was living in the bay area making around $60K. Now, that was '00. The crash wasn't too long after that so I had a few years of flat salary, but then things picked up again; that seems to be the way it works. learn things during the downturns, cash in when times are good.

Now, I've chosen the path of bootstraping my company, because I prefer to sell to customers than to investors, which is a little different, but really, knowing how to do something useful is a huge help in starting your company. First, working lets you see problems people have, and second, if you know things, you can rent yourself out for venture capital. I suck at business. I spent four years bleeding into my current venture before I saw black ink. (But... that was my Porsche.) But the thing is, with what I can bill out as a contractor, I've got (what seems to me like) a massive wad of venture capital, replenished monthly. That means I can pay for a lot of mistakes, and I'm finally at a point where it looks like I have the upper hand. (see, this downturn I'm prepared. During good times, nobody cares about money. During downturns, money matters. You should probably try to apply this to selling your labor. Offer to be underpaid for a job you are not quite qualified for.)

I don't want to discourage you from going to school, but it's not the only path. Credentialism is dead.
His book distinguishes between "arguing" and "fighting." The five components you describe above fall under the heading "argument."

I highly recommend "Thank You for Arguing." It's a wonderful book that takes classical rhetoric, a relatively dry subject, and turns it into something entertaining to study.
I don't think he's behind.

I didn't write my first real program until I was almost 20. I had written some HTML and BAT scripts for MSDOS as a teen but little else.

Then I started really programming a few months before my 24th birthday. It took me less than a year and a half to get to the point where I was confident in applying for nearly any programming job, regardless of the language or skills required. So I would say if you decide to dedicate yourself to it and you are smart(which it seems you are), you could be fairly advanced in <1 year. Definitely not far behind.

My piece of advice: move to the Bay Area!

It is 10x easier to become a better programmer by working with other programmers face to face while getting paid. The job opportunities out here for programmers are probably 50x better than Georgia. So if you could do one thing, that would be it. (Unless you are attached to living in GA, which it doesn't seem like you are).
On the other hand, once you start digging a hole, you have that much farther to go to get on top. I dug my hole deeper for about 5 years, and while I'm still not sure I had a better option at the time, I sure am glad that I can fill in that hole with a regular job/contract for a while.
I have had MANY hours that were far darker than having to look for a job. Please don't whine about your darkest hour/ struggle unless you have lived through a war, famine, or disease, as I can assure you everyone here has had the same or close to the same problem you have now.
Vietnam Open Tourist News : Vietnam Open Tourist Holiday
I was impressed by the part where the programmer called the potential customer's bluff and told him to bugger off, especially since they didn't have any other customers.
Houses are always works in progress. I'd like all my receipts to be digital. You touch furniture more than fixtures.
If google can offer for sale a significant fraction of the books they currently serve, I will be happy. However, The current state of the ebook market is unexciting. There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software. Furthermore, ebooks often do not carry a significant enough discount over the print edition to make up for the restrictions in my opinion. I've come to this conclusion myself after I purchased an ebook, found a passage revelatory and wanted to show it to a friend, but realized that I did not have printing rights. So I was forced to go out and buy a hard copy.

I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.
A Deep Breath
Oakland Charter School: Spitting in the Eye of Mainstream Education
I don't understand a lot of this.

How do you learn Python backwards and forwards without using it to do something first? I may be the odd man out here (?), but for me, computers and programming have always been a tool to accomplish something, rather than an end in and of themselves. In my case it was laziness--I couldn't stand the thought of repetitive, redundant data entry and so I set about creating a database app. I had zero background in programming but I did have a) friends to ask questions ("Can you tell me about Alan Turing again?") and b) a compelling interest (said data entry). The logic and the programmer's mental place will come with time.

Also, how is he behind the curve at 20? Don't most people alternate between periods of coasting and advancement? 1500 on the SATs isn't shabby, and if he could pull that off without preparation, his ability multiplier on those 70-80 hour weeks ahead should be enough to get him "caught up" after a few years, if not to expert level then at least middlebrow.

Completely agree re: "I want to found a startup". That may work for some people ("I want to be rich"), but it has always failed to motivate me. If he has something he wants to do and a startup is the best vehicle in which to do it, then yes, found a startup.

You may be right about "the hardest thing". That has the ring of truth.
> Don’t get me wrong, if you really work at it I’m sure you can do it but you are WAY behind the curve if you’re 20 years old and have done nothing but tinker with BASIC and C.

FWIW, many of my coworkers at Google had never written a line of code before they got to college.
I doubt it will catch on.

(edit) Huh ? Downmodding this for what exactly ? This is a valid reply - I have no specific opinion on where Wave stands compared to other technologies, but I am pretty confident that it won't catch on in its existing form. They are not the first ones introducing new communication paradigm and they are certainly not the last ones. So far only evolutionary changes sticked, nothing revolutionary did (e.g. IBM's Remail).
12 Month Contract Mobile 0n 3 A New Way to Get New Cell Phone
Cherokee County, eh. We should touch base; I'm in Fulton/Midtown.
In old days, there is another path: To join military. It will shape the view of a person definitely. After services and you can go to school with better financial support and stronger will to achieve things, if you are lucky to get out the service without trauma.

But it seems joining military is not really good choice since invasion of Iraq. It seems like the best way is try to build something that you like and learn from it. School can only teach things that can be taught, and unfortunately there is no school to teach creating stuffs for arts and technologies or fiction/poem writing! You can only learn them by doing, from trials and errors.

It is your will power to be successful matters. You are 20, so you are much more luckier than people who figure this out in 30s or 40s and have no guts to choose the path.
I still think you're reading me backwards. I'm not recommending not going to University.

Say I thought that blogging could be easier 5 years ago. It would not be easier to build an easier blogging engine. It would be easier to just use whatever existed. But it would have been correct to identify that easier blogging is possible, a market exists & someone would cater to it at some point.

I think that University education (and possibly also the other features of Universities) could be available for easier/cheaper/different. I also think there is a market for this. I think that eventually Universities may not have the same prominence they do now.
On one hand, it's funny how draconian their policies are but on the other, they get results. If education is meant to be the great equalizer then they are providing a strong foundation of knowledge... now as for wisdom... I'm not sure such an environment breeds sufficient amounts of creativity/innovation which is what will be required for countries in the West like the US to compete.

But then again, I'm not sure that this article gives enough detail to make that determination. I do think it's possible to have a structured environment but still allow for flexibility that allows for creativity without er, (for lack of a better word) chaos? It's interesting to think about whether we should manage kids the same way we manage creative people.
Are there supposed to be pictures on this page? None load for me.
People moved to the burbs because federal and state policy systematically subsidized and encouraged it.

William Whyte wrote about the genesis of suburbia. It was not really a mass movement of preference. Businesses and jobs moved, the infrastructure moved, and people followed.

Also, machine politics and race conflict was destroying the cities, as the article alludes. Suburbia is much more about racial apartheid than is commonly acknowledged. The most functional urban cities, such as Portland, just happen to be the most white.

> tax-sucking mass-transit projects.

What does he think suburbia is? It's a massive government subsidized experiment that started in the 40s. Without federal highways and the systematic subsidization of house construction and ownership suburbia wouldn't exist. The American development patterns of the preceding 50 years would probably have continued.
Flash Catalyst (Prototyping/Design) & Flex Builder 4 (OO Flash) betas released
> Be on the lookout for cities that have a solid economy and job opportunities for people with your skills and education.

There's plenty of work in Atlanta. I don't know if it's interesting or if the companies are pleasant, but it's there.

North Carolina and Washington, DC are other options if he wants to stay kinda local. In DC now there's high demand if you have/can get security clearance. Not sure if that would be desirable work, but it certainly exists. And if there's anything of the anthropologist in him, he might find the beltway culture interesting.
I am confused with your fear. Google is just utilizing XMPP, they are not creating anything new, its open sourced. Plus the group that developed XMPP were formalized by the IETF.
I think that the analogies between books and digital music will go much further. Books have, until recently, stubbornly stayed in the dead tree format and out of the digital realm. But to see the same synergy with digital technology that music has experienced, they need to go digital as well.

A big part of the problem has been media. Backlit LCD screens are fine for the "workstation" and watching video. But form factors have rarely approached the utility of the sketchbook, (paper) notebook, or scratchpad. The Newton made some inroads here. The high-end Wacom LCD tablets have as well.

To match the utility of paper, the form factors need to be light and thin, approaching the size and weight of a thin standard magazine. They should be always instantaneously available, so should remain on basically all the time. (We can give them 8 hours of charging time back at the desk, but they should still be usable all the while.) The ergonomics of input have to be excellent. If there's a stylus, the feel has to be as refined as the feel of pencils and pens on paper. Interactivity is a must, so long refresh times like with e-ink are unacceptable.

I'm waiting for the day when we can browse and remix our personal libraries with the same facility with which we can browse and remix our music libraries.
You never been at #bookz or the multitude of ebooks on torrent trackers (text and audiobooks). A lot of people I know read those ebooks on PDAs and listen to them on their mp3 players
The most mass transit friendly cities have the longest commuting times.
New PHP 5.3 Release June
I'm amazed gcc is slower than java.

And it's more expressive than scala and f#? Something's gotta be wrong there..
The funny thing is that with all the talk of "dreamers" and "aiming high" on HN, there's a horrible horrible groupthink that goes on here.
An obsession with the latest fad, to the complete disregard of substance. Buzzwords over basic utility, lists over productivity,

I would argue that demosceners (like little Johnny) are the dreamers
while much of HN consists of internet hucksters. Back when
I was writing demoscene code I bent my computer over my knee and
made it beg (Wrote a flat real mode extension for borland pascal).
Phong shading on a 486? Check. realtime raytracing on that same
486, in the same demo? Check. (10fps btw).

These days people struggle to handle a few thousand users of a text
based website on a quad core system with gigabytes of ram.

PS: Sorry this was a little off topic. Follow your dreams, don't
let the man get you down!

N.B. Although the S/N here is often quite poor, it is at least
an order of magnitude better than other places I know about. At
least once a day I read an article that is very much worth my time.
Not much related, but this reminded me of the French army; they have a motto, especially for a work that has to be done by multiple people consecutively and the first one is late on his task, the second has to wait, eventually the first guy hand out the work to the second one : "It was my problem, now it's yours".
My darkest hour was moving from Chicago to Rhode Island with my credit cards maxed out, collections people calling all the time, and desperately needing a change in my life. We had $50 bucks to our name, and it had to last us two weeks until I got my first pay check.

So, we arrived in Rhode Island on Thursday, my new job started on Monday. Tuesday, the union I'd just joined voted to strike, and by Friday I had a pink slip and lost the job that I'd moved 1000 miles for.

I smelled the pink slip coming the day I started the job, so I was hustling to find a new gig, any gig I could get my hands on.

I was actually able to scare up a job the following week. I was making twice as much money as the job I'd moved for, and for a much better company. It was a miserable couple of weeks, though. We survived on a package of spaghetti someone had sent us for a house warming gift.

We did the check cashing service because we couldn't open a bank account. We had to borrow money to pay rent. But, it worked out.

When the chips are down, you do what you have to do. If you're just not willing to get a 9-5, things probably aren't that bad for you yet. When things are bad enough, you'll do what you have to do to pay the bills. You won't have any choice.

Also, you never know what direction unexpected decisions may take you. Things may well work out better than you expected at a 9-5.
How do you determine "best and most capable"?

One way to do so is to let people trade their talent for property that they use as they see fit. If they're good and not just lucky, they'll succeed again, getting more property over which to make decisions.

However, that method seems to be in conflict with "talent should trade highly against property".

> They have the interest of humanity-at-large at heart.

That's bullshit on stilts.
> GT's engineering, science and CS programs tend to smack people down in their first couple of semesters, and the worst thing you could do is let that get you down to the point of dropping back to your current situation.

Same at my school. The Intro to CS class (which I never took) was famous for failing you if you left out a semicolon on the written exam--"It won't compile."

Just keep plugging. There are hoops in place to thin the ranks. It's loosely based on merit, but the actual results can be quite arbitrary. Keep SICP in one hand and Kafka in the other.
I really have no idea what he's talking about. Is that some sort of code?
I was in a similar situation in 2000 and ended up in a job I really enjoyed for 2 years. It was at a startup with a cool boss who let me more or less make my own hours as long as I was getting the company work done. I'm still good friends with some of the people I worked with then, and the experience I gained helped me out a lot in my career.

When I left the job, it was to get back into running my own small company, and have been self-employed ever since.

I obviously don't know all the details of your situation but maybe you'll be lucky like I was and be able to turn this into an opportunity.
From the Collapse of the Auto Industry Shall Rise the Electric Car
In Australia, BitTorrent is especially popular among those who want to catch up with US television shows that appear months or years later on TV down under. Money is not so much of an issue for them, they simply want to see the latest Lost or Heroes episodes.

I'd just like to reiterate this point.

As a pay TV subscriber (foxtel), it always astounds me to have seen episodes like Battlestar Galactica and Heroes advertised as "aired in the US only hours before" (those were the exact words)- for the same episodes I had downloaded and watched about 12 weeks prior.

It's not that I don't want to pay for the content, I mean, I'm a pay TV subscriber, I'm paying for eventual access to it - it's frustrating to be living in a global community and friends can be discussing an episode of one of the few shows I do watch that has already aired but due to odd licensing/distribution deals, that content is just not available legally in any timely manner, even if you WANT to pay for it.

I've already ranted on this topic many times before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569114 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498159 plus others), I know lots of people who are Australians and who feel exactly the same way - its not that we don't want to pay for that content, but their bad deals are kind of forcing our hands given the communication between people moves at a much faster pace than the licensing deals.

I kind of saw the same sort of data the other day when I had looked at the Alexa top 100 by country and was interested to see mininova specifically come in at #37 (depending on how accurate you argue Alexa to be http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;1/AU) so seeing data like this only confirmed my initial suspicions and argument based off anecdotal evidence.

Basically, get a clue tv industry...
There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software.

Kindle books are just HTML with the extension changed and some trivial "encryption" on top. The encryption is there to give the publishers some illusion of security -- but if you want to read your books on a computer or other device, it's easy to remove the DRM. Once you do that, open your web browser on the resulting file, and enjoy. (All of your indexing tools that take HTML input files work quite nicely.)

DRM is "evil" and all that, but I don't worry about it since it's so trivial to remove, and always will be. If you can see it, you can copy it.
I had a similar thought recently - conservatives are motivated by fear, idealists by hope.
Bonus points to anyone who can figure out what the "x" to the right of the "+-" is for.
US Senate wants Obama to crush LRA for good
N.B. Although the S/N here is often quite poor, it is at least an order of magnitude better than other places I know about. At least once a day I read an article that is very much worth my time.

I think this is a very ego-centric remark that I don't particularly care for given my experience here, especially since it appears you just copy/pasted the same comment from the Dreamers article into this thread. Accident?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=635275
> if you're gonna ignore people you no longer have a right to expect replies to your emails/msgs

Wilson asked me (personally) to tell him the product of one of his portfolio companies would work for an application that I was designing. I spent a fair amount of time looking at said product after it became clear that I wasn't going to use it so I could write up a reasonably comprehensive discussion. Yup, I spent more time.

I sent this writeup to him by e-mail and he never bothered to respond.
Merging Wiki with e-mail, IM, and threaded discussions with fine-grained security already is powerful. I hate discussing an issue with 5 other people over a three-day e-mail/IM/phone thread and settling 7 or 8 decisions ... but nobody updates the "authoritative document" in a file share or in the Wiki. Two weeks later you need a big e-mail hunt to find what the decisions were. Google Wave consolidates all that discussion ... sales strategy sessions, collaborating on writing technical specs, deciding where to meet for extended family vacation, handling a tech support case where 1 support engineer + 2 customer contacts + 3 internal engineers + 1 account manager need to interact ... all these become more efficient and possible.

Add to that good multimedia content, versioning/branching/merging, embeddable widgets, and human-machine interaction ... Google Wave becomes a very powerful platform. It suddenly becomes much easier for a corporation to add human intelligence to deal with exceptional circumstances in automated workflows. There's fertile ground right there.
>>You literally have to remake yourself at a time when many of your instincts have already been formed. It’s not easy, it’s not fun and it will be tons of work and tons of time before you see even a little bit of results.

Julius, if you move somewhere new, you may find the process of metamorphosis becomes easier.

This is the beauty of college: the total newness and change of scenery allows one to change and improve oneself. One's reputation at home no longer matters. One remakes oneself and begins spending time with other motivated people.

You can create a similar situation for yourself by moving. With determination, you will be able to shed the bad parts of yourself and develop the good parts. Moving somewhere new could be a great help. I highly recommend it.
Yes it was.
and yes it is. I value my grey matter and time, I don't enjoy wasting it on trivial tat.
Actually, Gladwell's basketball analogy does work, it just doesn't work the way folks seem to think that it does.

The basketball team didn't win because it decided to use a full court press.

Reread the story. The kids trained so they could run a full court press the whole game. The other teams didn't have the athletic ability to keep up.

You can't just play the game differently. You have to do what it takes to be successful playing the game differently.
Regular free meals provided by your employer are taxable as income. I learned that the hard way at tax time with another startup...
A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality