skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have one semester of college, in which I took psychology and political science.

I've worked as the lead network architect for a large ISP, as a developer and then lead developer of a network security tool, as a security researcher (I have a pretty decent cite record and a fun list of universities with courses that have taught papers I wrote), as a 2-time startup founder, the first of which was VC-funded, as a lead developer for a large-data Internet backbone monitoring system, and as a product marketing manager for several years. The shortest of these roles was 2 years; the longest 8 (and counting).

No. You do not need a degree. Early on in my career, I was asked for my GPA and then my SAT scores, by HR, after passing a job interview on Wall Street; I declined to continue the process. I've walked from all similar requests ever since. Not only do I think it hasn't cost me, but I think it has also helped me, by keeping me out of jobs at companies that suck.

If you're going to skip college, be very serious about your craft. Opt for difficult jobs. Tune your career so that you are always on the verge of being overwhelmed. Read like crazy; particularly, read papers, not blog posts. Learn a systems programming language and a functional language, then stop with the languages and start building things from papers. Be careful about getting wedged into things that are just barely programming, like CRUD web apps and iOS design. You can do good work in those settings, but the median project is (technically) boring. You know something is going wrong when you start promoting your unit test or A/B testing tools.

Watch out for IT. IT for people without a degree is a trap.

Consider staying in school long enough to pick up math. Math didn't matter much in my first 10 years or so, but it matters a lot to me now, and doing it on my own is a slog. I would pay a lot of money to be taught serious linear algebra and calculus instead of hacking and slashing my way through the subject on my own.
s/Linux/BSD/

It is the evolution of "development board".

It is the "home computer kit" in the back of Popular Science that started the PC revolution, but this time much, much easier. Because we have heaps of free software.

As another comment suggested, hardware has been commoditized. It follows that system software will also be commoditized.
Without a degree? Sure, but you're going to have to put the time in either way.

I know lots of developers, great developers, who don't have a degree. The degree may be required some places but most it's just "required". One of the best devs I know misspelled his main tech (at the time) 3 different ways on his resume. You're going to have to know your stuff but it's completely possible.
It should be noted that this is happening in the middle of finals. I would lean heavily towards this being false threat by a student who didn't study.
These types of comments are becoming the norm on HN. Perhaps someone should write a script that can generate the reciprocal of the parent like this... it'd be a neat weekend project :d

Btw, not saying the comment is bad in anyway.
So you never heard of TIA and data mining?
Absolutely.

When hiring, i'm much more inclined to take someone straight out of school (or someone currently, I dunno, working in a bar or not working at all) who has some good code up on github or some personal side projects over someone who has a degree and no other apparent interest in coding.
Lets see our options are 1: do nothing, 2: involve the military through use of force.
I wonder what happened to plain old diplomacy. I guess that is too slow and seems ineffective. So is training the locals to fight their war. After all they all live in dark ages and only know how to use stones and sticks to fight. But we cannot put forward these options to general public so we are left with just two.

Even then I feel that more than Obama or any other politicians or military official it is the general public to blame. The public wants democracy but does not understand that democracy does not work out of the box. One needs to get involved to make it work properly. It is a good system but needs fixes. The problem with democracy is it treats my stupidity same as your intelligence and my apathy same as your concern. And as long as people like me hold majority there is not much others can do.
There are two big final exams today, and the buildings targeted are where they are held. It seems very likely that someone didn't want to take their tests.
And the next sentence starts Impressed with his technical abilities, Snowden’s managers decided that he was the most qualified candidate to build a new web front-end So whatever he did that was impressive, it wasn't security-related.
That's probably true.

Also: Just saying "tech" makes it hard to discuss. Tech ranges from IT (Helpdesk throughout very advanced network architecture), to Software engineering (Websites (html) to integrated systems, to application development), to many more obscure and loosely-related fields.
Yeah; I lived there for 10 years. Everybody outside the area conflates "Silicon Valley" with "San Francisco". There are some startups in 'the city' (as they like to call themselves); there are thousands of others throughout the bay area.
Why not quote the complete paragraph, it is very relevant to have the whole context:
"For years, Qian was in a sort of limbo, being watched closely by the U.S. government and living under partial house arrest. Eventually he quit fighting his expulsion and actively worked to return to China."
Whereas "Accept our terms of employment or starve," isn't?
This just says that someone called in a bomb threat, aren't those common? It's a school during finals. And I just realised I'm wasting far too much precious time reading the internet.
All you need to know about fragmentation is that when I build a mobile app for android, I have to put a clause in the contract that I will not support it, that it is untested, and that the client releases it at their own risk. Any updates to the app will require additional fees that may or may not include the purchase of a new device and that the client agrees to cover those costs.

It is just impossible to test it everywhere. I can't afford to purchase 700 devices to test on and the client can't afford for the QA on all those devices.

Products have to be pushed into the marketplace and then you have to react to the idiosyncrasies of each platform.

I'm dealing with an issue right now where my galaxy tab runs an app just fine, but a customer's sony device isn't reporting that it is connected to the internet.

It is a real issue because this isn't an issue with iOS and most of the time customers delay their android release because of the testing and quality control issue.
"For starters, you were never even asked, you never had a chance not to participate, and you can't just opt out of the system either."
Here's my advice.

First, some context. I have degrees in math and experience in computing. I am now part-owner of an established company, and occasionally we recruit. The following is my experience based on some successful hires, some unsuccessful hires, and many, many CVs and interviews.

When I look as a CV I want to know what value you'll bring to my company. I want to know why you'll be worth the money I'll pay you, and how well you'll fit. Yes, there was a job description, but your role will change, develop, and in the end you may be doing something completely different from what we originally thought we needed.

So I want to see, quickly, what value you claim you'll bring to my company. That means you'll need to have thought about that, and tailored the CV to match not just the job description, but the homework you've done on what we do. In particular, that makes it hard to get a job via a recruitment firm.

After that, I want to see the evidence that your claims are true. Do you claim to write clear, usable, effective code? Show me some code. Do you claim to work well with others? Tell me of specific occasions that I can verify.

Sometimes you can't provide evidence, and I understand that. Make it clear that you understand that I will somehow need to verify your claims. Be sympathetic - put yourself in my place, and help me see you as a potentially valuable asset.

And all this is true even if you don't have a degree. State that you know things, and then provide evidence. I've employed people with and without degrees, and it's been interesting to see how different people have worked out.

tl;dr - No, you don't need a degree. Yes, you can get a job, but you need to provide evidence of value other than by quoting that you have a degree. Sometimes that's better.

Edited for typo and word-crafting.
Yeah, my question was in the somewhat broader sense, as in "Why the hell is there an organization that wants to kill people halfway across the globe".
Absolutely! I would reach out directly to startup companies hiring that you're interested in working for, who are more apt to base your application on coding projects and a technical interview. Large, older tech companies with HR departments are probably a lot less likely to look at an application without a degree.
That would not bother me. Its the word being used for a decidedly non-religious context that seems to trivialize the word. A programming language or system is a tool and is likely to be supplanted in the years to come. This is not the same as a religious or life philosophy that could well guide a man or woman for his or her entire remaining life. Software just is just not as important in the grand scope of things.
If you have not read it already I recommend reading The Guardian article - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/01/week-amazo....

One quote from it that stands out for me:
"At the Neath working men's club down the road, one of the staff tells me that Amazon is "the employer of last resort". It's where you get a job if you can't get a job anywhere else. And it's this that's so heartbreaking."

There was another previous thread on Hacker News where people compared Amazon warehouse workers to Costco workers. I wish Amazon could be more like Costco in regards to their warehouse workers (I don't shop at Amazon any more for that reason).
He has loads of options other than that. Use some imagination.

- Employ soft power / carrots instead of sticks such as foreign aid and literacy education.

- Take actions that make people hate you less instead of more.

- Equip/arrange for the locals or neighbours to do your dirty work.

- Get a UN vote saying whatever you want to do.

- Arm the government, conditional on a transition to democracy over the course of ten years.

- Employ targeted bombings only on terrorist training camps, not on weddings.

- Convince, bribe or threaten local cultural and religious leaders to guide their followers away from whatever you want them away from.

- Divide the country along race, religious or class grounds and install a minority government that serves your interests.

- Place bounties on the heads of people you want killed and increase the payout until the free market takes care of things for you.

- Just let them take care of their own internal political issues and wait for the terrorists to reach the US or one of its allies before whacking them.

- Increase employment rates and workloads so people are too busy/tired to devote attention to trying to destroy america.

- Free bread / circuses / fast food / TV.

- Drugs in the water supply.

- Nuke the whole place as a warning to others.

- Adopt a realistic foreign policy that admits the inevitability of civilian deaths, occasional bad apples engaging in torture and executing prisoners etc. and just agree to monitor and set realistic targets regarding the number of civilian deaths etc.

- Do something low impact and ineffective and let the next president deal with it.
Well China hasn't really been Communism for a long time. They still hold that name for sure. But for those who know they are even more capitalism then you could imagine.
Because anarchism was defined in the late 1800's, anarcho-capitalism is a definition of Rothbard, made on an unpublished note in 1949. So why should anarcho-capitalsts dictate what 'anarchy' means, especially when the ethymological sense is 'absence of regulating principle' and not 'absence of state'?

EDIT: corrected year of unpublished Rothbard note
>I really do believe he thinks that quality control being supposedly better in print was actually good for the best writers.

And this is exactly why I, apparently like Mr. Franzen, appreciate the "quality control" of newspapers like, for example, the Guardian in this case.

Otherwise, people tend to believe that dismissing a thoughtful 5,000+ word essay with, "I really doubt he understands the Amazon algorithms" passes for reasonable criticism.
If you went to both sites, you would also notice that a lot of the items and indeed merchants are the same on both domains.
How would hlint catch this? The offending line is

foldr (flip (buf_append bufOps)) (buf_empty bufOps) strs

hlint doesn't know what 'buf_append bufOps' is, or 'buf_empty bufOps' or 'strs'.

If you saw 'foldr (flip (u v)) (x y) z', would you immediately go 'ah, n^2! better throw a warning'? If not, why do you expect hlint to warn?
Another great thing about studying is that you get to know a lot of clever people interested in the same areas of technologies that you are. And also, depends on your personality and the school maybe, a lot of possible business contacts.
I suspect ~50% of HN could confirm that but.. just one cautionary point, not having a degree could make it significantly harder to work overseas, if you were to want to do that. For example, if you were outside the US and wanted to go to the US on an H-1B, it's possible without a degree but somewhat harder.
Ah I see now. Thanks for clarifying.
>Watch out for IT. IT for people without a degree is a trap.

What do you mean? You just talked about being in IT without a degree.
naturally, after receiving permission to do so.

This is not quite true. I never gave anyone (especially not the users of WhatsApp or Telegram) permission to upload my personal information to any cloud services. You can not actually imply that permission from all contacts merely by asking the user.

this also enables us to use proper names in notifications on the iPhone

I do not know enough about the iOS internals, but my naive assumption would be that after receiving a push notification, you can run code locally (like get the contact name from a local database), not merely get the notification displayed by the OS.

We will add another prompt in the coming version.

This is an improvement, but unfortunately does not tackle the first issue I mentioned, with implying consent from the actual contacts.
The metaphor in your argument is dependent on the fact that Einstein and Bozo are two separate entities.

Once Einstein[0] had published his theory of relativity people stopped laughing, and they never laughed at him again.

[0] They still didn't laugh at Einstein, but you get the idea.
That type of work is demoralizing to one's soul. I couldn't imagine having to do that as a 9-5. However, I'm going to guess within a decade or so there will have to be a 3-4 day work week instituted as the norm, since there simply won't be enough jobs for people to support themselves with.
Probably the other way around.

If you do something for the people of a country you're patriotic.
Tangent: This reminds me of a rumor I heard about gmail. Rumor had it, one of the ways the inbox loaded as fast as it did when you logged in is because as soon as they identified your email address (and before you typed your password) they'd kick of a job to start pulling things into memory so that your inbox would be ready to go once you logged in. If true, kind of a neat hack.
Thanks for sharing the link! The etymology is fascinating.
You'd think a Harvard student would be smart enough to realize that the criminal consequences of such an act far outweigh the negatives of failing a test...
I'm not sure I get your point. He doesn't need to speak for all anarchists. He just needs to speak clearly. If he advocated "collectivism fully devolved to the local level" (which I think is what he advocates, right?) it would be much more clear, and he would not be peddling a contradiction. "Anarchism" contradicts with the thing I just described, which is still a government and/or power structure.
You're implying that Amazon has a de facto monopoly on available jobs.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

Set the timer to something like 15 minutes.

HN and reddit are wastes of time.
5 Bad reasons to startup
Incorrect. http://www.walmart.com/ip/700c-Thruster-Fixie-Bike/21635147?...
$1,600 USD is very realistic.

I work full time, but also spend ~12 hours a week on freelancing, and am making ~$2,000 every 2 weeks from this.

If I went full-time I could make more, I think, and so could you.

I focus almost exclusively on PHP, but also offer Vagrant/Puppet services that go well together with my PHP projects.
Sir, I beg to differ. I personally know of two individuals who are regularly reprogramming their 6809-based arcade boards, freely, with new software.

So, I urge you to reconsider your opinion; I believe it may be wholly incorrect.
That's very typical for unions. This is also the time of year for hotel unions to act against their employer and customers in order to demand more. In San Fran the hotel union employees will conduct noisy picketing demonstrations at 6 a.m. I guess it's a universal tactic for unions. The BART union held the Bay Area hostage twice this year.
This is about the only political instrument the workers have. And unions are important to provide the infrastructure to allow for strikes. What constitutes the aggressiveness you speak of?

"As a german" I see that the political opinion in this country got a bit too streamlined to the view that the vast number of low-paid jobs in this country guarantee "long term goals". Yes, business is successful. After all, Germany has a big sector for low-paid work, and reworked the former restrictions on fixed-term and part-time jobs. "Stable jobs" is a bit too general, then this comes at a price where I would dispute the view that they are "stable". They don't provide enough means for sustain a life after retirement anymore. Yes, Germany as a nation is economically doing fine. The low-paid job sector is booming - and the price for that will be paid by a lot of people struggling to finance their daily needs.
mutually exclusive is a Venn Diagram with no overlap - so no, they're not
>> The countervailing argument to "voluntary exchange" is that many trades are highly unequal

If an exchange is genuinely voluntary, it leaves both parties better off by definition. You value whatever you're giving up lower than what you're getting in exchange, because otherwise you just wouldn't go through the trade.

>> On top of that, trades that involve large quantities of capital must still rely upon law and violence to guard ownership, and therefore at least somewhat subject to public jurisdiction

Everyone naturally has the right to defend his property, through whatever means necessary. Not only that, but we all intuitively agree on what property is. An apple in your hand is automatically assumed to be your property, and so is the apartment you live in, or the factory everyone has always known you to own and run. If you see a car on the street, you don't assume it's no one's property even if there's no one in it.

>> For better or worse, we should take responsibility for the relationship between private capital and the social contract, even if it is for the purpose of maintaining private ownership.

I can't tell what that's supposed to mean. But again, your property is your property, and you have the right to defend it regardless of whether a State exists.

>> capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others

Capitalism is not a "system". It's not something that's imposed on anyone, but instead, it's just all the things people do in their pursuit of personal gain - exchanges, commerce, investments, and contracts etc. If you see problems with "Capitalism", they're actually problems with Crony-Capitalism, and caused by the State. Those evil corporations buy political power, and then use it to prevent competition, to rape nature, pass their losses on to us, and so on. All the nasty stuff.
NSA Officials Say Snowden Used Legitimate Access to Steal Data
Just because you have the means to do something does not mean you have the permission. If I drop my car key on the ground and you take it, it's still stealing. I gave you the means (accidentally), not the permission. Especially when using the ill-gotten item will cost me (gas, time, money).

Reminds me of the old phrase: What's the difference between hacking and penetration testing? Permission.
Will the Dell Chromebook 11 be the best Chromebook ever?
A similar event happened last year at the University of Pittsburgh, although the threats went on for months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_University_of_Pittsburgh_b...
Ireland is not a tax haven
Someone else also said "If you do no wrong you have nothing to fear."

You sir can go directly to hell for your betrayal of the Bill of Rights, this country and what it stands for. I will settle for nothing less than the total destruction of the system you represent. You are the farthest thing from a patriot, you do not love this country nor it's people nor the ideals it was founded on.
I'm in the exact same boat as you MDCore - the job description describes me decently well, but I too have my pick of jobs. If you need to hire yesterday, this company should consider hiring a UI person and a JS person separately.
Looks like the site has been hacked, there is a bunch of spam underneath the header.
Bigfoot: footnote popovers
Hmm, now that is really interesting! My initial reaction to your question is, "Of course they're separate entities." But then the person I'm replying to probably thinks, "Of course they're a single entity."

Is that the true division between conspiracy-minded people and others?
+1 for supporting Costco. I also find that there is no guesswork: I've been happy with every Costco purchase, their return and replace policies are extremely friendly, and, while they don't cover all niche items, all of the products they sell are good to excellent quality. I suspect, if they really tried, they could eat Amazon's lunch in the space

Unfortunately there is no Costco in Germany
Property can only be defended (by force) after someone tries to take it from you. The aggressor is immoral.
This is the reason why I love chiptunes. Just the right amount of complexity, in that you can still focus on the individual waveforms/voices.
And we're all sure that Google's autocomplete doesn't do the same thing, right?
Also, paid less than backend.

Companies encourage people to become a front-end dev because they don't want to do it.
Expert PHP Deployments: An eBook On Deploying PHP Applications
Most of this discussion is centered around the definition of anarchism. It seems difficult to debate undefined ideas.
I think the point is that those jihadists in Yemen are the direct result of this sort of thing happening in their home towns. It's very easy to recruit someone when they just saw a whole bus of their friends and family being blown off by reasons they can't understand, from a robot in the sky, being controlled by someone miles away.

It's a whole chicken and the egg thing.
My view on this is if you want to be paid better, work somewhere else. Or encourage an environment where there are more alternative employers. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to take a job there. (And yes, I know that Europe has a different view of unions than the US)
Oh how I wish Mars had a thicker atmosphere.
TL;DR The researchers instrumented the Facebook client-side javascript to return statistics on users that wrote a post then deleted it, without collecting the content from the deleted posts.

Also, the tone of the article seems to suggest that server-side autocomplete is scary and unethical, which I disagree with.