skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry for any and all rambling.

Hey OP,

I'm a 19 year old software developer in NYC. I didn't go to college myself, and
I was in your position not too long ago, so I think I can offer some helpful advice.
First of all, you don't need to go to college to get a job as a software
developer, especially if you live in/near a tech hub (NYC, San Fran, Seattle, Austin, etc).
However you'll probably be limited to smallish startups, at least until you build
up some professional experience. If you're genuinely confident that you can handle
a fulltime position now, then I'd suggest just applying to companies near you
that you're interested in working for. On the other hand, you could try working
for one or two companies as an intern over the next few months. This is what I did,
and although it was difficult getting paid very little (or nothing) at times, it
was worth it because I was able to leverage my experience for a fulltime position. Either
way I'd suggest creating a nice resume for yourself and putting up some code on
github. This will go a long way towards making you look 'professional'.

It's true that not going to school will mean that you might miss out on some
fundamental CS knowledge, but this doesn't have to be the case. With wikipedia,
google, stack overflow, moocs, and online lecture notes/textbooks, you'll have
access to the same knowledge as your average undergrad in a state school. With
the added benefit of being able to place all this information within a real-life
context. You're probably not going to learn as fast as someone immersed in a cs
curriculum, but you'll be getting paid an absurd amount of money to learn this
stuff, instead of spending the same amount of money.

There are some disadvantages to entering the workforce at such a young age
though, nothing major but I thought you should be aware:

- All the girls our age are in college. Literally all of them. It makes dating
very difficult.

- You'll always be 'the young guy' at work. Prepare for endless jokes about
your age.

- A lot of people will probably look down on you for not going to
college. Don't let it get to you, these people don't matter.

- All the girls our age are in college. Think about what this really
means and if you're willing to deal with it. You're probably not going
to meet girls frequently until you're 21. I've repeated this twice for a reason.

- You won't always be able to go to bars after work with coworkers.

Nonetheless, being a fulltime developer is awesome. I've got zero debt, I get
paid an absurd amount of money, and I love my job. Good luck dude.

P.S: Learn Emacs. It's awesome.
You may well be right, but that's a crummy reason. They could have implemented that feature in a way that protects privacy with a little thought.

Look at how the Safe Browsing API accomplishes the same task: https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/SafeBrow...
Show HN: Introducing the Casper/Ace project scoring system
If the question is which option will be more lucrative over your entire lifetime, nobody here or anywhere else will be able to give you an iron clad answer. That said, I can just about promise you that four years of college will expose you to more "stuff" than working as a developer somewhere for four years will, so I'd recommend it for that.

I entered as a freshman who could already program. I wasn't amazing, but I was ok. I liked programming, and had a good intuitive sense for it. What I didn't know before I went was how much I actually didn't know... and I don't mean about programming, although that is part of it. I mean how many interesting subjects there are in CS, some of which turned out to be far more interesting to me than the actual programming.

A university probably isn't the best job training program for a developer, but maybe you'll find out you don't actually want to be a developer? That's what happened to me while I was there and I wouldn't trade finding something I was really passionate about for four years of income.

So my advice would be go if you can, and take advantage of it while you are there. You may get more than a piece of paper or a higher salary out of it.
Nonsense. Smaller governments are always willing to try something new (Estonia, Slovakia), we can vote or have referendum online. Larger follow pretty fast (Germany recognizes bitcoin as currency...)

Also it is very common for american start-up to fix something broken in america. Uber is good example, most EU taxi services are well regulated, cheap and easy to start with. That is why Uber is not so popular in EU.
Tolerance does happen with modafinil, but sensitivity increases again very rapidly for most people, so if you don't take it every day you might never start noticing it.
If it's in the EULA? I didn't check, though it crossed my mind, fixing a tap [faucet] instead.

http://pastebin.com/PTG57bXb is the .deb and the online "Steam Agreement" - section 2A of the later is probably most relevant from a brief look through (unless they've hidden things under non-relevant headings). That requires you to give them rights to run "the software".

There are parts about their rights to your UGC, but that doesn't seem pertinent really.

Nothing seems to be a warranty from you as user to Valve giving them rights to snoop around your system and upload data they find.
C# and .NET get a bad rap for being created by Microsoft. But one thing that can't be ignored is how polished their development tools are. I absolutely love coding in Visual Studio.
Really depends on the position to be filled. Recently we let go a senior member of our 6 member team. We really could not afford any more down time and needed someone with a pretty exacting skill set. After a blistering 35 interviews in 2 weeks I found 2. I'd say more often than not there is the person you are looking for with the right experience.
Aside from the mental stimulation or distraction drawing provides, it's an incredible tool for solving or communicating problems... Especially to non-programmers.

What other tool or method allows you to explain a development challenge or solution (at a basic level) to a non-developer, in a matter of minutes? Being able to stand up in a meeting, walk to the whiteboard, and sketch out basic concepts for everyone in the room to understand makes you a goddamn hero. You'll go from being just a developer to the developer who can communicate with the biz guys, the sales guys, the designer guys, etc. That's valuable.

There's a good book on this topic, which I highly recommend: http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/

(I have no affiliation with the author or the book.)
Economic plausibility should be a requirement for science fiction
The two things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Though it's extremely difficult to get a degree while working (and cash-flowing the whole thing, not going into debt), it's the route that I chose via an online school. In reality, it meant going to school closer to 6 years rather than 4 for a degree, but I will be graduating in May and already have a job that makes nearly $100k a year, with no student loan debt. If you have the ability, skill, and discipline to do both at the same time, I wouldn't entirely suggest against it. (More companies are open to developers that are seeking a degree than those that simply don't have it as well)

I won't lie...it is tough, particularly with a family. But I think in a way it gives you both the practical viewpoint and the theoretical viewpoints of programming both together.

Also, school doesn't have to cost 50-100k...unless you get into a top 10 school and are favored, it may not be worth it to go to such an expensive school.

If you're already good at development though, I think that getting the experience is more lucrative, but the degree more rewarding.
You Don’t Have to Live in Silicon Valley to Start a Company
You absolutely should attend college. (But there's nothing wrong with taking a gap year first.)

The difference is between thinking about the now and the rest of your life. It's true that you'll probably draw a good salary from a front-end development job; you'll also keep up to date with technologies for quite some time. However, a degree, for better or for worse, is a gatekeeper for a great many things, which are very likely to be helpful later on.

If you're truly interested in these technologies, it's not like you'll lose your skills: you're very likely to keep working on front-end web development throughout your college career. But you'll also be earning a signal that you're a long-term thinker with a rounded education who can think strategically. $60-80k may seem like a great salary now, but eventually you'll be thinking about how to grow from that. Having a degree opens up many more positions to you, but also increases your surface area for new experiences, opportunities and ideas. In turn, that will open up your opportunities for freedom, self-determination, and simply making a larger impact in your field.

Hopefully, you can get scholarships to help with those college fees, but either way, because you can command a high salary as a developer, you'll be able to pay them off. They're worth it.

Gap years are good, though - I wish I'd taken one - and may help clarify your decision.

Finally, regarding those fees (and increasing your opportunity for new experiences), don't forget that you can go to college outside of the US.
Agreed, Grunt has served me well, much like Bootstrap up to v2.3.2 has, so am in no rush to go looking for the hat on my head.

Hands full server-side anyway, client-side moves way too quickly to keep pace with the latest and greatest...
Thank you very much, Derrick!
I presume the issues are licence costs for a new runtime ?
How Gracenote became a big metadata player
The Blind Builder: Alternative to Bloch Builder, for highly-extendable classes
I have been greatly influenced by Joshua Bloch's Effective Java (2nd edition), probably more so than with any programming book I've read. In particular, his Builder Pattern (item 2) has had the greatest effect. I have gotten farther in the past couple of months since discovering this book and this pattern, than in my past decade of programming. Despite this, I am still finding myself hitting the same wall: Extending classes with self-returning method-chains is at best discouraging, and at worst a nightmare--especially when generics come into play, and especially with self-referential generics, such as Comparable<T extends Comparable<T>>. As a result, I have created what I call "The Blind Builder", which is a replacement for the Bloch Builder, for a very specialized situation: for use in classes that are highly-reusable, and intended for extending and sub-extending many times over. Not to say in any way that this pattern is "better", just that in this particular situation it does provide some advantages. The biggest is how it decouples the to-be-built class from its builder, allowing it to be extended without having to extend its builder. Another benefit is that, aside from a single character, The Blind Builder is used in exactly the same way as the Bloch Builder. This pattern is thoroughly documented, and is presented in a question-and-answer format.
One typo I noticed - "Time Square" should be "Times Square"
"A big one was that startup founders who got lucky in the early days also didn't hoard their money. They reinvested it in the next generation of companies which really helped keep SV strong."

Nor was their money taxed away. It was theirs to reinvest. Does this hold true in Europe?
Actually, not. The definition of convex is that given a point A and a point B and a line between A and B, all points on the line AB are in the interior space of the solid.

Inflating two adjacent surfaces creates a valley along the pre-existing edge between the two of them and fails the above definition.
There may be a way, depending on your exact situation, to both reduce the need for loans, and still do college... it depends on motivation and your level of discipline.

1. Use exams such as CLEP to be able to bypass certain intro courses. In such cases, you could enter university with 10% or so of the required credits to graduate, "in the bag" on your first day of classes.

2. You may be able to find an employer that will take you on, and, pay for some or all of your schooling. A bit more of a long shot; and, you would be taking longer to complete a degree, as well as having to give up some evenings due to classes being taught at night.

3. I would suggest up-front, that you expect or anticipate being disappointed with some parts of your university experience.

Bluntly, most students will not have the drive or the intellectual curiosity you exhibit. Some of them will treat school as 4 years of partying, chasing women, and drinking or doing recreational drugs, and have an attitude of "I need to go to college to get my ticket punched".

4. Your internships might be a good source of contacts - most people are willing to help out with advice, especially if they have worked with you before and respect your work ethic. That can pay off in recommendation letters, suggestions for scholarships, etc.

5. You should try to clarify your goals, if you do decide to attend - what are some of the skills and capabilities that you should retain after you leave? Perhaps there are "soft skills" you can learn, like speaking in front of people with confidence, giving presentations to a group; and "hard skills" like mathematics or even some basics in electrical engineering, chemistry, etc.

I would suggest that you try as much as possible to avoid debt, especially since student debt is not able to be discharged, even in bankruptcy (most of the time).
Overheard on Twitter
but it's a terrible place for discussing important social issues

Is an echo chamber really better, though?

In this case Raganwald twisted someone's disagreement with an idea into a purported attack on a person, inventing a victimhood that doesn't exist (finding an idea ridiculous isn't shaming an individual, and I would be humored to meet the delusional person who thinks they don't generate a constant stream of ridiculous ideas), which is a tactic of opinion suppression that is far too prevalent in gender discussions.
Yeah, I'd personally rather have naked domains than a couple hundred milliseconds better performance for my static sites (which are basic and small pretty much by definition.)
Care to turn that into a coherent argument? These views are hardly unusual, and many Europeans share them.
It's entirely possible for the same situation to happen in a free market, and it does in some states. Replace "municipality" with "private corporation that owns the common areas of the subdivision" (sometimes called "homeowners' associations" or similar names). As long as there's a landowner that owns land that's necessary to transit to run cable to a neighborhood, they can reach exclusive deals with providers, because you can't dig up stuff without permission of the landowner. And having lived in both "traditional municipalities" and the new private-style non-municipalities in Texas, it's not clear to me the latter result in markets that are freer in any meaningful sense: in both cases the only real freedom you have against the organization is to either try to change their policies through internal democracy (municipal elections, board elections, etc.), or "vote with your feet" and move to a different organization's territory.
Pages load almost instantly like as if it's a local webserver - I'm quite impressed.
On balance, it will probably be better for you in the long run. I am a high school and college dropout, and nearly as old as dirt. I am entirely self-taught with computers, with no academic credentials. I didn't even take CS courses while in college. I am not a failure career-wise, but I believe that a CS, EE, or similar degree, in hind-sight, would have helped me.

There's 3 main reasons for this:

1) there is a lot of conceptual and algorithm stuff that is drummed into people at school that, while possible to learn on one's own, requires time and effort. If I had time to study Knuth in depth, I would love to do so. This subject matter is very often useful--in hindsight, this is my biggest regret for not having studied CS, because there are gaps in my knowledge that would have been easy to fill had I been studying these things long ago.

2) while employers generally do not require a CS degree, it is very often that their employment screening steps will filter you out if you cannot regurgitate much of the stuff described in step 1: algorithms and coding styles taught in college, the way that colleges teach them. No matter how much PR a company claims for itself in looking for intelligence, creativity, and experience, if you haven't internalized the textbook stuff, then you'll frequently get filtered out of interview process quite early. You'll still be able to get jobs, but just not likely the ones with the biggest marquee names with the highest candidate:opening ratio.

3. If you want to do a startup, you'll want to be in the vicinity of people who also want to do a startup. That's much easier when you're in college, and you get looked upon favorably if you come from a prestigious institution. Seed and angel investors like throwing cash at pairs of kids from good schools who can make something that seems useful and is in a hot space.

So, yes, go to college. Study CS, math and also some business stuff like econ. Avoid humanities like plague.
Having worked in the flight test industry in a 'prior work life', nothing that this article describes sounds especially interesting or novel. I think what happened is that when the planes started getting technologically intense and at the same time the development team became highly distributed (geographically and contracted), there was a period of time where things 'got out of control' in that a) the design/simulation tools didn't have good capabilities for dealing with this level of distributed/revisioned work b) it was more important to 'get the job done' than making sure that everyone used the same exact toolchain and was working on the same version of the model etc. Eventually this caught up with them and they experienced some significant issues (like the wiring snafu the article mentioned, and I also recall another issue where fuselage parts wouldn't mate up), which finally made the industry pull back and get serious about fixing these design tool/practice issues.
> You mean, my local municipality has a binding, perpetual contract with Comcast.

In other words, if you or anyone else attempted to compete with Comcast in your municipality, the government would use violence (or the threat thereof) to prevent them from doing so. If that doesn't count as "regulation" then I don't know what does.
Wow navigating around feels instant and it almost feels as if I'm hosting the site locally. Great job!
yeah, seriously. anything less than 70 and its like you're not even trying.
Is this really so common that it's called a 'dishwasher argument' ?
"..misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator) at Startup Grind 2014
Look at how different UI is from mainframe/green screens to the client-server apps of the 90s-00s to todays mainly web front ends. It has changed drastically over the past 40 years but still pretty much does the same thing. Provides the user a way to interact with computer/software/data.
The Uganda Police Force debacle
The Mobile App Format that Wins Big
It seems like every holiday is an excuse for a sale these days.
The last week best of embedded systems tech articles
This is true, and absolutely worth considering.

As long as you have access to enough of the market that open-minded employers are competing for your work, I believe that this wouldn't harm your salary or propsects in a meaningful way.
As the author mentions, the real insight seems to be to switch from the file-based unit to the tree-based unit. This means asset building can be made more intelligent.

Now, I wonder if the same approach can be taken in gulp using vinyl-fs? Otherwise, I wonder if it might be worth plugging this tool as a specialized asset pipeline into existing grunt/gulp files.
1994 you: Considering the fact that these are the de-facto UI languages for the World's most widely deployed platform (Windows), do you think that the Win16 API is anywhere anytime soon?
Improving your product emails
But he only did the rewrite after the first version proved there was a demand for the product. Sounds better than spending a few weeks (he did 20h!) on V1, only to find out there is no demand for it.
I aliased `cd` to pushd (squelching output) and `dc` to popd in my interactive shell. It's super handy to have a back button for my shell.
This is slightly related and I don't want to sound like I'm trying steal its thunder, because this looks really cool. I work on the asset pipeline that comes with the Dart SDK. It has many of the same principles as these.

Any transformation step can read in many input files and produce many output files. The built-in dev server tracks the entire asset dependency graph and only rebuilds the assets that are dirtied by a source file changing.

We have a plug-in system, and it's built on top of the same package management system that the SDK uses, so you can get transformer plug-ins as easily as you can get any other dependency.

We still have a lot of work to do to fully flesh things out, but it already does a lot, including supporting complex scenarios like transformers whose own code is the output of a previous transformer.

More here: https://www.dartlang.org/tools/pub/assets-and-transformers.h...
The time has come for us to say goodbye
No, don't bother. Maybe later in your life if you've got nothing better to do. If you can't find your $60k+ job, then college can be a good economic buffer (living off loan money) until you do.

If you're already questioning it, you're probably going to be questioning it every year of school whether you should drop out or keep going. This could lead to misery, especially if you lose interest in what the school is teaching. The networking benefit of school is overrated; networking with other professionals is better than networking with other students. (You can also more easily get around degree requirements if you're getting a job at a company where someone you know already works there.) The 'variety of topics' at schools is overrated too; you can get such a broader knowledge of things in your spare time, and as another commenter mentioned front-end dev is rarely covered at all in a CS degree and you can learn so many other things not covered just from doing your job.

I would recommend actually learning about the material covered in a CS degree in your spare time. Use your job money to buy a few books -- if you don't know what to buy, many schools have a required/suggested book list organized by course. Two I'd recommend are Pike and Kernighan's The Practice of Programming and Skiena's The algorithm design manual, the latter of which goes over enough CS that if you ever wanted a "Software Engineer" job instead of front-end work you would be able to handle most any technical interview question.
What a load of crap. The only thing I see.missing is the money and I'm in a relatively small city in the UK, Nottingham.

There are tech events packed with people, startup events packed with people, a bio-tech incubator, two university incubators and a thriving creative scene.

The thing missing is funding, SV doesn't have an exclusive grip on the rest.
Thanks a lot! Appreciate it!
I would like to request renaming brocollifile.js to brocolli.js. I believe brocollifile.js is too long for a standard build file name. Gruntfile.js always bothered me. Compare it to pom.xml, build.xml, package.json and it feels out of place.
And you can extend everything with native objects. So yeah, i am, like you, quite happy with it.