wmp56 · HackerTrans

For a new hire, it's more about standing out of average: github projects and all that. At that level connections are same CS grads that can't help much with landing a job. 10 years down the road it's more about connections with people from past gigs. Being a former roommate with someone in college is of no little help: unless that connection has been maintained, it's gone, and even if it's been maintained, that reference is of no help unless you worked together.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

For me college was only useful to learn math, while everything I know about programming I learnt myself. Technically, everything I learnt about math I also learnt myself, but there was an important difference: math courses were structured in a particular way, as a sequence of topics that build on previous topics, and I had to pass exams on those topics, while learning programming was unguided. I don't use math at work, but math completely changed the way I think, and that happened during the first year in college. By "completely changed" I actually mean a substantial meaningful change in my thinking process. I believe, that the same result can be achieved by reading and proving all the theorems in the calculus: the end result should be understanding how the notion of integrals is derived from the definition of numbers and the ability to actually derive it on paper (since just understanding often misses small details that change everything).

As for my programming skills, I can safely say they are top 1%, as I can often ignore inquiries from say FB HRs. Yet I learnt everything myself. Without math, and without that structured way of thinking that's required to prove theorems, I wouldn't be able to get to the CS fundamentals, and my CS knowledge would be very shallow. There were a few CS teachers in college, but even then it was obvious to me that they don't know much and they had to cater to the least able students in the group anyway. I don't see a way to bring highly skilled and competent CS teachers to college: those who really know programming and have interest and ability to deal with people, often make 500k+ a year with very relaxed work hours - there is simply no incentive for them to bother teaching CS to (mostly uninterested) kids in college. And those who do teach CS in college as their full time job don't know much about CS, simply because gathering that knowledge is a separate full time job.

Edit: so online courses or college? Neither. You only need a book that thoroughly explains fundamentals and will to go thru it. Not enough will? Then you need a teacher whose only job will be to assess your knowledge twice a year in the form of some exam. Both online courses and college are too slow: I could honestly finish a masters degree in 1 year if I could avoid wasting time on all the fluff.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

I have another wild guess. Not only we have just right amount of fossil fuels to leave the planet, but also the sun has just right amount of energy to reach the stage when people can move to another solar system.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

Why do you even need Windows in that case? Internet isn't any different when seen from Ubuntu and if you really have to use Windows, because AutoCAD and Photoshop, then you're paid enough to not worry about 260 usd.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

The recourse is to move to another team or company.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

> Git was released in 2005, four years before Bitcoin

Now I have a suspicion who was that mysterious Satoshi who had remarkably good industry-grade software skills.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

OK, the 95% percentile, if we want to be pedantic. Regardless, this comment tree is going to be taken down because you used a banned word.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

I have one idea that I'm working on now. It will be open source (both app and the server, AGPLv3), but only to prove that it doesn't do anything fishy. There is no way it can make money, though, but luckily, I don't need that.

You probably meant to ask how to make a dating app that also makes money in an honest and upfront way. Such services had existed long before the internet, you know them well, and they just honestly recognize the true reasons why men and women want to date. In short: human moderation with the premium to access the high quality dating pool. Obviously, fees there are way higher than what most people can afford.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

I think women mostly look at social status of men. Appearance is only a plus. An ideal candidate is a wealthy gentleman with manners.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

> That cannot be "just replicate"d for javascript extensions.

This is false too. If extensions aren't allowed to communicate with the internet and can't auto-update themselves, then they also can't run arbitrary code without the user's consent.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

I'm afraid I have to disagree. The key ingredient is unusually high IQ, not money. If I had a choice between being born with a very high IQ or in a moderately wealthy family (10s of millions), I'd choose the 1st without thinking. The family money rather reduce chances of striking success because they make people lazy from childhood. A 12 month trip to SV gives exactly nothing by itself. We could randomly select 1000 college grads, give them 100k and send them to SV for 1 year. The success rate will be 0.0%. What really helps on the SV path is (1) very high intelligence and (2) real industry experience. If you have the former, you can get the latter by joining one of the few known firms and spend there a decade. Then use your savings and connections to try your own idea. I don't see how family money help to skip that decade of experience or how they help to become smart.

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

Great idea and the implementation is pretty good for v1. The v2 can index reddit and render that index as a fancy 3d structure that gives a 10,000 feet view on what's going on in reddit: relationship between subreddits, topics, comments, users. Perhaps this structure can look like a forest where heavy subreddits look like big branchy trees and users look like bees adding comments. Big plus if this is rendered in real time, at least with 1 fps. It's not entirely impossible that this idea may be good enough for a little startup (afaik, YC offers 150k for 7% if the idea seems worth exploring).

wmp56

7 anni fadiscuss

Why does everybody think that by virtue of math ought to be nice, such a nice hypothesis ought to be true? Isn't it just a form of the survivorship bias that we observe only nice side of math? What if this hypothesis stands true for all N < 10^10^10^467+17, and then suddenly it doesn't? Perhaps to make a breakthru in math (and physics) we need to consider the possibility that the reality can be ugly and counterintuitive and beyond a certain complexity level, math and physics cannot be described by nice formulas.