cmattoon

Verified-and-approved "whistleblower" says what?

Blockchain: IPFS and FIL

Though, who knows what will be around in 500 years. In theory, some blockchains will be, if only as museum pieces.

This is from the company (Apple) who "mitigated" a zero-day with a case-sensitive string match so it could still be exploited?

Like apple gives a shit about concealed code.

I blame Adobe for lots of things, but 9/11 and "lost" news coverage are not among them.

Maybe abolish credit scores, because they're only used for evil.

They help nobody but the bankers.

A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place. Didn't these geniuses JUST add field-specific search to SWIFT, so orders for "cubanos" don't get held up because of Cuba sanctions?

Maybe these clueless old men should stick to what they know - mountains of physical paperwork and pointless policies and procedures, and stay away from anything that uses electricity or internet.

Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.

I can't tell you how many obviously-fake profiles and scammers I report, and see other people commenting about reporting, only for them to still be around days, weeks, sometimes even months later.

All of these were obvious scammers directing traffic to a single profile - some forex guru or whatever. Shilling get-rich-quick schemes doesn't meet Facebook's definition of "spam", apparently.

https://imgur.com/a/xihRPwE

What a garbage app.

IMO, most courses are shortcuts to actual experience, and there are no shortcuts to such things. One might describe this as Education vs. Learning.

I do agree with the general-case argument that Education (vs Learning) is largely a filter for conformity (and socioeconomic status).

However, depending on the job (and company) you're applying for, conformity may or may not be a desirable trait. I recall an after-dinner conversation with a CEO and some VC's who said their favorite (illegal) interview question was "Have you ever been arrested? If so, for what?". Answering in the negative or pleading the 5th was a hard pass (as were stupid and/or egregious crimes) - they wanted people who were direct, honest, and took (calculated) risks.

The typical college student is conditioned to avoid risk - memorizing/cheating/etc to get the highest GPA, or at least making sure they get the credits required to graduate. Pick the project idea that you know you can do in a week (okay, a weekend), pick the uncontroversial/uninteresting subject for your paper, etc. - just keep your head down and pass the class.

Often, this seems to translate into people who can't program their way out of a FOR loop (or whatever the appropriate metaphor is for their field), solve new problems, or create new products. Inside-the-box thinking is great for passing standardized tests but somewhat less great for innovation.

At that point, your four-point-whatever GPA and the two semesters you spent as the Deputy Assistant Vice Co-President of the Student Navelgazing Council are really just reasons to mock you after you've left the interview. Maybe the HR department of a dusty institution with those upload-and-re-type-your-resume-style portals will care, but I've never met a recruiter, hiring manager, or staff engineer that did.

On the other hand, I've met people without CS degrees who have clearly put in the effort and know what they're talking about. A prior CTO once remarked that he had more respect for open source contributions and Coursera courses than he did for people who only had a degree to show. All a degree indicated, he said, was that their parents could afford to send them to college.

Also, I don't mean to disparage extracurriculars with my above comment, but there's a similar phenomenon there, too: people who sign up for some club or organization just to pad their resume are less impressive than people who have developed some degree of skill in non-trivial hobbies. It demonstrates that you're capable of developing yourself on multiple levels rather than simply checking as many boxes as your parents will pay for.

TL;DR I'd say you're far from naive if you're striving to learn and understand rather than recite and recall. You might get fewer wins when you punch above your weight class, but you'll be better in the end for doing it, especially when stacked up against people who never got off the metaphorical couch.

That "Report Abuse" button...

Personal anecdotal experience corroborates this finding.

Oh, look, another one: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484018,00.asp

With the amount of frivolous cases brought under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (http://www.networkworld.com/article/2908555/opensource-subne...), it'd be nice to see some charges filed for this.

I've done this myself - I've been programming as a hobby since around 5th grade, but never did anything serious with it. I'm now 27, and am in my 3rd year at my first "professional" development job. My career before that was as a Paramedic ($14/hr).

Some quick advice, in no particular order:

1. Get on GitHub. Look at the source code for libraries/programs that you like and use. This'll show you how other people do things. Look at the "issues" tab and help fix some projects or add new features. Also, most places use Git for version control. It can be a beast to wrap your head around at first, but it's not that difficult once you start using it.

2. Look on employment sites and see what kind of requirements they have. Do you want to be a JavaScript developer? You'll probably want to know Angular, Knockout, etc. Want to work as a Python developer? You'll probably need to be familiar with Django framework. Then, there's all the other stuff for build automation and testing - grunt, composer, bower, phing, nose, etc.

3. Stay away from frameworks and IDE's while learning. Use a text editor, not Dreamweaver, NetBeans or Eclipse. Notepad++, Sublime text, emacs and vim are all common favorites. Learn the frameworks, but don't rely on them. It's easy to gloss over the details and just use the framework "as-is", but you really need to understand what's going on under the hood.

4. Learn Linux, if you don't know it already. Most developers I know are responsible for server administration stuff, too (to some degree anyway). Know how to tail an error log, configure the webserver of your choice, create a MySQL user, SSH to a machine, WGET a file, etc. DigitalOcean, Koding, and many others offer you a very affordable linux box to play with ($5-$10/month or less). (With virtual machines, you can screw up all you want, then just revert to a snapshot)

5. Learn how the internet works. This should go without saying, but it'll keep you from banging your head off the wall when your AJAX application isn't working because you didn't know CORS was a thing.

6. Look into "fizzbuzz" tests. They're short, simple programs that an employer may ask you to solve. These are good at weeding out people who know how to rearrange framework functions, but don't know how to program. http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

You don't have to be a pro to get paid. Apply to jobs at small to medium-sized companies that don't have an HR department to throw away your degreeless resume. Check craigslist, freelance sites, etc. Build a portfolio.

As far as working from home, I'm still waiting on that opportunity myself. There are plenty of jobs out there that allow it (google is your friend), so just apply and see what happens.

Good luck!

See also: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html