Interview with Ryan Dahl, Creator of Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://www.mappingthejourney.com/single-post/2017/08/31/Episode-8-Interview-with-Ryan-Dahl-Creator-of-Nodejs <comment><USER2> A serious problem with Node was the callback pyramid of doom.

This means deeply nested callbacks such that the indentation wanders steeply to the right. When you do loops or have exceptions programming got very confusing. In effect you have to do a continuation passing transform. It's not difficult but the results are utterly unreadable. For example a simple for loop could be transformed into recursive function because this way it is easier to keep state between callbacks. It's a nightmare.

What I found surprising in the early years of Node that some people in the mailing list had a «Real programmers don't use Pascal» attitude.

Bruno Jouhier's developed streamline to simplify and automate the continuation passing transform. One could almost program in a «blocking» style. I found his work really amazing. However for that Bruno got attacked in the mailing list.

Then Marcel Laverdet developed fibers. A different and equivalent way to solve the callback pyramid are fibers, coroutines and generators. This way we don't need the continuation passing transform. But the reception in the mailing list was at best only lukewarm. Anyway, the developers of Meteor saw the potential and decided to base the server side of the platform on fibers.

And now JavaScript has generators and async/await. And lo and behold: with these official solutions the hard core programmers swayed and accepted «Pascal».

In my opinion, Ryan Dahl has missed an opportunity. Node was by large not ready and finished when he left. He should have tried to convince the community to find a solution for the callback hell.

I think I understand people like him. They are always on the lookout for fresh ideas.

<comment><USER3> This was easily foreseeable when he started on Node.js. The Twisted framework for Python had existed for years (decades?) before Node.js was created. Anyone familiar with programming in that style knew of the issues with "callback hell".

I was the primary instigator of generators for Python. Part of my motivation was to do something like CSP (e.g. call-with-current-continuation, call/cc) without having to redo the whole language runtime and also kill off alternative Python implementations.

Generators in Python are limited to a single stack level. They have been extended to better support async IO coding. They work and are probably nicer than using callbacks but are still pretty ugly IMHO. The message passing that Erlang does is the best solution to this kind of concurrency. You can't really bolt that on a side of an existing language though.

Anyhow, I think Node is successful largely because Javascript is the language understood by web browsers. The non-blocking coding style is not some kind of magic bullet as Ryan originally suggested it was.

<comment><USER4> Somehow I never experienced callback hell.

It always felt like every other code-nesting problem to me.

I mean, nobody talks about conditional hell, everyone acknowledges that you should flatten out your conditionals.

<comment><USER5> Callback hell was real, especially if you worked on projects that decided to join the node.js bandwagon in its early days. Then promises happened.

[https://twitter.com/winterbe_/status/541868081308790784](https://twitter.com/winterbe_/status/541868081308790784)

<comment><USER6> Why post a contrived meme as an example? Especially one with a sane solution[1] just below.

[1]: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4W2AmaCAAA- heo.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B4W2AmaCAAA-heo.png)

<comment><USER5> It's an exaggeration, yes, but it does correctly summarize how I felt when I had to work with node.js code bases before stuff like _promises_ became mainstream.

<comment><USER7> An exaggeration could be written for any language. A decent programmer would not write code like the one you showcased as an example for callback hell.

This [https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/2.5.x/javadoc- api/org/spr...](https://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/2.5.x/javadoc- api/org/springframework/aop/framework/AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.html) is not an exaggeration and I still would not use it to showcase how I felt when I had to work with Java developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many are forgetting the initial reason node.js became popular. Consider the popular server-side landscape before node.js. It was dominated by Java, Python, etc. The primary way these ecosystems handle concurrency is OS-level threading. There was nothing else in the popular languages. Each language had some niche library that did non-blocking I/O (Twisted for Python, Netty for Java), but these all had a critical flaw, which is the rest of the ecosystem didn't support it. Basically every library, almost all existing code used the threading model. And when you mix threaded libraries with a non-blocking I/O server, it completely falls apart because the threaded code blocks.

Then came node.js. Look at the ecosystem it came into. JS itself has very little standard library, and nothing for I/O. It has a highly optimized VM supported by the resources of Google. It's a language known by many developers. node.js took this well developed clean slate and built a non- blocking I/O server on top of it. It offered a concurrency model on the server side that's completely new to many developers, an alternative to the traditional threading model everyone knew. Since server-side JS didn't exist yet, it forced all libraries to be written in this non-blocking way. Every package in NPM is written to support the core design of node.js which is non- blocking I/O. And it was exciting to many developers, it was a reason to rewrite everything in this new way.

<comment><USER9> On that note, coming back from node.js has been a really frustrating experience for me. I want to scream every time somebody suggests threading as a solution to non-blocking database calls and HTTP requests. It's made me painfully aware of how often parallelism is suggested in place concurrency.

C# in particular does a great job at conflating concurrency and parallelism. Both fall under the same Task namespace and it drives me mad to no end. I've also seen a couple instances of Execute and ExecuteAsync _both_ blocking because the underlying driver didn't support async, with no indication other than my async calls blocking.

It's quite different from the async-by-default sort of thing that's going on in the node.js world.

<comment><USER10> but why? Go's model is perfect. They're not real threads, it's basically very similar to Node, except that you can write code without a mess of callbacks and it's easier to reason about...

<comment><USER11> async await though

<comment><USER12> And no shared-memory CPU parallelism.

<comment><USER11> No threading bugs though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > That said, I think Node is not the best system to build a massive server > web. I would definitely use Go for that. And honestly, that's basically the > reason why I left Node. It was the realization that: oh, actually, this is > not the best server side system ever.

Really interesting. I can imagine others would refuse to give up on the thing they'd worked so hard on. But Dahl has the self-awareness to just step back and say "huh, guess this isn't so great after all".

Huge props to the guy.

<comment><USER14> Agree. It takes a lot to walk away from something and say you were wrong.

But, sadly, part of the saga of nodejs could have been avoided by people looking at the history of computing. If you look at Go's concurrency model it was entirely mapped out in the 1970s in CSP. There wasn't really any need for go the 'single thread, non-blocking' route that nodejs took and evangelize it as nirvana. There was a ton of distributed systems work done in the 1970s. Just look at Lamport's clocks paper.

I'm not criticizing Dahl directly here, more a sense that people ignore history in a field that has only had history for far less than a century.

<comment><USER15> The fact that Node survives as a platform for Fullstack JavaScript shows how serendipity works in invention: he set out to build a high performance network server and ended up building one of the largest platforms for building web applications.

The reasons it ended being very big are clear in hindsight but are hard to predict:

\- Sharing code between server and client

\- Server side rendering

\- Lower barrier to entry than other platforms (learn once write anywhere)

\- Well-designed package system

It was also helped by the fact that folks decided to write JS tooling in JS, be it minifier, transpilers, or test runners, without nodejs we would've built then on top of something else.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't call npm "well designed".

It's progres bar was the bottleneck causing slow downs.

The size of node_modules directories is basically a meme now.

<comment><USER15> It's the least shitty of all other designs. It picked the best design decisions from existing package managers. By default it is project local (as opposed to global like what rubygems, pip, and others are), it's recursive and largely reproducible (fully reproducible using lock files). The resolution algorithm is also deterministic and simple, you can implement it in an hour.

Although other languages are catching up they have to do it as add-ons or third party tools -- for example python pipenv [https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/announcing- pipenv](https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/announcing-pipenv)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ryan is so smart. I like the way he thinks. This blog post [1] is still one of favorites.

[1]: [http://tinyclouds.org/rant.html](http://tinyclouds.org/rant.html)

<comment><USER18> In a similar vein, see "We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines":

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/139.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/139.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "And then, you know, maybe little servers to... maybe little development servers, and here and there, maybe some real servers serving live traffic. Node can be useful, or it can be the right choice for it. But if you're building a massively distributed DNS server, I would not choose Node." -Ryan

</comment><comment><USER20> I find it interesting that he ended up at Google Brain working on deep learning research after writing Node. There seems to be a trend in the industry of taking people who are exceptional in one area and putting them on AI problems (e.g. Chris Lattner). I wonder how effective that cross pollination is.

<comment><USER21> He has two math degrees from decent (R1, AAU) schools, so I wouldn't say it's a huge leap; he probably has better training for modern AI than most people working in the area with CS degrees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pretty cool how he took a very unusual career/personal route to become such an important figure in the programming world. Good reminder for a parent like me that getting your kids into a "top" school isn't a must to succeed.

<comment><USER23> I mean, he went to two "Top 50" schools studying math. Do you mean he didn't go to an Ivy League or a school traditionally known as a top CS school?

<comment><USER22> Yes correct (and not saying that top schools are really top; good article on selection bias a few weeks ago on this).

I was primarily pointing at the fact that he started in Community College, which is sometimes looked down upon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was always curious why Ryan Dahl left the community. He finally answered that question; not the way I thought he would though:

"I think Node is not the best system to build a massive server web. I would definitely use Go for that. And honestly, that's basically the reason why I left Node."

Go may be an excellent choice for massive non-web servers, I don't have enough experience in it to say. For the product I work on, though, Node.js is the way to go. It's the best framework that allows us to use the same exact code on the server and on the client to create a fast progressive site.

</comment><comment><USER25> Given free choice I'd use Elixir, but working with Node and Python at work have to say that for async web services to my surprise I prefer Node more and I def. like Yarn more as package manager.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't help but feel like Google gently encouraged him to promote Go over Node. Or that being told by coworkers (goworkers?) for years-on-end that Go is better than Node has had an effect. Especially considering he talks about green threads like he's not quite sure what he's talking about. At any rate, there are many innovations where the creators weren't fully aware of their impact and eventually come to hate their own designs, so no love lost there.

<comment><USER27> Node lets you do single thread non blocking.

Go lets you do multi threaded non blocking.

That's a pretty substantial delta in the server world where you can easily have 24+ cores available.

Memory and cpu footprint of go is also drastically lower to node as it is a compiled language. That makes a difference when you are running in a cloud paying per GB of memory and per core.

I say this while actively developing in node.

<comment><USER26> The thing is, in real-world scenarios with databases, http, and regexs, golang and node.js have very similar performance with node beating golang in some cases.

Furthermore, not everyone is developing cloud-based apps and trying to optimize for metered cost structures.

If you need raw, parallelized, computational power, then I will without-a- doubt agree that Go is a better choice. However, to say that one would always use Go for any server (even webapps? come on...) truly doesn't make any sense.

The only other benefit-of-the-doubt explanation I could come up with for such an explanation is that it seems like the creator has spent more time in academia than in "the real world" of development, and perhaps the persuit of "the ultimate async system" is more important to him than practicality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems weird to me to have an interview with Ryan Dahl today, August 31st, without talking about the political struggle the Node Foundation has been going through over the past week. [http://www.zdnet.com/article/after- governance-breakdown-node...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-governance- breakdown-node-js-leaders-fight-for-its-survival/)

<comment><USER29> If you think back to when he quit node, it seemed to when it was due to not being interested in anything not involving the technology.

<comment><USER30> You wont get much done if your focus is on politics and fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There's an audio version for the lazy like me (it's a podcast)

[https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/340298200/download?client_...](https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/340298200/download?client_id=cUa40O3Jg3Emvp6Tv4U6ymYYO50NUGpJ)

</comment><comment><USER32> A lot of people talk about callback hell. For me, the biggest issue of Callbacks is that you don't have a single point to catch thrown errors. We need finer control than a global catch-all handler.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ryan Dahl's advice for building high performance web server: Use Go.

<comment><USER34> nginx is faster then caddy

<comment><USER27> And better all around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> But, but what were the colorization projects? What was the domain?

<comment><USER36> [http://tinyclouds.org/colorize/](http://tinyclouds.org/colorize/) [http://tinyclouds.org/residency/](http://tinyclouds.org/residency/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> They need to fix their ui on mobile, there's no way to listen to the podcast and most people listen to podcasts on the go I would imagine.

</comment><comment><USER38> Even if Node is not the perfect server-server environment, you can go quite far just with knowing JS.

</comment><comment><USER39> In this thread: people who don't use Node.js making wild presumptions about how it works. Callback hell? Been a few years since that's been a problem.

<comment><USER40> It depends :tm:.

There are still a lot of codebases that are callback heavy. For one, callbacks are faster than promises in a lot of node versions by a very large margin. In other code bases, legacy rules still apply.

Promises don't work well for some more complicated logical flows (though they're pretty damn perfect for the common ones) and async is still pretty new.

Just because it's not a problem you deal with doesn't mean that it doesn't still affect plenty of devs.

<comment><USER39> You can mitigate callback hell using classes, which are far quicker than promises and easier for humans to parse than callback chains.

<comment><USER40> Genuinely curious, how? Do you have some example code to post?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> _this new paradigm of model view controller_

New... in the 1970s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller#History)

It boggles the mind how little "web devs" know about the history of the field. No wonder they keep reinventing the wheel.

<comment><USER42> Maybe he's talking about when it got popular, not when it was literally invented...but I guess you can just be pedantic and miss the point.

<comment><USER29> I was seeing frameworks in ColdFusion referencing MVC back around 2001.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, MVC was well known to the Visual C++ community in the 90s, and it was a well established concept among commercial (as opposed to academic) programmers even back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Software Engineering in 2017 : Personality cults and mostly a lack of appreciation for the history of CS.</comment>


My Bill to Open PACER in memory of Aaronsw - <AUTHOR> https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/sjs/my-bill-to-openpacer-in-memory-of-aaronsw-open-for-comment-and-available-on-github/

<comment><USER2> Cheers for doing this!</comment>


Refined GitHub: A Chrome extension that simplifies the interface, adds features - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github <comment><USER2> I think this (and Dear GH) has been a reminder of how hard UX is, because many of these complaints have never fazed me.

Of course that says nothing about the quality of this project, and I'm glad people are pursuing their own solutions! I think most of _my_ complaints require back-end changes unfortunately...

<comment><USER3> UX is hard indeed. If your UI improvements need back-end changes consider having a look at GitLab, we would be happy to collaborate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Linkifies branch references in pull requests

This alone would be worth it, I have no idea why Github doesn't do that by default.

Alas, I'm on Firefox 8-).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer: Not by me. Author is [https://github.com/sindresorhus/](https://github.com/sindresorhus/)

<comment><USER5> In that case you can't put "Show HN" in the title. Otherwise every post could, since every post is showing HN something.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the clarification and the title change!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awhile back I had a Chrome extension that would show a fork of a source repo if it had more recent commits. This was super helpful for finding interesting bits of code. I can't find it anymore, anyone know what I'm talking about?

<comment><USER7> Not exactly what you're asking for, but `lovely-forks` [1] shows you "notable forks of Github repositories under their names", where "notable" is defined by comparing the number of stars.

[1] [https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely- forks](https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks)</comment></comment>


Abundance without attachment - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/opinion/sunday/arthur-c-brooks-abundance-without-attachment.html?mwrsm=Email&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if it had been shared earlier. Relevant to optimising for personal happiness. Since that's the ultimate variable to optimise for.</comment>


1967: Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth 'Crying In Rage' - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/18/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage?ft=1&f=1026

<comment><USER2> "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Richard Feynman

As an engineer (and I hope those who design spaceships - and nuclear reactors, as it seems evident lately) you have the obligation to do the best job you are able to and, if you are not able to do it well, to refuse to do it. Even if you'll end up missing your sales target or be moved to Siberia.

I feel for Komarov, for the Apollo I crew, for the Soyuz 17, for Challenger and Columbia and to a host of other people who were killed by careless engineering.

<comment><USER3> That notion is covered by Adam Curtis in his "A is For Atom" film. [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1860517361048002456...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1860517361048002456#)

Western and Soviet engineers that made nuclear power stations happen could not refuse because nuclear was the cultural mania of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Komarov was honored with a state funeral. Only a chipped heel bone survived the crash."

I'm confused by what appears to be a badly burned form in the open casket photo - appears to be more than a "chipped heel bone."

<comment><USER5> _"his body turning molten on impact"_

Perhaps everything else liquefied and was unrecognizable?</comment></comment>


How Accurate is Apple Maps in Canada's Largest Province?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.mtonic.com/applemaps/

<comment><USER2> Good attempt, but some of these results are wonky.

Right off the top of the list, the result for Allanburg is actually perfectly right - administratively it's part of Thorold hence why GeoNames came back with that. Dain City is maybe 500 m off the centre rather than outright wrong as suggested in the list. Ayr comes back as "8 George St, Kitchener ON N0B 1E0, Canada <+43.29177700,-80.45398100>" - the coordinates and the postal code are correct, the street and city name are not - I don't know how to rank the correctness of such a result. Same deal with nearby St. Jacobs. Port Robinson is also described incorrectly but has the correct coordinates.

The answer for Burlington has first coordinates that are "close" (well within the city but not at centre/downtown/city hall), and the 'region' one is about 8 km off with a silly large error radius of 15 km. Ditto Kingston, Kitchener, and Markham. Similar deal with Clarington, Clarkson, Falconbridge, "Sudbury", and probably a bunch of others, though there's the added difficulty of Ontario municipal organization thrown in for those ones. Bizarrely, Ottawa's point result is perfect whereas the 'region' result is more than 20 km away with a specified radius of 55 km, but I'm not sure if that warrants a 'wrong' rating.

Echo Bay points to the body of water rather than the settlement around it, and I don't think it's fair to expect the search to know you meant the settlement specifically. Jordan Station is marked "close" but is in fact 500 km off. Wilno is marked "close" but is 10 km of forest away. The results for Mississauga are unreasonably far away from the centre of the city but within the limits.

Then there's search context - if you ask the service for "Baltimore Ontario" with no further context it might get it wrong, if you ask it from a device that knows it's at least in Ontario (or even New York or Michigan) it might work better.

It would also be useful to somehow quantify the results by search likelihood, popularity, community size, etc. A few names I recognize from the missing or wrong list are fairly small settlements. Scrolling through the list (currently on W), the largest results I saw that were flat out wrong so far are Belleville, which is about 10 km off, North Bay about 8 km off, Whitchurch- Stouffville about 6 km off, and Burlington/Kingston/Kitchener/Markham/Mississauga 'region' issues as mentioned above.

<comment><USER3> Yep. Many of the place names in his "official" list do not have Wikipedia entries, which cast doubt in my mind on whether the places actually exist. I googled some and it seemed like Google doesn't think they exist either.

Also, it looks like he counted a server error as a bad map result. Maybe the server was throttling him or the server is otherwise overloaded?

A better attempt would be to use Wikipedia as a reference for places which (a) exist and (b) are non-trivial. Also he should cross reference against Google since that is the current standard in mapping.

<comment><USER2> The server code 8 error appears to come up only for less significant placenames (I don't recognize vast majority of code 8 results), lending some credence to a theory that this error is returned for unrecognized queries.

Edit: It has occurred to me the 'region' results might be trying to circumscribe the whole area of the municipality in a circle, which would certainly give odd results for a lot of Ontario municipalities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this person is applying for a QA job with Apple they have the right mindset for it. Its always great to come up with interesting ways to measure the quality of something, I see a few problems with the methodology but hook it up to an automated bug submission process and it could do wonders for quality over all.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it would. This particular method is likely to be unactionable, due to comparing a base map data source to another.

The problem is that either Apple have rights to this data source, in which case they should just be fusing it together with their other data. Or they don't have rights, in which case they can't use the results of this comparison to fix data without also risking tainting said data. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know where the line would be drawn. But automatically or manually filing data bug reports based on results like these seems very dodgy.

Second, automatically generating and filing hundreds or thousands of bugs would just render the submission channels useless. Just triaging geocoding bugs requires ridiculous amounts of skilled human effort by people whose time would most likely be better spent in fixing the geocoder. It might be different for things known to be guaranteed data bugs, but then your methodology certainly shouldn't involve a geocoder. And you'd run into the rights issues of the previous paragraph.

There are good ways of doing automatic quality evaluation or semi-automated quality improvement. But they're really going to be more sophisticated. And unless Apple's expensively bought maps people are totally incompetent, they are already doing such things.

(Edit: I don't mean to belittle the efforts of the original poster. It's good that somebody tried to quantify the quality of Apple maps rather than relying purely on anecdotal evidence. I just don't think that it's a method that'd have much relevance to the way Apple works.)

<comment><USER4> I was thinking more along the lines that this person was passionate enough about improving the quality that they were willing to code up a prototype way of visualizing relative quality. Perhaps I've known too many engineers where I've asked "How do you know that is ready for prime time?" and they have sort of glazed over and said, "Uh, I don't it seems to work?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll be needlessly pedantic and point out that actually Canada's largest province, geographically speaking, is Quebec and not Ontario

<comment><USER7> LOL. Well for what it's worth, I looked up an address in Montréal and Maps had it completely screwed up. I don't mind the beta quality of the product (Apple has to gather the raw data somehow) but I do mind its hubris and the fanboys' initial rave reviews of iOS 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After just today reading news about the ios6 map app failing, and then this article, I really am amazed at the deterioration of the company. Nothing too surprising as all goods things come to an end, but still, this is fast.

<comment><USER9> So all it takes to declare the "Most Profitable Company in the World" deteriorating and coming to an end is some hiccups with a fairly new product?

I agree, this is fast, but not in the way you mean.

[http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/20/technology/apple-most- valuab...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/20/technology/apple-most-valuable- company/index.html)

<comment><USER2> I think "most profitable" and "deteriorating" are perfectly capable of being orthogonal. If nothing else, the profit or its first derivative w.r.t. time could be declining while still being the highest in the world. No opinion on Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what the symbols mean, but there's a red circle next to Kingston, ON. The Kingston info is correct. It's in the right location and Portsmouth is part of Kingston.

The Belleville information looks mostly correct, though it places Belleville city center a few miles north. Actual street addresses work.

And it place Picton, ON in Australia...

<comment><USER11> I wonder if was because Picton was unincorporated (I believe it happened 14 years ago)

<comment><USER2> Unlikely, the list of communities has a lot of unincorporated areas that are formally part of a larger municipality and the results for some of them are correct. Clarkson and Dain City off the top of my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apple is using the cartographic data provided by TomTom (who bought TeleAtlas a few years ago), notoriously less accurate in Canada that Navteq's (Garmin's provider). This may be the reason (or Apple's own mapping algorithms - couldn't tell, as I'm not using iOS).</comment>


Two-day-old baby dies form COVID19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52752334 <comment><USER2> Please don't editorialize titles. The baby died "with" Covid-19, not _from_ Covid-19.</comment>


Signs that you're a good programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-good-programmer

<comment><USER2> > Is oblivious to how many times their cubicle-mate has gone for coffee, the > bathroom, or the hospital

> Substantial refactoring on the eve of a deadline

> Fondness for films directed by Stanley Kubrick

> Commits changes to the repository that consist only of comments

> Pauses "The Andromeda Strain" at the part about the sliver of paper getting > between the bell and the ringer and grins like a madman

> Has the German versions of "Der Kommissar" and "99 Lufballons" on their iPod > (and, er... their native language is English)

> Giggles when someone says the phrase "This is recorded on sticky-tape and > rust"

> Willingly throws away weeks or months of work in order to adopt another > programmer's superior code

> A cubicle or desk populated with toys that came from ThinkGeek

I hate to be the first comment and be a negative comment but there is _WAY_ too much subjective/whimsy/useless filler in this article. Apply your coding standards and cut this article down to 10% of its original size.

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw The Andromeda Strain a while back but it was kinda boring compared to the book. I don't get the point of the "sliver of paper getting between the bell and the ringer" reference. Anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER4> I found it entertaining.</comment>


114 million visitors, 5 billion pages – community management at Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/What-to-Learn-from-the-Man-Who-Managed-Reddits-Community-of-Millions#

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting that this interview really does focus completely on the quality of the user experience, and never says anything about the quality of the content. My impression is that the company has a completely laissez faire attitude to content quality.

It's shocking to discover that 8 years ago, Reddit's front page content looked very similar to Hacker News today: [https://web.archive.org/web/20051201042755/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051201042755/http://reddit.com/)?

Although the basic user interface hasn't really changed, the content now is totally different. Low quality posts tend to rise to the top, and this effect has become more obvious as the user base has expanded. The lowest common denominator is the meme post (an image with a few words of text).

Obviously this trend is a broader issue which is seen in other social media. But for Reddit, the subreddit concept has worked extremely well, and it has at least extended the site's useful lifetime as a source of good quality content and discussion.</comment>


Vermeer in Manhattan - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/04/vermeer-in-manhattan/

<comment><USER2> For those interested in Vermeer, I highly recommand the movie called Tim's Vermeer [1][2]. It's about some graphic designer who's never painted (according to the movie) using mechanical/optical setups to paint scenes in order to acheive Vermeer's painting style. The final result is absolutely impressive in my opinion and the whole movie is a good watch.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer) [2] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/)</comment>


An Open Letter To LulzSec - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/pbhBQLKy <comment><USER3> I wonder if this is jedburg of reddit. I only say because he said "reigned" in his goodbye post today, and this pastebin said "reigned" too, when they both meant "reined". Also the writing is very similar. Similar number of sentences (48 vs. 54) and words per sentence (15 vs. 12) too. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, or it's a glitch in the matrix.

<comment><USER4> I'd be looking for the same grammatical errors etc appearing in both documents if your trying to see if it's the same person.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Its best if your looking for they're bad grammar.

<comment><USER6> Funny, but downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An Open Letter to LulzSec

1\. Dear Boys and Girls,

2\. Do you remember what it was like when the bullies picked on you and your friends during lunch in the canteen? Broke your spectacles, stuck their filthy fingers in your food?

3\. Do you remember what it was like before you really discovered the internets? The lonely empty darkness inside you that matched the lonely darkness that surrounded you?

4\. Do you remember how you felt when the cool kids had fun stuff to do of an evening and all you had was a night of MMOs and online chat?

5\. Do you remember thinking that you and your brain were capable of big things. Great things. Terrible things and the world would be sorry for underestimating you?

6\. Do you remember a life before Lulz?

7\. I'm guessing you do. I'm guessing it wasn't that long ago. I'm guessing that you are still stinging.

8\. Then the lulz began.

9\. We have to admit that when you were picking on the internets's big kids we had a moment of guilty lulz. When it looked like you were teaching them an important lesson we lulled along. But you changed.

10\. Just because you have a pain inside doesn't mean that you you should inflict pain. Just because the big kids shit on you doesn't mean you should shit on the little kids.

11\. The power has infected your young head, Child. You've gone to the Dark Side.

12\. But. Wait. Shhh! Baby. It's OK. I promise.

13\. The big, real world it full of lulz. Real lulz. The kind of amazing lulz that you can touch. Lulz you can taste and smell. Warm lulz, soft lulz. Hard lulz.

14\. You have a big brain in your young head. A brain capable of good things, clever things, important things. Once you discover the power of real lulz you will soon put this behind you.

15\. But do it fast before the bullies return and your life returns to being nothing more than a high-school cafeteria on repeat loop for 2-4 years with good behaviour.

16\. The lulz aren't worth it.

17\. Yours, Concerned.

</comment><comment><USER8> All that 'lulzspeak' in there sounds like an old guy trying to be 'hip' when talking to younger people.

<comment><USER9> Only if we operate under the assumption that lulzsec is a group of younger people and not older guy(s) also trying to sound 'hip.'

<comment><USER10> Just using the word hip dates you.

<comment><USER9> Perfect example of how the web masks age: I'm 21.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I mistaken, or is he making the "get a life" argument, classic of seventh graders?

<comment><USER12> Read it. Again. In it's entirety.

All will be revealed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some of their recent hacks were _not_ kiddie stuff. I don't think they will be very impressed by this letter.

Also: I wouldn't bet on them being autistic nolifers, which is what the author of this letter seems to be suggesting, you'd probably be surprised.

<comment><USER14> Can you expand on what kind of methods they employ, or the barriers they had to overcome with their targets?

<comment><USER15> Getting the machines to DDOS everyone took a while.

<comment><USER16> Given that I frequently hear about renting botnets, that's not necessarily the case - to acquire a botnet, one does not have to go out and compromise a bunch of computers. Of course, your phrasing suggests that you are presenting yourself as a primary source, as if you were a member of LulzSec speaking from experience. If that's the case, disregard this comment.

<comment><USER15> That was pure sarcasm, in reference to the OP's statement that "their recent hacks were _not_ kiddie stuff". Most of the crap they pulled last week were merely DDOS attacks, where the only real coordination required is getting everyone on an IRC channel at the same time to hit a button when someone says "Go".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 'It's not what you do it's who you are'?

I would like to politely disagree.

<comment><USER18> (I feel like I need to clarify something after upvoting this.)

You're right, the "it's who you are that matters" card spells out resigned bullshit about most of the times someone plays it.

But it's not what they do that matters either: like the author of the article said himself, what they're doing is mostly kiddie stuff. Using well-known tools and techniques to goof around with well-documented security flaw 'patterns'.

And so they're not _crafting_ anything either, they're just wasting humanity's bandwidth. In _that sense_ I agree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree with the sentiment of the letter. I used to participate in Internet subculture type stuff for years (nothing really illegal though), and eventually I got bored of it. I wouldn't really say that I regret anything, but I wouldn't want it to come back and bite me (I probably shouldn't run for President).

They're really just a kiddie version of Anonymous/Wikileaks. Hopefully they'll move on to more meaningful hacking (either definition of the term) before they get thrown in prison, but there will always be someone to take up the lulz mantle.

And yeah, DDoSes aren't really brag-worthy anymore. Getting thrown in prison for a worthy social cause, doing something mind-blowingly awesome, or hacking capitalism and making yourself rich legitimately are way more impressive.

</comment><comment><USER20> "If you want a truly righteous hack..."

I was so hoping for a "you should score one of those Gibsons."

<comment><USER21> LOL that's what I was expecting too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was expecting a rickroll there at the end... Fresh prince - close enough.

<comment><USER23> The least he could have done is get the song right though.

<comment><USER19> Maybe getting the song wrong was a metatroll?

<comment><USER24> The only real amusement I get from trolling is when people discuss it afterwards and start trying to dissect it you get to meta-trolling, then meta on meta, trollers trolling each other, meta-trolling each other, etc. It's turtles all the way down and at the bottom there's a huge ocean of words that has lost all their meaning.

It amazes me that they can muster the energy to even bother.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't get it... why does a Fresh Prince reference make him a troll?

<comment><USER26> It's a practice that I assume started on 4chan where you get roped in to a serious sounding story only to have fresh prince lyrics busted out at the end. The story is always made up in these cases. It's kind of the rick rolling of wall of texts as in that if you'd never heard of it and saw a link like that you might assume it was a mistake or just random but of course it isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "But men at whiles are sober / And think by fits and starts, / And if they think, they fasten / Their hands upon their hearts." --A E Housman

<comment><USER28> Who in the fuck downvoted this?!

<comment><USER27> Thanks, I was afraid that very few got the message. It's been one of the more powerful quotes I've come upon in my life. So many of us, virtually all of us at times, try to get ourselves so wrapped up in whatever it is that keeps us distracted, but, as the quote communicates, the deeper issues at some point or another enter into everyone's mind, even those who try the hardest to proverbally 'stay drunk.'

At some point the seriousness of this life hits us all. I've had the best luck when I've faced it head on. When I can be not merely self critical but act on that criticism. When I confront my own ignorance and nothingness then I'm far less likely to squander my time/life and for more likely to remember to respect and revere others and their rights and claims to the chaos, confusion and wonder that is this life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This guy lost me when he said, "I know it sounds pretty faggy".

Not really interested in someone who's supposedly lecturing LulzSec from a position of vastly greater maturity and life experience, but still hasn't outgrown 12-year-old homophobe-speak. At all.

<comment><USER30> I think that was simply "/b/" talk, not homophobic as such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Spoken like a true troll...

</comment><comment><USER32> A masterclass. Be sure to read until the end.

Well played, anonymous poster.

</comment><comment><USER33> Read the last sentence. This was a pretty good troll - I know I found myself agreeing with him, nodding my head a bit. Then I saw the last sentence and had to laugh at myself for falling for it.

<comment><USER34> I interpreted the last sentence as yet another meme mention, meant to indicate that the author was part of the same subculture as lulzsec - <USER2> 4chan/Anonymous culture. I don't think it was intended to mean the message isn't being offered sincerely.

<comment><USER35> I think it's both, and you're making excuses for getting Bel Air'd. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sorry, this is made of so much fail.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think Intellectual Property laws do more good or harm? - <AUTHOR> Millions of people suffer because medical equipments and medicine are protected by these laws, there is no point in thread an individual liberty to protect an abstract concept like an idea or invention. <comment><USER2> I'm one that believes that patents are an important part of society. One of the reasons the U.S. has had so many technological advancements is that people are able to profit from their ideas. Right now many people are trying to come up with the next million-dollar idea. Most will be trivial without much impact, even if they make a million dollars, but a few will change everything or a combination of them will change everything. Yes, protecting ideas may sometimes seem like they are hurting people but keep in mind that in most cases the idea would have never been had there not been protection for ideas.

The problem comes when people start to game the system and use their influence to get an advantage over others. The problems we see are mostly related to the way the rules have been set. So it's a matter of tweaking the rules rather than getting rid of the system.

So, no, I don't think Intellectual Property laws do more harm than good.

</comment><comment><USER3> We need some mechanism by which to encourage people with good ideas to make those ideas available to the world rather than keeping it to themselves. Intellectual Property laws are our current mechanism for rewarding such behavior and thereby encouraging people to add value to the system.

Maybe they aren't optimal. Maybe there's a better solution.

But doing away with them without first coming up with a superior method for making sure those ideas get shared at all is a great way to strangle the supply of better ideas and new inventions. Counting on people to give that stuff away for free out of the goodness of their hearts so everyone else can benefit while the brilliance of the originator gets treated abusively like slave labor is an excellent way for the world to cut its own throat.

Brilliant people can choose to turn their brilliance towards a "Fuck you, got mine!" personal policy if the world wishes to habitually and by policy fuck them over. Encouraging them to behave that way is an excellent way to actively foster a dystopian future.

</comment><comment><USER4> Way more harm than good. "Intellectual property" locks up ideas, which hinders human progress. That might be tolerable if the monopoly so granted was short. But it's not, it's what, life+70 years or something? And it never gets shorter - we only increase copyright term.

The legal setup around copyrights and patents is also indicative of "bad". We can no longer inspect some item and decide whether or not it's copyrighted, for example. We have decided that the default is "assume copyright". You basically have to have a trial to decide whether some use is OK under one of the exceptions to copyright. This limits educational and critical use, and this, in practice, limits free speech.

</comment><comment><USER5> The original intent of patents was to provide the inventor a window of opportunity to profit from their invention. Unfortunately corporations are gaming the system and have weaponized patents. The basic problem is that whilst you can get a patent granted for tens of thousands, large corporations wilfully infringe upon patents because it costs millions to defend them and the typical inventor does not have the resources to defend.

As with most things the IP laws have resulted in perverse incentives benefitting those who can afford to spend the shareholders' money in their quest to protect their monopolies. The little guy gets screwed, yet again.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think they are more harmful than good (although in the past it might have been more neutral, although I am still against copyright/patent laws in general). I think patents and copyright should be abolished (although trademarks might be useful, although I don't know if the trademark laws should be altered a bit maybe). Stuff I write myself I make it to be public domain because I don't like copyright. Copyright/patents don't promote inventions; they tend to hinder it instead, I think.

<comment><USER7> What is your counter-argument to people who write for a living and say they need copyright to protect their livelihoods? Say fiction or technical manual writers? It's the entirety of their work product. Should they just find something else to do? How should they be rewarded for their time and effort? Not trolling, just trying to understand how an anti-copyright advocate would argue this case.

<comment><USER6> Question Copyright has many ideas (and there are also counterarguments in the comments, although there are problems with some parts of some of the counterarguments). I would buy a book if I want a printed copy, at least. There is also possibility of agreeing to write or modify it in exchange for payment, and there is also trademarks (including the "Creator Endorsed" mark), and I am not suggesting to abolish trademarks (although a lot of fair use should be allowed in many circumstances, maybe more than the current laws I don't know). Also, I am not suggesting that someone should be forced to publish something, but if they do, then someone could copy it (if they want to), with or without modifications (although the author should be allowed to specify (if he want to) that altered versions should not be confused with the original version (except for technical compatibility purposes in some cases, e.g. if a file format requires the file to contain the text "This file is authorized by [company name]", then it does, although the documentation that comes with the file would mention that it is not true and is only included for the compatibility reasons)). You can also charge money for a CD, DVD, admission fee for a concert, etc, or even for download if you want to (although I am not advising it, and even if you do, others do not have to change for the download too). If you have not sold any DVDs yet, then nobody is allowed to steal one in order to copy it or trespass on your property in order to make a copy, but once you sell a copy to someone who wishes to copy it, then they can (including format shifting). Also, a company providing it as a service could still have terms of service that say they can terminate your service (but cannot force you to pay for it in this case, unless you have already paid and received the service in exchange) (also, someone can still set up a competing service if they don't like their terms of service, anyways).

[0] [https://questioncopyright.org/understanding-free- content](https://questioncopyright.org/understanding-free-content)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Patents are one way for the state to select who will become rich and who won't. There is little justification for "intellectual property" in a free market.

</comment><comment><USER9> In the US you mean? The problem is much more endemic in that you need money to hire a good lawyer to fight against someone with money, be it patent,civil or criminal law

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a historical argument against software patents. And one can be made for shorter durations for hardware ones now.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think In 99% of the cases, the costs, work and effort by far outweighs possible benefits.</comment>


I sabotaged my editor with ransomware from the dark web - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-dark-web-ransomware/ <comment><USER2> A good read, but not quite Gloria Steinam bunny good.

Also "don't encourage them" as in "please don't feed the trolls" (or malware writers)</comment>


Arabic Translators Did Far More Than Just Preserve Greek Philosophy - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/arabic-translators-did-far-more-than-just-preserve-greek-philosophy <comment><USER2> Translation is made worse when one doesn't have a "synchronizing" mechanism. This is very common in India where the state is quite lazy, where there is zero economic value in the native language.</comment>


Are there any unicorn co-founders who didn't attend prep school and Ivies? - <AUTHOR> It seems like everyone from Gates to Blecharczyk went to private prep schools and then on to Harvard or Stanford. Is there anyone who DIDN'T have this advantage who made it in the world of startups and VC? <comment><USER4> Cofounder of thumbtack here. I grew up in East Tennessee, attended public schools through high school and then got my bachelors at the University of Tennessee.

For the record, I never went to a better school because nobody ever told me that I could.

My high school graduation rate was somewhere around 50%, and when the guidance counselors found out that I got a scholarship to the University of Tennessee, they pretty much made a plaque to commemorate the success and then moved on to the other kids.

It's a problem I'd like to work on in the next couple of years.

However, while I'm opining, I might add that I could be the exception that proves the rule.

All three of my cofounders were Ivy educated, and a heavy proportion of our early investors and advisors were either connections from their social network or people who they met at the various Ivy networking functions.

I'm really not sure what to say about it. It's just how the world works. People like to help people that they know, and when you go to an Ivy League school it just so happens that the people you share a dorm room with are going to be in a much better position to help you than my freshman year roommates at UT.

The UT alumni Association, bless their hearts, can't seem to see any purpose for contacting alumni except for donations and to organize football watching parties.

My most successful friends from back home are lawyers, doctors, and small business owners. My cofounders' most successful friends from back home are venture capitalists, Stanford professors, and finance types.

<comment><USER5> If the guidance counselors _had_ given you advice, it would likely have been wrong. After hearing a few friends in College complain about terrible advice from their counselors, I thought it might just be that people only tell the bad stories. So, I asked every single one of my college friends (mostly Seniors) at the time specifically if they had gotten advice from a guidance counselor, and whether they thought it was good. This turned up _more_ stories of bad advice, but nothing positive.

This was at a state school in Indiana, so maybe just midwest guidance counselors are bad, but it's still troubling to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot of founders: Wish Slack Credit Karma Uber (both founders) Xiaomi Minecraft Tumblr

There's a lot. I suspect question comes from status anxiety. I don't really think it matters.

<comment><USER7> > I suspect question comes from status anxiety. I don't really think it > matters.

Depends on your perspective. If it's mere "status", then no it doesn't matter. Everyone has Buddha nature, etc., etc.

But from the perspective of "does privilege matter?" you'll get an entirely different answer, which is why people in tech are paying a _lot_ more attention to questions like this. A very, very narrow slice of the population has any possibility of becoming a founder at all, much less of an ultra-high valuation tech startup. That slice is far from random, it encodes a lot of history we're not too proud of, and it is not just a star awarded for merit.

If you're reading this and this word "privilege" doesn't make sense in context, it's time to do some homework. There's a lot being written on the 'net about this now, but I'll throw this out as random current starting point:

[http://gregorykatsoulis.com/2015/07/and-it- worked/](http://gregorykatsoulis.com/2015/07/and-it-worked/)

<comment><USER6> The problem is that it's a false path and the logic doesn't quite make sense. If Ivy league really matters, then you can deduce it to high school, jr high, elementary school all the way to pre-school. Therefore if you're age 4, if you don't get to the most elite pre-school, your life is over, just over. If you make it an Ivy league, then your life is set. If you've been at one of these institutions, you'll know both of these things are false.

<comment><USER7> You are not really "getting it" re: the effects of privilege.

It's not that going to some particular school or even a set of them (Ivy or no) matters _per se_. The effects of privilege exist on a continuum, and tend to accumulate over time. In that article I linked, the filmmaker had fairly extraordinary privilege via a long accumulation of access, education, peer mindset, parental support, and resources. But that's perhaps an extreme example. A lesser example: just the fact that a university student was even able to consider college as a life path is _also a manifestation of privilege_. For the most part, it points to an accumulation of parental and peer support over the student's life. E.g. her parents valued school and encouraged schoolwork, maybe tried to get her into a better school. She had peer support for life-paths including notions of education, career, "bettering oneself", etc. Peer support is especially interesting, as it also subsumes a lot of class issues.

Memes matter, and speaking probabilistically, kids whose peers see no paths to "success" in life can expect to have a hard time finding it themselves. We've likely all seen tales of hugely successful people who rose from modest backgrounds. That's the old story. The new one, the one we're just starting to tell, is about the enormous waste of potential from _all those who didn 't make it._

<comment><USER6> I understand your points. What you're talking about is middle class and upper middle class privilege. That privilege is different than upper class, which is implied by the original poster's comments on ivy league and boarding schools like Andover. There's different granularities and levels of privilege.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You mention Bill Gates to Blecharczyk, what about Steve Jobs and Woz (Woz went to Berkley, though I'm not sure that is considered in the same league as Stanford, I could be wrong).

How about Stuart Butterfield (Slack), he went to University of Victoria in Canada.

Here is the unicorn list according to Crunchbase [http://techcrunch.com/unicorn-leaderboard/](http://techcrunch.com/unicorn- leaderboard/)

go through the co-founders, I think you'll find only a small percentage went to prep schools or Ivy Leagues.

<comment><USER9> From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#History)

"[...] Also in 1975, Ken Thompson took a sabbatical from Bell Labs and came to Berkeley as a visiting professor. He helped to install Version 6 Unix and started working on a Pascal implementation for the system. Graduate students Chuck Haley and Bill Joy improved Thompson's Pascal and implemented an improved text editor, ex.[2] Other universities became interested in the software at Berkeley, and so in 1977 Joy started compiling the first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD), which was released on March 9, 1978. BSD was an add-on to Version 6 Unix rather than a complete operating system in its own right. Some thirty copies were sent out."

I don't think that in 1975 Berkeley was all that bad for future computer scientists. Seemed like a pretty good place to be actually.

<comment><USER8> I didn't mean to suggest that great things don't come out of Berkeley, but it isn't normally talked about in the same list as Harvard, Stanford, etc.

Same with University of Illinois, where Marc Andreesen helped create Mosaic and launch the consumer internet.

I suspect most universities can tie themselves to some modern massive success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a silly thing to spend five minutes of your time researching, as that is five minutes that isn't building a company (unicorn trajectory or otherwise), but be that as it may the answer is "Yes, of course there are founders of companies at all levels of success who didn't go to private prep schools and then Harvard/Stanford/etc."

I had five pegged off the top of my head, plus the obvious answer of "Run down the list of foreign-born founders you know." I'll elide naming them to avoid even the appearance of suggesting there is something magic about particular universities: all of their companies speak for themselves.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't seem to silly to research aspects of the startup ecosystem that one is part of.

<comment><USER12> Only if that is a factor contributing to or reducing the likelihood of success.

If it's completely orthogonal, it _is_ a waste of time because that's time you could use doing/learning something that _does_ contribute.

<comment><USER13> If you know of any way to conclusively test whether or not something will eventually be useful I'd love to hear more about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Being someone who's against the obsession with pedigree in SV. I've noted a few that came up outside of the Ivies:

Jan Koum, CEO/Founder of Whatsapp - San Jose State

Aaron Levie, CEO/Founder of Box - <USER2>

Suhail Doshi, CEO/Founder of Mixpanel (almost a unicorn) - Arizona State

Logan Green, CEO of Lyft - UC Santa Barbara

</comment><comment><USER15> Travis Kalanick went to a public high school and dropped out of UCLA.

But really, this is the wrong question. Even if there were 0 examples of what you asked for, it doesn't mean one can't come along.

</comment><comment><USER16> You're correct, if you look at founders from Gates to Blecharczyk, this is what you'll generally find. A few exceptions have been mentioned in the thread.

It's something to bear in mind. I mean, of essays written and so forth - <USER3> you're say, black - they don't apply to you. This is obvious - how many black unicorn co-founders are there? I mean you rarely see a black programmer in the Bay area, never mind a unicorn co-founder. Most essays about joining startups, starting startups etc. are for the class, age group etc. of people who already joined or started startups. There's no warning labels that these things are not possible for certain people, but those people should understand that.

I mean it goes to all kinds of things, even what languages to program in. People ask why things like Lisp never made it big - well, most people don't have the time to devote to it. I mean even the idea of making something original a few people love, and putting making money off - it's a wealthy person's prerogative. People not born to the manor have to make money now, no matter how smart or hard working they are, and the amount of time they can devote to long-term or even medium-term goals is limited. This is how those who control the forces of production have set things up, and it's important for you to know it. People born on third base like to pat themselves on the back about how brilliant they are. They used to say they were put into their position by God, but in the modern world they have changed that to saying they have better DNA.

</comment><comment><USER17> Unicorn = lucky white or south asian man.

YC alums (majority) & Founders with VC = Ivy Leaguers

<comment><USER18> I have a dozen or so friends who have done YC who aren't even American, let alone from the Ivies. Don't make things up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Notch made Minecraft, I don't think he went to any fancy schools, though I'm only speculating.

Edit:

David Karp is another great example I suppose. He made Tumblr, and doesn't even have a high school diploma.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been reading Hacker News for a long time, and until now I've resisted creating an account. It used to be that this forum was a collection of scrappy founders, talking about building out their companies or particular engineering techniques, or the latest front-end library. A lot of posts revolved around helping each other out, either emotionally or technically.

This post represents its slide into a vapid gossip rag. Another reddit. Why does it matter if a founder comes from an Ivy League school? Does that prevent you from founding a company? People who end up going to Ivy League schools represents a self-selecting bunch of go-getters, that's it. Successful founders don't ask these sorts of questions, they just build.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let me ask you a question instead; what do you hope to learn from this? What do you want to be true?

<comment><AUTHOR> I get where you're going with this. My interest in entrepreneurship exists independently of the current "startup" scene, so the fact that it's dominated by the upper class doesn't dissuade me from my current goals and interests. My goal isn't to blame any lack of success on the unfairness of our quasi- meritocracy.

It is interesting though to see a group of people who convinced that they are on the progressive side of history admit that much of their success has been achieved through the connections they made at their elite schools and through their parents, which seems like the way business has always been done. But what do I know, I'm just a middle class guy who went to a state school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin went to public high school and then to public universities for undergrad (University of Michigan and University of Maryland). They went to Stanford for grad, but they still fit your query of not going to private prep schools.

</comment><comment><USER23> Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square dropped out of NYU and went to Catholic school.

</comment><comment><USER24> Brian Chesky (Airbnb) attended Rhode Island School of Design.

</comment><comment><USER23> Airbnb was founded by RISD grads.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's from the last tech go-round, but Rackspace co-founders Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorff went to Trinity University in San Antonio.

</comment><comment><USER26> Look at Flipkart from India. Valued at over $15Bn USD. They attended the IITs in India yet build a world class company :) So to answer your question, there are people who still make it big despite not having attended the Ivies!!

<comment><USER27> FWIW, IIT is an extremely prestigious school system in India that has historically been geared toward the upper echelon of Indian society like private and ivy league schools have been in the United States.

There have been some efforts to rectify that through quotas, though from anecdotes of colleagues it sounds like it hasn't really been solved (e.g. no proper support system leads to disproportionate dropout rates)

[https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-Scheduled-Castes-SC- Sched...](https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-Scheduled-Castes-SC-Scheduled- Tribes-ST-and-Other-Backward-Classes-OBC-reservations-at-premier-institutes- like-IITs-are-justified)

<comment><USER28> Don't rely too much on quora on the caste question. It is dominated by the privileged. Please read other material that like [http://ambedkar.org/](http://ambedkar.org/) and [http://roundtableindia.co.in/](http://roundtableindia.co.in/) . There a lot more sources as well. The problem of our country is that how hounded we will be if we talk in support of the caste system where the majority are from the upper caste. See the recent trouble with starting a ambedkar-periyar study circle at IITM for an example. [http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educat...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/education/after- iit-madras-ban-ambedkar-periyar-study-circle-spreads-to-other- campuses/articleshow/47501675.cms)

<comment><USER27> Oh, for sure. I picked a source that had a lot of opinions that differed from mine as to consciously oppose my bias :) Thanks for the other links!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Kik, Ted Livingston, University of Waterloo

</comment><comment><USER30> Do the founders of Intel and Alibaba count?

<comment><USER31> The founders of Intel went to prestigious graduate schools. Gordon Moore went to Berkeley for undergrad and Caltech for his PhD. Robert Noyce got his PhD from MIT. Andy Grove got his PhD from Berkeley.

<comment><USER30> Prestigious graduate school is far from a private high school.

Wikipedia on Andy Grove: "He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and moved to the United States where he finished his education."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes, there are many, many examples.

Marc Andreessen grew up in Wisconsin and went to the University of Illinois.

I co-founded Open Market (a unicorn in tech Bubble 1.0). I grew up in West Virginia in a trailer with no indoor plumbing & wood heat. Our high school graduated 99 and about 10 of us went on to college. (I did go to an ivy league school, but I strongly suspect it was on quota because WV was so underrepresented.)

<comment><USER33> UIUC is one of preeminent comp sci schools in the country. It is where mosiac was founded. It kind of shows that it helps to go to a good school even if not an IVY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Stanford isn't an Ivy...

<comment><USER34> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Other_Ivies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Other_Ivies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Drew Houston - MIT (not Ivy)

<comment><USER36> Technically Ivy League is just a sports conference, it has nothing to do with academics. But most people conflate it with the cluster of top, elite schools on the East Coast, including MIT. So OP probably did mean MIT.

<comment><USER37> I've seen made this sort of public/private university distinction before, for the purpose of generalizing (humorously) what kind of person you are, and engineering schools were declared to be honorary public schools. So, not necessarily, in fact, I'd wager probably not.</comment></comment></comment>


These Teachers Set to Climb Kilimanjaro to Raise Money for STEM Initiatives - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2017/09/08/climbing-kilimanjaro-to-develop-the-next-generation-of-innovators-and-leaders/ <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm cynical but this seems like a vacation to me in the name of 'raising money for kids'. How does this actually help the schools?</comment>


Facebook and Google Are Gentrifying San Francisco Neighborhoods - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/burgh-disapora/facebook-google-gentrifying-san-francisco-neighborhoods-65888/

<comment><AUTHOR> A different perspective on a recurring topic.

While the title suggests intent, I tend to think that the effect is simply more market-driven than intentional.</comment>


Show HN: Gifcurry – Your open source video to GIF maker built with Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://lettier.github.io/gifcurry/ <comment><USER2> This is really nice. Removes some of the overhead. I was able to install using yaourt in Arch.

Here's my output, first time using it [https://i.imgur.com/rRiHZXv.gifv](https://i.imgur.com/rRiHZXv.gifv) (original video size: mp4 1.1mb, output gif 6.3mb)

And here's some feedback:

\- I'm unable to resize the window at all.

\- A preview of the text would be really nice.

\- Loved the menu, thought I would be confusing but I notice it wasn't.

\- Thought the upload buttons were direct uploads but it's more of a shortcut to the upload pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello.

Gifcurry controls the window size to maintain an accurate preview of the video (no added bars, wrong aspect ratio, etc.). This becomes important when cropping. If desired, I can add a preview size setting.

A preview of the text would be nice. This will be a future feature.

The upload buttons are shortcuts. This avoids having to maintain and distribute/reveal API keys. It also avoids having to keep the integration accounts in good standing.

The quality setting can reduce the final file size. Still, using your benchmark, I tweaked the optimization and pushed an update to the AUR.

At 100% quality: [https://imgur.com/a/YRQot](https://imgur.com/a/YRQot) [0] (2.8 MB).

The top end quality (100%) is not as nice but with a 55% reduction in file size, the appearance is still very acceptable.

You can also save the final GIF as a video.

As a video at 100% quality: [https://imgur.com/a/8nRxc](https://imgur.com/a/8nRxc) [0] (166 kB).

Thank you for taking the time to review Gifcurry.

[0] _(c) copyright 2008, Blender Foundation / www.bigbuckbunny.org_

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this optimise the gifs using gifscle?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello.

Gifcurry does not optimize using Gifsicle. It employs the optimizations afforded by ImageMagick. In most cases the Gifsicle file size reduction is only minimal (even with the "-O3" flag).

Still, if desired, I could add this extra step.

Thank you for commenting.

<comment><USER4> If you decide to implement optimizations beyond imagemagick's ones, you might want to consider other tools than Gifsicle:

\- lossygif for small size, based on gifsicle, [https://kornel.ski/lossygif](https://kornel.ski/lossygif)

\- Gifski for high quality, based on pngquant, ([https://gif.ski/](https://gif.ski/))

Both are made by Kornel Lesiński. Lossygif is actually result of a pull request being ignored by gifsicle maintainer(s) for years – more details in a recent HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573627](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16573627).</comment></comment></comment>


Perpetual loop - two computers remote desktoping to each other - <AUTHOR> http://thecommonage.com/remote-desktop-software-opened-both-ways-across-two-computers.PNG

<comment><USER2> They tried to obscure personal information on the outer window, but they forgot the inner ones!

</comment><comment><USER3> A suggestion to whoever took the screenshot: ALT + PRINT SCREEN removes the taskbar.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to publish research work in CS without any affiliation? - <AUTHOR> I am a CS undergrad student from India and I would love to continue with academics/research. But getting into top institutes in India requires high percentiles in competitive exams which are not my cup of tea. <comment><USER2> I was in a similar boat as you many years back. Did not get CS at the older IITs, I was too interested in coding and entrepreneurship to be super involved in JEE.

I persisted and got an internship at a top CS place in India. Ended up publishing more research than most PhD students in just a year. And got admitted to all top 5 CS programs I applied to. Was advised by a very well known professor in grad school and even published with one of the grandfathers of machine learning.

I now mentor several undergrads who are going through the same phase. I think just partnering with the right professor helps. Having a vision helps. Most research students just blindly follow whatever the professor tells them to do. Being able to think independently really helps; most of my classmates who ended as Professors still crave for such students. And find it hard to encounter such folks.

To repeat, independence and persistence. You will make it. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> You surely can, but it _could_ be very difficult.

Publishing research without any affiliation _could_ be difficult because of various reasons beyond your control. Having an advisor or a team can significantly boost your publication quality. Think in terms of how quickly you can validate your ideas, get proper feedback while preparing the publication, and get proper visibility for your work.

Keep in mind that several large tech-companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Yahoo, IBM, Xerox, etc.) look for research engineers, or software engineers that work with research teams. You could start looking for such jobs and collaborate with teams/team members that publish their work at top journals/conferences. Such teams tend to be highly selective, but that is definitely something different from taking competitive exams. You'll probably have to create a strong portfolio to indicate that you can "independently" conduct research (e.g., showcasing some novel ideas on your website, sharing implementations on GitHub, listing your contributions to open-source projects, etc.).

Another option is to look for any research associate positions with labs/professors.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a CS professor, so I've a fair bit of experience publishing research. A few things to think about:

It's easy to publish research, but the first lesson is that the places it's easy to publish in, no-one will read your research. I was one of the authors of DHTs back in 2001. That paper has clocked up nearly 10000 citations over 16 years. That's a 16 year mean of around 2 citations per day, and that's just one paper! It should be clear that the total number of CS papers published is huge. It's likely that many of those papers will almost never be read. If you want your research to have any influence on people you need to publish in places that are not easy to publish in.

The second lesson is that the hardest part of doing good research is coming up with a good problem. There are three parts to a good problem: it must be solvable with the resources you have, it must not have already been solved well enough, and people must care if you succeed in solving it. I see people fail on all these three, but especially the third. "Make something people want" applies to research as much as to startups. Knowing what will be a good problem is hard without people around you to guide your problem taste, and even then it's hard. Rejection letters from conferences and journals rarely say the biggest problem with your work was that it wasn't interesting; you have to read between the lines if this is what the feedback should have been.

Most people think that the hardest part of research is coming up with a good solution, but usually this ends up being the easiest part. If you find a novel question and really understand it well, solutions tend to present themselves.

The third lesson is that evaluation is hard. Usually harder than coming up with a good solution. I've never yet met a new PhD student who could devise a good experiment plan, and properly interpret the results. It's just not something that is taught properly in schools or at the undergrad level. It's all too easy to evaluate what you _can_ evaluate, not what you _should_ evaluate, or to only run experiments to confirm what you think you already know. You should be looking hard to convince yourself that you're wrong (you often will be), and only when you've failed to convince yourself you're wrong, will you have a convincing evaluation. Good PhD students eventually learn how to do this, mostly by osmosis from their advisor. Some fail to learn this even then. As an independent researcher not surrounded by people asking critical questions, you'll likely struggle on this part.

</comment><comment><USER5> In my field (social science) you do a PhD in order to learn research methods and familiarize yourself with the literature you are going to relate to in your research. Without this background, it would be virtually impossible to get punished in a big journal.

If you are serious about research, you should do a research Masters / PhD somewhere. What if you join a non-top university? Or can you work on your exam skills? Many universities offer support with that.

<comment><USER6> _Please_ let it be intentional that you wrote punished! It conveys the feeling of publishing so well.

<comment><USER5> Haha, Freudian slip thanks to Swype... but I'll keep it there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can speak of theoretical computer science: if you have work that is worth publishing (as evaluated by your peers), then yes, it is possible to publish without any affiliation. I would be _very_ surprised if a good result is rejected just because the author is not affiliated.

(Indeed, it is possible to get published even if you have _negative_ affiliation; see: [http://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJPAM/20005a2...](http://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJPAM/20005a23_643.pdf) )

The operative word in the first sentence above is "if". In my opinion, unless you are in the Ramanujan or Erdős class, then it is highly unlikely that you come up with a publishable manuscript on your own. Briefly put: you need a lot of "context" to be able to do publishable work, and you are unlikely to get this context unless you interact with the research community.

<comment><USER8> The corollary to this: most correct work is not worth publishing. And most people bitter over their work not being accepted were not rejected because their work was incorrect, but because it was not notable. So at the end of the day, it's all a popularity contest, and that's what you're really engaging in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes. Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=616143)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is always possible to publish without affiliation, but I'd recommend you try and "get" some affiliation nevertheless. Many universities have interest groups, reading groups, loose projects, etc., that in principle anyone can join, and in most cases all you need is one project leader or professor interested in your publications who allows you to mention the affiliation. For instance, at our institute we have the status of a collaborating member, which includes anyone from the outside who works together with someone from the institute on a project. There are restrictions of our funding agencies of what we can count as a publication _of our institute_ , of course, for that you need to be an integrated member, but that's another issue.

At least that's how it works in many places in Europe, I imagine some places in the US have stricter conditions, especially the top universities. Anyway, contact some people at universities and see if they are interested. That's my advice - assuming that your planned research and publications are of high quality. If not, you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone, of course.

</comment><comment><USER11> First, please understand that publishing a research paper is not an easy task (at least at reputable venues). I'm writing this mainly because lot of undergrads have this feeling that they are someone special endowed with some magical capacity to envision beautiful ideas that no one else has thought about. Many of them tend to think that they don't need to study prior art, do advanced studies or be upto date with any recent works. It seems to me that some of this thinking in young students have developed thanks to constant onslaught of movies like Harry Potter, Lord of the Ring or even Star Wars where main character is great just because they were born _that way_ and they don't need to put in any work to get there. They are just destined to be great. They are the chosen ones to crack the hardest problems and save the world :). This is then further re-enforced by stories of Faraday and Edison who did not had PhDs and ended up doing great discoveries. The world has changed big time since then!

Typically these days to publish research paper at reputable venue requires _lot_ of work. Count in 10-12 hour per day for 3-6 months per paper + lot of luck + competatnt collaborator(s). You will most definitely need to be intimately familiar with everything that has been going on in the field. Design experiments to prove how you compare to others. If you are doing research, you won't have time for anything else. It's a full time job, not a weekend hobby. If you don't know what were the major paper came out during last 3 months then it means you are not quite ready. If you can't name the 20 people who have published significant work during last 20 years in your field then you are quite possibly not ready. If you haven't been reading at least 1 paper a week (or if you are reading but have no clue what's going on) then you have quite some way to go.

So to summarize, being a researcher is a full time job of _reading_ research papers with some occasional bouts of _writing_ your own papers. In today's complexity levels, it would be very hard to do significant novel work without any collaborations at all (ala Einstein 1905). More importantly you need other eyes to enhance content and/or fix issues. The best way for undergrads to write papers is to get enrolled in Masters and then to PhD. There is almost no escape from this requirement and people who tend to think that there is another way would usually tend to regret it if research is what they really wanted to do all along.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention that the review cycle can take /years/. I've published a paper that was under various stages of review for a year and a half at JAMIA. And, that's actually kinda short. Be prepared to let go, revisit, refine, redefine, etc for potentially a very long time. Often it's not a deal of submit, revise, accepted. It takes time. A lot of it.

<comment><USER13> > Not to mention that the review cycle can take /years/.

In journals, yes. In conferences, you get your review within two months or so, and the decision is final (modulo a two-week author response period in some venues).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can, because reviews in any reputed conference are anonymous. You will not be able to get travel support funds though. That step assumes you have an academic apparatus behind you.

What are you interested in? Can you demonstrate expertise in that field? If you can, just email a professor. Most of them, at least the young ones, will be happy to collaborate.

</comment><comment><USER15> If you have made decent publishable research, then sure, publishing without affiliation isn't a problem.

Making decent, publishable research is the difficult part though, and this is where academic institutions are very useful - both in doing the actual research, and also in getting funding for the (many!) weeks you'll need to do this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Are papers not published by the 'lesser' institutes?

I ask because you state that you can't test at the highest levels and so won't get into a 'top institute' but are you concerned you would not get into any graduate programs?

I ask because while the source institution might get you in front of the review committee more often, it is the quality of the work (in the ideal situation I know) that gets you into the journal. You can also publish papers as an undergrad with your adviser's support in the US, is that not true in India?

<comment><USER7> > You can also publish papers as an undergrad with your adviser's support in > the US, is that not true in India?

It is just as true in India as it is in the US.

And: while it definitely helps if your college/department/advisor is there to lend you support, such support is not a prerequisite for getting published.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes as an undergrad I have 3 publications till now (in 3 years) in India. Still other institutes in India won't care how many publications I have when I am applying.

<comment><USER7> Here is one thing you could try:

1\. Identify research scientists (e.g: in Google/IBM/Microsoft/... research labs) and professors (in institutes/universities) that you would like to work with.

2\. Write to them directly, attaching your publications and requesting an internship.

Depending on how your publications are perceived, there is a good chance that at least a few will choose to engage with you.

Indian institutes funded by taxpayer money are required to follow a prescribed set of rules for selecting PhD candidates, in the interest of ensuring fairness, preventing nepotism, etc. . The competitive exams that you seem to loathe are part of this process, and professors can do nothing about this.

They have much more leeway in choosing interns, though. The rest follows as per kubrickslair's recipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Publish it on arXiv.org or ECCC (Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity). Then, check whatever you have published on arXiv is novel, then submit to a 2nd/3rd tier conference.

<comment><USER18> That order is no good. You'd want to check what other people have done in that area _before_ you spend weeks figuring out the details of your idea, let alone produce a decent paper and publish on the arxiv. Not to mention that the arxiv is for _preprints_ , not half-baked ideas.

Step 3 is absolutely correct.

<comment><USER19> I agree that the order of Step 1 and 2 should be reverted, but how is Step 3 absolutely correct? The tier of the conference you should submit to depends on the content of the paper, not on the author/affiliation.

<comment><USER18> I don't think anybody's first paper will be accepted at a tier 1 conference. It takes practice to learn how to write a paper, not just in style but also the substance. In academia, your supervisors will typically help/guide you. It's going to be much harder on your own without any experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Honestly, the easiest way to get involved is, similarly to open source contributing, I think, is to build upon someone elses work. Find a paper you like and think you can use as a base for something. Then when you've done, publish it and contact the writer of the paper you used as a base. If you're lucky, you'll get some important feedback from him.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sure, got a blog?

There are some very high quality resources out there hosted on WordPress or home-grown websites. Maybe not the same level as prestige as a published journal, but of all subjects, CS is less steeped in credentialism than most.

</comment><comment><USER22> Do you mean doing academics and research on your own time outside of a job? Is it for fun or do you have some goal to accomplish in mind? I ask because getting published might be relatively easy to do. However whatever you publish may get lost in the million plus papers that get published each year. Perhaps there are more effective ways to let others know about your important ideas?

</comment><comment><USER23> You can apply to the Ronin Institute [1] which helps people in exactly your situation. They allow you to be affiliated with their "institution" and also provide some support for access to publications.

[1]: [http://ronininstitute.org/faq/](http://ronininstitute.org/faq/)

<comment><USER13> That looks interesting, but somehow I can only find information on how to to give them money, not how to receive it. How _do_ you apply?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> openAI does have some public research problems they want people to work on.

[https://openai.com/requests-for-research/](https://openai.com/requests-for- research/)

As with anything , you will need to give it time and learn all the dependencies to be able to do some quality research. They also have a gitter page where you can talk to like minded people .

As far as competitive exams are considered , i would highly recommend you go through the drill. 1\. These are human artifacts of judging your credibility 2\. The science you actually learn can be mind expanding . 3\. Life is mostly about the people you surround yourself with. You shall be able to meet peers that may have similar interests.

Further, having gone through the education system myself I would congratulate you on the belief that you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it .

</comment><comment><USER25> If it's love of the art that drives you then nothing really can stop you from doing what you want.

If you want academic prestige, on the other hand, you really need collaborators and mentors who can spar you and introduce you to the community and its culture.

</comment><comment><USER26> Doing research and getting it published requires you to show how you have built-upon the work of researchers who came before you. In order to get to that point you have to read and understand a huge body of work. Much of that material is behind paywalls which are expensive to access unless you are enrolled as a research student at a university that subscribes to those journals. As a minimum you would need access to ACM, IEEE and Springer-Verlang conference papers and journals.

People without the depth of knowledge often "re-discover" stuff that has been documented a decade or so ago. So if you were to submit such material to any respected journal it will be rejected during the peer review.

As for calling yourself an academic, you would need to be part of some academic institution in order to do that. Passing exams as an undergraduate is the first of many hurdles.

<comment><USER27> Sci-hub.cc

Libgen.io

scholar.google.com

What is missing from these three resources that would prevent anyone from doing a literature survey of Ph.D standard in any research area related to Computer Science?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The lack of affiliation is less of an obstacle than being an undergrad. I'm 48 with a phd in cs, my advice is spend your energy elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER29> Try one of the IITs in India. They have a reputation for excellence and and for quality research.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, and most of them require a huge GATE score. Even if as an undergrad I have several top tier conference publications, IITs won't even consider me without a very very high GATE score.

<comment><USER30> No, this is not strictly true.

a) I think you're underestimating how tough it is to actually publish at top tier conferences. Professors at the IITs rarely get more than a few a year.

b) There are MS programs that are typically not as big on GATE score. In fact, at places like IIITH you don't even need a GATE score, you can talk to the professors involved and he/she can accept you as a graduate student.

c) If you did publish at even national level conferences, you can talk to professors from the IITs who will show up there to present their work. They can put in a word with the admissions head, and get you admitted if you really wish it.

Source : I study at one of the older IITs, and have seen it happen where a professor is impressed with students who have interned with him, and ask them to join the graduate program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> facetious answer: yes, due to computational trinitarianism! All you need to do is convert your proof from a logical form into an executable, type-checked and fully verified program - that should get you around the academic clout pre- reqs.. people love to use hobbyist-made software alll the time, but they equally hate to even look at hobbyist research :P /s

</comment><comment><USER32> Possible but exposure would be a problem that said that is true for most affiliated research also, most papers are only read by their reviewers and authors and given what we know about the peer review process even the reviewer part is in question.

If you have good research the best way to get it published is honestly through talks, register for local or international conventions as a speaker and make a talk out of your paper. It the talk picks up so will your paper.

On the other hand you can always "pay" to promote your research there are companies that connect popular media outlets with researchers.

</comment><comment><USER33> I feel it's pretty arrogant to think that you can contribute to research entirely on your own. You really need to be around other researchers who are smarter and more experienced than you to share ideas with and learn from, you simply do not have the insight needed to make progress in your field on your own. If you were that wunderkind who could do it, you honestly wouldn't be asking.

If you truly want to get into research, grad school should sound like a dream (at any school with a decent program, not just top schools). You'd be surrounded by likeminded people, get to do crazy science stuff all day, and you'd push the frontier of knowledge a little bit. It's really the best and most effective way to immerse yourself in the material and become a good researcher.

<comment><USER34> > If you truly want to get into research, grad school should sound like a > dream (at any school with a decent program, not just top schools). You'd be > surrounded by likeminded people, get to do crazy science stuff all day, and > you'd push the frontier of knowledge a little bit. It's really the best and > most effective way to immerse yourself in the material and become a good > researcher.

Are you speaking from experience? It honestly sounded like a dream to me but many who have gone have said that many parts of it really suck because you have to do a lot of things besides research.

<comment><USER35> Grad students usually teach so that they are paid, but you're not required to. Classes are required in my program, but only a handful. Your mileage may vary by university.

<comment><USER34> What about things like applying for grants though?</comment></comment></comment></comment>