Enter the software world at 30 - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, I'd like to ask a honest question to you industry-savvy guys.
I recently came to the (late) realization that what I really like to do in life is developing things, and long story short, specifically software. I do think I have what it takes to succeed and give meaningful contribution to the field, yet I am now 26 with a 3-year degree in useless subjects and 3 years of working experience, mainly in business and totally unrelated to IT. The question is: how's the idea to try and shift my life toward CS? Should I give up everything and go for a second degree? I would graduate at 28-29 (30-31 adding an MSc). Or should I focus on side projects while holding fast to a 9-5 job and try to impress employers with that?<p>What do you think is the most realistic plan? I'm not the kind of guy that gives up easily an idea, but I must face the reality. If nobody's going to employ me anyway because age, maybe I'll devise a different solution... <comment><USER2> A CS degree is not a pre-requisite to working in the tech industry or as a technologist. You should probably concentrate on learning enough programming to be dangerous. This is possible with about 5~10 weeks of dedicated work (apparently, based on the experience of people whom I find credible reporting their experience hiring graduates of coding bootcamps) or in about a year or so of self-study by someone bright and motivated (I know numerous examples of this). You'll gain a lot in your first few years of work in terms of seasoning, going into more depth on some of the _many_ subfields in every tech segment, rounding out your technical skills, and learning soft skills and other value enhancers, but you can do all of that learning while getting paid professional wages as opposed to paying for additional credentialing.

The combination of business skills -- even skills which strike you as so basic that they barely deserve the word "skill" \-- plus the ability to program is an extraordinarily powerful one, by the way. It is almost unseemly how many hundreds of thousands of dollars are sitting behind projects which could be banged out for roughly the same technical complexity as the "Build a blog in 15 minutes" Ruby on Rails demo.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm 62. Although I've dabbled in programming since 1977 when I took a CS course as an undergrad (FORTRAN on a main frame), my entire life was basically in other areas: 20+ years as a U.S. Naval officer, followed by 12 years as an IT project manager.

And yet at 62 I am jumping in feet first. Starting early last year I immersed myself in Python and online introductory statistics, and this year I actually have several real-world Python projects I'm doing (while concurrently I've upped the ante in statistics and started an MS program in Applied Statistics).

I fully expect that by the end of 2015 I'll be happily ensconced in a well paying, full time job doing some combination of programming and data analysis.

Although in many ways my situation differs from yours -- I probably have more financial resources to buffer the time off I took to shift gears, and I have a lifetime's worth of associates who are helping me in ways large and small -- the larger point is that it's never too late to learn something new and start applying it. Never.

As Henry David Thoreau said in Walden, "If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to life the life he has imagined, he will meet a success unexpected in common hours."

That's another way of saying, "Go for it!"

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> It does really depend on your situation. If you're single with no commitments, going back to school might be easier.

Another option might be to talk to your current employer. See if there might be an opportunity to slowly transition to development work from your current position.

I'll give you an example from my past. Back in the early 90's, my first employer needed a tool to track time and inventory but wasn't willing to pay for an off the self solution. I was able to create an MS Access database application that solved the problem. After that, I was given more and more development opportunities. Eventually I went from repair technician to a software developer at the same company. When I was 32 I quit that job to try for a Software Engineering degree, but found I was happier working. It wasn't hard to find another job as a software developer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Started doing tech support at 30. Discovered that there was data at point a in format b, that I needed at point c in format d. Taught myself assembler (didn't have a compiler or interpreter). Went back to school at 34, got a master's, paid for by my employer, most of the classes taken one per term.

Government contractors often can pay for classes you take that "maintain or improve current job skills", and the IRS will not inquire just what (say) computability has to do with system administration or tech support. The only hitch with my employer was that I would have had to repay any classes taken within a year of my leaving the company. I didn't leave for about two years, so I was OK.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1\. 26 is not old. Many people are just now graduating at your age. You have some advantage from prior business experience as well.

2\. It depends. Can you learn to program without getting a degree in C.S.? I took three classes and programmed for about 500 hours before I was hire-able, let alone useful. Are you willing/able to climb that steep slope?

3\. I would suggest that you start out by working on learning to program, either at your current job or in your free time. Do this for -at least- 2 months/100 hours before making any life-altering decisions.

After all that...if you still want to go through with it, it's very, very difficult to learn an advanced subject exclusively in your free time after working 40 hours/week. There's good odds you'll need to either take a long chunk of time for dedicated study or get a degree.

</comment><comment><USER7> No, it's not too late, but I wouldn't necessarily think that a degree will be some kind of magic bullet. Rather than spending lots of money on a degree, just try to get some experience. Experience is more valuable than a degree for many jobs.

What's your unrelated field? The software world exists to solve problems. You may be able to leverage your previous experience and make you more valuable than the average new-to-programming person.

For instance, a programmer with a background in tax prep would be more valuable to accounting software companies than a programmer without. There is software written to do anything. Target companies where your background will give you an advantage.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The unrelated field I'm in is pharma / drug development. I'm the business guy who brings new projects in.

Actually I do have programming experience, very very modest though. That's where my realization comes from. I developed a simple CRM for my department and, since I like languages as well, I'm working on a learning tool for translators and students alike. I needed that tool in the first place but couldn't find it anywhere, so I decided to put it together by myself.

Yet as people from my country say, this pretty much boils down to "singing and playing your own song". So thanks for your comments, they're really much much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER8> First of all, 26 is young, and it's great you've reached this realization now. Second: there was just a story in the NYT I think about how over 25% of coders in NY startups have no college degree. In the industry I come from (web startups) you just need to be awesome at what you do. No one cares about a college degree. On the contrary, people with other backgrounds are considered more well rounded and can contribute to the company in many ways. I say forget the CS, learn a coding language you love and go for it. You'll be happier! Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> spending your life doing something you don't like is so sad. I think you stand a fair chance of getting employed.</comment>


When a Bookstore Closes, an Argument Ends - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/when-a-bookstore-closes-an-argument-ends <comment><USER2> Go read your e-book in a cafe, or go to the library. Problem solved. Argument ended and won.

<comment><USER3> don't think I agree with this. The environment of a bookshop invites smalltalk around titles and lookers. On a cafe people are much less inclined to such behavior and libraries, imho, attract a different crowd. At least where I am from, they tend to be used for education related work assignments and tend to be very quiet.

I remember more than ten years ago, driving with my father for 40 minutes at 2:00 AM to go to a 24/7 bookstore that had a great coffee. We would do that often, specially in the odd hours where it was not as crowded and the experience much more enjoyable. I started reading "Dune" and "Tao Te King" in there while drinking tea of coffee and talking to random people I never met again. Now, that place is a clothes store, there is no nice bookstores in my city anymore. I don't believe that reading on a kindle or similar device on a coffee shop will have the same effect but then, it might just all be nostalgia...

<comment><USER4> There seems to me to be a general problem of too many books. It makes me a little sick to say that, but I think it's true. We built a Little Free Library (1) and we get _way_ more books than we have room for. We throw away complete crap (e.g., anything from a Fox News author) and donate a Ikea bag (2) full to Goodwill about once a month. It's like instead of sharing books, we've become a sink for the neighborhood's infinite sources of books.

I personally own a _lot_ of books. Within the professons, I think it's safe to say medicine is known for having a lot of books; within medicine, pathologists are known for having a lot of books; among the pathology residents, I'm known for having a lot of books.

Much like the rug seller becomes a collector of the best rugs, we are becoming keepers of an insane library. I anticipate our special collections will eventually beat the local public library's.

The point is: people are consuming a huge number of books. And shedding some of them. Just the number they shed is overwhelming.

The house behind us is up for sale. I wonder if I should approach the buyers (some investors) about converting it to a book cafe?

(1) [http://littlefreelibrary.org/](http://littlefreelibrary.org/)

(2) [https://www.google.com/search?q=ikea+shopping+bag](https://www.google.com/search?q=ikea+shopping+bag)

<comment><USER5> Local public libraries have had this problem since they were invented. Weeding is a huge part of managing a collection.

My FIL is a director of a public library system. Weeds tons of books.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We need more analysis of "uncanny valley" boundaries between F2F discovery and atomized collaborative filtering. E.g. Amazon reviews can be better than algo recommendations for book discovery. From the article:

 _" By atomizing our experience to the point of alienation—or, at best, by creating substitutes for common experience ("you might also like…" lists, Twitter exchanges instead of face-to-face conversations)—we lose the common thread of civil life ... Books are not just other luxury items to be shopped for. They are the levers of our consciousness._"

<comment><USER7> "By atomizing our experience to the point of alienation—or, at best, by creating substitutes for common experience"

I don't know much about the social life in France, but in the US we've done this with the last couple of generations independent of computers and in response to, unjustified statistically, fear. We plan our children's activities and kill opportunities for exploration and organic growth. We lock people up who leave their kids to run as previous generations because we need to make everything safe.

Amazon does not lead, we were already there and they filled a need. Our common thread is planned, isolated, micro-metered, and safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I knew that it would be closing for good, though I was surprised to find > that its fermeture definitive was to be this week, on Saturday, June 14th.

Saturday is the 13th. I know it's a minor detail, but when I see something like that, I can't help but stop dead in my tracks and wonder if anyone took the time to give this a cursory once-over before publication.</comment>


Surprising Things About School - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/972346041189019648.html <comment><USER3> > "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% > completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it's the students' > fault not they're not learning, not the school's"

I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books.

I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a single one of them. Instead I learned the concepts I needed to, maybe completed some test material if it was freely available, and moved on.

Some of those MOOCs were gateways into my career as a developer - so they were absolutely vital to me. This again seems to be an issue with measurement/metrics - I don't believe completion rates are worth that much in MOOCs, just like they aren't worth that much in technical books.

<comment><USER4> Not knocking your own choices, but its more the backlash to the 2013 "MOOCs are the greatest thing ever! KhanAcademy/EdX/Coursera! Wooo!" Personally, I love them and would love to work with those companies. In fact, when I started teaching, I used many of the aspects I saw MOOCs using in my traditional classrooms.

However, there is a truth to the statement. Almost no one finishes a MOOC (some never even log in to take MOOCs they register for), and predictive models can determine whether someone will complete the MOOC as early as the 2nd week (if not sooner). Some people do grab what they want and leave, but that is not the case for everyone. If we then look to justify why bother, its a little hard to warrant hosting costs, etc. if you aren't seeing anything come from it. If I ran a MOOC with a 95% fail rate, how can I label it successful.

We are unable to do meaningful research on MOOC strategy effectiveness because we are too busy trying to understand why people never log in in the first place.

<comment><USER5> > some never even log in to take MOOCs they register for

I've done this many times. Why? On some platforms (like Coursera) you retain access to the content of a course you have registered for, but that content isn't available for people who didn't register once the class is over. If I think I might ever want to view that content, my best bet is to register (there's no cost) and then have that content available when I want it.

I've also done this on platforms like Udacity where that's not the issue, because by registering I can create a curated list of courses I'm interested in possibly looking at in the future.

In my experience, the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time. Many people don't find lectures to be useful at all, but the vast majority of MOOCs focus on them. After the fifth time I'm stuck waiting for the teacher to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook.

I don't think I've ever seen a MOOC that had written content anywhere close to the quality of Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way.

Also, MOOC efforts for community building are (at least were) focused on a particular class rather than a particular subject. This doesn't lend itself well to long-term community building, especially when people are going through these courses and very different paces.

There seems to be lots of discussion about how MOOCs can be improved, but not much effort into actually trying different approaches.

<comment><USER4> > the big failings of MOOCs is that they try to copy university classes, and > university classes just aren't that good a lot of the time

We are still trying to understand what makes for better "learning". If I practice the piano everyday, I will no doubt have a better ability to play, but I may not understand music theory. As a shameless plug, I am trying to add practice to be a core part of learning Computer Science and a link to my research platform is in my profile.

This is the same separate of vocational schools and coding bootcamps to graduate schools. The traditional 4-year school sits in the middle ground between application and theory and is probably why we have such difficulty deciding "success".

> to finish their long personal anecdote or humorous story I usually give up > on the MOOC and go looking for a good textbook

This is ultimately student preference. Some students like a more affable teacher, some don't want a social-able instructor (so long as its not interfering). I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community building.

I will argue larger-scope community building is difficult and MOOCs struggle with it; I would say because of its availability. It is harder to build community when the individuals come from such diverse backgrounds. Many factors can make it difficult to build bounds (social, cultural, temporal, etc.). Furthermore, you cannot control why the student wants to take a MOOC. They may not want to give that additional effort to community building for a subject they do not perceive as having higher priority to other life decisions.

I would disagree with "actually trying different approaches". This is being done and academic journals are trying to study them (the deadline for the Journal for Education Data Mining just passed). There are also non-academic approaches like Duolingo and Khan Academy, and they are trying different techniques as well.

Ultimately, there is no panacea for learning. We know engagement can lead to learning and therefore if we can maintain engagement, we might be able to teach. Community-building can be that engagement. Self motivation can be. At that point we need to research these things more to know for sure.

<comment><USER5> > This is ultimately student preference.

Sure. But the last time I checked, almost all MOOCs were lecture focused. Like I said, I've yet to find any with a text component as good as Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way or other free online textbooks. Perhaps there's are a few out there, but every time I've browsed MOOCs I've found just about everyone to be lecture focused. Out of the dozens I've looked at (on multiple platforms) I can only think of one that wasn't, and that was eventually removed.

Plenty of people use the internet to learn plenty of things. I think it's time to consider how much of the "failure" of MOOCs is due to the failure of online learning, and how much of it is due to the fact that university classes aren't a great way to teach people things (at least for a large chunk of the population).

> I will say that your post is confusing as you say you don't want instructor > anecdotes but then MOOCs should be doing more for larger-scope community > building.

Instructor anecdotes were an example of why I don't like lectures. With a book you can scan over content that is superfluous and get to the information you need. You can re-read or take slowly the parts you have trouble with, and quickly skip over the parts you already know. All of this is much, much harder to do with lectures.

I'm confused as to why you think professor anecdotes are related to large- scope community building? They're quite different things, and if people view them as serving the same purpose then there's even more of a misunderstanding when it comes to education than I had previously believed.

As for the difficulty of community building, I think you should broaden your horizons a bit. For instance, if you're a bit late on a Coursera course the forums are pretty much dead, and you're better off discussing things or asking questions on another site. Likewise with Udacity - the course might still be active, but everyone that has completed the course has moved on and won't see your message. This isn't because of a difficulty in community building, but because of a conscious decision that most MOOCs take to segregate their forums by class.

<comment><USER4> (I will ask if you could define "community building" a little more. You did not in your original post, and it seems my assumption was incorrect. Before trying to address better, I'd like to have a more concrete definition)

While I cannot speak for all MOOCS, I have not had the same experience. MIT's CS 6.00x course on EdX was work heavy, Udacity's Web Development course was work heavy, and even Coursera's Design of Everyday Things had participation components. In the only (barely a) MOOC that was video only, it was predominantly a "follow along with me" coding process.

For instructor lectures, I give more positive responses than negative about my anecdotes. At the end of the day, I'm human and I'm trying to enjoy my job (which students can tell if you don't). Development of tutoring systems is still in research phases as we identify knowledge components for different subjects. A history course operates different than a computer science course.

I will say EdX has produced research on instructor lecture videos. Users prefer 3-5 videos and so instructors should design courses like that. Instructors that simply upload a classroom lecture are not appropriately transitioning their material for online use. This satisfies your being able to flip from topic to topic.

I will end the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that students are not the best at assessing what they know and that a professional instructor has a better idea of what "knowing" something means. This again gets back to my discussion on vocational vs. graduate school and again, humans are flawed, imperfect beings. While an intelligent tutoring system can alleviate this issue, humans are still building them for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER6> I searched for The Design of Everyday Things but I could only find a course with this name on Udacity, not Coursera.

Can you check and confirm?

<comment><USER4> Ah, it was Udacity, not Coursera; my apologies

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "17\. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice"

This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice.

I know a lot of advice I _did_ get was wrong, my professors basically said they don't have good advice for me, and I _know_ I'm not making the most of the experience I have behind me.

Searching for relevant mentorship is a _very very hard_ problem.

<comment><USER8> I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard.

The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like:

1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.)

2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support)

3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now)

Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.

<comment><USER9> Small fish in a big pond? I've heard a completely opposite advice stating that "in a big pond" there's much competition, and dominating a small niche yields better results. What is the rationale behind being a small fish in a big pond?

<comment><USER10> I can't see how either choice could be always correct. A small pond can have great rewards, but also great risk. Like if it dries up totally.

<comment><USER11> I've been in both ponds, and I can honestly say that the small pond was more interesting and personally satisfying. That was, until the pond did in fact dry up.

The big pond on the other hand, pays a bit more but is much less interesting. The big pond is almost certainly never going to dry up though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement.

In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't know, maybe it should be if it isn't. However I never finished the class, only glossed thru the book, and barely remember either.

I was curious about the topic, not trying to meet someone elses arbitrary goalpost, and the "graduates" metric isn't a useful number.

Kinda the difference between running because its a beautiful day out and I need exercise, and running a competitive marathon against live athletes in person solely for the goal of getting a number when I run thru a gate. I would guess in the general public the former outnumbers the latter 50 to 1, so the MOOC stats aren't unusual at all.

Another interesting analogy is "The Mona Lisa" painting is a failure if you measure its worth solely based on number of PHD students graduating who give it credit for them selecting "Art History" as a major. That doesn't mean it needs to be burned as a failure.

<comment><USER13> OP here (shocked to see this on HN):

The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we're learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them.

In other words, take a random sample of 100 people with the same level of motivation. 90% will complete a live, guided course. 5% will complete a MOOC of the same quality. Which is unfortunate because the live/synchronous part is what is expensive.

There was a time when we thought all education was is just a bunch of video lectures, and that if we got a bunch of professors to record their lectures college would be free.

We now know that doesn't work, at least for the vast, vast majority of people, both because we're unable to discipline ourselves and because most true learning happens in a multi-way environment with accountability measures.

<comment><USER14> How are you measuring the same level of motivation?

From my anecdotal experience, the people taking the "live, guided course" have committed to:

      - synchronous attendance at a particular time, probably at a particular place
      - probably a dollar investment
      - face-to-face contact with instructor
      - near-traditional learning environment

People taking a MOOC have committed to:

      - browsing on an electronic device

There's generally a really high barrier to entry to the synchronous, guided learning, so it seems like comparing students who have paid tuition and enrolled in a class vs prospective students expressing interest on a university recruitment page.

<comment><USER13> There have been quite a few studies that have done this in a scientific manner.

Internally we have taken sets of students that apply to our free "mini code bootcamp" and sent half to an archived version published each night and send the other half a live link that becomes an archive each night. So we didn't control scientifically, jsut an AB test, but the shift has been breathtaking.

We can also take students that are struggling learning from our MOOCs and they finish the live course almost every time. I know the latter is unscientific, but it becomes obvious over time.

<comment><USER15> 'Mini code bootcamp' suggests that your target audience is people looking for careers? What are the end employment results like for all the participants?

For instance, are MOOC students more likely to not complete the course because they have already found work in the meantime? Perhaps because they have more freedom to look for work during business hours, for example, rather than sitting in on a live class during the optimal employment search time?

If the goal is to find work, there is no incentive to keep going in the course after you have met your goal.

<comment><USER13> The "mini code bootcamp" doesn't prepare people for jobs, it is a "miniature" version of code bootcamps. It actually only prepares you to _begin_ our full computer science academy, which is six months long.

If you want the stats for our full computer science academy I can give you those; they're good. 50% hired within one month, median $90k salary.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the clarification. I'm still most interested in the results of the 'failures'. What did the people who failed to compete the MOOCs end up doing? How about those who succeeded with the mini live classes, but did not continue into your full program?

<comment><USER13> I don't have a good sense for what the "failures" went on to do, they fall off our radar.

<comment><USER15> That is unfortunate, although I understand the practical reasons for why that is the case. However, how do we resolve the bias of only looking at the success stories? What if all of the 'failures' also went on to $90k average development jobs within the first month of quitting the MOOC? $90k developer jobs are not exactly difficult to come by in the current market to anyone who has expressed an interest in programming. The fact that they were willing to try a code bootcamp MOOC puts them miles ahead of the general population.

<comment><USER13> As I stated above, we've A/B tested it with random samples, but it's hard to get any data on "failure to complete" populations because of obvious sampling bias

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates_

I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the gap to solve the specific problem you have. And when the next problem arises, you may continue further into the course. There is no reason to cover everything at once. This flawed opinion about failure may be directly related to #3.

 _> Economically we vastly undervalue education._

Because it hasn't shown economic value. The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant. If the more and more people attaining a postsecondary education really were adding $10k to their yearly income like the article suggests, incomes would be rising substantially.

Those who have a degree, on average, make $10k more than those who don't. But since this simply measures high-achieving people against low-achieving people, income conclusions cannot be meaningfully drawn from it. It is important to remember that universities and colleges reject the lowest-achieving people at enrolment time, preventing them from signing up for class entirely. Medium- achievers who make it past the initial filter are put through academic rigour that sees them drop or fail out. That leaves only the highest achieving people able to graduate.

Nobody should be surprised that high-achieving people are able to make more money than low-achiving people. This would remain true even if colleges and universities never existed. Finding something that correlates with high- achievers does not tell us anything other than this group of people is more likely to be high achieving.

Allowing more and more medium-achievers to graduate from university still leaves them as medium-achievers in life and they will still end up in the medium-achiever work that they always would have (after all, someone has to do it). All while incomes remain stagnant.

<comment><USER16> MOOCs were propagated as alternative to traditional higher education. Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. I remember reading those optimistic articles.

At that it failed. It is not cheaper education for non traditional non full time student with lack of money. They drop out faster or equally fast then non traditional students on colleges (who drop out a a lot too).

It is great free easy to use option for educated professional through. But, that was not original sell.

<comment><USER15> _> Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college._

It seems premature to say that it isn't provided that. You have your _entire life_ to gain a college-level education. The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. Like the article points out, a major hurdle for a large segment of the population in accessing brick and mortar schooling is proximity to those brick and mortar schools.

Online learning has no such constraints. You can be out in the middle of nowhere and still pop into class whenever you feel like it. If it takes you 80 years to complete your college-level studies, great. To say that is a failure, only a few years after becoming available, seems to miss the point of what alternative means. If a MOOC had to be exactly like brick and mortar schooling, it wouldn't be an alternative, it would be the same thing.

Although I concede that a fatal flaw of MOOCs is that there are an infinite number of options online. While it may be impractical to visit 100 different brick and mortar schools to see who teaches a specific topic the best, online it is easy to do so and can be done in an instant. With that, there is no incentive to go through your studies only in one spot that can be tracked by a single entity. This makes it challenging from a business perspective, but not an education perspective.

<comment><USER17> >The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life.

I would rather say it's because neuroplasticity is high until you're still relatively young. In later years it takes more effort to learn and retain.

<comment><USER15> 17% of college students are already over the age of 35 and that number is growing[1]. This does not seem to be any kind of real impediment.

[1] [https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back- school-o...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back-school-older- students-rise-college-classrooms-n191246)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a museum educator turned classroom teacher, this resonates with me.

Readings that may be relevant to those who find this Twitter thread intriguing:

\- "On the Wildness of Children," on what kind of educational experiences we might imagine for our children if we consider what children are like first: [http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/](http://carolblack.org/on- the-wildness-of-children/)

\- "Deschooling Society" (on my reading list): [https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety](https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety)

<comment><USER19> You should also check out "Free to Learn" and "Free at Last" books, and Sudbury school model. As a parent, it's something I've been contemplating a lot, but haven't quite committed to yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some other surprising things about school:

\- parents care more about extracurricular and athletic pursuits than academic. They'll help their kids play a sport, but rather than try to help their children learn, they'll complain that the teachers are not doing their jobs

\- children react to changes in environment the same way adults do, but this isn't considered by schools because they know the students have no choice but to comply

\- many children still go hungry at school, making learning difficult to impossible

\- one in ten children are diagnosed with ADHD; somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 10 may be on stimulants, antipsychotics, antidepressants, etc

\- private schools may pay half the salaries of public school teachers, and their curriculums are not as strict (virtuslly no required curriculum)

\- children are still told today (by teachers) that they will be destitute and homeless if they do not go to college, but they do not provide any extra assistance either, making them either extra stressed or give up

\- teachers pay, pensions, etc and overall school budgets are still cut short by politicians whenever they need to trim their budgets, while other areas of budgets are increased

\- children in 8th grade often have a 3rd grade reading level in many parts of the country, but especially major cities with a history of segregation and a lack of access to jobs

\- some kids are still booted from one school to the next and used as scape goats if anything negative is on their transcript

<comment><USER16> I can help my children to learn sport and I can help them learn math. I can not help them learn subjects I have long forgotten or was never good at in the first place.

I dont expect teachers to teach my kids sport, I do expect them to teach math and history. Not sure what is wrong with that.

<comment><USER20> I think what's wrong with that is assuming teachers even _can_ teach your child things that even you weren't good at or can't even remember. Parents seem to think teachers can do things they can't do. But they're not magicians. They're normal adults with textbooks. Many times they're not even experienced in the subjects they're teaching.

Teachers have to teach 30 kids at a time, who all have different backgrounds and lives. They can't possibly give them all enough individual attention and time. And somehow they're supposed to get them all to surpass all the factors holding back each specific kid in a myriad of ways, to succeed at the same material, at the same time, at the same pace.

They have to be babysitters, disciplinarians, counselors, role models, and educators. And then they get yelled at by parents or lectured by administrators for not keeping up to this standard. It's crazy. It's one of the reasons so many teachers quit within five years. It's one of the reasons it's so hard to find good teachers. And of course, they never pay them accordingly.

If it weren't for the fact that teachers are idealistic and want to help children learn, we'd have a nation of morons, because only desperate people would subject themselves to this career.

<comment><USER16> > I think what's wrong with that is you assume that teachers even can teach > your child things that even you weren't good at or can't even remember.

Teachers taught me things my parents were not goot at and did not remembered. Right now, teachers are teaching my kids things I was never good at. A math teacher I know (friend) it teaching kids math they parents down know - <USER2> now. And I met kids, they do know that stuff.

So yes, teachers can teach kids what kids parents don't know.

In your attempt to defend teachers, you made them sound to be completely useless. Some are, but plenty of them are not.

<comment><USER20> They're not useless, they just have a job which is far more difficult than people give them credit for. When some kids get bad grades, people point at the teacher, even though other kids are getting good grades. Or the same teacher teaching the same curriculum for 20 years will suddenly find their whole class failing - and they point at the teacher. But the teacher never changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn't have anywhere to get that from. Insane."

<comment><USER22> It's self-contradictory - he did have _somewhere_ to get it from :)

I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't.

On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.

<comment><USER23> The school should partner with one of those "we invest in you in return for 1% of your life earnings" hedge funds.

That way it'd have easy access to short-term capital needs like this.

<comment><USER13> OP here. We _are_ a school that is completely free and takes a percentage of income (though for two years, not for life). Even still the $400 to make it through the last month was a barrier.

We're working on having a fund available for living expenses, but "I'm going to pay you cash so you can go to school" is a different risk profile than "This School is free until you're hired."

<comment><USER23> That's awesome. The only reason the school should take the burden is to distribute the risk pool and also theyre the most capable of providing some value framework on whether this $400 or that $400 is a better investment.

I personally would loan money for this sort of thing if there was a reasonable ROI and someone vetting the students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it's the students' fault not they're not learning, not the school's_

Before: simply getting familiar with a subject required me to jump through bureaucratic admission hoops, go through arbitrary prerequisites, pay tons of money, bend my life around some class schedule and then get mediocre lecturing from some random guy who happened to teach the subject at the nearby university at that time.

After: I can watch lectures from world-class professors and universities at any time, starting with any difficulty level, on a wide variety of subjects. I can also get free help from other people if I need to.

How is this a failure? MOOCs are one of the greatest thing that ever happened to the Internet and education.

<comment><USER25> I think they are great if the alternative is nothing. I don't think they are so wonderful if, as many have proposed, they start replacing regular classes in universities people are paying to attend.

<comment><USER24> I would be _ecstatic_ if I had an option to replace some of my university classes with MOOCs. The leap in quality of lecturing would be gigantic. MOOCs made me realize that most of the subjects in college I found "complicated" really weren't. I just had horrendous professors and bad books.

I'm currently in the process of "fixing" my college education by watching lectures on fundamental subjects like biology (which I never had in college for some reason), chemistry (which was taught really badly) and linear algebra (taught awfully). It's astounding how many new things I'm picking up.

Plus, there are classes like AI, Cryptography, Model Thinking and so on. Nothing of this sort was available to me in college at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think that 3 is consequence of 10 - prototype of working online school was not created yet.

On 1: The "is this required" question is direct result of students being goal oriented with their education and time. They do it because they want job or because of social pressure. It sounds depressing, until you realize the alternative is not caring about job when choosing what are you going to learn, which is criticized in other points.

We can't have this one both ways. Either it is for purpose of job and they will ask that question, or it is hobby and they will care less about utility (e.g. job).

</comment><comment><USER26> In the UK at least, 2 isn't true, loads of universities do follow ups to find out where you are and what you earn and then advertise their post-degree employment rates.

I, perhaps cynically, think some universities have even started "hacking" that process. In Nottingham you can hire graduates from either of our 2 big universities where the University pays part of their salary! [1]

[1] [https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy- adver...](https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy- advertising/nottinghaminternship.aspx)

<comment><USER27> My hunch is that these surveys would suffer from

1\. selection bias (unemployed or low-income graduates would feel embarrassed to respond)

2\. the mean of the (biased) sample being much higher than the median (die to outliers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very interesting thread. I want to know how to measure effectiveness, beyond "got a job". I think there is more to it than that, and getting a job doesn't work as a yardstick in many contexts (e.g. most commercial training where everyone already has a job.)

"99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." I have to agree with this, and yet the appeal remains a deep mystery to me.

It's also worth noting that a number of those points are specific to the US system. Basically anything involving money. The maximum tuition LambdaSchool (OP's school) charges for six months is almost enough for three years of tuition here in the UK, or about 50 years in Germany.

<comment> purple-again Effectiveness is measured by intent. Those who go to University with the intent of getting 'a job' measure their success by getting 'a job'. Those who go to get a deep education on a specific topic...likely measure their success based off their understanding of the topic when they leave.

In this day and age I would hazard a guess that over 90% over University students...are there for a job and thats it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> OP here, also happen to be a YC founder (S17 - [https://lambdaschool.com](https://lambdaschool.com)). Shocked to see this on HN.

A lot of people are asking me about number 7:

> 7\. We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills > and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, > and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he > didn't have anywhere to get that from. Insane.

We train people to be software engineers for free in exchange for a portion of their future income for two years (we only get paid if they make above a certain salary threshold doing what we train them to, otherwise we don't get paid). So as a school we focus on eliminating the risk and upfront cost to the student, which lets many brilliant people access a world-class education who otherwise might not afford to. We're also incentivized to make the perfect school that will cause you to be successful in your career, and those incentives make an enormous difference.

The average stats from our first classes are remarkable: our average student increased his or her annual income by over $40,000/yr, 50% were hired within weeks, and the median salary was $90,000, including a lot of low-cost-of- living areas.

Since we're paying for all the other costs of running a world-class school without upfront revenue (we're spending over $300,000/month all-in right now), we're not in the place to pay for living expenses as well, and currently students need to cover their own living expenses for six months. Usually they can live with family, some have part-time jobs, we do have a part-time program, etc. but it's never easy.

This kind of small discrepancy forcing people to quit is something we see all. the. time. I probably see a similar situation with different small dollar amounts _weekly_. There are times when I am fairly confident I can swing someone's future earning power by several million dollars, but I don't have the thousand dollars it takes to do that. It's incredibly frustrating.

We can partner with lending companies, but if they're paying for students' living expenses they also require students to pay their tuition upfront and be saddled with debt, which goes against our mission, and we think there has to be a better way.

I'm looking into raising some sort of non-profit, living-expenses-only fund/endowment to lend during these sorts of shortfalls, but I'm new to raising nonprofit dollars. If anyone has any suggestions I'm happy to hear them. I don't have a good sense of what the interest rates would need to be for this to work in a for-profit world, so we'll see.

<comment><USER4> With respect to #15 and 16, how is LambdaSchool not the same AND what happens if your numbers do not go as projected? How will you avoid becoming these points in the future if LambdaSchool does not gain traction?

<comment><USER13> We don't get paid unless our students get a job (we're $0 until you're making $50k), so we would go out of business if that didn't happen.

We have 3x as much coursework as code bootcamps, spend a lot of time in lower- level fundamentals, spend time in CS theory, write JavaScript, Python, and C. It's a pretty big difference from "build your first javascript app!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> " 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix."

Do people on here agree with this? I think that is far too cynical... education (even this guy's education) tends to be misaligned from a person's actual interests, and so most would rather not do it in their free time. But I do think people want to do work/productive things and not just watch Netflix.

<comment><USER30> It depends. Most people are exhausted at the end of the workday. It isn't the time that is the key component; it's the energy.

Give me a few days to a week of pure relaxation, and my creative juices start to flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _We've been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are "is this required?" and "donwe get a certificate for this?" It's sad_

If the students had their own projects that they were working on, would you know about it? Offhand I'd guess they have things they'd rather be working on than your assigned coursework, so if there's no benefit, why do it?

<comment><USER32> See note 9.

<comment><USER33> Note 9 is why I gave up trying to mentor developers.

Relevant background: I've held a career that is a dream of high profile projects: game studio owner at age 17, beta developer for original Mac in '83; on Mandelbrot & DeVanney's original Fractal research team, 3D graphics research community during the 80's; engineer on the 3DO and then original PlayStation OS teams; 15 years as a lead game developer of major release titles; 5 years VFX developer and artist and financial analysis for 9 major release VFX heavy feature films; and now 10 years in machine learning and facial recognition.

I love to mentor developers. I ran a free coworking space for 3 years where I tried mentoring many, many starting-their-career developers. I also have both undergrad and graduate school teaching experience.

Out of perhaps 3 dozen mentoring situations, only 2 people actually took the opportunity seriously. Both of them went from nearly minimum wage shit coding jobs to real development companies making in excess of $70K. The other 34 people I tried to mentor never even finished the first "let's see if this person is serious" task I gave them.

<comment><USER13> You should chat with us. Filtering for interest is important, but is very possible. We have 300+ very motivated students enrolled right now from thousands of interested applicants.

<comment><USER33> Lambda School - I'll contact your organization... which contact should I use? I can only find prospective student contacts.

<comment><USER13> firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER33> got it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I disagree with #6. I always felt like getting a degree is such a huge waste of time, but I need to jump through this hoop to get a job for which I didn't require much more knowledge than the programming knowledge I had after high school (self-taught).

But then again I went to school in Europe with cheap tuition, so time is the biggest investment here.

<comment><USER35> "I always felt like getting a degree is such a huge waste of time" is a humblebrag.

There, I said it.

<comment><USER36> I don't think its a humblebrag. I take it as someone who wants to get on and code but the system requires a hoop to be jumped through.

<comment><USER37> It really is. It's kind of "I'm so awesome that I learned nothing of value in 4 years at a university". Which is a sad waste of time if true.

<comment><USER34> That's not what I said though. I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. I don't regret having studied, I saw a lot of cool stuff. But it's a very long time investment which doesn't lead to an equal ROI in terms of work output if you ask me. It leads to a good ROI mostly in terms of employment offers and salaries, because it has signaling value.

<comment><USER35> > I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value > to work.

What did you study, and what do you do for work?

<comment><USER34> Electrical and computer engineering, and I'm working on embedded systems software in engine control units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> About that 2% completion rate.

Organisation A runs a traditional class that takes in 100 students. 50 complete it.

Organisation B runs a MOOC that, with a bit of advertising, gets 2500 people to sign up for free. 50 complete it.

Maybe my made-up numbers are off by orders of magnitude. But "2% completion rate" on its own doesn't sound so terrible if it reaches a much wider audience to start with - which both "free" and "online" could contribute to.

I have signed up to many MOOCs and completed a couple. I consider that a net benefit. MOOCs are not going to replace university education any time soon in my opinion, but for people who don't have the university option in the first place or want to take a single course every now and then they're a great thing.

<comment><USER39> It sounds fine in theory -- people are being helped -- but in practice, I don't think it's so simple.

People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?)

When the vast majority of people fail to complete the goal, you decrease their confidence in the process. Unless someone starts with strong academic confidence, they may be demoralized by giving up/failing a course. We shouldn't be happy that 5% of people enjoy high school math class if 95% of people graduate hating it, and never touch the subject again.

We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned.

"That pill I sold you, turns out it's no better than placebo... but placebos are 30% effective, so it all worked out, right?"

<comment><USER40> > People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it.

Most of the free MOOCs I've registered for I've not really had a particularly strong intent to finish. (Paid MOOCs are a different story.)

> (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific > topic on youtube/MIT OCW?)

Because of a preference for interactive vs. static content, for one thing.

> We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random > buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not > how they were positioned.

Actually, being low-barrier-to-entry so as to support more experimental, low- commitment exploration—which logically implies a lower completion rate—is a big part of how free MOOCs were positioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > 1\. Students' brains are broken by our existing system. We've been reworked > purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most > frequently asked questions we get are "is this required?" and "donwe get a > certificate for this?" It's sad

I suppose this is sad for academics, who teach as though they expect all of their students to become academics. But the students are just being realistic -- for almost all of them, an education is preparation for a career. I was in academia for a little while and it was amazing how many professors just didn't understand that.

</comment><comment><USER42> A new book just came out by economist Bryan Caplan, called "The Case Against Education".

The basic thesis is that school isn't mostly about teaching/learning - it's mostly about signaling to future employers that you are smart enough (and conformist enough) to get through school. He guesses it's about 80/20 between signaling and actual education.

It's interesting to read most discussions of education with that idea in mind - his assumptions solve a _lot_ of puzzles of how/why education works the way that it works.

</comment><comment><USER43> "1\. Students' brains are broken by our existing system. We've been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are "is this required?" and "donwe get a certificate for this?" It's sad"

That's because they are responding to the incentives that have been placed before them. Learning, when it happens, is done so in the pursuit of some form of achievement/validation (grades, test scores, etc.) Yes, properly evaluating learning capacity and knowledge accumulation is difficult, evidenced by the popularity of algorithm/fizzbuzz whiteboard problems. However the major issue is that culturally there is a lack of passion towards accepting ignorance and trying to learn ("We'll fix the problem with common sense"!), as well an open hostility by some towards those that are educated.

"9\. 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix."

This is caused partly (if not mostly) from issue number 1: Self direction and self control is absent from schooling. When no one is around to tell you what to do and yell at you when you don't do it, it's no surprise then that people lack the interest and discipline to pursue self-education when it is available to them.

</comment><comment><USER44> > Everyone knows too many people attending universities don't consider the > financial burden, but NO ONE thinks about the time. Four years is a LONG > time, but it doesn't enter into peoples' thinking generally when deciding if > they should get a degree

You're right, I _hadn 't_ thought about the time. From 18 to 65 is 47 years; four years is a significant chunk of that. It's still a reasonable chunk if you come out of it with a degree that helps you get a good job (or, to worry less about credentials, with training that makes you more productive, or a mental framework that improves your life). But if you spend the four years, don't get a degree (or don't get one that gets you anywhere), and don't learn anything life-changing, four years is a _lot_ of time.

</comment><comment><USER45> > "Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their > effectiveness, and most don't try. If you can't measure effectiveness you > can't fail."

I don't know the facts-- and none are presented in the tweet-- but I do have a friend whose very job is to run studies on the effectiveness of programs at a University. I am sure this person is not alone.

Even if "most" (asserted) universities don't have a way to measure their effectiveness, the fact is that many of the best do and they all tend to benchmark each other. I would be really curious what the author is basing his assertion on because I think it is likely schools research a lot of things (like their effectiveness) but don't release that information publicly for many reasons.

<comment><USER46> I see billboards and the busses that shuttle people between the different ASU campuses going on about their effectiveness all the time.

#1 school for this metric.

In the Top 10 for some other metric.

Even the small California state school I went to goes on and on about the things they're good at...Environmental stuff and getting grads into the Peace Corp.

<comment><USER45> Right, and they know a lot about things they may have reasons not to share. Like, what majors are people likely to drop out of, which groups they accept are least likely to finish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anecdotally, I think I signed up for a MOOC back when that's what you had to do to hear Hinton's explanation of RMSProp. Of course I didn't complete it; I just fished out the bit I needed. I'm deeply dubious of these completion metrics...

</comment><comment><USER48> If MOOCs are an even better measure of conscientiousness than live courses then the market should eventually price that in.

</comment><comment><USER49> > Lack of access to a computer almost kept some of our best students from > being able to attend. Those aren't expensive.

This is a bias from the lower middle to upper class. A computer without some knowledge or support to maintain it (more costs) make that price rise.</comment>


I was an undercover bot for 2 months - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/chat-bots/bots-hype-or-glory-656f4d614efb <comment><USER2> I can't help feeling there's a "walking before you run" thing here. Unsurprisingly, no, you couldn't make something to do this yet. Because we haven't yet built anything that passes the Turing test.

But the fact that we can't yet do that doesn't mean that bots are going to be useless. That'd be like looking at the first ocean-going freight vessels and saying "well, it can't move 300,000 tonnes of freight, so it's useless), or the Wright Flyer and saying that because it can't cross the Atlantic, it's a bit rubbish. (I'm aware this is close to straw manning, but bare with me...)

Sure, early proofs of concept are often both limited in scope and fairly dire. But that doesn't mean there's no potential utility in them and what they do. I suspect bots are similar. Initial, narrow use-case versions will be very useful at providing value in specific circumstances, and eventually they'll become more general in nature. But decrying them at this stage seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

</comment><comment><USER3> I realize this is not related to the actual article, but having looked at their website ([http://www.workgroup.im/](http://www.workgroup.im/)) this really struck me.

Does anyone else find it a little bit gross when companies take stock photographs, give them a name and write stories about how they use the product? It's clearly meant to work as a social proof and to look almost like an endorsement from a peer.

It's just another warmer, fuzzier dark pattern in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> It's especially jarring because their photo of "James Gold" is actually my coworker [http://andymatthews.net/](http://andymatthews.net/)

<comment><USER5> Are you sure your coworker isn't actually a stock photo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like we haven't progressed much beyond Clippy, the old MS Office "bot" from 1997. So perhaps we shouldn't be holding our breath. (Though AlphaGo just came out of nowhere so....)

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess something that wechat does is more appropriate for the time being to use in business products... If at all.

[http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace- apps....](http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html)

<comment><USER8> I found it interesting that many of the text UIs wind up with a list of numbers to type for each command. This is the exact UI everyone built when I started programming in the early 80's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a hard time giving credit to the examples they raise, since they say users were aware that humans were present behind the 'bot', which would explain to me why they used emojis / gifs and images to talk with the 'bots'.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can a bot be made which understands emotions, sarcasm, etc.? Can something be made which does more than just parse commands and gives out predefined replies? If so, how far away are we from this?

<comment><USER11> You're asking whether we can create artificial intelligence.

<comment><USER12> General artificial intelligence with a knack for natural language, that is...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would have loved to see some data on what requests were easily handled by the _bot_ and/or what questions could truly be answered by a fully automated bot.

<comment><USER4> I don't think they had a actual bot at all.

<comment><USER13> Right, so what I want is a list, or even anecdotes of requests made that _could_ have been handled by a bot. All we saw were the opposite examples, of queries not able to be processed by a true bot.</comment></comment></comment>


Letter of Resignation - <AUTHOR> https://www.bakejam.com/letter-of-resignation/ <comment><USER2> Could you say more about what you take to be failures to address injustice?</comment>


No more tl;dr - <AUTHOR> http://smartcuts.xyz/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't direct me to a single page, just to `smartcuts.xyz` Is this a ShowHN centered on smartcuts.xyz? Or a link to a specific story on smartcuts.xyz?</comment>


Rappers, ranked by the number of unique words used in their lyrics - <AUTHOR> https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/ <comment><USER2> Interesting for sure.</comment>


Google Fast Flip's code browser does not have Flash - <AUTHOR> http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/view?q=view%3Apopular&a=bmorAOnndYvZhM&source=news&type=embed <comment><USER2> Wait, link didn't seem to go to article referenced, but was interesting anyway. I would undo my upvote if I could.</comment>


Ask HN: Should HN support Markdown comments? - <AUTHOR>

Of course, you can type your comments in Markdown today; they just won't be rendered as such. :)
Anyway, the audience here would probably make good use of such a feature, and comments would benefit from all the nice formatting options that people are already familiar with from Stack Overflow, GitHub, and other places on the web.
I'm not sure how HN would transition to support Markdown rendering of comments. Perhaps some problem with the transition is the only reason this hasn't been done already.
In any case, wouldn't this be a solid feature add for the site? <comment><USER2> Supporting every feature of markdown would enable people to insert eye- catching but distracting comments. Besides the features already described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc), which ones would be most useful without being abusable?

<comment><AUTHOR> The feature I miss most is being able to link text.

Right now people just paste links as-is, or use this numbering syntax [0] which works but could definitely be replaced with something better.

After that, supporting lists and fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting would be handy, though those are probably more prone to abuse.

[0] Where the link goes here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's already supported is a subset of Markdown. Certainly not whole hog. Perhaps I'd like to see backtick `code` quotes or linebreaks without paragraphs (though I don't like MD's use of invisible trailing space as markup).

</comment><comment><USER4> First, HN should support collapsible comments. I would love to see that feature.</comment>


Smash more bugs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aha.io/smash-more-bugs/ <comment><USER2> It probably works if you have a single team that is owning everything but I don't think it scales well If you have teams all over the world owning various part of the system. You should definitely strive for it but I have seen many organization past a certain size where the favorite past-time is to push your bugs or undocumented behavior to other teams, which in the end is a huge waste of productivity.</comment>


The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2018/10/12/the-power-of-shutting-up-and-sitting-in-silence/amp/?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> 3400 words about how one person smuggled in a book to read, instant coffee, M&Ms, and champagne-soaked gummy bears, and somehow still half-thought it was _the ashram_ that was "total bullshit."

<comment><USER3> I read someone describe an isolation tank as boring and pointless. To alleviate the boredom, they would touch their legs "just to have some sort of sensation". They did not seem to understand that they had missed the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for sharing that.

Our awareness of our own attention is quite a "superpower". Harnessing it is a non-trivial matter, but strengthening our muscles requires focused exercise too.

</comment><comment><USER5> "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone."

<comment><USER6> This always has seemed to me as condemning people who are not introspective enough or introverted enough. "If only we could get rid of these people, all miseries would vanish". Right?

<comment><USER7> Why do you think you need to be particularly introverted or introspective in order to be able to reflect on yourself? I'd say it doesn't matter what kind of person you are by birth. If you aren't able to reflect on and evaluate your experiences, you're going to end up in places you probably didn't want to end up in or as a person you don't like.

<comment><USER6> No, the problem I have is saying that "all miseries" come from that and nothing else.

<comment><USER7> It's not intended to be an ultimate truth of the universe. But the world would be a better place if more people did spend more time thinking about themselves instead of drowning it out with games, music or social media (like plenty of people that I know).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Didnt seem to get the point of the article. Does anyone have ideas?</comment>


Red Teaming Toolkit Collection – 0xsp - <AUTHOR> https://0xsp.com/offensive/red-teaming-toolkit-collection <comment><USER2> This is amazing. Best resource dump I've seen in years.</comment>


Is Facebook taking over our lives? Interesting infographic. - <AUTHOR> http://dvice.com/archives/2011/01/image-of-the-da-115.php

<comment><USER2> I deleted my facebook Oct '09 and don't regret it nor have any desire whatsoever to go back.

I have to admit it is a rare pleasure to facebook stalk someone from a friend's account when I have idle minutes at a friend's computer.

My social life has been impacted undoubtedly. I sometimes miss parties I otherwise would have gone to, simply because they are only on facebook. For the most part though this isn't the case, as I maintain actual, close friendships with enough people that I generally find out about them anyway.

I quit due to a terrible case of procrastination on facebook; I stayed quit for the privacy.</comment>


The costs of annoying advertising - <AUTHOR> http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/04/costs-of-annoying-advertising.html <comment><USER2> Not as annoying as the ACM charging people to read articles. I bet that doesn't last too much longer.

<comment><USER3> It's quite ridiculous. A bit sleazy, even.

( a popular read for the unfamiliar: <http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/acm.html> )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Revenue earned vs. number of ad spots on a site is probably an inverted parabola; after a certain point is reached, each successive ad spot actually reduces revenue along with pageviews.

As a side note, here are several good case studies for adsense users: https://www.google.com/adsense/success</comment>


Entrepreneurs Don't Think Enough. Here's What You Can Do About It - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/11/20/entrepreneurs-dont-think-enough-heres-what-to-do-about-it/

<comment><USER2> I think this is incredibly important at most levels of the organization. Pushing for 100% capacity utilization (e.g. no downtime or slack) doesn't leave any room for garbage collection (and other optimizations) to occur in people's minds. Often the "Eureka" moment can't be found if you're exhausted after working full-tilt all day.

I also find that individual contributors, particularly in a software context, need more downtime than you think. Sure, you can solve just about any problem quickly if you rush, but you're introducing bugs (subtle or overt) that will have to be cleaned up later.

I'm not saying that programmers should sit in their office chair all day staring out the window, but some amount of it is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> A great reminder that the macho "work all the time" attitude is actually counterproductive - not just in life, but in work.

You need to relax to be creative. Not just at Thanksgiving, or other publicly mandated holidays, but all through the year. There's a great deal of peer pressure in America to not do this, but hey - whoever said running a startup was about going with the flow? And you need to be creative to make great products and services.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is another point against the attitude of "My time is worth $XX/hr". Valuing all of your time at the maximum never gives you any time to be at your minimum. And, like others have stated, we aren't equally productive at all times.

Many of my inspirations come from busy work - sweeping, cleaning, maintaining my car, etc.

<comment><USER5> This is what has been bothering me about the proliferation of cleaning service apps targeted at the tech crowd. I have found cleaning and other menial tasks to be rather meditative. In fact one of the reasons I love working from home is that, when I hit a rut, I can go wash some dishes or vacuum a room. It is a productive way to step away from your problem, while at the same time it is not mentally demanding enough to distract you from your problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely part of my plan during the rest of this Thanksgiving week.

This is a great reminder. I feel like people typically spend too much time at the nascent stages of a venture planning everything out in their heads. There's not enough DO at this stage. They typically don't do much of anything to actually progress only to find that once they do dedicate themselves to the venture, they forget that they still need to think. Actual planning and strategerizing (it'll catch on) take a backseat to hitting deadlines. I doubt I'm the only programmer who would love a couple days to just sit down, plan, THINK, and revamp the entire architecture of their current project.</comment>


My experience mining Dogecoins - <AUTHOR> http://curran.pw/such-coins-many-doge-dogecoin/

<comment><USER2> It's not profitable unless your spot price is less than $0.15 per hour

</comment><comment><USER3> How did a glorified I.O.U. note get 8 upvotes?</comment>


EventStore: Open-Source, Functional Database with Complex Event Processing in JS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/eventstore/eventstore <comment><USER2> I've played around recently with a Redux inspired frontend architecture where the complex, nested reducers are replaced with a single one that simply adds every action to an immutable linked list (i.e, `(state, action) => ({state, action})`. This means all the business logic that would normally live in reducers can be moved over to memoized selectors, which fixes the awkward difference in how reducers and selectors are composed that tend to happen in a typical Redux app, and gets all the declarative benefits of selectors. It makes it easy to load code for new selectors asynchronously (for example when navigating to a new route), and because the state is a long list of every state your app has ever been in, they can "rewind" as far back as they need to sync up correctly with the rest of the app.

What I've realised recently is, this is basically event sourcing. Replace actions with events, selectors with projections, and memoization with snapshots. So this submission is certainly timely and of interest to me. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> I wrote a similar comment before, viewing redux as a realization of the event sourcing pattern: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061827)

You can go even further and use the exact same "events" or "actions" for event sourcing on the server side too. You just need to save the list of actions to the server. This lets you do realtime sync and multiplayer really easily!

<comment><USER4> This.

It makes Implementing CQRS in a single service really easy. GETs load the event log, replay and display the results while POSTs send a command that gets translated into an event. If it is valid it gets appended to the log. This approach is storage agnostic: It doesn't matter how the log ultimately gets stored

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We use this heavily in production and to good effect. It has its downsides (doesn't every product) but we have found it works well once you've grasped them. If you have a primarily .NET focused team, have plenty of event-driven applications and want to do CQRS / Event Sourcing for some of your applications I would recommend it as a starter step towards that. It gives you a lot 'out of the box' which is great when starting out but over-reliance on some of its features can make it hard to replace. Make sure you have a good handle on retention and an archival strategy. Storage maybe financially cheap but it's certainly not maintenance friendly once your database grows beyond certain sizes (we're currently running our own fork to solve some of these issues whilst the PR process is going on).

<comment><USER6> We just wrote our own on top of Sql Server. Runs fine for thousands of accounts with many events per day. We currently host it on the smallest azure sql scale level. We have virtually unlimited scaling with azure, and should have no problem sharding it in future because we include extra metadata (event type, accountid, etc.) so we could choose to shard on any of those dimensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do event sourcing in my company and we had a look at this when we started out 4 years ago. What I don't understand is why build a database? Why not build something in the application layer that uses your fav database as a storage mechanism instead? Aren't the existing databases more mature and better to use?

<comment><USER8> There are a lot of non-trivial aspects to scaling event sourcing systems. Particularly if you want atomicity or asynchronous two-phase committing. Having implemented them ~5 different ways for different services at my startup, I'd definitely welcome a reliable DB-level abstraction.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Sorry for my inexperience in this kind of implementation but wouldn't an sql transaction achieve something similar? And with table partitioning (at least on postgres) you should be able to go quite far, instead of neediness a new db (and a lot of related stuff to study)

<comment><USER8> No because in a distributed system, you can't rely on SQL transactions. i.e. if you need to make one API request to start the transaction and a second API request to commit it/rollback - you can't hold the SQL transaction open between those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Event Sourcing seems like the ultimate YAGNI architecture.

You make an architecture that optimizes for future features at the expense of a coherent flow for the current features that you know you have.

it's like if you made pub-sub the core architecture for your system. very actor-system like, but also probably harder to understand the runtime behavior - control flow.

<comment><USER10> Try to solve complex architectures that can handle race conditions without some kind of event sourcing, good luck with that

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had to break it to my client that had built a CRUD application using CQRS and Event Sourcing that they have wasted a huge amount of resources on a misguided architecture. A rewrite is pending.

<comment><USER12> > _A rewrite is pending._

So another huge amount of resources wasted.

<comment><USER13> rewrites are really the on thing all programers enjoy doing. If it works dont touch it, should have caught it sooner. Make the next project better and move on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some ex-colleagues were considering using this a few years ago. They were getting interesting in CQRS, got Greg Young in to give a talk, and came away filled with enthusiasm. I think they ended up doing something incremental on top of the MySQL they already had, rather than switching over to this.

Is there a particular reason this is suddenly exciting again now?

</comment><comment><USER15> "Functional Database" is contradictory. Honestly this sounds like a bunch of buzzwords concatenated together. Is there an example or a purpose for this?

<comment><USER16> It isn't that contradictory. You can have data in a functional language. One of the common features of a functional language that separates it from imperative is data immutability. In this case it's a database of immutable data. I personally understand exactly what they're talking about when they call it a functional database.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand how this is useful. The purpose of functional programming isn't to make everything immutable, but to use immutability to prevent unnecessary change of state which can result in flaky code. So where's the usefulness in a functional Database?

Also this still isn't functional. Is adding records to a set not mutation?

<comment><USER17> I think your question is answered here: [https://eventstore.org/docs/event- sourcing-basics/event-stor...](https://eventstore.org/docs/event-sourcing- basics/event-store-as-a-functional-database/index.html)

<comment><USER15> Oh I see I misunderstood then. But still, how is this a database? Without looking into it too much it seems that would either be an ORM or simply state.

<comment><USER18> A database is simply an organized collection of data with a restricted interface for accessing and/or querying said data. This seems to qualify.

<comment><USER15> Should we call PANDAS a database?

<comment><USER18> Add "durable" qualifier to my definition, since otherwise you could say that it's just a data structure. Which it is, but with durability properties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good article on how EventStore can be used in production: [https://medium.com/@eulerfx/scaling-event-sourcing-at- jet-9c...](https://medium.com/@eulerfx/scaling-event-sourcing-at- jet-9c873cac33b8)

</comment><comment><USER20> What does functional mean here?

</comment><comment><USER21> What's it good at? What is this the right tool for?

<comment><USER22> Persisting a log of events. Used with CQRS and event-sourcing to decouple the Read model(s) from the Command layer for benefits like: multiple read models (projections), time-travel and audit-ability (rebuild the read model to certain point in time), and decoupled contexts.

Event-sourcing can be a really useful tool in many domains, but especially where having a state-of-the-art audit log is helpful.

<comment><USER23> In the parlance of Domain-Driven Design, every aggregate (think object instance as a loose equivalence) is its own stream of events. Loading aggregates involves replaying events until you are caught up.

The key design requirement here is to deeply understand the reads your application will need to perform.

The downsides are you have to push the data somewhere else to digest and report on it. Relations are tough to model, too, as events that happen to more than one aggregate essentially have to repeat the data in each stream in the form appropriate to that domain entity. (You can often model this as one event causing another. Projections work less well for this circumstance.)

This can make it hard to draw data from the underlying store. Instead you must "hydrate" it into objects in memory to ask questions of it, though projections can help. EventStore is definitely not the right choice if you need ad hoc query capability. (I used EventStore in production for 2 years with F#.)

I'd classify this as an exotic data store. Use it if you have a really strong need for event-sourcing. Me... I'd likely choose Datomic instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's not a new concept.

<comment><USER25> Was some claim to a new concept made somewhere? I haven't seen this.

A new realization of an existing concept can be notable.</comment></comment>