Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mosk-warren-commission-kennedy-assassination-20131027,0,4165051.story

<comment><USER3> _The promotion of false conspiracy theories is not harmless. In the past, what one historian dubbed as the "paranoid style of American politics" has led to fear of and antipathy toward certain religions and social and political movements._

This is a stretch in my opinion. This article is thinly veiled legacy defending. Not admitting to any of the Warren Commission's flaws just plays into the hands of the conspiracy theorists. Frankly there is a lot to be suspicious about. I'm not saying there is a conspiracy, but the Warren Commission deserves to be criticized.

For example: Seth Kantor's testimony of encountering Ruby at Parkland hospital after JFKs assassination remains a baffling thread that the Warren Commission dismissed out of hand. Kantor had a very normal and somewhat productive journalistic career up until the assassination. During the Warren Commission he wasn't even suggesting any ideas for what his encounter with Ruby might have meant, he just wanted it out there that it happened. Later he became a little conspiratorial (from what I've heard), but who could blame him after watching the President get shot and running into the assassin's killer soon thereafter (if he was telling the truth)?

If I had to be I'd say there is probably no conspiracy, but I think it's very safe to say that the Warren Commission is not even close to the entire story. People can't be blamed for filling in the details with their own imagination.

<comment><USER4> > This is a stretch in my opinion.

How do things like "Obama is a Muslim!!" fit in? Or the bizarre conspiracy theories around the "crescent of embrace" having coded pro-Muslim signals? Or the ever popular "THE JEWS DID IT"?

They feel like they've created ill-will towards Jewish people, and Muslim people, and anyone who looks a bit like a Muslim.

<comment><USER5> I would disagree strongly in that they've been ineffective at accomplishing anything.

OK I've heard from every distant acquaintance and social media connection since 2007 who's even vaguely neo-con that 'bama is absolutely positively a verified practicing Muslim. OK so lets say he is for the sake of an inductive proof. He's been in power quite awhile, and my kids haven't been forced to attend Mosque school, Sunday school has not been made illegal, the rapture hasn't happened, we haven't nuked Israel, Sharia law hasn't replaced our local laws, OK you clowns, if he is in fact a Muslim, aside from the thought experiment above, give me one reason, just one, why I should care? Because it obviously doesn't seem to matter. And next election, if an out of the closet Muslim was on the ballot, I'd vote for him, after all nothing relevant happened with "'Bama the Muslim" in charge, so the next Muslim president isn't going to be any more of a problem, right?

Ditto the jew thing, where people who hate jews to a ridiculous level seem quite competent at making themselves look like idiots, which seems fairly effective at discrediting their position. Their position may or may not be correct, but if the only people pushing it are morons, then ... at least from the "victims" point of view, that's a good thing? If the only people who hate you are widely viewed as morons, that's probably a good situation to be in?

<comment><USER4> I guess that position is easier to hold if you're not the brown person being given extra attention every time you enter the US. This happens even to Olympic athletes.

([http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mo-farah- reve...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mo-farah-reveals-he- was-detained-in-terror-bungle-at-us-airport-8433440.html))

> Farah moved to America last year, but despite his international fame he says > he frequently gets stopped at customs because of his Somali origin.

> He told the Sun on Sunday: "I couldn't believe it. Because of my Somali > origin I get detained every time I come through US customs. This time I even > got my medals out to show who I am, but they wouldn't have it."

([http://www.channel4.com/news/mo-farah-stopped-at-customs- hes...](http://www.channel4.com/news/mo-farah-stopped-at-customs-hes-not- alone))

<comment><USER5> I think our discussions are diverging in that I was specifically commenting on the "Obama is a Muslim" conspiracy theory as being pretty much irrelevant, and you're referring to our countries long tradition of making life hard for brown people since 1500 or so, which is not new or a conspiracy or a new result of a conspiracy. Or rephrasing it we've never historically needed a conspiracy to mistreat non-whites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who are pointing to the "magic bullet" theory, it's all a matter of understanding how both Kennedy and Connally were seated in the limo. No "magic" bullet required:

[http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm](http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_bullet_theory#Theorized...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_bullet_theory#Theorized_path_of_the_bullet_CE399)

I grew up with a steady diet of conspiracy theories. My mom could be considered a guru on JFK. But after venturing out on my own and reading actual source materials, like many of the interviews in the Warren report, such as the doctors, Marina Oswald, and even the bus driver that picked Oswald up after the murder, makes it clear that Oswald did it.

I'll admit that there are still some weird parts to the story, like Oswald's visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico city, but I'm willing to bet that Oswald was some sort of CIA source or contact and that fact needed to be covered up. It would have been supremely embarrassing. But I don't think that there's any wider conspiracy.

Edit: For those that are interested, I think the McAdams site is the best "anti-conspiracy" site out there, despite its 1990 internet look: [http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm](http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm)

<comment><USER7> So much of the conspiracy theorists' case rests on the "magic bullet" that you'd think its definitive refutation would have chastened them. Perhaps my favorite source is this video, which uses the Zapruder film and computer animation techniques to recreate the scene:

[http://youtu.be/DSBXW1-VGmM](http://youtu.be/DSBXW1-VGmM)

It's clear from the timing and the geometry that a single bullet, originating from the Texas School Book Depository, did indeed hit both Kennedy and Connally.

Another cornerstone of the conspiracy case is that Kennedy's head moved "back and to the left" after being hit, when in fact the Zapruder film shows a sharp movement _forward_ immediately after impact. This fact was uncovered by, of all people, Richard Feynman: [http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/jfk/intro/wound...](http://assassinationscience.com/johncostella/jfk/intro/wound.html) ( _Warning_ : graphic imagery).

The real world is messy, and conspiracy theorists will always be able to find things to stoke their suspicions, even though many of the key "facts" underpinning the conspiracy theories have been debunked in the years since the assassination. It's clear at this point that no amount of evidence will convince some people that Kennedy was killed not by an elaborate plot but rather by a lone nutjob. But Oswald had the means (rifle & training), motive (desire, as a 24-year-old loser, to prove his importance to the world), and opportunity (a job in a building that happened to lie on the motorcade route published in the paper on 11/20 and 11/21). As Robert Oswald, Lee Harvey's brother, put it, the Kennedy assassination was one of those "happenstances of history"—undeniably, a bitter pill to swallow.

<comment><USER8> > _The real world is messy, and conspiracy theorists will always be able to > find things to stoke their suspicions_

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that conspiracy theorists will often latch onto one detail that they think is odd, that doesn't quite jive with what you would expect from the official account, and use it as the basis of saying that the official account is a lie.

 _(Expect for a hyper-sentitivity to weirdness, that ignores the messy reality of reality..)_ So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with finding a reason why the official story doesn't fit the observed facts. The problem occurs when they fail to ask themselves why that weirdness makes any more sense in their version of events.

Since what I just said there might not ring true, I'll give an example:

(The best example of this I have is "Why wouldn't they just _actually_ shoot him from the book depository? It would be far simpler, shooters from different locations buys them little and seemingly serves to do nothing other than raise the suspicion of people like yourself.")

For various silly reasons, some "9/11 Truthers" think that empty remote controlled planes, probably controlled by the CIA or some other shadowy organization, were used in the 9/11 attacks. What they can never explain to me is why the CIA, or other shadowy organization, would use empty remote controlled planes instead of _actually_ just hijacking planes.

Why all the stagecraft to imitate something that you could just _actually_ do?

<comment><USER9> I don't really disbelieve the official account of 9/11 in any strong sense, but your reasoning here seems silly. Why not hijack a plane and crash it into a building? Maybe because you'd _really_ rather not be in a plane that crashes into a building!

<comment><USER8> If we are assuming a shadowy organization of conspirators, the lead conspirators don't have to be in the plane themselves. The idea that the CIA, able to find people that are willing to remotely fly a plane into a building full of people, cannot find somebody willing to actually get onto that plane with some box cutters (or barring that, cannot coerce somebody into doing that) is silly. Hell, they could keep it simply and just find some radical muslims to do it...

Remotely controlled planes are needlessly complex with too many opportunities for failure or discovery. Any weirdness surrounding the planes and their alleged passengers is _far_ better explained by _" reality is weird"_. Furthermore, that weirdness isn't resolved by "empty planes" since you are now supposing that the conspirators introduced those weirdnesses while inventing fake passengers. Why would they do that? Is that them tipping their hand to the conspiracy theorists?

<comment><USER9> Remotely controlled planes is done all the time. I don't see how that's got a significantly greater chance of failure or discovery. It also potentially reduces the number of people needing to be involved.

<comment><USER8> The problem isn't remotely controlling the plane. The problem is all the problems _not actually doing it_ introduces. You now have more, _many more_ , people that need to be involved because you now need to fake grieving families for 246 different dead people who never died (or never existed, depending on who you ask). You also need to ensure that nobody notices missing drone'd 757s (or worse, make sure that nobody notices the planes weren't 757s...), you need to ensure that nobody notices the planes are empty, and need to somehow get those empty planes into the airlines systems without anyone becoming suspicious of that, or trying to sell tickets for them. On top of all of that, you then still have a few live pilots who are witnesses you wouldn't have to otherwise worry about.

It is simpler to just find a few lackies to _actually do it_.

<comment><USER9> Oh, right, missed the "empty plane" in your original. I agree that would be far more difficult. "Spooks crashing plane by suicide" vs. "spooks crashing plane by remote" don't seem too radically different in likelihood. "There weren't actually planes full of people" is unlikely even compared to these.

None of these, I should note, seem terribly likely.

<comment><USER8> Aye, rigging a real plane with a real schedule to be remote controlled would make a great deal more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not that there's no conspiracy, it's that there are too many credible, and not even mutually exclusive, options (some with strong supporting evidence) to pick from.

My three favorite isolated pieces of evidence: (a) the pristine "magic bullet" found on the stretcher JFK was brought in on (it wasn't just magic how it supposedly hit two people 1/12 of a second apart, but it took no damage in the process, and was found lying on a stretcher), (b) the perfect handprint of Lee Harvey Oswald found on the rifle by Dallas PD -- which happened to have custody to Lee Harvey Oswald's corpse -- after the rifle was returned by the FBI lab which found no prints at all, and (c) the implausibly large number of witnesses with strong mob connections (many of whom died in suspicious circumstances over the next ten years). Each of those, on its own, is enough to launch a thousand conspiracy theories.

BTW: I really love _American Tabloid_ by James Ellroy. It doesn't pretend to be "true" but it's a lot more compelling that _JFK_.

Anyway, in 2025 the LA Times can declare that Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes.

<comment><USER11> regarding a) magic bullet, it wasn't pristine; it was deformed but not longitudinally but sideways, also they have fired the same bullets/rifle and it doesn't deform if it doesn't touch a bone

<comment><USER10> Interesting, I did not know that. (I guess I don't obsess enough over it!) It's still very unconvincing (it didn't just "touch" a bone).

There is far more weirdness in the case and there's plenty of collateral evidence that the FBI's modus operandi at the time was to frame suspects in high profile cases -- along with anyone J. Edgar Hoover simply didn't like -- to reinforce its reputation for infallibility.

Anyhow, the basic argument "if there was a conspiracy, someone would have talked by now" is disingenuous. All kinds of people have talked -- so many that it's impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Magic bullet. ✓

"The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it." -John F. Kennedy April 27, 1961 [https://archive.org/download/jfks19610427/jfk_1961_0427_pres...](https://archive.org/download/jfks19610427/jfk_1961_0427_press.flac)

<comment><USER13> It's an excellent quote. Sadly by the early 1960s the monster that would make America no longer a free and open society had already been birthed. It has been nothing but secrecy and Constitutional abuses ever since, with one piece after another of the American Republic being consumed by the military industrial complex. I suspect JFK knew what was happening, given Eisenhower's warning, and he most likely had conversation/s with Eisenhower about it. From what I recall, Eisenhower warned JFK about forces inside the government that would try to push him into a conflict in southeast Asia.

Now? Now we've got a psychotic general, among others - <USER2> potentially more powerful than the President given the blackmail material the NSA probably has on Obama after having illegally wiretapped him as a Senator for years - pointing his power at The People, and spouting off about how the media needs to be stopped. It has been a gradual coup against the democratic process and now secrecy reigns supreme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is it that in a lot of recent American articles, the words 'conspiracy theory' are invariably linked with 'nutjob' 'wacko' 'tinfoilhat'. (This is the 'inception' of conspiracy theories.)

I am a European wacko and proud; I believe that whole JFK thing was highly suspect.

<comment><USER15> People just tend to associate the term 'conspiracy theory' just with the ones that are actually crazy (such as the suggestion that we didn't land on the moon, or that the US Government perpetrated the 9/11 attack). And on top of that, many of the ones that actually turn out to be true do just sound crazy at first (who would have believed anyone last year if you told them the NSA was collecting metadata on almost everything that happens on the Internet and millions of US citizen's phone records etc.?)...

<comment><USER16> They're only crazy until they're unproven. Beyond that, they become history. Why everyone forgets that history is thus, crazy, beats me.

<comment><USER8> No, some very certainly are crazy, and are likely the product of mental illness. See: The Queen is a lizard.

It's a shame that _" The CIA is making shit up again"_ and _" The CIA shot somebody"_ gets mixed in with _" The Queen is a Lizard"_, and _" The CIA orchestrated an absurdly needlessly complex plot to shoot somebody from all sorts of bizarre angles in broad daylight in plain view of the public, when shooting them from one angle would have sufficed."_

I mean seriously, if you tell me that the CIA goaded Oswald into doing it, then had Oswald killed, that is something I'd consider plausible. I see no proof for it, but it is something that could have happened; I'm not going to say for sure that it _didn 't_, because I don't know that it didn't. When people start ranting about magic bullets and multiple shooters though, that is an express-line into crazy-town. It's just making shit up, and I don't understand why. Was _" The CIA had Oswald do it"_ not a fun enough plot or something?

Yeah yeah, _" The CIA had to be sure, so they had a backup sniper."_ Fine. Why the hell would that second sniper not be in the book depository as well?

<comment><USER16> You never know. Maybe there is an uber-lizard-race ruling the world. It would certainly explain a lot of the inhumane things going on.

:P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _And if a last-minute interrogation of Oswald had not delayed his transfer, Ruby would not have been at the jail in time to kill Oswald. These unfortunate coincidences are not, however, consistent with a conspiracy._

That seems consistent with a conspiracy though; ie: Ruby wasn't ready, so delay Oswald.

<comment><USER18> Or it was just random chance, and absent Oswald's delay, Ruby never would have killed him, and we wouldn't know anything about Jack Ruby today. (He'd just have been some dude who thought about offing Oswald but never quite got the chance, the story probably only retold to drunks at his bar for the rest of his life.)

There are any number of other things things that didn't happen -- if Oswald had been walked out of the building early, maybe he'd have been run over by a bus, and we'd have a bus-driver conspiracy theory instead of a Jack Ruby-based one. But he didn't, and wasn't, and so that theory doesn't exist.

It's easy to see conspiracies in long chains of events that have unfortunate consequences. But if you look at unfortunate events that are demonstrably _not_ conspiracies (e.g. power plant or aerospace accidents), you'll see the same sort of stupendously-unlikely chains of events feeding into each other. They in fact do tend to be very unlikely, generally coincidental, events, but it's important to keep in mind that we're only looking at the events that lined up in such a way to produce a particularly bad outcome. All the times that little failures happened but _didn 't_ produce the meltdown or explosion or whatever, we don't pay any attention to.

Such is the case with conspiracy theories: it's easy to look at something after the fact and say "what are the odds of that happening?!" when in reality, the odds of it happening were 100%: _they happened._ (And if they hadn't happened, we wouldn't be remarking on them.) But the human mind seems to deal poorly with coincidences, so there is a desire to assign agency to random chance.

<comment><USER17> I agree that it could have been random chance, and any number of things could have or did happen to make events happen as they did. It depends on how far back you want to go to highlight pivotal events, or with the butterfly effect, consider every miniscule event is important to the end result.

Absolutely agree with aerospace accidents occurring because of events that by themselves wouldn't be fatal, but the combination is.

I still think the original articles attempt at proving there was no conspiracy by using that example is a poor choice, because if you did want Ruby to kill Oswald, and the timing was wrong, Oswald needed to be delayed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One thing that I'd recommend any supporter of the official story* (~1963) to look into, and invite them to elaborate on, is the story of Eugene Dinkins.

[http://themostdangerousbookintheworld.com/index.php/hot- arti...](http://themostdangerousbookintheworld.com/index.php/hot- articles/item/1-the-strange-tale-of-eugene-dinkins-by-robert-mitchell)

*Note: As of 1979, the official story changed. A Congressional Report from 1979 suggested that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy. This was 16 years after the Warren Commission.

[http://www.examiner.com/article/congressional-report-john- ke...](http://www.examiner.com/article/congressional-report-john-kennedy- assassination-probably-a-conspiracy)

</comment><comment><USER20> I confirmed one of the claims in the movie JFK myself.

I'm always more interested in proof of a conspiracy, than in evidence of any particular parties guilt. This is usually easier to find, because the conspiracy itself leaves more evidence in harder to control situations than the crime does.

One good example of this is something I was able to confirm myself by direct examination.

In JFK there's a scene that really struck me, where Kevin Costner is getting filled in by Mr. X in Washington. He tells JFK that the papers in New Zealand have full write-ups of LHO that would be impossible without a pre-planted cover up story.

So, one day I found myself in New Zealand and went to a university library and looked up the papers on that day.

LHO was arrested approx. 1:40pm, Dallas time. Time Zone differences: NZ is UTC +12 hours, Dallas is UTC -6 hours. Thus LHO was arrested on November 23rd, at 7:40AM NZ Time.

Yet the morning papers on the 23rd, a Saturday, which came out between 8AM and 10AM (it varies by the edition) had a write up of LHO's dossier.

In the 1960s they did have telephones so the news could have easily reached NZ by then. However, printing tonnes of newspapers takes time, as does writing a story and distributing the papers.

The papers likely went to print in the middle of the night before-- which is before the assassination even happened.

I wanted proof, and I got it.

The people who don't believe are not interested in evidence and will take any rationalizations presented to them at face value. This is the reason that, every year or every 5 years, in November, we get these asinine "there was no conspiracy" stories like this one.

Check my account name, I won't be back (assuming I don't get hellbanned for the "crime" of disagreeing with the hive mind, like so many do.)

<comment><USER11> that paper was printed in the afternoon [http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/newspapers/sta...](http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/heritage/newspapers/star23nov1963/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The frightening thing is that all of the usual suspects--CIA, FBI, Mafia-- committed assassinations regularly and it would have not been out of character for them. And for most motives, you can't count out LBJ either--whoever wanted Kennedy dead likely had some belief that LBJ would be better for their purposes, and what better way to ensure that than to involve him in the plot?

On the other hand, knowing JFK it could have just as easily been a jealous husband.

</comment><comment><USER22> I highly recommend the book 'Crossfire' by Jim Marrs which is full of interviews and perspectives the Warren Commission chose to ignore. Marrs was a Texas new reporter at this time. The term 'conspiracy theory' has no place in a functioning democracy - if we don't question authority and keep our wits about us our democratic rights are quickly stripped away as we increasingly find

</comment><comment><USER23> Come on, who bumped this shit? Or was it several of you, in collusion?

<comment><USER24> Some say the downvoters all died under mysterious circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Everything surrounding the De Mohrenschildt persona is most peculiar. His brother founder of Radio Free Europe, his close connection to Jackie Kennedy, his correspondence with H.W.Bush

oh and let's not forget Hoovers 29.11.63 memo on "information furnished by George Bush of Central Intelligence Agency"

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord There's no doubt it was a conspiracy. The Warren Commission is the most famous, but most people are unaware of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, which ruled in 1978 that JFK's assassination was part of a conspiracy and that even further, Cuba and the USSR had _no_ involvement in it.

</comment><comment><USER26> So, it's just a coincidence that it happened on the day that the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast?

:)

</comment><comment><USER27> "Back, and to the left"

<comment><USER11> Look at the plaza in google maps, if there was a shooter in front of the car and slightly to the right, that would be on the curb in plain sight (grassy knoll is perpendicular to car in deadly shot); there's "nothing" in front of the car (buildings etc to hide), it's ramp to a highway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you want to find a conspiracy, the best place to look is a conspiracy theory.

</comment><comment><USER29> Science at the time may have "proved" the origin of the bullets, but I thought modern science, including audio processing was a bit more ambiguous....

</comment><comment><USER30> "The promotion of false conspiracy theories is not harmless. In the past, what one historian dubbed as the "paranoid style of American politics" has led to fear of and antipathy toward certain religions and social and political movements."

The allusion to "paranoid style" is rather galling because that essay attacks right wingers exclusively... and there is no doubt whatsoever that the Warren Commission purposely downplayed Oswald's communist background as not to hurt Johnson's re-election.</comment>


College Dropouts Thrive in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in-tech-1433323802 <comment><USER2> During the dot.com bubble I interviewed a number of people who had dropped out of college to jump into work. In general they did not have any trouble finding work. However when the bubble burst and the job market crashed dramatically, those same people were unreasonably discriminated against as there were plenty of 'degreed' people to fill positions so the folks without at least a bachelors degree were having a hard time. I know of at least two people who went back to school to finish their degrees (one essentially having redo their entire bachelor's program because their previous credits would not transfer). My takeaway from that experience was that during boom times it doesn't matter, but during lean times it does.

<comment><USER3> This was me. I left my 4 year degree my senior year in 1999 for to write code for a living. After the crash I started to be declined even an interview because I didn't have a degree, even though I had been working for great, well known companies doing some great work. HR people literally shooed me away on phone interviews, and even startups were only looking at people with degrees. Four years ago it happened again, and I had enough. I went back to school (working full time with side projects, as well as 2 year old and newborn in my life), losing two years of credits to study business. I graduated last month with over $40k in student loans at 37 years old just so the next time I don't get the brush off for having completed 3.5 years of university.

The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to hinder them in the consideration.

<comment><USER4> >losing two years of credits to study business.

This is interesting to me because I'm a little younger than you, but considering a similar path. I feel like finishing a degree would be useful, but I'm at a point career wise that I don't know going back to do CS or similar would be worth the time and cost.

I've been toying with the idea of a business degree for a while now. The kind of shops that want a degree just to get past HR usually aren't overly particular about what the degree is and I'd be adding _new_ skillsets instead of supplementing the ones I've already developed over the course of working professionally for a decade plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "It's almost a bigger risk to stay in school and let people like me drop out and start things before you have a chance," he says.

That says it all, for me. It's an incredibly shortsighted view that there are real opportunity costs to time spend in college, as if you'll only have one good idea in your lifetime. It's kind of a lottery ticket mindset.

College is absolutely a luxury good, and you can get by without it. But it's a great experience for most people, and education is worthwhile for it's own non-vocational merits.

I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to college. Either path is fine. I'm glad I went to college, even though it didn't directly prepare me for my career.

<comment><USER6> > I had a job in tech for a few years out of high school before I went to > college.

Can you speak about what your experience was like? I'm currently working as a backend developer in new york and I'm planning on starting a CS degree at CUNY Hunter this fall, so I'm curious to hear about other people's experiences with working and going to school at the same time.

<comment><USER7> I had my first job at 18 working on the development tools for embedded microprocessors. I was working about 30 hours a week and going to a local community college for about 20 hours a week. It was a good experience. Ultimately I dropped out because it didn't seem like I was learning much (I was already doing C and assembly language programming, and even training other programmers at my job) and it was too expensive (that was back in 2000, it's even worse now). I have no regrets about not getting a degree.

<comment><USER6> The difference is that I can't actually code in C and assembly and my knowledge of a lot of lower level topics is sparse. Sure I can sling Python/Go, but I feel like my understanding of topics like networking, compilers, or even algorithmic analysis is sorely lacking. And I'm not disciplined enough to learn from a book

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article focuses on kids who drop out of college to start businesses. That's great but there are ways to succeed in tech without trying to build the next InstaBookSpaceGram. I'm a college dropout who I guess you could say is thriving in tech but I didn't start a business and don't have much of an entrepreneurial spirit.

A little about me: I wrote my first line of code when i was 12 (perl) and went on to dabble in a few other languages. After high school I went to Penn (Wharton) to study finance. I dropped out in my second year (long story there). I bounced around doing a few random but fun things before I decided to give programming a go as a career.

My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work. It was shockingly lucrative. After that I moved to Austin and taught Ruby and database technologies at a coding bootcamp. Now I work at a company that does managed WordPress hosting (I write Ruby for them).

With the exception of a couple of my first contracts no one ever really thought much of the fact that I dropped out of college after three semesters. I carried a lot of guilt over the years regarding my degree-less state but am now pretty much over it. I guess the point I wanted to make here is that you don't have to be an entrepreneur to make it in tech. You just have to be smart, work hard, and get a little lucky.

<comment><USER9> >My first "tech job" was as a freelance VBA programmer and Excel expert. Pretty much the only class at Penn that came easily to me was called Operations and Information Management 101. It was basically an intro to advanced Excel techniques. I took what I learned there, and a few things from elsewhere, and contracted out to anyone in New York (where I'm from) that needed Excel work.

I'm a pretty advanced Excel user and enjoy writing VBA. How did you find these freelance opportunities?

<comment><USER8> I was pretty lucky. By time I was ready to try out coding for a living everyone I knew in college had graduated and was working on the street. I leveraged my connections there and it worked out pretty well. It happened mostly accidentally really. I had contracts with several banks and hedge funds and it call came through word of mouth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some observations...

I just finished Fareed Zakaria's " _In Defense of a Liberal Education_ "[1] and while he makes a passionate argument, the capital markets overwhelmingly disagrees with him. VC's (even those VC's not specializing in Silicon Valley tech) value makers, builders, engineers over experts in English/Art/History/Philosophy. If liberal arts _education_ was on equal footing as STEM, there wouldn't be the jokes about that B.A. in English acting as an expensive way to train Starbucks baristas. (Please notice I emphasize the "education" of liberal arts and not the pure value of liberal arts for its own sake when making comparisons.)

Unfortunately, the economic possibilities of tech droputs vs liberal arts graduates contributes to the (often smug) STEM circle-jerk. The current trend of "software is eating the world" underlies the disparity.

If a 19-year old freshman compsci dropout from MIT, Stanford can work on a startup for 3 years and be regarded as higher value than the 22-year old compsci graduate, it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. In other words, we care more that you were the top percentile of SAT scores and passed other intelligence filters more so than any particular curricula you would have completed at the end of 4 years.

It's fascinating that what we say (lip service about college) does not match how people in power vote with their wallets. Yes, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, you have to go to Yale/Harvard Law -- and you _must finish_ those degrees. If you want to be a neurosurgeon, you _must finish_ medical school. But the tech dollars funding programmers are saying something else.

So I ask as an informal survey, would you guys prefer to hire (or invest in) a dropout from MIT? or a graduate of Alabama Uni Computer Science? What's more important? The admissions filter at a top-ranked school? or the classes completed at a low-ranked one?

[1][http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed- Zakar...](http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Liberal-Education-Fareed- Zakaria/dp/0393247686)

<comment><USER11> " it means that MIT/Stanford's primary value (to investors) is to act as an unspoken IQ test. "

IQ is one of the greatest corollaries to success, and from the research I've seen it's unlikely to change dramatically from age 8 till death. This is a topic I rarely see discussed.

A lot of people like to mention Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg as examples of college dropout success, but fail to notice that those who succeed to a great degree all possess very high levels of intelligence. Gates, 1590 SAT. Zuckerberg, 1590 SAT. Kalanick, 1580 SAT (dropped out). Drew Houston, 1600 SAT. Read Patrick Collison's bio, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Collison).

<comment><USER12> Have you ever heard of Emotional Intelligence? EQ is increasingly being seen has a higher determinant for success than IQ.

<comment><USER13> Is that true in tech or just in "regular" big business? I don't see Gates, Zuckerberg or Jobs being real high in EQ as I understand it, but perhaps I don't fully understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm happy for people who are able to drop out of college and start successful businesses, but it's hardly the end-all, be-all of entrepreneurship. There are whole classes of problems that you will never even be aware of the existence of without going through college to get the qualifications to get enough experience in a particular industry to encounter them.

It's great if you can skip college build a new way for people to send text and images to each other through the internet (which seems to be what 99% of the hot apps are), but you're unlikely to make, say, a space shuttle.

<comment><USER15> There's no qualification more respected than a solid GitHub. If that qualification can't be expressed on GitHub, it's probably not a Tech qualification.

<comment><USER16> Maybe in some circles, yes. Many of us have had a career in industries where open-source contributions were basically out of question. I think Hejlsberg, Carmack, etc. are pretty respected and qualified despite not having 10k followers on GH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Met a couple of these guys in my career in tech. Two were DevOps engineers who had no college but made themselves indispensable. One was a guy who had only a smattering of Java but became a really useful Salesforce platform developer. Our VP of Sales had him on speed dial and he had a LOT of consulting clients on the side. All of these people were men, and I'm pretty sure they all earned over six figures.

I've met a larger number of people who have masters degrees, sometimes PhDs, and numerous certificates in project management, etc. Their jobs in education, healthcare administration, government, and utilities require these credentials for advancement or even for entry-level posts. Most of them have pay that is quite low. Some of them (the educators) are even at the poverty line in the Bay Area, where I live. Most of them are women.

I often read that men are "ending" because of their failure to attain college and postgraduate degrees in our new economy at the same rate that women do. At the same time, I read that our universities are failing to provide real skills valued in industry.

To what extent are these trends linked?

<comment><USER18> In college, in STEM, it seemed like all of the smartest women ran straight to academia and married a rich tech dude. The incentives are aligned nicely there.

The smartest guys on the whole seemed to go into industry or start their own companies.

I unfortunately was not smart enough for academia, and as a man have not found a rich woman willing to subsidize my lifestyle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the worst antipatterns in web design is a website that asks you "sign in or subscribe" to read this article. Well. I signed in, and it directed me back to the home page, tried searching for the article, now it wants me to sign in again, which I do, then it directs me back to the home page. Now I guess they have one more account but I don't have access to the article. Thanks WSJ

Can we get a mirror up?

</comment><comment><USER20> I dropped out of college at age 19 and I now do consulting pulling in over 5k/month, and work a 9-5 as a java developer (100k+). I knew college was a waste of time when my information technologies class professor assigned us as homework to look at the best buy ads every sunday morning to keep up to date with technology prices.... I am 22 years old now...

<comment><USER21> How did you start out without having a background from school? I've always been really curious how people were able to gain a reputation in consulting or gain expertise starting off

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you want to do real engineering and solve hard problems, stay in school. If you want to build a flashy media app or a social network, drop out.

There is much more depth in an engineering degree than you get from just learning a language on your own and hacking away at an app. There is more to engineering than just being able to code, and if you want to really solve the hard problems, you will need to study. College happens to be a very good setting for that learning process.

<comment><USER23> I agree with the last sentence, but not the first and second. The first implies that the only way to learn computer science is in school, and the second attempts to stereotype products built by those who drop out of college. I understand the sentiment, but I think it's possible to both create real value and not go to school. That's one of the points that this article is trying to make.

I also think that framing all hard problems as engineering problems is an engineering-centric view. Depending on the product, sometimes designing the user experience to be seamless is just as hard as building the technical foundation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're able to write code, that's relatively easily provable. You'll be found out quite fast by other coders if you can't do it, maybe a few weeks if you can pretend onboarding is going badly. So at a time when there's loads of demand for techies, there will always be some people who are happy to give you a go.

Contrast this with something a bit more fluffy, like political consulting. Are you going to hire a guy who basically talks a good game to work at your party head office? Because there's loads of guys who talk a good game. If he's crap, how will you know? All he does is make commentary, and he can always amend what he said to say what he thinks you want to hear. There's also not huge demand, so why not just get a guy who did Oxford PPE? You know he's sat there with a tutor for hours and hours, discussing politics. You know the tutor thought enough of him to not send him down.

<comment><USER25> Political parties do hire people who just talk a good game [1] so that isn't a great example.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Shapps)

<comment><USER26> Party Chairman are different they are meant to be backroom establishment fixers with tons of contact's who will pony up 100k -1 million. Grant wasn't that at all.

At one industry conference in Brighton the other year when his name got mentioned 1500 people collectively groaned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can't seem to read this without paying. Seems interesting, but not sure why you would post it if people can't view it without an account.

<comment><USER28> Search "College Dropouts Thrive in Tech" on Google and click the first link. The paywall will be gone.

<comment><USER29> Doesn't work for me. All results are either parasitic sites' scrapes of the headline pointing to the original page, or that page itself. Nothing has the full text.

The first Google hit from where I'm sitting leads to exactly the same URL as our submission:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in- tech-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/college-dropouts-thrive-in- tech-1433323802)

[EDIT: Problem solved. Searched using [https://www.google.com/ncr](https://www.google.com/ncr) (no country redirect). Looks like country-redirected Google uses a country-redirected Referer also, and WSJ is chummy only with the American google.com.]

<comment> squeaky-clean The WSJ paywall doesn't appear when you come from a Google search link. So it will be the same URL, but because of the referrer, you'll see the full text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "I thought he would miss out on the social aspects of college," says Judy Weinstein. "It's the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional time."

Bright Mom. College is a important rite of passage.. maybe thats why im kind of a grown up child

<comment><USER31> > It's the bridge between childhood and adulthood, a built-in transitional > time.

I wish parents would start transitioning their children sooner. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make some big mistakes in high school with respect to driving, money, relationships, and responsibility in general. It's a lot cheaper to make a mistake when your parents are around to help you learn and recover.

...in other words, all of childhood is a built in transition time. The teenage years are _supposed_ to be the runway for takeoff into adulthood. Delaying that process into adulthood is much riskier, IMO. This is part of the reason I'm concerned about teenage employment rates being so low these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first job straight out of high school at age 18 was working on the development tools for embedded microprocessors. I was self-taught and already knew C and Assembly. There was some serious doubt from some of them about hiring me but I was able to pass every technical test they threw my way so they eventually hired me.

I did have some resistance in the beginning (that was back in 1998) at other companies as well but now nobody even asks me about my education and I don't have any mention of it on my resume.

I did spent almost 2 years in college but it was mostly taking fun classes like singing, dance, and music. The CS classes seemed pointless to me since I already knew the material. I didn't even get an associate's and decided to drop out.

I decided, why should I pay money for something that I already know and if I don't know it I can buy a book for 1/100th of the price. Now it is even easier with the amount of free CS education available online. The few CS classes I did take were so easy they were a waste of time.

I did miss out on the whole college experience I guess but I more than made up for it when I spent about 5 years when I quit tech and started doing photography. I was basically traveling the world, doing photo shoots with models, and even got a job at a modeling agency in LA. Fun times and a way better experience I'm sure I would have had in college.

With the cost of a CS degree now it doesn't seem like it makes financial sense. You are losing 4 years you can be working in the work place and incurring a huge debt. Compare that to starting working earlier at a slightly lower salary. Within 4 years of experience you will be pretty close to the same salary and you will have no debt and money saved up that you could have invested. That's a HUGE opportunity cost.

</comment><comment><USER32> Every time this debate comes up (online or offline) it really troubles me because I can not help but wonder how can so many smart people be so blissfully ignorant of how the world actually works. I guess this is the engineers "entrepreneur-tunnel-vision-syndrome".

Few notes about Gates and Zuck: I don't know why people (media in particular) made such a big deal out of dropping out or rather taking a leave of absence/gap year).

They could've always go back if things didn't work out. Dropping out of college is not akin to jumping out of a plane with no parachute. It is just NOT

Also: The both came from money. It is easy to say I want to whatever-I-wanna- do when you have a trust fund ready for you. Having very successful parents/families -just in case you were wondering helps...

Jobs is a more peculiar case because he didn't have anything. But he got lucky and came upon the other Steve who was/is a genius-mastermind.

Third: why the measure of success in tech so extreme? Why do you have to make billions of dollars to be considered successful? In the world today, if you have just a couple thousand dollars in the bank you are living the dream of some six billion other people. I personally would consider anyone who has made more than 1mil out of a business (in profit) to be successful. The rest of it is just the lust for having more for sake of having more.

Last: College is supposed to get people ready for life. its not supposed to be a vocational school or diploma mill. It is sad that colleges today have became both. Denying the personal gain that university provides for pupils and the spirit of college amd liberal arts education itself is no worse than denying global warming or evolution.

You can become a programmer and make a buck without going to college but chances are you will not be an enlightened individual without attending a decent higher-ed institution.

(and of course we have people like Ted Cruz to the contrary but I'm speaking for the majority of population)

</comment><comment><USER33> Either the proportion of people with a WSJ subscription, or who up vote the title, is unusually high here.

<comment><USER34> The trick is to paste the url into google and then click a link to it. Note to other duckduckgo users, it has to be google.com, not encrypted.google.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Has there ever been a college dropout article in the past 3 years that didn't involve Dave Fontenot?

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm very glad to see that many of the more prestigious companies have loosened their restrictions and are willing to consider skill and experience, rather than formal credentials. Early in my career, this was definitely not the case. Heartening. There are still some less-than-ideal things people who don't go / drop out should be aware of, though. I wrote about some of them here:

[https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers- should...](https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should-still- choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1)

Still, this is a heartening development.

</comment><comment><USER37> "If money is all that you love, then that's what you'll receive." \- Leia

</comment><comment><USER38> It doesn't seem surprising these kids are doing well--they're already top students, money's no worry, and they're hooked into the a successful social network. However, these ~100 examples _don 't_ characterize college dropouts. There are roughly 30 million total dropouts, and most of them are unemployed and poor:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the- myth...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-myth-of-the- successful-college-dropout-why-it-could-make-millions-of-young-americans- poorer/273628/)

</comment><comment><USER39> It's become like the NBA draft -- if you've spent four years in college, how good can you really be?

<comment><USER40> Oh, please. Spending 4 years in college just means you are slightly less of an infant when you enter the workforce.

Recent college graduates and recent college dropouts are alike in a few things: they are still getting pimples, and they have tunnel vision because they're barely off training wheels and are on their very first trip around the block.

They can be tremendously smart, talented, and energetic, but at 21/22, whether they went to college or not, they are not very experienced in either adult life or professional life, and that lack of experience is a real handicap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> As a successful recent college dropout(3 years ago co-founded a company), my only fear is on what's next(on my career). b

Somehow, you end up solely relying on yourself, whereas many have degrees to do that.

Even with my solid experience, I doubt Google/Apple/Uber would ever hire me for an entry position.

<comment><USER42> I never finished my bachelor's and Google hired me for a senior position. There were several intervening years of experience though. And while I don't regret leaving the college program I was in, do regret not completing a decent advanced CS degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It is just confirmation bias.

</comment><comment><USER44> Three spring to mind: Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates

<comment><USER11> There success is more related with their superior IQ than their college attendance.

<comment><USER44> They're probably not all that smart. They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking. But I've seen Bill Gate's code, and its bad.

Typically its B students that run the world.

<comment><USER11> >"They're persistent, dedicated, hardworking" And intelligent. Those qualities are not independent of intelligence.

Gates = 1590 SAT (out of than 1600), Zuckerberg = 1590 SAT, Drew Houston = 1600 SAT, Travis Kalanick = 1580 SAT, Chris Sacca = Doing college grade math in 6th grade. Look into Steve Jurvetson, Patrick Collison, John Collison, Roelof Botha, and many more I am definitely forgetting of the top of my head.

>"Typically its B students that run the world."

I disagree. Any examples?

<comment><USER45> George W. Bush was president for 8 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone else having difficulty reading the article? I'm signed in but it still says "sign in to read the article". Lame.

<comment><USER46> There's two ways to get around this. First the easier way: you could google the article title and click the top result for wsj.com.

Or you could automate that as described [1] here:

[1] [http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around- th...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-the-wsj- paywall/)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> paywalled.

<comment><USER48> FYI: If you Google the article title the search result will bypass the paywall.</comment></comment>


The Pain Hustlers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/02/magazine/money-issue-insys-opioids-kickbacks.html <comment><USER2> This piece briefly mentions Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin and the subject of a fantastic and horrifying article in the New Yorker[1]. The scale and reach of these drugs is unbelievable and the lengths the pharmas go to in order to market them is truly terrifying — speaking as a doctor who does prescribe these drugs not infrequently.

[1] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family- tha...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built- an-empire-of-pain)

<comment><USER3> If you're aware of their miscreance but still prescribe, you must believe that the drugs are valuable?

<comment><USER4> It seems you are implying the parent comment is hypocritical. Unfortunately, the current reality we live in means complicity isn't necessarily a choice. The whistleblower is always a part of the machine he is exposing.

<comment><USER3> I'm trying to figure out whether Purdue Pharmaceuticals is unalloyed evil or whether they are defensible.

<comment><USER5> People do have legitimate chronic and/or acute pain, often severe. So there's a need for the painkillers in the market.

The problem is that Purdue's marketing went way beyond what was justified, leading to widespread overprescribing where that strength of painkiller wasn't necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Times has some great multimedia/hypermedia designers on their staff and their reporting is incredible

<comment><USER7> You're right. (And the linked article is from The New Yorker.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was surprised to learn recently—and the article notes this—that most overdoses are now from illegally manufactured fentanyl, not legally prescribed pain medication.

<comment><USER9> Yes because after allowing the handing out of prescribed opioid pain medication like it was candy the authority turned 180deg and instantly cutoff all those addicted. What did they think was going to happen - the addicted were just going to stop being addicted because the legal supply was stopped?

I actually hold those that changed the rules with near zero support for those addicted far more responsible for this debacle and all the deaths than Purdue.

<comment><USER10> As a Boilermaker alum, let's not shorten it to "Purdue".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is good to see. Finally great reporting on of our the most pressing issues of our time.

This industry has so far played so far outside of the regulatory world. The piecewise lawsuits are reactionary and in a way useless. Unless someone actually starts regulating these scummy companies we won't get anywhere.

<comment><USER12> They are regulated - that's why the government is going after them. They violated regulations.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's wrong with procedural programming? - <AUTHOR>

Without these OO stuff, C is still one of (if not sole) most popular programming language, and numerous complicated projects are written in C. So what's wrong with procedural programming? Is C++ really better than C? <comment><USER2> Try this:

So what's wrong with assembly? Is C really better than assembly?

Each has its place for certain task. Languages let you abstract away different things and therefor think _different kinds_ of thoughts while programming. Procedures add a whole new dimension to subroutines. OO adds a whole new dimension to procedures. Closures and functional programming add a whole new way to structure thought and code.

Would it be a good idea to use C to write a timing routine for a micro controller? Or to use assembly to write a gui?

You use the right level of abstraction (through the use of the right language) to think the right thoughts for the task at hand. Experience teaches you when to use what.

If you stubbornly stick to a non-object oriented approach when you should have used one, you'll likely end up reinventing a subset of object orientation anyway, probably badly.

<comment><USER3> I think its best summed up by a quote from some Perl book I read (sorry, don't remember which one).

"Programming languages differ not in what they allow you to do, but in what they make it easy for you to do."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You need to read this [http://web.mac.com/jimbokun/iWeb/Site/Blog/AB35C167-7755-411...](http://web.mac.com/jimbokun/iWeb/Site/Blog/AB35C167-7755-4113-938C-968F65256D76.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Nothing wrong with it.

I am not sure you're asking the right question. If you need a language that is close to the machine(but not assembly), then you go with C. If you need the OO concepts, you go with C++. Mind you, whenever you start using abstractions such as OO, you start to get away from the machine.

You can still use C++ to do procedural programming. So that's not the problem. Just that for some projects, using OO concepts to model the problem domain makes more sense.

Use whatever is right for the problem at hand.

</comment><comment><USER6> The fact that C is the most popular programming language is not a good argument for procedural programming, because it is quite common to use OO techniques with C. In fact, most of the C projects that I have worked with use OO techniques in some form. For instance, look at the Linux kernel. There are plenty of structures that include function pointers, which in practice is very similar to inheritance. Also, consider the UNIX concept of a "file"; that's OO design, pure and simple.

I wouldn't say that C++ is "better" than C, but for certain tasks I think it is easier to use. Consider the C++ inheritance model; sure, you can do the same thing in C, but unless you choose a common convention, each new developer will have to learn your way of doing it. With C++, inheritance works in a uniform way, so a new developer doesn't have to guess at how you did it.

With that said, I think that there is something to be said for the simplicity of C, versus more complicated languages like C++. It is a bitch to learn C++, and some of the most unreadable messes I've seen were written in C++. So I think there's certainly an argument for C, but it doesn't have anything to do with whether it is OO or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> C is probably better for writing cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) code than C++. See Linus Torvalds comments:

<http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus>

On the other hand, large corporations probably prefer OO programming. Paul Graham has some good quotes:

"Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches. Large organizations always tend to develop software this way"

<http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html>

"At big companies, software tends to be written by large (and frequently changing) teams of mediocre programmers. Object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them from doing too much damage."

<http://www.paulgraham.com/noop.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not just C. A lot of procedural code is written in perl, for example. It's true that languages that force you to write procedural code are relatively rare, but languages that force you to write OO are by no means the rule.

IME, OO sometimes works, sometimes not. It's not necessarily about getting close to the hardware, either.

</comment><comment><USER9> Instead of going down this same road yet again, I've got a better question for you:

I can pull out my C++ compiler and write straight C (mostly)

What do you call that? C? C++? If I don't use classes in my C++, is it C? Or, conversely, if I develop a complicated module structure in C, does that make it C++?</comment>


MEAN Development Stack on Google Compute Engine - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/cloud/mean/ <comment><USER2> So the hip software stack of 2014 supports no concurrency or very limited concurrency on each and every level. Have people given up on actually using their hardware? Are we content running our software on Pentiums, taking comfort in the fact that we can cram a few of those into a single box?

<comment><USER3> Isn't Node.js concurrent, just not parallel?

Can't be much slower than PHP or Ruby, so theres that. What is repelling to me is callback-hell and Javascript as a language in general. People will build simple stuff with this, then it will evolve, and then someone will have to deal with it. I don't want to be that guy.

<comment><USER4> You can diss Mongo all you want, but you can't say Node.js is slower than PHP[1] or Rails[2] -- it's way faster.

[1] [http://www.prahladyeri.com/2014/06/php-vs-node-js-real- stati...](http://www.prahladyeri.com/2014/06/php-vs-node-js-real-statistics/)

[2] [http://www.techhui.com/profiles/blogs/node-js-versus- rails-s...](http://www.techhui.com/profiles/blogs/node-js-versus-rails- shootout)

<comment><USER3> Thats what I was implying, sorry if that came across differently.

<comment><USER4> Apologies for misreading you! I can now see you meant that PHP and Rails are so slow that it's hard to be slower :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is on Google Compute Engine, _not_ Google App Engine. It's not straight forward to me what GCE is a good fit for^1. Can someone explain in layman terms?

Based on the name, I'd think it be for long running concurrent algorithms that require many resources, but the M of MEAN is throwing me off. Why do you need a persistence layer? Is it to load the data for input? To store the data as output? Is it for anything you want? If the latter, why can't I use this _exactly_ as I'd use GAE?

1: [https://cloud.google.com/products/compute- engine/](https://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine/)

<comment><USER6> > It's not straight forward to me what GCE is a good fit for^1. Can someone > explain in layman terms?

GCE is a pretty standard IaaS offering, like Amazon EC2.

> Based on the name, I'd think it be for long running concurrent algorithms > that require many resources

There's lots of things an IaaS like GCE can be good for; what you are doing with it will determine what size instances you use, and what options you use with them. Certainly, that's one thing GCE _could be_ used for.

But an open IaaS like GCE or EC2 is designed to be a general purpose on-demand dynamically-allocatable server solution, so anything you can use a general purpose server for is an in-scope use of the IaaS.

> If the latter, why can't I use this exactly as I'd use GAE?

You can. An IaaS like GCE is lower level tool on which, with an appropriate software stack loaded (which MEAN might be), you can use the system basically like a PaaS like GAE. The difference is that a PaaS already comes with a particular software stack included, rather than requiring you to bring your own (that's the "platform" in the "platform as a service".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks great but one thing missing is pricing, what does this cost, ie what type of virtual machine is used?

I also looked at the cassandra template and the same question arise there.

<comment><USER8> Are they intending this is used for development only? I see numerous places where they remind you to delete your app when done, but nothing about what to do when you want to deploy for production?

<comment><USER9> Yea, it's kind of odd they don't explain some of these things in more detail on their site. If they do then maybe I'll invest some time playing around with it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> don't be mean?

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't get GAE. They release the cool kids "MEAN" stack but still are using Python 2.7 =/

<comment><USER12> This is on Google Compute Engine and not Google App Engine

<comment><USER5> Aw, I made the same mistake. Thanks for saying this. For others looking for more info about GCE: [https://cloud.google.com/products/compute- engine/](https://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like you can't try it out without setting up billing first -.- (I'm not in the mood for setting up financial stuff now \ _yawn\_ \ _drinks a sip of coffee\_ )</comment>


Ask HN: Max number of GitHub repos you can fork? - <AUTHOR>

I need to fork thousands of Github repos to my personal Github account, is there a max number of repos you can fork in Github? <comment><USER2> I have no idea - but I'm curious to find out why you need to fork thousands of repos?</comment>


Building the next big productivity tool - <AUTHOR> https://simpleboard.tech <comment><AUTHOR> I'm planning on building a productivity tool that combines the best bits of all the bigger brands and packaging it into an affordable solution. Fully customisable with an addictive UI look, feel and interactivity. I appreciate some people are stuck with what they know in current providers, Simple Board is going to provide a fresh, modern, addictive approach into the market which will sky rocket productivity in individual projects and team projects.

Less clutter. More focus. Especially on the kanban board page. This will be completely focused in on your project and tasks only. Think of a clean modern writing app these days with hardly any GUI. It lets you focus on writing. Now apply the same sort of style and feature to a kanban board. Very nice to look at, awesome, addictive functionality within the board which motivates you to get your project tasks or tickets done so you can interact with the board.

Intuitive task list view which will let you efficiently and effectively see your workload in a slick, productive list - Again, gives you that ability to really focus in on what's going on.

There will be some project specific settings in terms of if it's a personal or team project which will be highly beneficial.

I know trello has customisations in there as well but Simple Board will provide this in a configuration / settings page which you control completely from here, again, separating this cluttering functionality from the actual board itself, allowing you to really focus in.

A lot more I could say at this stage and a lot more that will most likely be added as I develop.</comment>


Modern C++ as a Better Compiler - <AUTHOR> http://moderncpp.com/2015/04/13/modern-c-as-a-better-compiler/

<comment><USER2> Note that here "Modern C++" means "the header-only C++ library written by Kenny Kerr which he named Modern."

[http://moderncpp.com/about/](http://moderncpp.com/about/)

<comment><USER3> Which notably has not actually been released yet.

<comment><USER2> Which makes me feel I've spent the energy reading about the potential vaporware. Ugh.

The author writes:

[http://kennykerr.ca/2014/08/29/a-modern- update/](http://kennykerr.ca/2014/08/29/a-modern-update/)

"I have started using it myself and am really enjoying the experience but it has a few rough edges that I need to work on before I can make it more widely available"

So he has the site about it, writes the articles about it... and it works only for him.

<comment><USER4> > The C++/CX compiler....use a weird little hat

> What does the hat do? Well nothing.

Actually the hat is drastically different than a normal pointer. It's managed/garbage collected pointer[1]. Which is actually pretty smart to introduce garbage collection functionality without breaking legacy code.

I watched the first code and he doesn't show him actually compiling the sample he typed up. Instead it kind of cuts to a fullscreen version of some app. My vote is that this library doesn't actually exist.

[1] - [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/yk97tc08.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/yk97tc08.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Curious to see how .NET Native would compare given it is using the same backend as VC++ .

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by .NET Native?

He does compare .NET C# with the managed C++ extensions (terminology?) and managed C++ does pretty well, just a whisker away from full on low-level C++. And several times faster than C#.

<comment><USER7> .NET Native is compiled C#. You can think of it as pre-JITted platform -dependent C#. It is still managed, imposing memory safety through runtime bound checks (unless optimized out) and garbage collection. The project is preparing to be open sourced, it seems. For now you can read about it on MSDN.

The CoreFX project on github is part of the Common .NET implementation which includes Native, the new ASP.NET, etc.

<comment><USER8> Well they are experimenting with LLVM, as a backend for CIL.. So maybe this is a sign that they will not open source their VC++ backend and instead go with this LLILC [1] project for the AOT compilation target?

1 - [https://github.com/dotnet/llilc](https://github.com/dotnet/llilc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This comparison is unfair. In C# code it's using foreach loop over generic list which is ~4 time slower than for loop over array, but in C++ code it's using pointers (correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a C++ ninja) which is fastest loop

</comment><comment><USER10> >The C++ community is literally bursting with impressive examples

Ouch.</comment>


Black Phosphorous – the birth of a new wonder material - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/534166/black-phosphorous-the-birth-of-a-new-wonder-material/ <comment><USER2> Bullseye hit on a pet peeve of many years: the confusion between phosphorus (a noun) and phosphorous (an adjective).

<comment><USER3> You mean the difference between the element and the quality of glowing?

The adjective is falling out of usage, so you can assume references are to the first unless you are sure otherwise.

<comment><USER2> The chemical compounds, for instance, are phosphorous this or that.

(If you speak a romance language, it jumps out at you because the adjective has an extra syllable - e.g. 'fosforo' vs. 'fosforoso'.)

<comment><USER4> That's true of phosphorous acid (where the name distinguishes it from phosphoric acid), but otherwise English chemical names use the noun form of the positive ion (e.g. phosphorus pentoxide).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"...heralding a new era of nanoelectronic devices..."_

Did I just miss the previous nano-electronic era?! Where can I get my artificial nano-robotic ever-rejuvenating immune system injection?

<comment><USER6> The output of the previous nano-electronic era might be considered the MEMs accelerometers and rate sensors packed into most smartphones, DLP micro mirrors, etc....</comment></comment>


SnapScouts - Crowd Sourcing Crime Prevention - <AUTHOR> http://snapscouts.org/ <comment><USER2> It's a parody—albeit a good one. The Nineteen Eighty-Four references ("MiniTru LLC", "Winston O'Brien", &c) gave it away.

</comment><comment><USER3> For more details: [http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/05/enjoy-your- pa...](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/05/enjoy-your- participatory-panopticon-with-snapscouts/)</comment>


Amazon Kindle 2 pictures and pricing - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/159154/leak_amazon_kindle_2_pictures_and_pricing.html

<comment><USER2> I'll share my experience with ebook readers here. As someone who owns over 30 gigs of ebooks and reads academic journals often, I was naturally excited when the whole slew of ebook reading device hit the market.

I've tried 3 different E-book readers: The sony PRS505, the Kindle and the iRex iLiad. In the end, I returned the kindle and gave the 505 to my dad and kept the iRex. The main reason was that the Kindle screen was WAYYY TOO SMALLL to read full sized Pdfs and academic journals.

The sony had the same screen-size problem as the Kindle but its cheaper and it was a good fit for my dad, who mainly reads fiction books. The iRex was the keeper because of its big 8 inch screen.

The new kindle 2 seems to have the same screen size as the previous one, so this is an absolute no-buy for me. However, the upcoming plastic logic reader looks promising with its full A4 sized screen and could be a good fit for me.

<comment><USER3> At $699, the iRex also costs nearly twice as much as a Kindle and about three times what you can get a PRS505 for. I have no doubt the 8 inch screen is great, but that's a pretty big jump in price-- especially when you consider that the Kindle is already priced too high for many consumers.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the iRex is prohibitively expensive but if you buy the 1st edition while its on sale, you can get it for around $100 cheaper than that.

In the end, I justified the purchase because of the features I'm getting over the other 2 readers. \- The sony and kindle both have a 800x600 screen while the iRex has a 1024x768. \- The iRex also has a wacom stylus embedded into the screen which you can take notes with \- The iRex is open-sourced, the developer released the SDK a while ago and there is a bunch of 3rd party free software for it.

However, I can definitely see how the iRex can be overpriced for some people and the sony and kindle could be a better fit for them.

A good resource for ebook reader information is <http://www.mobileread.com/> (i'm not affiliated with them in any way) . You can read other people's experiences with them and find out which reader is right for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the eInk reader market is in dire need of some simplification (pretty strange considering it's not even remotely mature yet). I know several people, myself included, who are still waiting for what we consider the basic ebook reader features:

\- big screen

\- adjustable font size

\- left and right buttons

\- DRM-free

\- reasonable pricing.

I wonder how much of the price could be shaved off by getting rid of the other features like search, keyboards, image support, etc. I'd buy a cheap, stripped down eInk reader if only I could.

<comment><USER5> The Kindle lets you adjust fonts, and it can handle non-DRM'd formats with ease. What do you mean by left-right buttons?

<comment><USER4> I mean that practically the only buttons required on such a device are the buttons to turn pages (maybe some modifiers to swap between books and to go to the beginning and end of the book). Other buttons are superfluous to a "back to basics" device.

What I'm saying is, the Kindle has too many features and is too expensive.

<comment><USER5> The Kindle _needs_ that. Its top, ignored feature is its ability to download books from anywhere from the Amazon store. For that it needs a navigator, a keyboard, and wireless Internet access. And from my uses of the device, that's what puts it in a league of its own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tsetse-fly The title is misleading. As the article mentions, this is all speculative, based on information from a forum.

Why not wait until Monday to post official pictures/specs/pricing? Visit Engadget if you want rumors.

<comment><AUTHOR> It turned out the price was spot on and the article was correct as far as I can see.

I agree that it's 'just from a forum', this one turned out to be surprisingly well informed. My take on that is that it is a secret known by so many people that if there is a place it's going to be leaked is in a forum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks a lot better than the original Kindle. I tried one and disliked it so much I returned it. The sad thing is I really wanted to like it. I prefer reading on the computer anymore. I didn't like how there wasn't a good way to hold it with out accidentally flipping the pages. This new version seems to have fixed that. I was willing to accept the non-color display, but I didn't like the liquid paper. I wish it was backlit. The navigation was terrible. It looks like they've tried to address the navigation with a joystick, I'm sure it's better than the original.

I guess I wish I had an something like an iPhone or iPod touch that was around the same size the Kindle, that had a color screen, the touch features of the iPhone and iPod touch would be great, but button and stylus navigation would be alright. Nice looking anti-aliased fonts are essential. A good way to get content. Kindle has a nice tie in to Amazon, but the on the original it was such a bother to get other content on it. The big problem was no pdf support.

I'm excited that the Kindle 2 is much improved, I hope they have a lot of success with it.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm... If you don't like the eInk displays, none of those readers are for you, really... The whole point of these devices, their reason for existing, is the high contrast, non backlit, paper-like display that's much easier on the eyes than typical LCDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the keyboard really necessary? I would probably prefer to have bigger screen on its place.

<comment><USER8> The screen is probably the size it is because of price, not because the keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm still leaning towards the upcoming Foxit eSlick, unless the Kindle 2 has much better support for PDF programming books (ones not purchased through Amazon).

</comment><comment><USER10> The leaks look like the same design broken on BGR ([http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/10/03/amazon- kindle-2-eb...](http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/10/03/amazon- kindle-2-ebooks-its-way-to-bgr/)) 3 months ago.

I love my current Kindle, and if these leaks are accurate, Kindle 2 feels like a step back for a few reasons: * Pouch instead of binder. Current Kindle can be opened and read while waiting in line at the airport, train, etc. What do you do with a pouch after you pull the Kindle out of it? * Larger and heavier. I'm all for sturdy, but the current Kindle is feather light, which is great for extended reading sessions. * Joystick rather than roller w/ spare LCD. Is the new E-Ink screen really responsive enough for a random access pointer? * No SD slot. So, moving the 400MB of programming books I have as PDFs is going to be a PITA.

We'll see on Monday.</comment>