Ask HN: Advice for freshmen entering college - <AUTHOR>

Hi Hacker News, I'm going to college* in two weeks.  I've read <http://paulgraham.com/college.html> and right now my two main goals are: get really good at hacking, and do well enough academically that grad school is an option.
What's your advice for college freshmen, HN?  "What do you wish you'd known?"  I'm particularly interested in surprising, non-obvious things that I am unlikely to hear from others or think of myself.
Thanks!
__ * Olin College, for what it's worth. <comment><USER5> A little bit of perspective from someone five years further down the river:

I'm grateful for my honours ticket to the thrill ride that is my job. I see the joy I find in what I do every day reflect in the others I work with. I'm privileged in this regard and I respect that.

I regret the plethora of mis-spent hours that I lost in the pursuit of irrelevance and perfection in assignments; it took me five years to learn to ensure effort is concominent with benefit.

I'm grateful for the friends I met. They took me to places I'd never have gone alone.

I'm sad that now I see so little of them. My job might be great but I scarificed proximity to other pleasures for it.

I'm grateful that I can arrive at a roaring party, find one of those illusive corner jam-sessions going on with borrowed guitars and some drums from a gap year in Kenya and join in without hesitation.

I'm sad that I spent five months playing only World of Warcraft.

I'm grateful that I spent only five months playing World of Warcraft.

I'm sad that I only discovered I could write after I was too far down the arithmetic creek. Paddles came at too steep a price.

I'm grateful that I spent a summer crafting a computer game with four great friends and that there was an organisation with the generosity and skill to pay for me to make such an ambitious mistake.

I'm sad that I didn't understand what asynchronous development was and how it was, and still is, affecting me.

I'm grateful that I was drawn to learn how to cook.

I'm sad that, on balance, when given the option, I didn't take it.

I love the memory of Maria sharing how she felt about me.

I'm sad that I was cowardly and replied with too many words and too little care.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is my advice, which is going to be completely different from everyone else here. As a caveat, I almost flunked out of college but am doing pretty well for myself right now, so take it as you may.

Just have fun. Screw classes. Screw trying cramming for tests. Do well enough to learn while not stressing yourself out. College doesn't matter at all for if you can succeed in life. If you have the chops, you don't need the degree. But, you will never have a chance to live up life as you will in college. It is the most care-free and awesome experience you will ever have, and if you're lucky you'll make some awesome memories and lifelong friends.

But if you must do well in school. Spend your time wisely (I also had a 3.7 my last year in college as BS CS). Sit in the first row, do all your learning you need to do in lecture. Do homework between lectures so you can party harder at night and wake up whenever in the morning. GO TO OFFICE HOURS. Pros and grad students practically give away answers on tests at those things.

<comment><USER7> _College doesn't matter at all_

That's exactly what I was going to post, but I feared the downmod army, to be honest.

I'm 34 now. Nobody has cared what happened to me in my early 20's since I was about 25. It just doesn't matter. Sure there are a lot of positives you can gain in those 4 years, but some of the most boring and average people I know define themselves by where and when they went to college and what they did there.

As an aside, my totally unscientific examinations suggest that people grow more after a year of travelling than they do after 4 of college.

<comment><USER8> "As an aside, my totally unscientific examinations suggest that people grow more after a year of travelling than they do after 4 of college."

As a corollary to that - study abroad while in college! It will never be cheaper, easier, or more socially acceptable. The semester I spent in New Zealand cost my parents about 1/3 as much as a semester at Amherst (mostly because tuition + room & board at New Zealand universities was around $7000/NZ, while tuition + room & board at Amherst was $20k+). It massively broadened my perspective - not just because I was in a different country in a different hemisphere, but because I was living on my own, with a 14-hour time difference from my parents, studying at a different school in a different university system. And if I hadn't gone, I'd have to have stayed back on campus while all my friends were abroad...

I think I probably would've gotten even more out of the experience had I been brave enough to go to a country with a different language and vastly different culture, eg. Nepal or Ghana or Madagascar. But there's a limit to how many variables in my life I can change at once. If you're more adventurous, go for it.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't agree more. The statistic when I was in college was ~10% of students studied abroad, which I found shocking. A year's paid vacation to almost anywhere on the planet and 9/10 people said no! Also, despite the fact that you spend most of the time partying and traveling, employers look on study abroad favorably when you get out. I always found this amusing.

Two other things: 1) go to western Europe or Tokyo, or somewhere similarly developed and 1st world. It is far more difficult to go live in those places when you are no longer a student. 2) Go for a year. The people I studied abroad with who opted to do one semester were devastated when late December rolled around and it was time to go home. Although it may not seem like it, you aren't missing anything back home, and the friends you left behind will not have anything interesting to report when you get back.

<comment><USER8> 1) That's actually not what I've heard from the friends that went to Ghana or Madagascar or Nepal - they seemed to get far more out of their study-abroad experience than us normal folk who went to New Zealand or Australia or Oxford. Many of them have traveled significantly since then - both to go back to where they studied abroad, and to other developed nations like Europe. Judging from my circle of friends, it seems like studying in the developing world is a life-changing experience while studying in the developed world is "merely" a nice experience to have.

2) Agree, but I didn't do so myself. Mostly because studying abroad was totally a last-minute decision for me - I got to a week before the deadline for the spring semester, found out all my friends would be abroad for the semester, and thought "Shit - what will I do for a semester?" Better halfway than never. My friends that spent a whole year got much more out of it - <USER2> a semester, you're still sorta a tourist, while after a year, you've really started to internalize some of the culture of your host country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a bit random, but: if you're not already in good shape (and many of us hacker types aren't coming out of high school), find where the gym is and learn what to do there, and go three times a week.

College is one of the first chances where you A) generally have free access to a decent gym, B) have enough control over your own time to set a workout schedule, and C) you're generally old enough that working out will actually do something for you.

Getting in good shape will have a positive impact on your energy level, but more importantly it does wonders for your self-confidence and self-image.

<comment><USER11> I didn't do this in college and I regret it. Thankfully I am now on a schedule, controlling my diet, etc, and I feel _far_ better than I have ever in my life. I've always been overweight, and you have no idea how good it feels to know that your health trajectory is _improving_ as opposed to the opposite.

I have never been more glad that practically my entire wardrobe needs to be replaced. My BMI is now on the low end of "overweight", and I cannot fucking wait for the day when I finally drop back into the "normal" range - <USER3> that I haven't been since primary school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Choose your classes based on the professor, not the topic. Good professors can make a boring topic seem interesting; bad professors can make the most interesting topic seem boring.

Therefore: ask around to find out who the outstanding professors are, and take whatever courses they are offering.

<comment><USER13> <http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/>

<comment><USER14> Take this site with a _huge_ grain of salt. It generally rewards easy professors and punishes hard ones. Many of the best teachers at my school had so-so records on the site because they weren't afraid of failing people. People that do average or well in a class are much less likely to fill out the form on that site than someone who's looking to spite the professor that just failed them.

The corollary is also true, that easy but useless professors tend to have high scores.

The best advice for picking professors is to make friends with people in your program that are further along than you and ask them who their favourite professors were and why. If they say he was great because the class was easy and you got an A avoid that professor, you won't learn a thing. If they say something like well I didn't get a great mark but I learned so much that it was worth it that's the professor you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't skip class. College is easy if you actually go to class and pay attention.

<comment><USER16> I disagree on this point. I skipped classes left, right and centre. I'm sure it annoyed the hell out of my lecturers, but I was spending my time doing things that turned out to be much more valuable in the long run.

For example, I did actual research! By the time I was finished with my undergraduate programme, I had enough "real" research experience to gain entry to a very good PhD programme in another country. This was coming from a small university with no particular research reputation outside of a few select areas.

So skipping classes worked for me. Just don't do it to the point where you _think_ you know what is going on in the class, when you really don't.

<comment><USER17> I hate lecturers who take attendance. This isn't preschool, I can make decisions for myself. If I feel like I can do without that one class or feel like something else is more pressing (due project?) then I should be able to act on it. The whole idea of getting points for just being in class is silly anyway. You get grades to be able to rate your own knowledge, not as gifts or punishment. Thus if you've comprehended the subject fully you should get an A and if not, you should get less. Being in class during lecture has nothing to do with comprehension.

<comment><USER16> Mmhmm. I avoided those kinds of classes like the plague.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't lose your passion for the subject. I nearly did, because I got really, really bored near the middle of my degree (thankfully, my interest and love for CS was re-gained), mostly because I didn't follow the advice that I provide in the next paragraph. On the coding/academic side, apply what you learn early and don't feel like you should be constrained by what is being taught. Take every opportunity to code, learn and experiment.

And remember there is more to life than just academics. They are important and all that, but cut yourself some slack and remember to have fun occasionally. If you treat the academic side of things as your job, then you need to have things outside of that to keep you sane and balanced, and to prevent your job and your hobby from becoming totally indistinct from one another.

This also feeds into the basic notion that most future employers or grad school admissions committees will appreciate the fact that you are actually a well-adjusted person. Learning how other people in the world operate is valuable. Learning to be social with lots of different people is important. Having hobbies that you actually enjoy are important. Learn public speaking! All of these things will work to your benefit in interview situations and in any kind of later academic or industrial career.

<comment><USER18> Ditto to this. While slacking off during college is not a good idea, working so hard that you burn yourself out is also something to avoid. Believe me, after working on a physics problem for ~20 hours straight it's hard to remember why exactly you ever thought you enjoyed the subject. If you don't take breaks and live life a little it's easy to become disinterested in your field of study, at which point you'll be working hard, learning nothing, and hating every minute of it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you learn a lot more than academics in college; people also learn a lot socially, which is just as important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 1) Don't worry if you don't get all As, especially if you're ripping through the curriculum like crazy. This is college, you won't die when you don't have a full 4.0.

2) Find upperclassmen you respect and ask their opinions on classes and professors (take those with a grain of salt) before you take classes. Find the old syllabi for the classes online and figure out what you'll be doing. Don't waste your time on stuff that you don't want / need.

3) Don't feel like you can't do something just because it's not spelled out that way in some piece of documentation. Talk to the people in charge, plead your case _well_ and you're likely to get what you want if it makes sense. This goes for getting credit, taking upper level classes, doing projects, getting funding etc ...

4) Get internships (related to your major) under your belt as early as you can. You might need the experience to get faster to whatever your dream job is. As a corollary to #3, they'll always tell you that freshmen can't get jobs, it's a lie. The truth is that better companies will be willing to give you the time of day to see if you're actually good enough.

5) Finish at least one nontrivial project before you graduate. Have something to show off and to spend spare time on.

Olin has a good reputation, good job and good luck.

</comment><comment><USER19> Two pieces of advice come to mind:

1\. If possible, don't think about what degree you're going to get until at least your 3rd year. (This might be impossible, depending on your college -- some institutions require incoming students to declare a major promptly.) Out of dozens of students I've dealt with, I'm only aware of one case where "spend four years taking _whatever courses looked interesting_ each semester" didn't end up with a student meeting the requirements for a degree in something -- but I've seen lots of cases where students decided what degree they wanted before starting, carefully mapped out all the courses they'd have to take, and then changed their minds later.

2\. Read your textbooks before class. Not five minutes before the lecture starts -- two weeks before the semester starts. Learn the material before the instructor reaches it in class -- and then go to class and pay attention to how he/she teaches it. Aside from cases where the instructor wrote the textbook, I always found that this approach, and consequentially hearing two different perspectives on the same material, resulted in my understanding the material far better than if I only went to the lectures or only read the textbook. (Think you can't spare two weeks to read the textbooks before class? Look at it this way -- if you spend those two weeks, you'll know the material well enough that you don't need to study at all at the end of the semester.)

<comment><USER8> Seconding #1 (well, #2 too, but mostly #1). I was sure I wanted to be a physics major when I entered college. I continued being a physics major despite doing terribly in most of the upper-level classes. One of my biggest regrets about college was not switching to CS earlier, because I could've gotten much more out of my classes if I'd taken courses I was really interested in rather than taking courses I thought I had to to complete the major and then doing the stuff I was really interested in in my spare time.

Your perspective in high school is really narrow. It has to be; most of the things you might find are exciting aren't even taught in high school. (Similarly, many of the exciting parts of the working world aren't taught in college unless you got to a specialized college.) Be willing to accept all the new avenues that open up for you in college, and don't stick to your plans from high school just because they're your plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 1\. No beard or moustache until you're old enough to drink. Goatees are OK.

2\. There are core programming skills, and there are technology-of-the-week skills. Instead of worrying terribly about the latter, worry about getting your core ability to design and test efficient, maintainable code. Definitely play with functional languages instead of the enterprise-y fad-of-the-week.

3\. Don't hang out with other geeks all the time. Branch out as often as possible. This will help you be a better programmer, businessman, salesman, and will probably get you laid more.

[Edit: added some explanations]

<comment><USER21> 1\. No they're not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Version control - use it for everything

Even things not software-related. If it's done on a computer, it should be in VCS. Ideally on a repo hosted by your school, if that's not possible, then one on a third-party machine that's run by as large a company as you can find. If you roll with DVCS, then make sure you also publish it to somewhere third- party. This is not only for the versioning, but for the dating of those versions. Having all your work under a VCS means you can say the following things:

"Sorry Prof, I was a day late submitting this assignment because my flight had to pull an emergency landing in Reykjavik when this guy had a hart attack, and then we were locked in for a day by the fog. But here's a commit dated before the deadline, can you accept that?"

"No, I didn't plagarize that paper - you can see it develop over the past thirteen versions here, time-stamped over three weeks."

"I had my circuit designed, but when I opened it to print OrCAD crashed and mangled my data - here's a version that's time-stamped to yesterday I can use instead."

The third-party large-company aspect is good so that when they say (for all of those statements) "How do I know you didn't change the times on your server to make up that history of work?" you can respond with "The company that's hosting this had revenues of three million dollars last year, they're not gonna screw with their systems because I ask nicely." and then they drop the issue.

</comment><comment><USER23> take things seriously from the start. you're probably the type of person who could barely be awake in high school and still make an A+ in all of your classes.

you can maybe skate by doing this in college, but if you want to keep your grad school options free and/or keep your scholarships, you'll have to be serious from the start.

edited to add: i'm not saying go full-tilt study crazy either though. just make sure that you expend the effort you need to do well. don't forget to have fun, meet people, and expand your horizons.

</comment><comment><USER24> Have fun - probably going to get obliterated for saying this - but, give a quick read to "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman" so you can realize that, more than anybody, really smart people always need to have fun.

It's good that you want to get good at hacking. Working on Open Source projects every once in a while will help you with that.

Learn to be disciplined about studying. Study hard but not harder - only you know what hard means, or you will have to learn.

Take time to learn something else besides hacking, maybe dance, or play an instrument, I don't know, maybe painting.

Use at least one summer to travel abroad, it will give you perspective.

Try to get along with the professors that you find are the best at teaching, maybe do some research with them. You might learn more than you think from them.

Finally, I will repeat it again, have fun more than anything. Make college a series of memories and not just one big race to the finish line trying to get good grades. I've said it before and I will say it again, the goal of college should be to help you become a well-rounded individual with knowledge that its balanced between different topics, not just computer science.

</comment><comment><USER25> \- Make sure you work on cool side projects to keep your hacking motivation up. I regret wasting all my time on stupid games online or just chatting with people. I'd much rather have a few cool projects under my sleeve.

\- Look for hacker-friendly internships in the summer. I really wish I had done internships instead of trying to breeze through college by taking Summer semester classes. My resumé still looks as if I'm straight out of college[1] and I graduated 3 years ago.

[1] In the sense that I don't have much experience out of my current employer where I've been working at since college.

<comment><USER15> You should value your time, and if you are spending too much doing an unproductive activity you should change your habits. This goes beyond college, but the college experience is often the first time you are fully in control of your schedule so it is a bit test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Remember that you will probably not graduate with a 4.0. Your first C is going to hurt, especially if you were an A student in high school. Just keep going.

2\. Don't worry about the impact of switching majors or programs. I started my school in the computer engineering program, hated it ~2.5 years in, and switched around a bit. I'm now graduating with a degree in pure mathematics. Study what you love -- the jobs will come.

I'm afraid I'm starting to ramble, so let me get to the main point -- what you study means nothing after you graduate. Where you study means (almost) nothing. What matters is who you meet along the way, and your actual accomplishments while in university.

Study what you love. Meet facility, upperclassmen, and other students. Work on writing something cool and useful. You will get more out of school than if you spent your time grinding for a perfect GPA.

</comment><comment><USER27> I agree with most of the other posts... but have a few things to add:

First, grades matter, or else you'd just self-teach everything and not worry about a degree. A B+ average is not an option. Thus:

Take the _minimum_ number of credit hours to qualify as a full time student. And demand a lot of yourself -- try to earn an A or A+ in each class you take... Read ahead, do problem sets weeks ahead of time, go to office hours. Make each class an obsession. This is much more like real (startup) life. I'd also even consider being a part time student if doing so helps you achieve this. Also, you should do some partying and have a social life, which is another benefit of not taking too many credit hours.

Pre-learn for the next semester. Read the book, do the first month's worth of problem sets, sit in on a few classes. Do some other, related reading. Do this as a reward for being ahead in all of your other classes. Doing this can give you confidence if you decide to skip a prerequisite... to see if you can handle the material.

But fun is also important, so:

Self teach. If you want to learn CS, start now. Pick up some books, start your own projects. Get nerdy. This could lead to some key independent study work with awesome faculty members. What research areas are they working on? Can you hack that? Why not stop by and talk about being a research assistant or even a work study gig?

Money:

If you need to earn any money during school, I suggest either getting a job where you can sit around studying all the time (desk clerk, etc.) or where you are being paid to contribute to research in some way, etc. The bottom line is that if you can be paid for your study hours you will prosper as a student.

Fun:

Don't feel too much pressure to engage in all the over the top social stuff, but realize that you can meet some very interesting people in college, and so be open minded to meeting all sorts of people. Friends will respect you more if you are self-possessed enough to put your academic priorities first. Besides, after two semesters of A/A+ results (see above) you will be known as someone who kicks ass. Everyone always assumes grades are the result of brains or inspiration rather than good planning and hard work (and reasonable pacing). I had a friend in college who was known for being really bright. He would help various classmates with problem sets. On several occasions the people he helped obliged him with oral sex. He's not a creep at all, but that's the sort of gratitude that being respected for your academics can lead to.

Course Selection:

Figure out which professors are well respected for teaching a particular class and make it a MUST to get in that class. Also, don't hesitate to drop a class if it's being taught badly. Most of the classes I had that turned out badly started off with a strong intuition on my part that something was a bit off, yet I persevered due to schedule constraints, etc. It's better to just drop it, add it to your pre-teaching regime (per above) and take it in the future when someone better teaches it.

College is an unexpected combination of self-teaching and guided-learning. You must always self-teach (and pre-learn) but with the guidance of an inspired prof your learning experience can be significantly more fulfilling.

</comment><comment><USER28> College is a great place to start building your network. Teachers, fellow students, employeers... These are all people that you can use later in life to make things easier/possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> \- Don't underestimate the value of making lifelong friends and having fun. You won't make it through an engineering degree unless you have a way to blow off the steam for a few minutes a day. We were buried with work but the 8 or 9 guys I hang out with made it to the dining hall together every night and played video games for a half hour or so after, that hour each day made work a hell of a lot more manageable

\- Make connections with professors. Unlike high school it is quite easy to never build a relationship with a professor because you see them so rarely. Going to office hours and talking about things will lead to research opportunities and recommendations.

\- Get involved. Engineering teams (I know Olin does IGVC for sure), sports, clubs, whatever.

\- Buy your books used on Amazon - now is about the right time since shipping takes a while. It saves a few hundred bucks a year.

</comment><comment><USER30> Go to parties. Rush for a fraternity. Have fun.

Meet girls. When you are laying on your deathbed, you will never think to yourself "gosh, i wish i got with fewer women in college."

<comment><USER31> I think chasing women is a terrible use of one's college years. The women are mostly immature and have terrible tastes in men. Better for him to recognize that he probably won't meet a marriage-worthy woman until his mid-20s, suck it up and work hard until then.

I definitely regret having lost a lot of great learning opportunities because I was fooling around with spoiled, immature, half-formed people. Very few men, at 18, are good enough judges of character to not end up losing badly on this gamble. Most 18-year-old men have certain, umm, influences on their judgment of other people that make them pretty bad at this.

Obviously, some people luck out and meet a soulmate at 18. One of my friends met an amazing woman (also his first girlfriend) in his freshman year and is now happily married. I've seen it happen even in the US, where the average quality of women is low ("hookup culture", _Sex and the City_ ) and the odds are bad. I don't think he should count on it, and he definitely should _not_ allow his success or failure with women to affect his concentration and work.

<comment><USER32> This assumes that a person is looking for a soulmate in university. I certainly wasn't. There's lots of benefit to dating many different women - just make sure you don't lose sight of yourself. You can't pick out the good ones if you haven't been with a few bad ones. I learned more about myself dating a few crazy girls (and it was never boring) than I did dating the straight-A overachiever.

<comment><USER31> _You can't pick out the good ones if you haven't been with a few bad ones._

I don't think this is true. I know some people who luck out on the first try. Also, I know a lot of people who seem never to have dated _bad_ people. They've dated some people ill-matched to them, and had some breakups, but they've never dated someone I consider to be a rotten person.

I think there's little to be gained by dating horrible people, except some unwanted emotional baggage. There's a lot to be gained by dating good people who aren't right for you; this is how you find out what you're looking for and refine your tastes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh, I just thought of another thing that served me well.

Find the professors and academic staff who are doing worthwhile research that interests you, and talk to them! Not in an irritating sycophantic way, just have a conversation if you genuinely want to know more.

A big adaptation going from high school to university for me was the fact that academic staff are not like teachers at school. Most of them will actually treat you like an adult and will just have a conversation with you. The clear demarcation between "teacher" and "student" kinda goes away.

This probably varies hugely between institutions, but I found that by the end of my undergraduate career, I had made really good friends with some of my lecturers. Just last week I went to a pub with one of my old professors because he was passing through London. There are three major benefits to this: 1) You'll see the other side! If you are planning a research career after grad school, it's a really good way to learn how to be a professional researcher! 2) You are more likely to get a good-quality recommendation for grad school if the person writing it knows who the hell you are. 3) Academics are generally really nice people! They became academics because they were good at something that you want to become good at. You have a shared interest - it'll probably be very rewarding for you (and hopefully for them too).

So, in short, don't view your lecturers as faceless drones who stand up in front of a class and drone on for an hour. That's a tiny part of what they do - and the rest of what they do is usually much more interesting! And finally, just don't be sycophantic about it. Nobody likes a suck-up :-p

</comment><comment><USER33> If you're not enjoying it you don't have to do it. I switched course (admittedly from maths w/ CS to pure CS) after my first year and had a _much_ better time.

Get involved in stuff. Don't spend all your nights indoors hacking!

<comment><USER15> Yes, be flexible. I started out in Computer Engineering, and was miserable for 1.5 years. After switching to Computer Science I was much happier as it was a better fit for me.

<comment><USER34> 2.5 here :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My advice is two fold.

1) Have fun, you think 4 years of college is long...but trust me, it'll go by in a blink of an eye.

2) Start thinking ahead from day one.

GPA: don't slack off early on, early on all your classes are bullshit, you might think they are hard, but you have no idea. Get those easy As early on.

Startup/Projects: start working on them from day one. Even if it goes slow, you'll be much better of. Startups start off very slowly, so college is the best time to start, since you can have the 4 years for it to grow big enough, while you have no real expenses.

<comment><USER22> Re: GPA, take As when you can get them. Doesn't matter if the course is bullshit - an A is an A, and your GPA is cumulative. This is especially important in first-year, as your performance therein haunts you for the rest of your time at school.

If you went to a moderately good high school, most of first year should be review for you. Learn the new parts, ace the old parts, and finish first year with a 3.7+ GPA and you're set for the rest of your time there.

<comment><USER35> I'd aim for a 4.0 for that first yet. If you keep the same studying habits you had in high school getting As in those early courses is a breeze.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Having just got out, some things that I wish I had known when I started up:

 _Take Risks_. Lots of them. College is one of the few times in your life when you're old enough to do cool risky things, but in a position where short of killing someone, everything is fixable. Most things that you do wrong (aside from plagiarism, which most places are big about going after) can be fixed, so take advantage of this to do some cool things.

 _Use your student status_. Most modes of transport have steep student discounts. Your campus rec program will have classes that cost 30% (or less) than what they'd cost in real life. I got into martial arts because it got me into shape, introduced me to people outside my program, and gave me a way to burn off steam. You don't have to do that, but find a cheap class and take it.

 _Socialize outside your program_. You make make fun of people in a lesser program, but they're interesting as well - just in other things. They provide some perspective on what you're doing, keep you sane and interested, and can offer great ideas without knowing it.

 _Socialize within your program_. You may find these people boring, but you're all working on the same assignments and all having the same issues - so band together. They'll also be useful for networking in the future, and may have old exams you can study off of.

 _Find people you work well with_. If you find someone (like a lab partner) you work well with, keep them - plan to take the same classes. I had a guy who I worked amazingly with in a lab, who was my lab partner for three years (across six classes). Never saw him socially, know nothing about him personally, but when we got into a lab we got shit done and fast, and knew how each other worked. This relationship is invaluable.

 _Get into student politics, lightly_. I'm not saying run for class president, but there's almost certainly a Senate (or whatever your school's governing body is) committee on IT that takes student representatives. If you ask to be on this, you'll get a spot - since no one else will want it. You'll meet some interesting people in student politics (who will be good to know later), and you'll meet some administrators and department heads, who are also good to know - especially for recommendation letters for grad school. If your school has a technology transfer committee, get on that (it's full of interesting industry reps and people with great ideas).

 _Find a prof and get friendly_. Every department has a few professors who are regarded as "crazy". They're the ones who have classes that people avoid because they're incredibly hard markers, and who teach a few esoteric subjects. These people fall into two categories - profs who mark hard because they're assholes, and profs who mark hard because they're demanding. Find one of the latter, take all their classes (which should be small because of their rep), and go to their office hours. They're likely very smart, and will provide valuable insight (and refereces) for your future. Get friendly with them.

 _Go to office hours and tutorials_. Office hours are one-on-one with the guy who creates your exams, or at least superivses their creation. Tutorials are where that guy (or a TA he's instructed) goes over problems they think are important, which often are very similar to ones you'll be examined on. If the prof thinks that a particular problem type is important, then you can be sure that it will come back again - and it might even be important in the long run.

 _Don't sweat your grades_. If you are sure you want to go to grad school, then sweat the shit out of them, and use your undergrad to form relationships with profs. If you don't, know that after your first job, no one will care about your grades. If you do good work outside of class and get soem good summer jobs, your first job won't even care about them.

 _Search for resume-builders_. Ever school has a few societies that you can join for minimal effort that sound really good on paper, or classes that sound good but teach you nothing. These are worth it for the future. Also good is joining things like IEEE and ACM.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure if it is surprising or non-obvious, but I wrote my postfact list of things someone would've told me at the start: <http://metarz.net/blog/17/>

<comment><USER37> I don't know about the do all the problems in a book part. There are a LOT of problems in math and science books!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 1\. don't watch tv or play video games, find more productive and ultimately rewarding ways to spend your leisure time, like playing a sport (team sport in particular is good, geeky choice is ultimate frisbee, but any team sport is good) learning an instrument, martial arts, theatre production, volunteer work, student government, etc.

2\. you won't learn real programming in school. take real CS classes like algorithms, data structures, and object oriented design, they are essential, but recognize that they won't teach you how to be a real programmer. real programming cannot be taught, it can only be learnt. the toy projects that you will be doing in class are too simple for you to get a sense of the type of problems you will routinely face in a real project. they are valuable in teaching specific things you need to know, but if you want to get a real sense of what code looks like, join an open source project or find a good internship.

3\. i reccomend taking theory of computation and compilers as early as you can, they will help your understanding of your other classes a lot.

4\. take more math, especially statistics and game theory clases

5\. take at least a few philosophy classes

6\. take the time to learn how to make friends and meet girls, college is the best time to learn these skills, if you put it off later than that, you will get further and further behind other people in social skills and end up bitter and disappointed like pwnix_rising.

</comment><comment><USER39> Get to know professors so you can get recommendation letters for grad school. I was shy and didn't meet any, and now I'm locked out of grad school for it. (They all require recommendation letters)

<comment><USER17> It's funny how highschool makes people forget that professors are people too - and then you go out for food and drinks with your CS professors in college :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> College is more than the classes you attend and the grades you get. Get involved on campus, and make friends. This will make your life easier in the long run because you also have people you can help you if you're struggling in a subject, not to mention you can go and focus on other things if you're burned out. This is all coming from someone who just finished their first year at Georgia Tech.

</comment><comment><USER41> TA as soon as you can.

Do research as soon as you can.

Surround yourself with the smartest people you can.

Don't make partying a priority (this is a painful one, but binge drinking, fun as it is, won't help you towards accomplishing either of your goals).

If you're learning a new language or tech, find a way to leverage it against something else you have to do for class. If you want to learn LaTex (for grad school, of course), write a paper for a class in LaTex. If you want to learn C, brute force the answers to discrete math problems with a problem written in C. There are lots of opportunities to do this.

 _MOST IMPORTANTLY,_ there will inevitably be a group on campus that is all about being geeky. Inevitably, they'll know something about tech as well, but they'll mostly want to use memes in real life, play weird card games, complain about athletes, etc. Including yourself in this group means ostracizing yourself from everyone else. Not worth it.

Take the hardest classes you can, and ahead of schedule.

</comment><comment><USER42> College is a great opportunity to try a lot of different things. There's a lot of good advice here, but I'd like to suggest that you find some time to do some kind of volunteer work.

Most colleges have many different groups and causes you can volunteer with. You'll learn a lot of important skills that you won't practice during your normal coursework. The things you learn while canvassing, petitioning, and organizing will help you in many aspects of your post-college life.

You'll also meet people that aren't in your major. Fun people. People who throw great parties. People who will expand your "network" immensely. Don't let this pass you by.

Volunteering also looks good on applications for jobs and grad schools. It opened the door for my first post-college job.

</comment><comment><USER43> Be sure that at least some of your friends do not look like you; yes, I mean that literally. The world's only going to get more interconnected and diverse, and understanding how different people think and feel is vital, especially when you don't agree with them.

Ask questions, especially in class, but also when you study, work in groups, etc. Olin will probably have a smaller, cozier feel than most colleges, but this bit of advice should still hold. Most people are too afraid of looking stupid and miss out on innumerable opportunities to get fully engaged in what they're doing. Sit at the front of classes (easier to pay attention, easier to ignore what other classmates think) and transform the usual professorial monologue into a dialog.

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't do what I did.

I drank too much, partied too much, worked full time the entire way though, didn't go to enough class and didn't study enough(which turned out meant that I didn't get very good marks either).

I basically did everything wrong in my university career. That being said, University was boatloads of fun, and while I didn't do stellar in school I am a pretty decent hacker and still am doing what I wanted to do when I started(that is develop software for a living).

I think if your going to enjoy college/university at all, just find the middle ground. Do enough to get your Marks, become a really good hacker, but make sure you experience things. You will be much happier and well adjusted in the long run.

<comment><USER45> > Don't do what I did.

Au contraire, I did what you did (probably to the extreme, I was on academic probation 2x and did more drugs than I can remember), and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone if they have the mental fortitude to actually graduate at the end of 4 years.

When you stand on stage smirking and hung over with your degree and mortar board after 4 years of doing whatever the fuck you wanted, it feels like much more of an accomplishment than if you had buried your face in books the entire time.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I basically blew off college for the middle 6 semesters, barely graduated, flunked two courses in my major, was on academic probation twice, and skipped probably well over half my classes, and have no regrets. It was nice to stand up on the stage and get my diploma - a year late, though I didn't need to take any additional classes beyond my 4 years - and remember that I got _everything_ I wanted out of college.

I actually didn't spend much time drinking and doing drugs - my reasoning was that I actually wanted to remember college. But I got involved in a bunch of clubs & activities, just hung out and chilled with my housemates a lot at like 4 AM, got to know hundreds of friends through the Internet, studied abroad, learned Lisp and functional programming, took on a major software rewrite for a popular website, went to a few parties (enough so I felt like I didn't miss out anything), had lots of quasi-intellectual discussions with friends, read lots of books, visited local attractions, and took courses at other colleges in the area. I feel like this is an opportunity cost that I'd regret missing a lot more than the class-time and homework assignments than I skipped.

The irony is that it doesn't seem to have harmed my career at all. Once you get that first job and do well at it, nobody cares how you did in college. And I got that first job through a friend I'd met on a programming website on the Internet, while I should've been doing my homework. Score one for slacking!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It can be a big shock to start living with someone else closely for the first time. Prepare to compromise.

There _will_ be several times when your roommate(s) gets on your nerves, and I found it best to step back, take a breath, look at specifically is bothering you, and confront your roommate about it calmly. Ask him to do the same if you start to bother him somehow. Patience and good communication are key to maintaining order in your living space. Do this right and dorm/apartment life will be a blast.

On the flip side, your first year can be quite hellish if you've got a roommate that is unbearable. If peaceful negotiations are not working, definitely consider moving out; don't just live in misery.

</comment><comment><USER47> My advice is to make sure you don't get depressed or hopeless. Being away from home for an extended period of time and adjusting to many new situations can lead to a negative impact on mental health. Both depression and hopelessness happened to me in college, leading to bad results (I didn't date, I had no friends, I didn't care about classes since I thought everyone in the world was going to die from pandemics/war/etc). If you find yourself becoming depressed, the techniques at the following link may help. They're based on empirical evidence and have helped many people: <http://bit.ly/z8rwF>

</comment><comment><USER48> I want to echo gdp's advice above. What I wish someone had told me as a freshman:

Grades don't really matter, no one will care about them.

1) Future employers (investors too?) will care about code you wrote outside of class, whether open source or your own projects.

2) Grad schools will care about great recommendations, which you do not get by getting good grades. You get those by doing research with the professor outside of the class.

I'm not saying it's ok if you fail; just that there are different priorities to be balanced. Missing out on that A in order to improve on 1) or 2) above is a trade off that will serve you better.

<comment><USER31> If he wants to go to graduate school, grades matter as a necessary but not sufficient condition. However, if he's a promising student, he'll have no problem getting the requisite grades (3.5+ in-major) while working on independent projects and doing research.

He might also decide he wants to go to law or business school, in which case undergraduate GPA is a significant selection criterion.

<comment><USER48> Thanks for correcting about law/business school; I had overlooked that. Medical school too I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wish I had known which material was going to be the really high yield material later on (obviously that's not always possible). I had a couple of math courses (e.g. linear algebra) that I absolutely hated and put very little effort into, learning very little, only to find out that the concepts from those courses would be the cornerstones of much of my later coursework.

If I were back in college, I would try to find out from older students, grad students, and professors what they considered to be the most important concepts to learn for my major/field, and make sure I had those down pat, not just for the test.

If someone had said, for example, "you need to understand eigenvalues, they're really important, you will use them all of the time", I probably would have paid a lot more attention and tried to get something out of it that first time around, even though they were completely abstract and without context.

</comment><comment><USER50> Take advantage of the school whenever possible. If tuition covers up to 20 credits, take 20 credits a semester (assuming you can handle the course load of course). If there are discounted summer courses and you are available, why not?

Take interesting and challenging electives. A lot of students just take the easiest electives they can, but in my opinion they are wasting their time and money.

Use the library. It will probably have access to all sorts of expensive journals and publications.

Become friends with your professors. Most of them are interesting, intelligent people.

Find clubs with like minded people or just hang out with people who are in college to learn (you will find that the majority of people in college are there because it's what you do after high school).

Finally, enjoy yourself. If you are not enjoying yourself than why are you putting yourself through all of this?

</comment><comment><USER51> Olin is designed to be challenging, and your fellow students are all going be selected from the top tier. This means that you have a 50% chance of being worse than the median (and probably the mean, too). You may need to learn how to learn from your peers, and learn how to act when you are not the smartest person in any given room. It may be the very first time either of those two situations has come up for you!

To get to graduate school, you'll need at least a 3.0 and good recommendations. The good recommendations is pretty easy at a place like Olin as long as you are enthusiastic, but the 3.0 may be difficult given the average GPA at Olin in combination with point 1.

You can have any two of: friends, grades, and sleep. I recommend the first two, but make sure you sleep enough to maintain a baseline of bodily health, or else you will lose out on all 3.

</comment><comment><USER52> Since you're already focused on hacking and academics, my advice is to balance that by developing your social skills:

1\. Read (and practice) How To Win Friends and Influence People

2\. Go to parties and have fun at them

3\. Cultivate a group of close friends whom you can count on

If you can graduate with great hacking skills, good grades, good social skills, and trusted friends, then you will be in a good position for the next phase after college. If entrepreneurship is on your mind, think of it as hacking+friends and start laying that foundation.

Regarding the opposite sex, don't fret them but absolutely do chase the ones you like! That's a wonderful part of life, and there is much to learn. :)

</comment><comment><USER53> I live in Needham, just down the street from where you'll be (Hi Neighbor ;-). If you can get a parking spot on campus, I'd be sure to have a car. Boston is a much more interesting town than Needham, and you'll want to be able to explore. (If not, you'll be taking the commuter rail.)

Secondly, why don't you take a class at Wellesley College? Our babysitter just graduated from Wellesley, and she took classes at Olin. It seems like a good idea to do the reverse.

Olin sounds like a great school. I think I would have gone there if it has existed in my day. Just go with the program. Lots of these comments apply more to people going to large, state schools. You'll be having a much nicer experience.

</comment><comment><USER54> It seems that a lot of good points have been covered so I'll point out two that seem lacking: 1) Make sure that when you do have a choice, that you only live with folks who will be easy to get along with even at their most acrimonious 2) for late night snacking and caffeine, fruits, oatmeal, and some variety of loose leaf tea are the way to go. Its cheap, and in the case of tea, even the strongest caffeine dosage of tea (even at the energy drink strength) is very low jitter. 3) you're in the boston area, take advantage of it and the opportunities to meet fun interesting people at other universities, seeing the constrast between the cultures at different schools is not to be underrated.

</comment><comment><USER55> 1) Get a Github account, fork projects, fix bugs, and send pull requests. Write your own libraries and apps and push them there as well. When you graduate, you will have a corpus of code to show people, and a documented history of playing well with others. That will matter more than your GPA to any company you would actually want to work for.

2) Have a social life. As someone else here commented, don't be afraid of girls. If you ask her out and she says no, it's not the end of the world. Don't be afraid to take risks.

3) If your study/organizational habits are lacking, seek out the people who have their act together and duplicate their habits.

</comment><comment><USER56> You have some time, but you must know that when all is said and done, your grades and your classes won't matter to land you a job, your _side projects_ will: [http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs- grad-...](http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/05/13/being-a-new-cs-grad-in-this- economy-sucks/)

In the meantime, keep a good balance between study and social life. College is a great time to reinvent yourself and be someone new, no strings attached. Make mistakes now, so you don't make them later.

And +1 for travel abroad at least one year. It _will_ change your perspective on life.

</comment><comment><USER57> If I went back or could start over, I would study two or more fields that interested me making sure that they weren't closely related. I'd do this because it's not enough to know how to make good tools for programmers. Knowing what programmers need lets us have bunches of good text editors, databases and programming languages. If you have domain understanding that isn't about coding and computers, then you have a chance to fill a void that no other coders can possibly see.

Also, I'd take some graphic design classes because user interfaces matter.

</comment><comment><USER58> From experience: if you drop out at 19, know that things can get seriously fucked up. Now I'm 21, and the startup I stopped out for for nine months went nowhere. It can also throw a wrench in your college experience.

Just...if you want to learn what I learned from it, it's this: learn tech in class, and don't bother with nearly anything else. Except IP law and corporate law, and if you seriously suck at writing, which it appears you don't, learn to write well.

Also, I have no idea how, as a practical matter, one goes about ignoring grades.

</comment><comment><USER59> Try to find some good friends in CS (or whatever your major is). I made the mistake my first year of college of being far too standoffish and irritated with most of the people at my first school, and spent most of my time bored and lonely until the middle of my second semester, by which point I'd already made plans to transfer out.

I considered myself a pretty outgoing person before I left for school, but moving away from all of my high school friends had a bigger effect on me than I'd expected.

</comment><comment><USER60> Get good at time management. College undergrads have an enormous amount of free time, few responsibilities, and a lot of flexibility. The main cause (for me, at least) for not doing most anything you want is poor time management. Start here: <http://www.alice.org/Randy/timetalk.htm>

</comment><comment><USER61> Go to class. Go to class regularly. Go to bed at 10PM or earlier. Don't drink or eat things like caffeine in the evening that will give you an excuse to get up and dick around. Don't own any game systems or a television. Don't spend hours and hours on the computer messing around. Don't take more classes than you can keep up with.

</comment><comment><USER9> Be open to the possibility that something completely unexpected may turn out to be your life's calling.

</comment><comment><USER62> Don't skip the first day because thats when you get the syllabus. Don't leave your education solely to the university. Don't learn any European languages, they all speak English in Europe, I'd trade my German degree for a Chinese / Japanese degree any day of the week.

<comment><USER49> Spanish isn't a bad one to know if you live in the US. I decided to switch to Spanish while on a trip to Germany during college :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Keep your head on straight and you'll do fine. :)

FWIW, it's been awesome having you around at work, and I wish you the best of luck at Olin.

</comment><comment><USER64> Take advantage of _everything_. Try things you've never tried before, even if you're not interested in them (especially if you're not interested in them). This is your one big chance to have the freedom to find out almost anything about yourself and the world. You probably won't have a better opportunity for the rest of your life. Four years will be gone before you know it, so don't regret that you didn't try or do something that could have changed your life.

</comment><comment><USER65> 1\. Easy on the alcohol. You can waste great quantities of time that way.

2\. Learn at least one foreign language well.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is the advice I would have given myself at 18: Don't fret girls and relationships. I'm serious. Focus on making friends (male and female), working on interesting projects, and learning everything you can (academic and otherwise) during the next 4 years.

You may have inflated expectations of college women, assuming that intelligence and good behavior, decent tastes in men, etc. are correlated. I sure did. In fact, this is what I told myself to expect throughout high school: when I get to college, things will be more civilized. Wrong. You'll be unpleasantly surprised if you go in to most collegs with high expectations. Expect a continuation of high school behavior on the dating front. In fact, college can be worse, because you now face competition from men ages 22-26, which you didn't in high school (one should hope). This makes the market tighter.

If you meet a woman you really dig, and if you're both mature enough to pursue a relationship, go for it. I wouldn't expect this, however; it seems to happen only for about 10-20% of men at this stage of life. Don't take it personally, at all, if this aspect of life is miserable and dry for you; it's that way for most (decent) men in college.

For a man who cares more than he should about womens' approval, ages 16-21 are pretty damn miserable; it becomes fun after that, however, as the balance of power tends to switch around age 25. Most college women are chasing bad boys whose IQs are 2/3 of yours. Just focus on school and your career, rather than sacrificing time, mental health, and energy on a pursuit that will enervate and confuse you. Enjoy life and work hard instead. Then, in your mid- to late 20s, women will begin pursuing you.

(If you're a woman or gay, my advice probably still applies, but I don't have any personal experience that would apply.)

<comment><USER17> Also, I guess it makes sense to say that college is like a clean slate - <USER4> one (well, mostly) really knows you, so it's a good time to reinvent yourself if you feel like it.

<comment><USER66> Slightly off topic I suppose, but makmanalp is making an AWESOME point here. No one knows you and it's your chance to get out and do what you really want to. I was in the closet for all of high school and fairly miserable because at the time I thought my friends would stop hanging around me should they find out. This fear kept me from making a lot of _new_ friends in my first year, especially since one of my friends from high school was my roommate. It kept me from joining the GBLT club which would have made my transition to university much easier, and let me interact with more people like me.

This is your chance to meet new people who have the same interests as you. Changing from a high school where very few people are interested in technology to a college where your entire program is filled with people who share your same general interests creates an awesome environment to grow and share ideas. The group of friends you meet in classes the first year can lead to an awesome experience in the second year, as you find people who you work well and agree with who will want to be roommates in later years. Can anyone say hacker house?

<comment><USER17> You might ( won't say will) end up in business with those people too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Point: You will be utterly lost. Counterpoint: So, too, will everyone else be lost.

Use your time to maximize your experience as best you are able. If you are studious, study your brains out. If you are a doer, find a lab and camp out there until someone asks you for help. If you're a drug user of any kind, walk around the on-campus/near-campus housing until you hear a party, then crash it. If you like guys/girls more than anything else previously mentioned, put some ice down your pants and concentrate on school for a few semesters. When you're confident and familiar, it'll count for a lot more in the long run (plus the available dating pool will have mellowed out by a lot.) Get off campus eventually, don't be a shut-in, don't think of the campus as your only safe harbor.

Point: Younger people at your school are still hormonal, just like high school. Counterpoint: When everyone's lost, it's good to be found. Find yourself -- not just within you, but in others. Independence is not overrated, but it is often ignored.</comment>


You don't have to be a passionate programmer - <AUTHOR> https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/30/not-a-passionate-programmer/ <comment><USER2> I feel this article is confusing "passionate" with "willing to work crazy overtime", or "lacking any hobbies beside software". I would argue that most good programmers _are_ passionate about what they do, in the sense that they enjoy their work and care deeply about the quality of the work they do. They genuinely find fun in solving problems and writing code. This, to me, is on an independent axis from "amount of life-time consumed by coding".

<comment><USER3> I agree. But I think in this industry those two items are generally what employers mean by "passionate".

"Passionate", "have a GitHub profile," etc. are all signals that an employer wants someone who's life is consumed by coding and, ideally, coding for them (while being willing to tolerate tedium or terrible working conditions).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are not passionate about programming, you must keep looking for your passion. And take calculated risks. Life is too short to waste on doing something you don't love. Until I discovered my passion in electronics and programming, I hated going to school and consistently underperformed. Later I did better even at unrelated areas

Being a passionate programmer does not always translate well into regular programming jobs. I love programming but the processes and bureaucracy at a job always came in my way. Of course, some of the processes are necessary - but I am not passionate about processes. When my manager asked me to develop a cool-new-complex-feature-in-bleeding-edge-tech in 72 hours straight, without paying for overtime - I didn't care about overtime or insane work-hours. That kind of insanity is possible when one is passionate. However, if that happened frequently, I'd fire the company.

And you are absolutely right - _most_ companies that look for passionate programmers are just looking for unpaid overtime from less-experienced programmers. Companies looking for "Experts in XYZ" are much better.

<comment><USER5> Sorry don't buy passion in work arguement as an absolute.

This seems to be such a US-centric view. When doing business in US I notice typically usually within 10min of meeting a new person they tell you how they love their job. It feels like something Americans have to prove to show their worth to their company/role.

I like to think I'm good at my job but I dont have passion. I'd prefer to be out hiking, speding time with the family etc. But I have a sense of pride in getting results and doing things well. I see people who go down the passionate route, while effective in some areas blind themselves in others where they fail to see the bigger picture outside their passion area. Passion can be good, but it can also be damaging and should not be treated as this absolute requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Itamar. Great post. Given that work occupies a large majority of our lives, one should strive to be passionate about their work. That is the global ideal (global over the lifetime of a person). The local reality is that not all jobs throughout a career can sustain the same level of passion, and recognizing that goes a long way towards reconciling those periods of monotony. The post is applicable as well if one is working in a field that they have mentally exhausted but cannot yet afford to leave, or else in a new field for which passion can take time to build. Either way, both mentalities are important as long as people are not using their lack of passion as an excuse to slack off or deliver substandard work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Want to kill a passion? Turn it into a job.

Love playing video games? Play them competitively, or play as a QA tester.

Love working with wood? Add in deadlines, the overhead of running a business, and build what other people want built.

Love programming? Go work for a company who will throw so much process, politics, and idiotic requirements at you that you want to pull your hair out before writing a single line of code.

</comment><comment><USER8> The whole notion of being passionate about a skill or industry without any context regarding means or ends is odd to me. It's like saying you should be passionate about banking. Sure, maybe, if you're helping people purchase a home or save for college or whatever. No so much if you're participating in ripping off poor people or just participating in a soulless gambling contest. Anyone who makes simplistic arguments with no reference to reality is either a lazy thinker or actively trying to take advantage of you. Why listen to them?

</comment><comment><USER9> You really don't need to be a passionate programmer. However, passion will bring you much further when you have to work on something that's boring, tedious, or has no real end in sight.

<comment><USER3> I've never understood this attitude. Passion doesn't necessarily bring anything to the table here for everyone. Persistence I think is the word you're actually looking for.

For example, when I was in grad school my passion for the subject actually nose-dived as the quantity of tedium and endless iteration increased. It wasn't passion that carried me anywhere then. It was simple determination.

<comment><USER4> Persistence and Passion - both have value and both might result into the same thing

Passionate person's approach: > I'm looking for something I don't know. > This framework I read on HN looks cool. I have a busy day, but let me put aside my boring work and try this new framework > Let me create a NN in my own way -just for fun. I know libraries exist, but I still want to do it my way. > I'm bored - let me check HN (I don't remember that I checked it 30 mins back) > I wonder that I work so long and hard, but I don't achieve anything concrete (Scattered energies) > I reached goal XYZ because I was trying this and that. And then the dots connected and I had this eureka moment. And now I have 10K users (accidentally)

Persistence approach: > This is the goal I want to reach (The goal could be learning a new thing) > This is the plan that I need to follow. Or experiment with another plan if this doesn't work. > Don't reinvent the wheel, use the resources available (exception: re-inventing was a part of the goal) > I need to read HN twice a day and see if something I can add to my learning/todo- list. > I need to stay disciplined even if I don't like it (Focused) > I reached goal XYZ because I planned and strategized for acquiring 10K users.

Combination of both is necessary. Throughout my career, I have seen persistent people achieve more often. However, if passionate people achieve something it is significantly larger win (amidst very low probabilities)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You don't have to be a good swimmer in the ocean either, but if you have a specific goal, you might not reach it without. As an engineer, you have to have the passion to keep learning so, despite the confusion introduced by the (almost ephemerally tiny) article, I'll just disagree with the title on its face.

</comment><comment><USER11> The "passion" thing is not unique to the software industry. David Mitchell had a very good take on it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz2-49q6DOI)

</comment><comment><USER12> Agree with the post. But if you want to be amongst the best programmers, being passionate about your craft is a necessary condition.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is finding a good tech job like navigating through a maze these days?

You have to watch out for the most esoteric of traps.</comment>


Bray · What's New in Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/04/06/Yet-More-iPad <comment><USER2> I'm really going to disagree with one point and say hierarchical folders are the problem. Just look at how people deal with their desktop (hundreds of docs). People get search. If someone found a way to make tagging documents more intuitive then just search for content keywords, then there would be no contest.

The problem comes with shell users, how does a non-filesystem terminal session work? I'm can't get a clear visual right now.</comment>


Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://elizabethan.org/compendium/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> You may be right. I read the guidelines and to me it falls under "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". But that is debatable. It certainly isn't tech related. If I get many comments similar to your own, I will consider them when posting future links. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> While interesting, this post may be off-topic.</comment>


A Map of Every Tornado Since 1950 - <AUTHOR> http://www.weather5280.com/blog/2015/06/08/a-map-of-every-tornado-since-1950/

<comment><USER2> Looking for the effects of climate change in the USA, I compared the first decade in one browser tab with the most recent decade in another browser tab, omitting F0 tornadoes due to better observations in the most recent decade.

It appears that the likelihood of a tornado has increased for the Texas- Midwest States and diminished for the Eastern States.</comment>


Your Co-founder is Much More than Just a Business Partner - <AUTHOR> http://www.rishtal.com/post/29474760589/your-co-founder-is-much-more-than-a-business-partner

<comment><USER2> I've got lots of friends in tech startups (all programmers), and one thing I hear over and over again is how much they hate their cofounders.

A lot of the time, information like that isn't really made public through blogs and such, so reading articles like this which enumerate the ways in which your cofounder and yourself should get along are nice, as they help prevent issues in the future.

My current cofounder is great. We talk often, debate about various technical and non-technical topics, and keep each other interested in our projects and success.

I think more than anything, having a cofounder who can keep you interested in your work and daily struggles is the best kind, as motivation is one of the hardest resources to come by.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said! Thanks for reading and glad you could relate to the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Get comfortable with being uncomfortable" was the best advice I've heard. Precisely why we should team up with co-founders that push our boundaries and bring out the best in us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that is sound advice. It is easier said than done but the first step is to realize that and then face it. Thanks for reading! I appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Remembering the 35th Anniversary of the Mount St. Helens Eruption - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2015/05/18/remembering-the-35th-anniversary-of-the-mount-st-helens-eruption/

<comment><USER3> My older sister was in Spokane at the time. The airport was closed - <USER2> of miles from St. Helens. I asked her to bring me some ash. She scooped up a small bag full from grandma's front yard. I told small baggies of it at school for two bucks apiece.

I still have some.</comment>


Tencent replaces PUBG with a Chinese government-friendly alternative - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/08/tencent-pubg-game-for-peace/ <comment><USER2> The title name, Game for Peace is like straight out from Orwellian concept of double-think.

> The new Tencent title bears a striking resemblance to PUBG but there are no > dead bodies, while it plays up to a nationalist theme with a focus on > China's air force

It looks like the new title was 和平精英. not Game for Peace. Still, it sounds a lot like double-think.

<comment><USER3> Google Translate says "和平精英" means to "Peace Elite". Is that an accurate translation? I assume "Elite" in this context is a noun referring to elite soldiers?

<comment><USER4> Counter Strike was translated as 反恐精英, where 反恐 meams counter terrorism. I have no idea how these elite things came into play.

<comment><USER5> Will you laugh if I tell you the game Half-life in China is called literally "Half of Life" (半条命)[0]?

Don't take that name too seriously, I don't think there is anything to it other than to make it sound better.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half- Life_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_\(video_game\)) (Notice the language selection)

<comment><USER4> I laughed years ago.

It was less popular than Counter-Strike (which was acronymized as CS) in China when I was young. And I didn't bothered with the translation for years before I realized the correct one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> China is a threat to freedom everywhere.

I know games seem like a tiny thing, right? But it matters when a government suppresses freedom of expression, even when it comes to a silly video game.

China sees it as their prerogative to do whatever they want to their people, including, by the way, detaining hundreds of thousands without charges in re- education camps.

<comment><USER7> Related to Chinese game censorship:

1\. A game developed by Taiwanese studio, Devotion, has been removed from Stream by its developers due to a hiding meme about Xi Jinping founded by Chinese gamers earlier this year.[1]

2\. Still earlier this year, Chinese Overwatch players being instantly banned from the game for typing the words "Winnie the Pooh" in public chat.[2]

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18239937/taiwanese- horror...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18239937/taiwanese-horror-game- devotion-gone-steam-removed-winnie-the-pooh-meme-china)

[2] [https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/chinese-overwatch- players-...](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/chinese-overwatch-players-are- getting-permanently-banned-for-typing-winnie-the-pooh-in-chat-411037)

<comment><USER8> They should switch it up with the Winnie the pooh references.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So a game company removes one of their own games, and replaces it with a different version with a different name?

If the company decided to do that independently, does that matter? Maybe they could be capitalizing on nationalism?

If the government made them alter it, how would that be different than say Left 4 Dead having different censorship in Germany

<comment><USER10> This is the difference:

 _" In its place, Game for Peace is very much the type of game that will pass the demands of China's game censorship body."_

The idea being that consumers aren't the primary drivers for changes in what is available in the market. Rather this decision was primarily influenced by a central government body that controls what is available in the market. It's an explicit example of levers being pulled by the government in a planned economy, in contrast to a more "democratic" if you will, market mechanism.

<comment><USER11> FWIW, Left 4 Dead has different censorship in Germany because of levers being pulled by the government, not because the free market prefers it that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I do hope American companies begin to wise up and realize that though China may be one of the largest markets, it is essentially worth $0 to a foreign company. The Chinese government will not, repeat, will not allow a non-Chinese controlled company to win long term. In the short term a foreign company may be allowed to achieve some success but at the cost of IP; I'll leave out the ethical considerations.

Maybe the realpolitik suggests that companies should continue to try in China since the alternative is further isolation between China and the Western world which may hasten hostilities? I just can't fathom why a company like Google still wants to work in China, they'll make product and IP concessions to the Chinese government and will either lose Google China autonomy or be replaced wholesale by a Chinese company. Where is the shareholder value?

</comment><comment><USER13> The new version contains a small banner at the left corner for PLAAF(People's Liberation Army Air Force) recruitment. The old to new game process is just replacing the old PUBG application with the new one and the update process suggests that the maps are just modified by a little, mostly the same. Most of my old game data are migrated to the new game. My player level, guild, achievements, war record, old season battle records- hey, this is just another skin for the game to met the legal requirements like how the green blood works before!

</comment><comment><USER14> "The new Tencent title bears a striking resemblance to PUBG but there are no dead bodies, while it plays up to a nationalist theme with a focus on China's air force — or, per the Weibo message, "the blue sky warriors that guard our country's airspace" — and their battle against terrorists."

<comment><USER15> That's really weird because there are no aircraft in PUBG besides the plane that drops you off and the supply plane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this means the desktop version of PUBG is also banned in China now? There has been a big problem of cheaters in this game, and others like it, the majority of which are Chinese.

<comment><USER17> Yeah I never understood why they mix asian and western player populations together like that. There is obvious cultural differences, of course there is cheaters of all creeds, but I promptly stopped playing this game when the chinese flooded it. No fun in playing a team game whera A. You can't communicate with your teammembers, B. Your teammates will shoot you in the face the moment you get better stuff than they have. (Had chinese do this to me 4-6 times in one day).

Edit: removed inappropriate generalization.

<comment><USER18> Tell me, did it strike you at any point that generalizing Chinese players viewing you as just another generic white person might have some hint of the pot calling the kettle black?

<comment><USER19> I think it's not the same because they disregard the rules and refuse to communicate (at least that's my impression).

Unfair game is unfair game no matter what nation / race or skin color you are

<comment><USER18> Sure, I wasn't trying to suggest they were completely equivalent.

The fact that the parent was objecting to every member of a group of people treating all members of another group of people similarly struck me quite strongly when reading it, separate from the discussion about differences in culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cheating in PUBG is an economic result. It has nothing to do with Chinese people or Chinese culture. You can - or could - make real money farming digital goods in PUBG, and people in China have the bandwidth and computer hardware necessary to make a living doing it.

Cheats are a rational response to the idiotic "loot box" incentives that are popular with game companies that are only able to see 72 hours into the future.

</comment><comment><USER21> 和平精英 shouldn't be translated into Game for Peace, more like Peace-Keeping Elites (connoting an elite military force that will fight to achieve peace). Doublethink accusations in this thread are interesting - when I read the title I immediately knew it was a shooting / battle game. Maybe this is doublethink... maybe this is how Chinese words work, especially in a language where a character can mean 2 or more things.

Peacekeeping means they will fight right? Is it a doublethink to call the UN Peacekeeping force a peacekeeping force if they have guns and stuff?

I don't see any other links with the Chinese Airforce, aside from the Weibo shoutout to 空军招飞局 (Airforce recruiting) on the Weibo post.

<comment><USER22> I think a lot of what makes the game weird is the combination of fairly realistic characters with such obviously silly animation and gameplay. It's very counter to expectations and makes the game feel very sterilized, if they had gone for something more weird and stylized (like Splatoon) it wouldn't seem strange.

Also if they made a game about UN Peacekeepers shooting people and called it Peace-Keeping Elites it would still be pretty funny to a US audience. They they might be called Peacekeepers but if you made a game about them shooting people and called them that no one would miss the irony of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Last month, the country's State Administration of Press and Publication > released a series of demands for new titles, including bans on corpses and > blood, references of imperial history and gambling.

I guess Three Kingdoms Total War won't be available in the country it is based on...</comment>


Amazing Spider Robot with Organic Movement - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/100612175927429294541/posts/1Lw1ZMKa5Ma

<comment><USER2> Wow, the spider robot is realistic enough that my cat started slapping my iPad screen to squish it. Bravo!</comment>


The Truth About Research on Screen Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.dana.org/Briefing_Papers/The_Truth_About_Research_on_Screen_Time/ <comment><USER2> this was an absolutely fascinating read, and it made me question a lot of things I've heard. Like many others, I've heard mostly negative things about kids and video games over the years (almost always from mothers) and now research is showing that the opposite may be true.

Great article!</comment>


WysiScript: Programming via Direct Syntax Highlighting (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.zifyoip.com/wysiscript/sigbovik.html <comment><USER3> This is droll but I think it inadvertently makes a good point: we _should_ be using more aids like syntax highlighting for natural language.

Natural language is at least as hard to understand as artificial programming languages, and humans have (reluctantly) regularly improved the syntax highlighting of natural languages, by adding consonants, spaces, scores of punctuation marks, cases, and variant typefaces. (Consider trying to read something like ancient Hebrew in the original, written without spaces, consonants, punctuation, or lower vs uppercase - never mind italics or bolds!) Why don't we add more? Surely we did not invent the ultimate way of writing English around 1500 AD?

The primary distinction seems to be that computer languages are regular enough to be machine-annotated. If you had to hand-typeset every line of code, syntax highlighting would be used only in the rarest of CS publications. (Sort of like color-coding in equations: incredibly useful pedagogically, but also so difficult to do in HTML or TeX on top of actually writing the equations that only the occasional enthusiast or particularly-determined teacher will bother.) Natural language is such a major challenge to annotate simply by part-of-speech that you need to be a linguist to do so reliably. So naturally, no one ever does, and anyone who might want to is deterred by the fact that no one else does so readers won't understand or like it. (Beginning programmers are often confused or distracted by syntax highlighting as well.)

However, when you look at the best grammar/style checkers, or deep learning results on parsing natural language, it seems plausible that they've gotten good enough that something useful could be done with them...

<comment><USER4> > (Consider trying to read something like ancient Hebrew in the original, > written without spaces, consonants, punctuation, or lower vs uppercase - > never mind italics or bolds!

Semitic languages are legible without vowels. Modern Hebrew... not so much, due to its great influence from Standard Average European. This is a major problem in Israel today (people often depend on the English [really I should say Latin] transliteration to read Hebrew place names) and many Israeli linguists are advocating just switching to the Latin script. Which as a former student of Hebrew I support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who loves coding and design, this was a very fun read.

But in all seriousness, the visual design of code these days feels archaic. The only real "innovations" in the last 50 years of on-screen coding have been block indenting and syntax highlighting. (And arguably coding ligatures.)

Coders of the future might find our source code as clumsy and impenetrable as ancient writing before the inventions of punctuation, headings, spaces, arabic numerals, footnotes, etc...

I'm working on some ideas and playing with some prototypes. If anyone else is interested in the subject, give me a shout. <my username>@gmail.com.

</comment><comment><USER6> > This is why plain text is not executable—it lacks formatting. (This also > explains the lack of functionality in Microsoft Excel.)

The author is not alone in that observation. There's an incredibly high demand for _programming via formatting_ functionality in spreadsheets[0][1][2][3]. One can only wonder why no one has yet tapped into the huge market opportunity of supporting WysiScript in Excel or LO Calc.

[0] [https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/4477/sort-by- color/](https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/4477/sort-by-color/)

[1] [https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/46352/how-to- filter-...](https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/46352/how-to-filter-rows- using-row-color-in-libre-calc/)

[2] [https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/98321/need-to- sort-d...](https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/98321/need-to-sort-data-by- background-color-in-calc/)

[3] [https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/136705/hi-is- there-a...](https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/136705/hi-is-there-a- function-sort-or-filter-by-color-in-libreoffice-calc-if-not-is-there-a-hack- to-filter-cell-by-color-thanks/)

</comment><comment><USER7> There are some gems in the conclusion :)

> In this paper we introduced WysiScript, a formatting-based programming > language that streamlines the programming process by removing the awkward > necessity of writing text. We gave an overview of its main ideas and a tour > of its built-in features, demonstrated its simplicity and ease of use with > several examples, and proved rigorously that it is equally as powerful as > other languages and significantly more colorful.

> In particular, we believe it will appeal to many types of students who may > not have an interest in traditional text-based programming, including > painters, graphic designers, and the illiterate.

> An obvious limitation of WysiScript in its current form is the restriction, > imposed by the RGB color model, that a single program can have at most > 16,777,216 different user-defined variables and functions. This hinders the > use of WysiScript for census-taking in the Netherlands, for example, because > the Dutch population is 16,979,729. Future versions of the language may > relax this restriction by adding support for additional colors not > representable in RGB, such as ultraviolet, infrared, and plaid.

> In order to support quantum computing, which makes use of value > superposition and probabilistic algorithms, future versions of WysiScript > may make use of the alpha channel in color specifications.

</comment><comment><USER8> While this is obvious joke, I think there is speckle of a idea there too. For example string literals and comments could easily be distinguished only by formatting in the editor and do away with delimiters and especially escaping. Or it could allow more natural formatting of snake-case identifiers by having single continuous underline for the identifier.

I know rich text for code is not widely accepted concept, but I think there is potential there and not just for laughs.

<comment><USER9> The obvious middle ground is syntax that is clear to the compiler, easy for a user to write but harder for a reader to parse at a glance, aided by syntax coloring to make all obvious.

Many programming languages use indentation-based parsing, yet no language adopts the convention that left-justified is a comment, indented is code. I've used preprocessors for years that provide this for me, in languages such as Haskell. I only gave up to more quickly use other people's tools as I switched editors.

Despite using dozens of languages since, the bulk of my lifetime has been C. There's an increasingly lame argument justifying its awful use of punctuation to avoid whitespace significance: Code can be sent through pipes that poorly respect whitespace. My memories of C punctuation are ground glass in my eyes, yet many new languages try to look like C to better attract programmers suspicious of the unfamiliar.

Comment characters in any language are ground glass in my eyes. Syntax coloring can mute these characters, but they're still there. They don't need to be there; syntax coloring can instead emphasize what's a comment, what's not, after inferring from more subtle programmer cues.

I also removed parentheses from Lisp. I tried everything to wean myself from this, believing the experienced Lisp programmer's creed that "you'll get used to how the water tastes in this city!" Fonts where the parentheses are lighter, syntax highlighting where the parentheses largely disappear. Then I'd look back at my parenthesis-light Lisp code, and I'd realize I love reading it more than code in any other language I've ever seen. The truth is that parentheses are just the dumbest, most dated way to indicate trees to the compiler. Editor tools do just fine with far more subtle cues. Lisps have been on the wane for decades, and this is a profound intellectual loss. Lisp programmers insisting on talking an Algherese dialect of Catalan is one factor.

We need to recognize that our norms for programming language syntax predate the prevalence of modern editors, language servers, syntax highlighting. I'm 64, and it's profoundly embarrassing that we're not further along than I dreamed we'd be as a grad student in 1980. We all thought the future would come a lot faster. Tree editors that only create grammatically correct code, aided with machine learning prediction? We're creeping up on this, it should have been the norm decades ago.

Joke or not, designing languages with syntax coloring in mind is a great idea.

<comment><USER10> I expect you're familiar with Knuth's literate programming and notebook-style programming interfaces of Jupyter and Mathematica.

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

[https://jupyter.org/](https://jupyter.org/)

Re. Lispy langs, agree about improving readability of the actual words by visually deemphasising punctuation. So many key presses to say so little; only traditional C syntax beats it out.

(Alas, nothing can ameliorate C's swathes of needless line noise, except to stop making languages with C-style syntax. Baby steps.)

I don't quite agree about structure editors—if there's one thing 10,000 years of the written word should tell us it's that the writing part needs to be flexible. Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. It makes more sense for a code authoring tool to accept (and execute, within limits) the initial imperfectly constructed text, and from there negotiate edits and corrections with the author—a literal editor, if you like.

Another thing I'd like to see syntax highlighting do: provide multiple semantic views onto code beyond just crude grammatical categorization of words. Why can't I have a view that colors words according to the library they came from, or any other high-level categorization? e.g. Show me all the words that have side-effects or perform "dangerous" operations. Or distinguish all the words relating to string manipulation, or accounting, or UI.

Embarrassing? Honestly, it's painful the lack of innovation going on. While I'm gradually exploring some of this stuff in my own work, I really wish others would step up to the plate. I'm lazy and very slow, and would far rather smarter people do all the work so I can just enjoy the results.

<comment><USER6> > Why can't I have a view that colors words according to the library they came > from, or any other high-level categorization? e.g. Show me all the words > that have side-effects or perform "dangerous" operations.

This. Highlighting side-effects would be especially helpful in language where this isn't clear, like JavaScript. »`sort()` is red so it must be destructive.«

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Joke as it is, to me it makes an self-contradicting point. If you look at the top highlighted code, there's a l0t of stuff there that I don't think adds any value. I certainly know of no work that suggests the 'excesses' (my words) of colouring help.

My experience is that comment highlighting really do help, especially for commented-out code so you know it's dead, I'm much less sure about the rest.

#include is red - it's graphically visual enough for that not to help, plus #inbcludes almost always live at the top.

int and void are coloured another red, does that help? return is blue - <USER2> that help? Does colourising string literals help? I don't think so. Code ends up looking slightly gaudy, I don't feel that beyond a limited point it adds much.

Opinions?

</comment><comment><USER10> While I think that "paper" was probably funnier in its authors' heads, there is some actual precedence: Atlas Autocode used underlining to distinguish user-defined identifiers from the language's own keywords.

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

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://xkcd.com/2309/](https://xkcd.com/2309/)

<comment> jagged-chisel Mobile-friendly, accessible alt-text [https://m.xkcd.com/2309/](https://m.xkcd.com/2309/)

<comment><USER13> which came first - the xkcd or the HN post :D besides the original paper is with date 31 March, so was scheduled for april 1 release ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> kalium-xyz Is this in any way different from colorforth? [https://colorforth.github.io/](https://colorforth.github.io/)

<comment> one-more-minute See also Piet: [https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Piet)

<comment><USER14> Definitely closer to Piet than ColorForth. ColorForth only uses color to replace what would in Forth require the use of compiler meta words. Piet is a 2D language that uses the difference in color between two cells to encode its instructions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> cf. ColorForth: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJoRyxRcj4A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJoRyxRcj4A)

</comment><comment><USER16> (Dated one day before April 1)

</comment><comment><USER17> gave me a chuckle</comment>


Samsung Galaxy Note 5 former of Galaxy Note 7 customer reviews - <AUTHOR> https://feedcheck.co/blog/samsung-galaxy-note-5-former-of-galaxy-note-7-customer-reviews/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any suggestion helps us to offer interesting review analytics</comment>


Argo closes $2.6B round from VW at a $7.25B valuation - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/01/argo-closes-2-6-billion-round-from-vw-at-a-7-25-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> Obligatory reminnder on the long and lucrative mirage of driverless cars.

Good summary here by Rodney Brooks in AGI has been delayed:

[http://rodneybrooks.com/agi-has-been-delayed/](http://rodneybrooks.com/agi- has-been-delayed/)</comment>


Turning Out The Lights: Splashcast - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2009/08/06/turning-out-the-lights-splashcast/

<comment><USER2> They had $4MM to prove they could make it work. That's a heck of a lot more than a lot of other people get. The VCs are probably smart not to invest more in this case.</comment>


Secret Passage Dating to 1660 Is Found Inside U.K. Parliament - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/world/europe/uk-parliament-secret-door.html <comment><AUTHOR> whoops, Discussion on earlier BBC post here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22421365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22421365)</comment>


A Gentle Guide to Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.monkeylearn.com/a-gentle-guide-to-machine-learning/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, just posted a brief guide to Machine Learning for beginners, comments are welcome!</comment>