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Ask HN: What should I study at HackerSchool?

• SparrowOS 14y ago
  I wish the term, "hacker", was limited to people who get unauthorized access. That's what I think of. I see it as derogatory. A kludge can be a hack, too. A hack is a unprofessional or incorrect way to do something. The enemy is busy fucking with words. God says... C:\Text\DARWIN.TXT cies through the aid of insects, and have probably been gained through natural selection. No one until lately would have imagined that in dimorphic and trimorphic plants the different lengths of the stamens and pistils, and their arrangement, could have been of any service, but now we know this to be the case. In certain whole groups of plants the ovules stand erect, and in others they are suspended; and within the same ovarium of some few plants, one ovule holds the former and a second ovule the ----- Some people bitterly resent "pirate" as a term. I don't have sympathy for piracy, now that God talks. Go ahead and explain to God. He is just -- you suffer for doing it. God says... C:\Text\YANKEE.TXT ed Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was to get a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur's death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike--at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who at middle age should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age--that is to say, forty--and I believed that in that time I could easily have the ac
• tom_b 14y ago
  Congratulations on heading to HackerSchool! A and B seem mutually exclusive to me these days. You seem to have an interesting (and not necessarily narrow) skillset, so don't sweat "broadness" much. The greatest number of opportunities are probably in enterprise Java or C# and I would feel bad recommending you use HackerSchool for that unless that is personally compelling to you. For B, I scanned your webpage. You have a short posting on predictions. I have this theory that I intend to more fully explore that building up a real strong background in stats and applied modeling would be a superpower. The applied part might be great fun at HackerSchool. Maybe tackle something with Clojure and Incanter. Or really push your Python chops. If you feel like you really want or need to build your foundations, maybe you could take a book like Concept, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming and grind through. I wish my formal CS education had spent at least a year doing a kind of "paradigms of programming" path, studying functional and logic programming deeply. Ask around about this, I often think that doing this with one or two others would be better than alone. I feel like I'm writing this comment to myself. Hopefully it's at least somewhat helpful to you.
  • mkrecny 14y ago
    Tom - you're certainly not writing to yourself. Thank you so much :-)
• jyu 14y ago
  A is something HackerSchool can answer, given that they are paid by startups to recruit (https://www.hackerschool.com/faq https://www.hackerschool.com/faq). In addition, the participants range greatly in experience, so you can a lot more datapoints there. B. There are different types of 'becoming powerful'. Given that you are self-taught, you may want to identify and fill some holes in your knowledge. Maybe you could go through SICP, Algorithms, learn about functional programming in scala, etc. I would personally try to find something really challenging to learn on your own that I've really wanted to learn for a long time. On your website, you mention doing predictions with twitter. Maybe you could go deeper into AI / machine learning. I'm currently going through Algorithms, and it's been a really frustrating / rewarding / mind bending time, and it's definitely shown in my code. Powerful in the sense of creating new and innovating things seems to come more from ideology / beliefs than from using a specific programming language or framework. You might want to read more into Bret Victor and Richard Reynman if you haven't already. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle comes to mind: http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366 Richard Feynman's approach to research problems is also really enlightening. Have 10-20 hard problems floating in your head, and as you go about your day, reading, looking, exploring, match everything against those problems to see if you can make any progress on them.
  • mkrecny 14y ago
    Jyu, Thanks, that's a really awesome response. I'm grepping through the Victor article now. All the best.