Programming thread

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Is it possible to own a website anonymously in this day and age? Basically, can you register a domain, get webhosting, and get ddos protection without having to give personal information and not having to worried about companies dropping support for your website?

AWS with prepaid credit card?

 

[y a t s]

There ain't anything a programming boot camp can teach you that you can't teach yourself for free. If you pay for a programming boot camp, you're automatically giving everyone in the universe a giant target on your back that says "I HAVE AUTISM, PLEASE LAUGH AT ME."

Also, trying to monetise your self-taught programming skills is a bad idea. 9/10, the labour you would provide by programming would be significantly cheaper if it was outsourced to India or Bangladesh. Oh, you taught yourself COBOL and Fortran so that big institutional banks will have an excuse to hire you? That don't mean jack shit because you only know how to write code; you have absolutely fuck-all for experience in maintaining that code (much less a decades-old code base that's double your age). That's not even getting into how all the recent institutional bankruptcies are making big tech companies change their hiring priorities to weed out the self-taught script kiddies looking to make high 5, low 6 figures off a job they barely know how to do.

There was a time where programming was a lucrative field that literally any rube could get into and make a fortune. Unfortunately, that time was long before you and I were legal adults looking for our first "real" jobs. While the barrier to entry is still phenomenally low, the sad reality is that programming for profit is a fool's errand due to how fucking oversaturated the job market is. Monetising your programming ability is like trying to put Microsoft Office on your CV... I mean, it made sense a decade and change ago, but now it's basically an implicit prerequisite for literally anything.

All of this is painfully true. My uncle got into programming jobs back in the late 90s with a barebones 3 year college program and he currently makes well over $100k.

Any entry level job will have to be Pajeet friendly, so having actual knowledge in low-level languages, memory management, efficiency, etc. is useless until you can get a higher level role in the company. This means building up years of listable experience, all while the job market for programmers continues to be oversaturated with imported "talent" until it collapses from the collective mediocrity.

It's the wonderful way of academia where you just need something to run once and then hopefully never have to touch it again. Nobody cares about readability or maintainability.

R is especially bad because it seems like nobody knows how or when to create functions, so everything's just a bunch of copy-pasted code with slight changes.

It's a shame, really. They are genuinely smart guys and they can clearly reason quite well in formal proofs.

Back when I was taking stats courses, my R solutions were always a fraction of the size of my friends' solutions. Most people don't realize that programming is 30% writing code and 70% reading docs, so many are oblivious to the fact that the thing they wasted 2 hours on could have been done in 3 lines if they made clever use of the way built-in functions behave, such as what happens when an input is 0.

 

[Overly Serious]

Is it possible to own a website anonymously in this day and age? Basically, can you register a domain, get webhosting, and get ddos protection without having to give personal information and not having to worried about companies dropping support for your website?

Anonymous from the general public? Yes, just about I think. Whois entries can be private.

Anonymous from the powers that be? Tough one. Maybe if you pick your hosting country carefully and register the domain there it's possible. I wouldn't be confident though.

If it were possible or if you find that it is, let me know - because I would have put up a very nice little hosted service to manage the KiwiFarms Secret Santa last year and this behind the scenes.

 

[y a t s]

Is it possible to own a website anonymously in this day and age? Basically, can you register a domain, get webhosting, and get ddos protection without having to give personal information and not having to worried about companies dropping support for your website?

I host my personal sites with Incognet and pay with XMR. They have no clue who I am nor do they have any desire to find out. They do domain names, but I have no idea if they ask for personal information to register those. Worst case, Tor addresses are always free.

 

[sadrefrigerator]

Is it possible to own a website anonymously in this day and age? Basically, can you register a domain, get webhosting, and get ddos protection without having to give personal information and not having to worried about companies dropping support for your website?

No, you have to have your information when registering a domain. Most domestic registrar have a privacy option where they have a buffer between your info and the whois, but I think they can find who you are eventually

 

[Agent Sandoval]

Is it possible to own a website anonymously in this day and age? Basically, can you register a domain, get webhosting, and get ddos protection without having to give personal information and not having to worried about companies dropping support for your website?

Off TOR? In the current year? Not really, or at least nothing I know of that would have the kind of resilience you're asking about. Anything which does have those properties will be abused by scammers and will be shut down in relatively short order as a result.
Depending on what you wanted to host there at least was an anonymous option. When I was learning there were little tech collectives that would pop up from time to time. Some tech enthusiast would slap a server together, buy a domain and provision a subdomain and server space for friends/interesting projects/noobs.

 

[emergenigger]

If you pay for a programming boot camp, you're automatically giving everyone in the universe a giant target on your back that says "I HAVE AUTISM, PLEASE LAUGH AT ME."

I wouldn't say autism but rather laziness. If you really insisted on self-taught and had a handful of self-motivation, you could *easily*
learn to program yourself in almost every language that isn't purely functional or object-oriented.
However, what these courses will NOT teach you is that your programming skills do scale with time and effort spent into learning algorithms,mathematics and/or whatever technical knowledge you might attain.

Having said that, free access stuff from EDX really helped me a lot even in my freshman year in CS/IT. Paying for it pays off quite literally as you retain the access to the course materials later, even though they are mostly available on OCW.

Any of you guys know much about those bootcamps that guarantee a job if you pass? I know they're going to skim over practically all the important back end stuff but I'm willing to learn that on my own if I can get a paying job and experience on file sooner than later.

qrd just get a degree if you're living in a country with free higher-ed

Spoiler

As a direct answer to your question, I do know of ONE Cybersec (not programming) bootcams that offered me a job right away after getting like a 100% mark on their sorting test.
However, it's an Israeli company that was recruiting people to work with both the private and/or public sector (literal fucking feds).

Nothing is for free, don't trust bootcamp tards, in this specific example I'd have sold my soul to the glowies

 

[y a t s]

However, what these courses will NOT teach you is that your programming skills do scale with time and effort spent into learning algorithms,mathematics and/or whatever technical knowledge you might attain.

This is something I have been preaching for years with limited success.

I remember seeing a video when I was very young about some pro Quake players, and something that always stuck with me was one guy saying something like "Practice. It's the only way to get good." This truly applies to everything. I taught myself everything I know about computer science just from stumbling my way through personal projects, and this extends to nearly every other useful skill I have. I believe people see having talent as an escape from the initial hurdle that everyone faces when trying something new. A great example of this is making music; you can have a good sense of rhythm and pitch, and it certainly helps, but the technical skill and genuine proficiency can only be attained through hundreds to thousands of hours of practice. It is easy to say you lack innate talent to avoid feeling the sting of failure when trying something new. Schooling just forces one to put in the hours, along with having some guidance.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

This is something I have been preaching for years with limited success.

I remember seeing a video when I was very young about some pro Quake players, and something that always stuck with me was one guy saying something like "Practice. It's the only way to get good." This truly applies to everything. I taught myself everything I know about computer science just from stumbling my way through personal projects, and this extends to nearly every other useful skill I have. I believe people see having talent as an escape from the initial hurdle that everyone faces when trying something new. A great example of this is making music; you can have a good sense of rhythm and pitch, and it certainly helps, but the technical skill and genuine proficiency can only be attained through hundreds to thousands of hours of practice. It is easy to say you lack innate talent to avoid feeling the sting of failure when trying something new. Schooling just forces one to put in the hours, along with having some guidance.

I wonder if modern education would be better having students do big projects about subjects rather than learning parts piecemeal with no real examples when those parts actually apply to real life problems. In CS it's especially notable.

 

[Flabba Wabba Jabba]

I personally couldn't figure out how to make it work properly.
And the time and effort spent configuring it probably is the same as just setting up a regular backend.

What do you mean make it work properly? As in self-host? If so I've also had some issues getting one of the containers up and running in a production environment. But the actual process of getting a new project up and running quickly with a postgres db is sweet.

 

[King Of The Kiwis]

Hey guys Im learning node right now and ive been using alot of "async" ,"await" ,and "fetch" but its kind of confusing. Ive done research and apparently "async" is syntactic sugar for something called "promises". Should I learn promises first before continuing with "async" or is "async" a replacement for "promises".

 

[sadrefrigerator]

Hey guys Im learning node right now and ive been using alot of "async" ,"await" ,and "fetch" but its kind of confusing. Ive done research and apparently "async" is syntactic sugar for something called "promises". Should I learn promises first before continuing with "async" or is "async" a replacement for "promises".

I say you should know both, but usually people learn promises both.

Personally, I prefer async await Everytime, but I think it varies by person.

 

[Kosher Salt]

Learn both. Sometimes you have to create your own promise. E.g.

function delay(ms) {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        setTimeout(resolve, ms);
    });
}

Here I'm creating an async delay function that relies on setTimeout for timing. setTimeout isn't an async function though, it's a callback function. So I have to create a new promise, and in the callback I resolve the promise.

Now you can use await delay(n) or delay(n).then(...) just like a regular async function, since it returns a promise.

 

[Scale Smerch]

Already mentioned but definitely both. Async await is simply a glorified wrapper for promises, so if you don't understand how promises work you're going to get incredibly confused when an async await inevitably breaks (especially for race conditions) or the compiler starts complaining.

In general you shouldn't need to interact with promises directly outside of creating custom ones as Kosher Salt mentions, but knowing how they work is one small thing separating a good programmer from a Pajeet.

 

[The Ugly One]

There ain't anything a programming boot camp can teach you that you can't teach yourself for free. If you pay for a programming boot camp, you're automatically giving everyone in the universe a giant target on your back that says "I HAVE AUTISM, PLEASE LAUGH AT ME."

Programming boot camp teaches you how to pass leetcode tests, which you need to do in order to get hired at the FAANGs. Seasoned industry veterans with laundry lists of patents can't get hired at Amazon if they can't pass a leetcode test, while a midwit Pajeet who has drilled on hundreds of palindrome sorting problems will get hired to a $250K/yr job. They're actually very useful if you want to make a lot of money and accept that the FAANGs are not actually looking for really smart people.

 

[std::string]

I wonder if modern education would be better having students do big projects about subjects rather than learning parts piecemeal with no real examples when those parts actually apply to real life problems. In CS it's especially notable.

The college I went to required a capstone project for CS, though it was something more on the scale of creating a new filesystem for MINIX rather than trying to add new features to a gargantuan poorly written codebase. The latter would likely be more useful from a vocational perspective.

Programming boot camp teaches you how to pass leetcode tests, which you need to do in order to get hired at the FAANGs. Seasoned industry veterans with laundry lists of patents can't get hired at Amazon if they can't pass a leetcode test, while a midwit Pajeet who has drilled on hundreds of palindrome sorting problems will get hired to a $250K/yr job. They're actually very useful if you want to make a lot of money and accept that the FAANGs are not actually looking for really smart people.

I've said it before but I honestly think the dumb hiring practices are by design. They really want those H-1B employees and Pajeets are the only ones willing to sit there and grind the fuck out of leetcode for 18 hours a day hoping to escape Mumbai.

 

[DavidS877]

I've said it before but I honestly think the dumb hiring practices are by design. They really want those H-1B employees and Pajeets are the only ones willing to sit there and grind the fuck out of leetcode for 18 hours a day hoping to escape Mumbai.

Too many non-technical managers think: I can hire 10 pajeets for this project and save money over 10 actual programmers.

What they don't understand is they still need actual programmers to fix the shit the pajeets write, and if they simply omitted the pajeets they'd probably still save money and time by just a hiring a couple extra smart people.

Being half the cost per person doesn't save anything if it takes them twice as long and you need twice as many of them.

 

[std::string]

Being half the cost per person doesn't save anything if it takes them twice as long and you need twice as many of them.

Middle management doesn't seem to be graded on this metric.

Can you save money for the company in the span of one quarter by firing everyone and replacing them with Pajeets with ChatGPT4? Yay!

 

[Creative Username]

Middle management doesn't seem to be graded on this metric.

Can you save money for the company in the span of one quarter by firing everyone and replacing them with Pajeets with ChatGPT4? Yay!

That's their problem. It's really funny whenever a corpo gets fucked entirely due to its own cost-saving measures; an example being whenever security-critical files are left on unauthenticated AWS storage instances, as pajeets love to do.

Edit: maybe less funny if you're one of the people using that service...

 

[The Ugly One]

I've said it before but I honestly think the dumb hiring practices are by design. They really want those H-1B employees and Pajeets are the only ones willing to sit there and grind the fuck out of leetcode for 18 hours a day hoping to escape Mumbai.

The dumb hiring practices were created to filter out absolute mouth-breathers while the FAANGs were growing at breakneck speed, but now that they're huge, they're entrenched in policy, and it's not like they're losing money, so it's not worth the trouble to change them.