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Comment by andrewparker | Hacker News Reader

A brief Sam Altman story:

Back when I was in college, I decided to be an RA for a Freshman dorm during my Junior year. Two of my freshman in my dorm were Sam Altman and Blake Ross. We took a class together called Internet Technologies (CS191i).

Our first assignment was to build a VERY rudimentary web browser in Perl; all it did was, open a socket, accept and validate a URL as input, and print out the result of a GET request from a web server. The creator of Firefox was assigned "build a web browser" as homework!

Needless to say, both Sam and Blake dropped out of school before the end of their Sophomore year.

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How is this a Sam Altman story?

There is a weird disparity between the programmers I read on the internet and the programming students I know in real life. The programmers I read on the internet are self-taught, have side projects, and are intimidating. The programming students I know in real life are college-taught, generally don't have side projects, and aren't intimidating.

I think I belong to the second group more than the first. Should I switch to a different major? Or is there a place in the world for programmers who aren't hackers?

As a third option, someone might have some magical "how to become a hacker" advice that I haven't already read.

I don't quite know what you mean by hacker - do you just mean you haven't worked on stuff on the side? As for intimidating - I don't know if I've ever met a hacker in real life that really seemed intimidating. A lot of people develop a sort of persona online, either because they think they're cool or because they're so flooded with work that they simply don't have time to talk to every single person they meet. So the more that you do, the more mail you get from people, and the harder it is to respond to them, and the more it seems like you're exclusive and therefore intimidating.

Don't switch majors because of other people. Switch if you don't like what you're doing. Do you really like programming, exploring code or at the very least making that code work? If so, there's bound to be a place for you. As for "becoming" a hacker: again, try not to look at other people. The path to people having ideas and making projects is always a bit askew and twisted. If you ever want a side project, go ahead and start one. Get your hands dirty. The more you do, the wiser you get. But don't feel like it's a necessity.

Also remember that lots of college students are just learning to code. The self-taught kids have a few years' advantage in a lot of situations. That doesn't necessarily make them better (though a lot more of them have an aptitude for the subject matter). It's certainly possible to get into programming late in your career and still turn it into something meaningful.

By "hacker" I mean someone who has the compulsive curiosity for programming that some of you seem to have. And by "intimidating" I mean they seem like they might be much better programmers than me. (Hence virtual experience is just as good an indicator as real-world experience.)

Not everybody here is a compulsive programmer. I'm not a particularly good programmer myself: my focus is more on designing and building things that don't exist already. That's the great thing about the industry: it's so huge that you can focus on one of any number of things and still find success at what you do.

Well what else did he expect?

I think you mean CS 193i. It's fairly well known that the CS 193x series are all "easy", non-intensive, non-academic courses designed to teach something useful (there's "high-performance websites", "internet technologies", "iphone programming", "client-side internet technologies", etc.) They have very few if no prereqs other than perhaps some programming experience.

And the point of that assignment wasn't to "build a browser". It's to introduce the students to sockets and HTTP. Just what you'd expect for CS 193i.

There's classes for this stuff at Stanford!?

Then what do you do with your free time?

There's classes for many many things at Stanford as there are at many other schools. Internet technologies etc happen to be among them and they happen to be offered under the CS department (which is probably the most appropriate one). The CS193x change from year to year I think, I remember there was a CS193j (programming in java) at one point but it seems to be gone now.

They are not required courses for the CS degree. IIRC I don't think they can even count toward any of the CS degree requirements themselves. You do get credit for them though and you need a certain number of credits to graduate regardless of major.

So basically you take them if you're interested in them and would prefer to learn about them in a classroom environment.

There are also golf and windsurfing classes.

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