skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I also left academia after a math PhD. Though in my case, my area was numerical linear algebra, and I entered the aerospace engineering field. A lot of what I was working on was immediately relevant, but I would say only a fraction of what became my dissertation would be counted among it.
Telstra free data day sees mobile users download 1,841 terabytes
I have a pet language, in which `f.g(x)` is merely syntax sugar over `{typename of f}_g(f, x)`. It's a combination of two ideas - the colon operator for method calls in lua, and extension methods from C# &c.

I think this debate is a small part of a larger one about unified namespaces, and for functions in particular. There's no good reason for a named function to coexist with a like-named function variable. Javascript gets this a right by having `function f` largely equivalent to `var f = function`.

I'm impressed that C++ continues to evolve 37 years later. It's a stark contrast to, say, the Go 1 Compatibility Promise.
The Clang AST – A Tutorial
lol .. It's still pretty shocking. I know lots of programmers, including some that used to write lots of Perl, and none of them are still working on it. Those job numbers are crazy.
When I asked in high school what math was for to some professors, they said it was more to 'improve your thinking' than to use it in 'real life'.
Now, a math course designed to be progressively easy to grasp, personalized when needed, entertaining and showing lots of examples from real life (e.g. relating algebra with 3d and video games) requires a very talented educator; teaching well is really hard and usually there's not enough time or resources to do it. That's why I think one of the most important skills to develop is to learn how to learn.
> Few professors tell you what are they doing and why; they just throw formulas, theorems and symbols at you.

That's not true. Proofs are a core process of all mathematics. Writing proofs can take up a majority of your time in some classes.
Ahh I'm sad. I really wanted x.f(y) to find f(x,y). Then std::algorithm and ranges would combine to make sweet linq-like filter/map operations.
It's not meant to compete with Python as a glue language. The point is that you can start using Julia right now and be productive by calling other languages' libraries to fill in the holes.
This happens to me all the time. I have a very popular illustrated post on Monads titled "Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Pictures"[1]. When I wrote it I thought it was the best monad guide ever. Now, reading back, I can see that some parts are confusing. I still see a lot of people liking it, but three years later I wish some parts of it were better.

[1] http://adit.io/posts/2013-04-17-functors,_applicatives,_and_...
Facebook search is broken, twitter search works much better.
Ah, I see. This is actually one of my favorite features of ido-find-file. I love the fact that I can treat the current path section I'm writing as independent of the path I've already navigated to. To each their own.
With respect, this appears to me a content-free reply. Greenwald is making a serious argument in the article I quoted from. Are you being dismissive of the argument or (as it would appear) the source, the author. If the latter, maybe you can more fully explain why and also why dismissing the source dismisses the argument.
It sounds to me like Ackman has made the right bet, just ten years too late. I remember researching Herbalife a lot back in 2002, off the back of these excellent articles by Rob Cockerham [1], and it definitely appeared as immoral as the Amway businesses I'd researched at the time as well.

I don't fully 'believe' the figures presented by Herbalife in this report, about returns, purchasers from outside the network etc. BUT it certainly seems that the business model and culture has dramatically shifted under Michael Johnson.

Had Ackman shorted this in 2002 not 2012 [2], I suspect his accusations would have stuck and he may well have prompted the FTC to improve their MLM guidelines. He may ultimately do us all a disservice by making all anti-MLM activists appear to be arrogant and greedy.

[1] http://www.cockeyed.com/workfromhome/workfromhome.html

[2] Which wasn't an option, because 1) it was privately held at that time (or thereabouts), and 2) Ackman was recovering from his previous fund's collapse.
Some of his characterizations are timeless riffs on politics, religion and science, e.g. these passages are relevant to modern entertainment and transhumanism, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601101h.html

"… music had a special significance for this race. So intense was their experience of it, that they were ready to regard it as in some manner the underlying reality of all things. In leisure hours, snatched from a toilful and often tragic life, groups of peasants would seek to conjure about them by song or pipe or viol a universe more beautiful, more real, than that of daily labour. Concentrating their sensitive hearing upon the inexhaustible diversity of tone and rhythm, they would seem to themselves to be possessed by the living presence of music, and to be transported thereby into a lovelier world. No wonder they believed that every melody was a spirit, leading a life of its own within the universe of music. No wonder they imagined that a symphony or chorus was itself a single spirit inhering in all its members. No wonder it seemed to them that when men and women listened to great music, the barriers of their individuality were broken down, so that they became one soul through communion with the music.

… It was amongst the rebel peoples that the biological interest of the race, hitherto subordinate, came into its own. Mating, at least among the more devout sort of women, began to be influenced by the desire to have children who should be of outstanding musical brilliance and sensitivity. Biological sciences were rudimentary, but the general principle of selective breeding was known. Within a century this policy of breeding for music, or breeding "soul," developed from a private idiosyncrasy into a racial obsession. It was so far successful that after a while a new type became common, and thrived upon the approbation and devotion of ordinary persons. These new beings were indeed extravagantly sensitive to music, so much so that the song of a sky-lark caused them serious torture by its banality, and in response to any human music of the kind which they approved, they invariably fell into a trance. Under the stimulus of music which was not to their taste they were apt to run amok and murder the performers."
I use a Kindle and it makes little to no difference at all. If you need you can edit a book in epub format and calibre converts it to mobi seamlessly in little to no time.
I think they're an indication that people find something interesting, which is often because it's novel.
To be clear: my issue (and in fact, most peoples' issues) are not with the Knight Foundation. In fact, they appear to have been above board in every way in this whole debacle. It is the WMF board who are the problem here.

See my comment here for just a few comments on this issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101262

Frankly, there's a lot more - to understand the issue better you might want to read Liam Wyatt's blog posts:

http://wittylama.com/2016/01/08/strategy-and-controversy/

and here:

http://wittylama.com/2016/01/30/strategy-controversy-part-2/
Funny that, I also did the same exact thing this month for org-mode. I never missed Vim.
So you only work on things purely under threats and external pressure? Let's hope no one ever has to work with you.

Granted, no one really does anything without considering the possibility of that thing causing them to go six feet under, but you've stated that the only motivation to do anything ever, to decrease the local entropy around yourself even one bit, is under the threat of death.

Are you not aware how unhealthy, conformist, tool-like of a life-philosophy this is?

(Also, you don't need to exactly buy into all this startup cult shit and work your ass off from the beginning, just do anything that makes you more money than you put in. I know this is obvious but judging from most people like you, you need that dose of reality)
Except the occasional mix in place, they are essential double check against doctors' errors.
The Effort to Build the Hyperloop
I used vim for 20 years before switching to emacs. I'd actually tried switching twice. Firt time with viper (I think), which didn't have good enough vim emulation. Second time evil-mode finally convinced me to switch completely.

Then I ran in to the same issue as you, that a lot of emacs modes had native emacs keybindings. So what I wound up doing was re-binding those to be more vim-like. I didn't rebind everything, just the things I most used, and it's worked great for me. I'm still a happy emacs user.

It did help that I already knew lisp and scheme, so getting up to speed with elisp was relatively painless. And it helped a lot that at the time I made the switch I was out of work and had a ton of free time on my hands. Don't think I would have been able to do it without that time, as it did take a ton of time to customize emacs enough to compete with the vim setup I had cobbled togather over 20 years.

It was totally worth it for me. But I'm not sure I'd recommend it to every veteran vim user, unless they have lots of time on their hands. On the other hand, I've heard that Spacemacs has a lot of sane defaults for vim users. So maybe Spacemacs+evil is the answer. I haven't tried it myself yet, since I have a ton of custom vim bindings of my own in emacs now, and very little free time to experiment these days.
If it's not broken, don't muck around with it.

Though I think the Apple bar is starting to show its age with higher resolution screens becoming popular. With the latest macs, moving the cursor all the way across the screen is a bit tedious. Apple seemingly introduced wonky mouse acceleration to solve this, but it seems like they've introduced an extra problem.
I totally agree with this. I think the Python community is becoming increasingly aware that this is the next major fix. I thinking 3-4 years before we see it, but we need to stay vigilant and make sure it happens.
Citing this example isn't very convincing.

Would be more interesting to know what language he uses when he finishes his Ph.D.
I am curious, how would you assess the readability of my code:

http://github.com/EGreg/Platform

I kind of developed that style organically as I went along, in both PHP and JS.

I tried to make the output readable as well. I've seen many frameworks output a bunch of gibberish, but with today's bandwidth it's not such a big deal to add a little bit of whitespace and make everything readable. Here's a fairly complex application, you can view the source of any page:

http://qbixstaging.com/Groups/
You mean, a Ford PR agent is submarining an article for the NYT to parrot without disclosure.
Math is twiddling with formal systems, and discovering how they behave, Some of it has uses, some doesn't, and some of what presently doesn't will in the fullness of time result in further islands of usefulness, as yet not even imagined. But ultimately, it needs no more justification than orchestral music.
Can I ask my question here?

I saw somewhere that you adjusted for cosmological redshift.

Did you also adjust for gravitational redshift as the gravity wave left the gravity well of the black holes?

What about time dilation of the wave signal caused by gravity and orbital velocity?
A slightly leaner object model with a fast runtime would make it perfect.
First, taking a break is probably the most important. If you're burned out, don't underestimate the need for healing by just relaxing. If you can't afford to take a long break (no savings, etc), find a really easy job where you don't need to think much.

Honestly, the most relaxing job of my life was when I was lifting and restacking wood in a shipping warehouse. The lumber would come in on these big trucks, but they'd be stacked in a way where they couldn't fit optimally into shipping containers. So we were responsible for literally manually restacking the wood into stacks that would fit. I got to joke around with my co-workers, and the work was great exercise too. Heck, I even poohed better due to all the heavy lifting in that job. Every day, I'd go home exhausted, but happy, and have a really great night's sleep. I felt like I did an honest day's hard work and there was no debate about whether or not I was succeeding at my job too.

Don't think that you're going to get away from tech forever yet. You might find later that you really actually still like it, but you just aren't in a good place right now, so it's hard to distinguish what your emotions really mean. Or maybe you are completely done with tech. Take some time to heal and rest first for a few months, and then ask the question again.

I like jacquesm's blog posts on this subject, in the first one listed, he actually personally experiences and deals with similar questions: http://jacquesmattheij.com/categories/health

edit: Thought. If you can afford it, something like Habitat for Humanity is a great way to get that type of physical exercise, and also give back and feel like you're contributing to a worthy cause. I think it gives us warm fuzzy feelings when we're doing something for the greater good, and that helps. Heck, you might become good at it and discover that you'd rather be in construction, who knows? Again, if you can't afford it, I recommend finding a simple job where you can turn your brain off and just do stuff, preferably with a physical component.
I start emacs once every few weeks, and that's mainly just to do a reset when I finish a project or get to a safe point and want to get a clean slate. The startup time for Emacs is never an issue for me.
"Public Curation" doesn't make quality. It makes a mob-rule system where only the most popular ideas flourish.
This is a long shot because I don't know where you live, and only have HN as my source of widespread info on tech careers. But if you're in SV or somewhere like that, maybe you'd be happier in a more provincial setting. You might be able to find an employer with a more laid back environment, and a slower paced lifestyle, more access to the great outdoors, etc.

I did something similar, a couple decades ago: Pulled up stakes and moved to a town that was listed as a "best place to live," with a similar climate to where I grew up, etc. Best decision I ever made.
This is fairly interesting. Postgres has a lot of momentum going on. I guess there's not stopping someone from building a better neo4j on top of it.
I am financing a $10 project to rival Tesla.
Oh that's good to hear. I was getting a distinct "Flowers For Algernon" vibe from the title :)
From a societal perspective, is it better for us to go after one person who stole $100,000,000, or million people who stole $100?

I really like the cross section though. Currently conservatives seem to be obsessed about cracking down on welfare fraud.
Its quite good actually. Problem with monads is that no tutorial will make them less confusing. But writing code that does useful stuff with them builds the intuition.

I now question the need to fully understand sometimes why not use libraries as per example and cargo cult a little to build up intuition. Then later get a more formal understanding.
> Smartphones outsell computers 5 to 1 and for the next billion smartphone users a smartphone will be their first computer.

Nice strawman. This was not at all my point. It's not because something gets market recognition that it's fundamentally new in itself. Most of the time it's simply because the way it's packaged or marketed is more attractive.
Google's advantage isn't just that they were first, or that their algorithm is the best- it's the CPU resources they have available to keep their data updated faster.

Search for any news item and you'll have all articles published more than 2 minutes ago included in your results, all blog posts, everything. They consume it all, and offer the output in near-real-time.

Wikimedia don't have the resources to do that. And they especially won't without advertising to pay for it.
Indeed, and morale at the WMF office is pretty damn low. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154689170123475&se... for an example.
Because F-Droid only indexes open source software and lists the license. On the play store, who knows what state the source is in for a given app.
CppCon 2015 was also the site of the first formal meeting of SG14, the game developer study group of the C++ standards committee. Michael Wong has just announced that it will meet again at CppCon 2016: https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/?fromgroups#!to...
When you are using a particular method that is required by the context of your work rather than code you have control over. Perhaps the method name in the framework you are using is non obvious, or there is a bug in the way it works.

Sometimes comments are just to save future you some time or help other developers find context.

Suffice to say any project of significant complexity will probably require comments at some point. That complexity can come from the code, the task, the stakeholders or the dependencies.

Unless you are happy with a method name like getSimpleProductInstanceThroughCoreFactoryBecause ModuleRewriteWillBreakCompatibilityWithSecurity PatchSUPEE5523 ()

In that case I guess you're right.

Edited to stop the method name stretching HN layout.
Ironically, it's not the project itself that is the problem. It is the way it was done. It is causing masssive, massive problems internally within the WMF and frankly it's spilling over into the wider Wikipedia community. Can't speak for the other projects though, I don't know enough about them to say what the general feeling is around there.

It's not nice to be the only one here on HN pointing out that there are some absolutely massive problems going on at the WMF at the moment, but I'm an outsider who was once an insider and I still know enough influential people through Facebook and other mechanisms to see enough to know that there is a crisis happening right now within the WMF.

edit: I should note that, as an outsider who doesn't ever really want to be hugely involved in Wikipedia-related matters again (for various personal reasons not necessarily related to Wikipedia or the WMF), I don't really have any fear in stating what I see - nobody can really come back at me so I have no fear of any reprisals.
Fashion solution can put an end to disputes over breastfeeding in public
X was designed to replace W, which ran on the V System (which is not related to System V or UNIX in general). It does not come from the UNIX tradition - it is a port.

Plenty of monolithic software runs on modern Unices, but very few can be traced back to a tradition of monoliths.
I am 28 and feel exactly like you: one difference, I have never gone on my own, I have always been an employee at a huge corporation.

Right now, I look up to you a lot, you had the balls to go on your own.

I don't have a solution to this, I can only let you know that you are not alone and I relate 100%. I would get a 9to5 job, save some money, and quit and travel for a while, find your passion. This is what I hope to do, hopefully soon
Study "false proofs", try to see where they go wrong. This will teach you what details need to be spelled out in detail to easily tell the difference between a false proof and a true proof. You will learn how to demonstrate you have nothing up your sleeves so to speak.
Python has been the #1 language/technology in Hacker News whoishiring threads 11 of the past 12 months[1]. Seems to be a fine time to invest. (Disclaimer: I publish these trends)

[1] http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2016/...
Comments are not for how or what, the code does that just fine.

Comments are for why.

Sometimes the why is obvious, then you don't need a comment. The rest of the time, add that comment. Even if it's something like "Steve in accounting asked me to put this in."
I thought of Nim, too.
To add to your comment, Nim's "Unified Call Syntax" recognises as the same len(x), x.len() and also x.len (this is similar to Ruby's poetry mode, if I am not mistaken). I find it cool, but I can also imagine reasons for which the latter would not be appreciated by the C++ community.
What I think is funny is people making fun of me for reading email in Emacs. I use my own filtering system built on top of MH-E, which is layered on top of nmh command line tools. MH-E uses GNUS for MIME handling and I'm able to view HTML messages just fine.

Why I think it's funny: people laugh that I'm using 20-30 year old technology and new tech would serve me better. To each of them I say: I challenge you to an efficiency dual/bet. Pit your system against mine. When I show them actually what I use, they don't take the bet.

Yes, what I'm using was first written almost 30 years ago, but I've tuned the crap out of it (with my own tweaks) and so have others, improving the tools themselves.

The only thing that would make my life easier would be if nmh could use IMAP. There have been many discussions of this, but it's just not a natural fit. I don't know if it will ever be done.

EDIT: typos
> Julia for data science

I work in scientific computing, and while me and my colleagues have all experimented with Julia at some level (and definitely welcome having more options), I don't yet know of anyone who has built any part of their permanent toolchain with it yet.

Are there any notable use cases out in the wild yet (known internal use by an organization, or major FOSS tool or framework)?
Pretty useful website builder
The author almost realized the much more important conclusion of the fact he lived. He shouldn't conclude the article by asking "what is the purpose of studying maths?" and then giving an three stupid answers.

He should have asked: is this actually "knowledge" as they say academia brings to society? Is the money researchers earn being well spent? Did I actually deserve to be remunerated by this piece of work no one understands -- and, in fact, no one has read except for maybe three people?
I absolutely think that following the GPS provides a worse mental map of the area/route than looking at an old fashioned paper map.

Here in Melbourne we have (shortly: had) the Melways. A4 size traditional map-book, two pages covers a good couple of suburbs. Let's call it a 5km-wide area.

When you look at this map, you see the relationships of suburbs. Balaclava is just to the east of St Kilda, which flows to the south to Elwood, etc. You see the major arterial roads and where they lead. You build a proper, high-level mental model of where you are.

Contrast this to the GPS. "Turn left in 100m" tells you nothing of your locale. It gives you no context. You see a sign that says "Elwood" and you're heading south because the beach is to your right and you know you want to be in St Kilda but this isn't useful to you: your brain doesn't instinctively think, hmm, that just feels wrong.

GPS is amazing until it doesn't work, and then you are truly lost.
The problem is that method X is a remote invocation into another system that has different change-control procedures, a different ticketing system, and a different release schedule.
Couldn't have said it better myself.

That's almost the complete opposite of Python, which has the ugliness of real world use (eg, 2.7 vs 3), but also has those thousands or real world hardened packages.