skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, I started in 03 programming C++ for an, at the time, small Chicago Prop trading firm. Prop firms tend to be in smaller than larger banks / hedge funds and that is the route I would try to take. There are several of them around the Chicago area.

I never took an "MFE" class in college. I graduated with a CompE degree, taking most of my electives in CS. Math is important, primarily statistics. Being a good coder and loving to program more so. Having a natural analytical bent, and being able to wade through data / formulate then test conjectures, and appreciating how markets will never stop surprising you, even more.

A lot of companies use C++. I don't like it myself, & we use Scala, as functional programming + oo works really well for trading specific coding. Also our last place was Java based, so we have a lot of experience with that. However there are plenty of opportunities no matter what language you use. I know of firms using Python, C++, Java, C#, OCaml. So it's pretty wide open.

Speed is important, but usually not machine level instruction important as people often think. Usually it's more about understand big O and not overwhelming your critical paths / pushing things off to other threads.

As for finding a job doing this stuff, google "Chicago Prop Trading firms". The first result lists a ton. Goto their websites and apply. Or you can use a head-hunter.

I have no experience with the New York part of things, but it's probably similar. Chicago does seem to be a good incubator for starting up a trading company though as the CME is located here and it's a great place for big and small companies to trade (IMHO/YMMV).

As for going directly to a startup, it's tricky, we don't have the budget to pay for more employees at the moment, and I know a lot of start ups are in similar situations. If we do hire someone it is usually below what a prop firm would pay them and they have to be extremely experienced in the area we hire them for.

So, I would suggest prop firm first route, it worked for me and I wouldn't be where I am now had I not gone that route.
I made the switch. My first job out of college was teaching at a private high school. I certainly felt that I was making more or less a permanent decision when I decided to go; now, I'm less convinced, but I certainly agree that going back to a tenured faculty position would be difficult.

What makes you think that this new position is going to be the bee's knees and satisfy your itch? How do you know that you won't be trading one type of pain and suffering for another? Is there any chance you could use a sabbatical to do work for this company, to "test the waters"? I'm guessing you couldn't actually become an employee, but perhaps you could work some deal that would further your academic research while seeing if joining the non-academic tech industry would suit you.

To me, "major Silicon Valley tech company" smells like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, et cetera. Keep in mind that while all of these types of large companies have different approaches to being large companies, they all have to deal with human scale, and with that can come a load of bureaucracy and overhead that may in time frustrate you as much as it does in academia. Some of those companies do a better job at that than others.

One last thought. When I saw the light bulbs go on in my students, and when I saw them teach other students what I had taught them, so I knew they truly "got it", that was very special and very rewarding. Moving to the tech industry has had it's own rewards and intellectual challenges, but for me, teaching others was very rewarding, and I find often that the times I spend teaching my colleagues something are some of the best. Don't forget the good parts of your current job, too!
As I understand it, his point isn't that these movies are bad, but that they're all thoroughly mediocre. I reckon he'd rather have a good movie and three bad movies than four mediocre movies.
Whenever I get a little bored, I load Knuth's page and just start clicking around, its amazing the stuff that I've learned!
Not to belabor the analogy, but...

Flash == chewing gum?
That, and in the current business climate, and the way the US patent system works, they pretty much have to do this - it's just good business strategy. If they don't patent it, someone else will, and will go after apple for buckets of cash.

In general, it's just a patent cold-war style arms race between large companies - they all keep huge patent portfolios so they all don't bother suing each other for patent infringement, because they're pretty much guaranteed to be infringing on a bunch of each other's patents - it creates a legal situation that neither party wants to get involved with in the first place.
If you have a shell account or a vps you could just keep running irssi or weechat inside screen or tmux.
I think it is both old-time Lisp'ers and JVM platform programmers looking for something more agile than Java.

I have been using Clojure for my work for several months and for me some of the big wins are:

1. easy to use existing Java libraries

2. lots of nice language features like destructuring, etc.

3. nice integration with Java and/or Scala projects with IntelliJ

4. fairly good runtime performance

And, a few hassles:

1. error stack traces have relatively little value.

2. The Clojure team is doing great work, but I still feel that the platform is not quite there yet compared with Java, Common Lisp, Haskell, etc.

I am in a patient mood in regards to Clojure: I use it for some things now, and expect my percentage use of Clojure over other languages will steadily increase over the next few years.
I don't think the article was disputing the original work contracts or implying that any part of the contracts were illegal or deceptive. Instead, the programmers mentioned in the article were upset because they became aware of just how valuable their work and knowledge can be. Those past high frequency trading work contracts are over and done with, but that doesn't mean the programmers need to take the same terms for future work. In fact, with some investment of their own, they may be able to supplant some of the established trading house market with their own startups and actually receive the fruits of their labor. What a concept!

Wealth is all about percentages and the standard profit percentage share for professionals and engineers, "big-corp" or otherwise, is 0%. These programmers left to start their own trading companies, likely because the salary bumps being offered (a measly $45,000 extra on $150,000 base salary, in the example) were insulting compared to the revenue being generated directly from their work. That's demonstrable value. Consider: a 1% profit share from the example in the article would be over $300,000 per year. Not a large bonus at all for a financial managers or executive, but not an outlandish bonus for a highly valuable member of a lucrative enterprise, either.

Your last paragraph sounds a lot like, "keep your head down and be thankful you have a job." I assume you're just defending the status-quo and pointing out the tradeoff between sharing the risk/reward and being comfortably salaried. You can't possibly be implying that programmers or other skilled professionals shouldn't even try to negotiate better contracts, right?
Can I ask a question? I hope that this doesn't come across as just another self obsessed post on the internet, but why am I different from the norm?

I am 18 and in some ways I do match the targets the author puts forward, but no one in this environment taught this to me. Instead, I had to go out and find people I could learn from, My parents take me to be a failure, because I want to get the job done in as perfect a manner as possible and I constantly think about making things or doing something better. It takes me longer to do stuff and I fall down more than anyone else I know of, but I like it.

My life would have been definitely easier if I could tow the line, but I can't do it. I just know that my integrity is precious to me and there is nothing in the world I would sell it out for. I admit it's not a smart thing to do, but at least when I am dying I won't have any regrets.

The interesting question is why am I so different? I am not special or anything at all. So, what taught me such stuff?
Nope, I'm not confusing them at all. I should have been clearer though, I was referring to the hardware inside.

Apple does the industrial design, and then solicits RFP's to get the system board. The laptop OEM builds the motherboards and all that, and I'm guessing that they deliver the internals to Apple, rather than fully-assembled machines, so that they do the final integration and burn-in testing and that sort of thing.
Can you share the name of the bouncer? Sounds like nice functionality...
Why Writing Weekly E-mails Is Like Baking A Cake
Right, but still sale is a job only certain people can do (it's the same for programming I think) - so switching to sale is not that easy for most developers. Also if you are a very good programmer, switching to a whole other job you will not be able to reuse your programming skills like you could for a better paid gig in a slightly similar programming topic.
I beg to differ. Some really, really bad movies this year, but there are some real gems.

1) How to Train Your Dragon (it's just magical for some weird reason)

2) Inception (finally something new)

3) Toy Story 3 (don't need to explain)
Key words "MUST", "MUST NOT"... are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119
I am working on this problem right now.
From Redesigning the Government to an OpenStack of Modular Innovation
Looking at your comment history it looks like you're part of the Prague team. Are you working with Earl and Praveen from the MV side, or with Dave and Evan from Maynard?
The goal of Section 3.3.1, pursued through patents.
Ancient “stress hormone” found in pre-historic fish
Does the article's author's misuse of "installation" instead of "installment" bother anyone else?

I mean, I hate to be a Usage Nazi as much as the next guy, but an "installation" is just not the same as an "installment". Those two words just don't mean the same thing.

I do, however, agree with the author's sentiments about Shia LeBeouf, and what DiCaprio should do with his Inception Technology.
With stocks you have to control the company management, of course proportionally to the the percentage of stocks you're owning. Too sad most investors forget that, you can see an example with BP.
Cryonics Institute: http://www.cryonics.org/ Membership is $120/year.

You'll also need at least $50K of life insurance with them as beneficiary. I pay around $170/year for $250K, and went through Rudi Hoffman who does cryo-compatible life insurance.
In my anecdotal experience, Canonical hasn't exactly been a shining example of working with the community instead of being tribal. They have open source projects, but they don't tend to go very far out of their way to make those projects useful to other organizations. The pace at which changes from outside Canonical get merged into their projects is very glacial.

But that's just my experience. I'm sure others have had plenty of great experiences with them.
And why you should be wary of sound-bite-driven public policy: while most reasonable people will agree that the MIT-educated top Burmese scholar should be able to work in the US, nobody has proposed a mechanism to extend a visa to her that isn't fraught.

The "Startup Visa" program Scoble pumps here is a good example. It designates --- officially --- a specific class of financier as a gatekeeper to immigration.

The US H1-B program is actually less freighted with conflicted and/or incoherent incentives than the VC-centric "startup visa" (if you lose your H1-B job, you at least have several overtly specified options to change your status and get another H1-B spot without dealing with the cap). And the H1-B program is notorious.
I've sat in that cafe in Brussels!
Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

Or in pathological cases, even when we are. :(
I think urlimg might be what you are looking for... http://urlimg.com/
Attacking the lore of early programming passion:  It's just class privilege
This seems like a direct conflict of interest for Apple. Patenting app ideas will only serve to further alienate developers from the platform.

I don't see any good coming from this, and I really hope "generic idea" patents like this start getting shot down by the patent office with regular frequency.
There is http://imagejuicer.com/, that seems to do what you want.
When one with a cryonics membership dies, is his life insurance benefit still paid out?

Yes, as many people pay for their suspension by taking out a life insurance policy that names the cryonics organization as a beneficiary.
"Consider if there were no advertising; the result would likely be that A and B would both lose because nobody would know they exist."

This may have been true in the past, but this is 2010... I constantly find out about products (and other things, and people, etc) that I didn't know existed, through other means than advertisements. Without paying for it, in fact; people put reviews about ANYTHING online nowadays.
If they overlap very briefly (say, across different markets) and nobody else has noticed yet, a trading program jumps in and arbs the difference.

Utter nonsense. In the case of crossed markets it is illegal to trade. Trading under these circumstances would violate RegNMS and most matching engines will reject orders that would cross the markets.

HFT firms reduce the spread due to competition. If the spread is $0.03 (say $9.97 and $10.00), I can do one of two things to be at the top of the order book and be the first to trade. I can either place my order first, or I can place an order at a higher price. If I'm the fastest, I have the earliest order at price $9.97 and I get filled first in the event of a trade. In this case, I make $0.03/share. If I'm not the fastest, I can still get to the top of the book by placing an order at $9.98. This reduces the spread to $0.02, and I can only make $0.02/share.
The developer said "somehow my so called ‘Distribution Provisioning Profile’ has expired and seems to be the reason."

However, to me, it isn't clear that this was really the reason for his app being removed from sale.

My first two apps haven't been updated for a long time (the first was released in 2008 and the second in early 2009). The distribution provisioning profiles (and the certificates used for the profiles) expired a long time ago.

However, those two apps are still available for sale in the app-store (because my developer registration continues to be active)

It is unclear why the developer's app was removed from sale after being approved, but if the certificate/profile had been valid at approval time, that isn't the problem. If the profile had previously expired and the app had been approved in error, he should just try to resubmit it with a new provisioning profile.
Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web
Humor Driven Development
Diese Website speichern | Mister Wong
vi commands $, %. and ^ are conveniently placed on QWERTY; Shift-4/5/6. If you use the one true style of braces for your C code then you can move through if-else-if chains quickly. $ moves to the end of the line, placing you on the open brace, % moves to the matching close brace at the start of the next

} else if (...) {

line, repeat... To go the other direction, ^ moves you to the first non-white character, the close brace.
All Hollywood needs are some new writer-directors breaking into the scene. Imagine this decade producing new well known names like Tarantino, the Coen brothers, and the Wachowski brothers. They all got to be well known by doing something totally different, and that can only happen if everyone is doing the same thing. The time is nigh...
Aren't they suppose to compare this year with some of the other years

Of course not. That would be mindful. This is a mindless nostalgia piece, right out of central casting.

The fun thing to do when one of these articles arrives on the radar is to see which cherry-picked "classics" are being name-checked:

"The Godfather," "Jurassic Park," "Casablanca," "Gone with the Wind," "My Fair Lady" and "The Matrix,"

These lists are always carefully constructed. In this case we have two extremely popular classics from the 1930s, generally regarded as among the best films ever made. That's to establish your street cred as someone who has actually seen some great movies. Then one film each from the 60s, 70s, early 90s, and late 90s, to ensure that every one of your readers over the age of thirty has something to be nostalgic about, and that they believe that the author is sufficiently "hip". (No sense in listing too many films from the 2000s; twentysomethings don't read newspapers.)

Then I got as far as this line:

Where once there was "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," there is now "Robin Hood," prince of duds.

This line is a dead giveaway, because "Prince of Thieves" was not a good movie, let alone among the best Robin Hood movies; it was redeemed only by the presence of Alan Rickman. Why, then, is the movie praised here? Because the writer really needed to write a cute sentence, reality be damned.

That's about all you need to read. The rest just wrote itself. It can read itself as well.
Instead of adding an "intermediate" keyword, I think JavaScript's approach is preferable. That is,

> var x = 0

Creates a new variable.

> x = 0

Assigns a variable if it has already been declared in a parent scope, or creates a new global variable otherwise.

Of course, this work break all existing Python code, so it would never happen.
Ask HN: How do you read/organize mailing lists?
I use OS X, and Apple Mail with threaded conversations for mail. I end up setting up folders and filters for each mailing list that I subscribe to. It works okay, but I'm wondering what other people use?
how's that meego platform coming along?
I personally use ZNC and I love it.
Some interesting conversions to put it into perspective:

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 0.18 U.S. cents / byte

(25 U.S. cents) / (140 bytes) = 1,872 U.S. dollars / megabyte
As far I know, he was writing a book about writing servers or protocols.
The state of clojure survey has some data:

http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Res...

So mostly java, ruby and python people, and relatively few lispers.
I'm using bip IRC proxy and I have no complaints. (couldn't get secure connection working with freenode the last time I tried it).
accessing these comment pages is VERY SLOW
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1560796
Excellent. BTW do you know if any cryo companies are using the sort of suspended animation technology described in Mark Roth's TED talk? It would seem to have potential benefits.
I was just pointing out that anti-white, anti-male bias is clearly not considered acceptable, contrary to what you stated. The evidence against Sherrod was not mistaken so much as manipulated to project an anti-white bias that immediately got her fired.

In the essay, the examples were chosen to illustrate his point, and were very non-contentious in my opinion. I see no "bad lesson," per say, but I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.
DIY picture frame better than store bought
Thanks for the insight.

I have an interview at one of the NYC prop shops, but it's for something more back office-y. Would it be a mistake to take this job, thinking I could move into something closer to the trading later? I've got mixed advice. Some people say it isn't too hard to shift, others say it's impossible.
At work I developed a wsgi script that use Python Imaging Library to resize images on demand. You can see it in action here:

http://dyn4.media.forbiddenplanet.com/products/2148557.jpg.s...
http://dyn4.media.forbiddenplanet.com/products/2148557.jpg.s...

Basically, if you chop off the dyn4 sub-subdomain and everything after .jpg you can see the original unmodified image. You can also change the extension at the end to change the format of the image (jpg,png or gif). We cache the files to /tmp which we periodically clear out. Whilst it might be more efficient of going down the route of pre-generating all the images we'll need, it's very convenient being able to do it on the fly and to be honest for a site of our size (225,000 visits/month) it's barely a spec on the CPU load of our media server.

There's also an apache module that uses ImageMagick to do something similar:

http://github.com/beetlebugorg/mod_dims

I have to be honest though, I prefer the API for my version and it gives the files a meaningful name in the /tmp folder as well as the user's internet history.

Unfortunately my version isn't open source (yet?) and the code is a bit of a mess, but it's something we have considered opening up.
It sounds like you live in the wrong city then. I can think of several places within 15 minutes of my house that fit your exact description.
I like the part where he notes that this isn't a real problem except that it creates centithreads of argument from people who believe it to be a real problem.
As I grow older and less idealistic, I'm more sympathetic to the notion that problems in theory but not in practice aren't really problems.
HJKL's location on a QWERTY keyboard directly influenced them being chosen. They were to hand under the right hand, and mnemonically, ^H is BS, ^J is LF, ^K is VT (vertical tab) which at least keys the vertical connection going, and L is just at the opposite end to H. :-)
I've thought the same thing. Seems like something that needs to be done over and over. It seems like a good potential business idea as long as it's cheap enough.
This semantic is pretty much anathema to Python, which tries to be explicit and to default conservatively. I'm pretty experienced with each of these languages and I routinely forget to qualify variables with "var" and end up stomping on globals.
Another user of Bitlbee here. It goes hand in hand with using irssi and a bouncer to maintain an always-on presence that I can take with me anywhere I go.
#startups on Freenode. I use IRC for collaborating with my colleagues (we're a distributed company). EFNet.

shameless plug:

Check out jIRCii. http://jircii.dashnine.org. It runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux. It's (in my opinion) the perfect blend of mIRC and BitchX. It's scriptable too with over 70 scripts contributed.
There was a survey about this (among other things): State of Clojure:

http://muckandbrass.com/web/display/~cemerick/2010/06/07/Res...

Quite a few Ruby and Python people trying Clojure out (much more than Lispers).
I agree. I actually now take notes with my live scribe pen while reading books and record myself giving commentary around important poiints. I go over the notes when I have free time. It seems that I retain a lot more when I do this.
Advertising would annoy me so much less if I perceived products as less expensive when they featured advertising. For example I feel incredibly ripped off that films have increasingly long rolls of trailers, ads, and commercials that run before them but continue to increase in price.

That's why I want to create an opt-in advertising revenue based pizza place. When you place an order you are offered the choice between paying full price and getting discounts based on how much advertising material comes with your pizza. I figure you could get a stack of coupons, Chinese food menus, brochures, car insurance fliers, and magazines that would roughly equal the cost of a pizza. Free pizza.