skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you really want to do something then why waste a "few years" doing something else? Honestly it doesn't matter if you're studying physics, programming or trying to invent the next slap chop -- what counts is that you have a passion for what you do and invest the time in that passion. Although be careful that your passion for programming is indeed that and not something else.
"Well Bush II lowered taxes to the point of unprofitability"

The US has been running up the debt for many years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_pu...
That was a very interesting read, thanks.
A company will act in its own best interest--this is expected and in no way alarming.

That they try to legally avoid taxes is beneath obvious.
If you like games, and don't mind generally poor working conditions, you should look at the game industry.
It's an opensource project run by a nonprofit.... nothing is stopping you from contributing ... did you even file a bug report or look one up regarding this issue?

not even apple has updated all of it's software to support these new features.. hell they can't even get xcode to stop crashing constantly yet...
Disagree with the guy's opinion, but in his mind he is innovating. As a writer the way he contributes is by innovating culture and thought. He has seen an information inefficiency in the common belief that we are making huge technological gains, and his article is an attempt to fix that.
People get stressed because there is always an infinite amount of work ahead. (This is true of big companies or personal projects.) This class is about how to handle the stress properly so you don't do something stupid like neglect your family to work 80 hour weeks.
If you become a good programmer then you are good either way, but definitely any company that deals with software that relies heavily on physics (3D Gaming, animation, movie special effects etc..) you will have a competitive advantage with a physics degree.
Smalltalk was marginalized by its image-based nature. It's an operating system as much as it is a language, so packaging up a native application to run 'outside' the image requires various widget libraries and runtime structures that haven't yet matured in the free Smalltalks. You'd have to look for enterprisey applications written with Cincom's VisualWorks, or Inception's VA Smalltalk.

The web is where it currently excels. Hence the prominence of Seaside, and similar frameworks.
Ludic fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy
are you talking about competing on the job market or in YC application?

If the former, you'll need to show a bunch of examples of your work. So do a lot of projects that you can show(+the source code).

If you are talking about YC...once again skill beats paper. I know Octopart both founders were physicists...which learned to code on their own
(1) The whole point of that "O(1) algorithm" is that the n'th Fibonacci number has asymptotic size:

F[n] ~= phi ** n / sqrt(5)

But this means that it requires O(n) memory to store, which means that it is impossible to get an algorithm which scales better than O(n), asymptotically. You might be able to get better than O(n²); I don't know much about arbtitrary-precision exponentiation algorithms.

(2) This is one of those nasty cases where CS folks are loose with the meaning of big-O, anyway. Strictly speaking the input size for the Turing machine scales like O(log n), and so the Fibonacci algorithms should probably be said to have exponential complexity, even though it's a linear recurrence relation. It depends how loose you are with what the 'n' means in O(n).
This with a capital T :)

Brilliant insight. Great advice.
It seems disingenuous that this article completely ignores Google as a source of innovation in the last 15 years. A company which (pretty successfully) organizes the entirety of human knowledge, and lets you query it in milliseconds? Sounds like some pretty serious innovation to me...
Inertial scrolling felt bad to me at first, but I've come to enjoy it after giving it a fair shot. This is often the case with UI / design changes.

(I also remember being convinced that Win9x-style aliased font rendering was the pinnacle and shunned ClearType and co. for a few years)
Otomata – Online Generative Music Instrument
If you look, I think you'll find that the "misinformation" in those replies was also posted by me ;)

I have also read the Reynolds book, and most of what I said is backed up by what he writes in it.

You can trace things back to the Paradise Garage, the Warehouse, to the Electrifyin' Mojo, to Amnesia on Ibiza, to David Mancuso's loft, to Kraftwerk, to the Human League, to the 100 club, to the flower children and their "happenings," to Wigan Pier, or you can go back to the Radiophonic Workshop, Musique Concrète, Léon Theremin, you could cite the Dancing Plague of 1518 or ancient african ritual dances if you wanted. Nothing new is ever invented, etc.

I still think that what Reynolds calls the Hardcore Continuum and its assorted tributaries started in some meaningful sense in Chicago and Detroit, as much as you may always be able to eventually link everything to everything else. The influence of records like Strings of Life is writ large in a way that is separate to the way in which the Human League and Giorgio Moroder are still influential on other strands of music history, despite their common sonic signatures. This is especially true if you consider the cultural/political identity of the scenes as separate from the musical evolution: the mythology of proletarian urban militancy surrounding rave arguably started in detroit with Underground Resistance. That must be the element most conspicuously missing from the current Diplo-fuelled chapter in rave history :)

I suppose we inevitably tend towards taxonomy and categorisation as a cognitive survival strategy.

EDIT: re-reading what I wrote, I admit that bold-facedly stating that the US "invented" EDM was perhaps rash.
Why your cat is making you crazy
This article is deeply flawed, primarily because it parrots the common misconception leveled against the formula, and options market by association (by none other than Taleb himself - who obviously knows better but prefers to act like a self-important bafoon).

Here is the crux of this misconception - that traders assume a Gaussian (ie Normal) distribution of events, while the world is far from "normal". THIS IS ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Traders and investors know that the world is full of "Fat Tails" and price the options accordingly. This is what's known as the Volatility Smile [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volatility_smile

Moreover - the formula is not used to predict anything. It simply converts a trader's expectations of future events (ie volatility) into dollar figures - price of the option. So the sentence "Black-Scholes changed the culture of Wall Street, from a place where people traded based on common sense, experience and intuition, to a place where the computer said yes or no" - is absolute nonsense. People still trade based on common sense and intuition - BS is merely a way to convert views in numerical figures.
Wow. These chargers may literally kill you. Where are U.S. regulators? Where the heck is eBay?
New depression treatment 'safe and effective', experts say
If the prevailing revenue source is advertising, it limits the type of startups that are viable.
Interesting, I didn't realize that recording votes wasn't done regularly in a number of major democracies. While looking for more information I dug up this book chapter on the subject, and it looks like practices vary a lot more than I'd thought: http://www.uni-potsdam.de/db/vergleich/Publikationen/Parliam... (PDF).
This may sound obvious, but it depends on how good you are. I graduated in Physics last summer, and am doing very well in a programming job. However many of my old colleagues, especially those who only learned to program during their degree, would not be a good fit for the job.

Ask yourself if you see programming, say, a web browser or a IMDb-like website an impossible feat. If so you will probably not enjoy it. If you see it as something that is eventually manageable (with a team and learning some new skills) then you will probably do very well.

I think physics provides all the analytical skills, it's just you don't want to have too much catching up to do before you are competative with other graduates.
The latter, I suspect. In Apple-worshipping circles, they bought the "Android is a stolen product" bit hook, line and sinker, conveniently ignoring the fact that the iPhone's interface was just an iteration on everything else that had come before. They look at the Windows phones and say, "see? You didn't have to copy the iPhone!"

They would never use it, but it's necessary to praise it in order to validate their indignation that Android is more successful and widespread (which feeds into their sense of superiority as being among the select few who see the light).

I'm seriously not an Apple hater. I have a MBP and a 3gs. I'll probably get a 5 when it comes out. I love the industrial design of Apple's products. But a good half the people I know who use them have a near-religious attachment to them, and fully buy into the Jobsian reality distortion field. It's kind of like how, as a Canucks fan, I love my team but hate half the fans.
How does it handle a polygon with 3 coplanar verticies and 1 non-coplanar vertex? It must internally triangulate the polygon in order to shade, no?
Cheap doesn't mean it has to be dangerous, that's a false dilemma.

Instead of shopping at Apple, try monoprice.

Edit: I have no affiliation with monoprice. If you downvote, please explain. Is my alternative not helpful?
CE and UL certifications get checked on import as far as I know. At $2.79, I doubt the author paid any import duty, so the parcel presumably never even went through the relevant office. I doubt regulation on such parcels could be done cost-effectively, it's probably more realistic for eBay to alert users to the problem. But then eBay might lose out on a bit of business and also, the manufacturers probably would get wise to it and print fake UL and CE logos on the device. And even if you educate people on the issue, a 90% lower price will be very tempting for many.

You could make eBay legally liable for missing or faked certifications, but that would basically just force them to cut out a bunch of categories of goods. So they'd get listed under another category etc. etc. I don't think there's a solution to this, and only high profile cases of these things actually blowing up in people's faces and electrocuting toddlers will change anything (probably the legal situation, and probably for the worse). If we're lucky, this doesn't happen before China becomes sufficiently developed to introduce and enforce their own, similar regulations. Of course, production of this kind of stuff will then just move to developing-nation-du-jour.

Meanwhile: Caveat emptor.

Another certification circumvention hack is to import the device as components (which don't require certification) and assemble it in the EU (or US, assuming this hack works there too). Obviously infeasible at that sort of price. A game console maker I won't name here did that with their early devkits for a popular console (maybe they all do it?) to get them to developers quickly. There's no way they would have passed CE certification, as their cases frequently built up a static charge, shocking unsuspecting developers. One even blew up in our office. Nobody told me about that particular work hazard when I took the job...
Same issue. Canary on a 2008 MacBook.
Looking back, were they overqualified or underqualified? If you had tested the second guy's C++ skill (sounds like he couldn't have done Fizzbuzz in your interview), would you have disqualified him? If you didn't think C++ was that important, why ask in the interview?

All I'm trying to get at is if you take your experience as a rule.

The population of people who lie about their programming skills is unfortunately all too high. The subset who can make up the difference in two days, unfortunately all too small. I think a Google or Amazon has to play the percentages to keep a high bar. The cost of a bad hire reverberates through the organization.
An app to rate parties in real time
Cool little app I found, seems like it has a lot of potential.
Not quite disagreeing, but from his (an end-user's) point of view, how is Google search different than Alta Vista or Lycos before it?
Having a physics degree has really given me an unfair advantage as a software engineer.

You'll have to do some extra work (hint: if you haven't already, start coding in your spare time now, and endeavor to learn version control and unit testing). But the short answer is: yes, you will be able to compete.
Actually, that's exactly why I switched. (more precisely, this could be said why: http://www.cs.elte.hu/zsh-manual/zsh_14.html)

If you don't want to use it, I don't see how that is any of my business. I was just trying to help out somebody who does, so there's hardly any reason to be an ass.
I want you to quit Internet Explorer 
I am currently testing my updated home page and I am NOT supporting Internet Explorer at all. Given below is the NO IE page:

http://adnansiddiqi.com/noie.html
Some people would say collecting tax is already immoral.
Maybe the innovation is so powerful and so large that it basically become the background and ignored. We all take googling for granted and hardly remember a time when search engines literally don't work.
Very similar to what MITx 6.002 offers in the lab. Even the interface / interaction is quite similar. Is there any connection between those projects?
So the screen sucks, the camera sucks, and there's no apps, but the design is great. Let's see how that works for microsoft.
Dear God, HN has neither a doctype nor a tableless layout... D:
Another good way:

def fib(number):
if number == 0:
return 0
elif number == 1:
return 1
else:
return fib(number-1) + fib(number-2)

print fib(10)
Clickable link:

http://adnansiddiqi.com/noie.html
Innovation don't happen in certain industries are probably because of a dysfunctional social environment within that system.

What prevent us from innovating is not so much intelligence but social configuration of our society at that particular sector.
For the truly curious, the source documents for this story are available here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/29/technology/app...
Or you could just use plug.dj that already works on newer android devices. And works internationally (unlike TT). And supports multiple playlists (unlike TT). And supports video (unlike TT). And has better avatars (unlike TT). And is translated into German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean (unlike TT). And is showing a LIVE STREAM of the Sweetlife Music Festival Live (something TT can't do). http://www.plug.dj/sweetlife-music-festival-live/

Make the switch today!
I wonder if the "employee" is a doctor. Something similar showed up on TheDailyWTF back in 2007:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Paging_Dr_0x2e__Null.aspx
Even IE 9?
Quaking? Please. Apple doesn't quake. If it pushes them in terms of innovation, great. But if you think they're quaking, you're clueless.
I signed up for this comment.

I graduated from a small liberal arts school with a degree in Physics (and a minor in CS). I actually would have done Computer Science, but the university's program didn't teach the things I was interested in -- but let me be clear: computers were my primary passion.

I got a software engineering job offer after graduation, but I decided to go to grad school instead and I'm now finishing a masters in Computer Science. When I started, I was worried that not having a BS in Computer Science would handicap me compared to other students, but it didn't seem to (or at least grad school is hard enough for everyone that I didn't stand out).

My work and my interests are in Free Software, and what I'm finding out in applying for jobs is that companies (especially those that deal with Free Software) care very much about your contributions to Free Software. It's obviously easier to get a handle on someone's skills if their entire portfolio of work is available in public git repositories.

In working with different projects, I've also gotten to know developers who work on the teams that I'm applying for jobs on. I feel like this gives an extra advantage that's not easily available in other fields.

The summary of this is that the degree doesn't matter so much. What matters (at least in the world of Free Software) is what have you contributed and who have you worked with.

Another data point: a number of really good software developers at Red Hat have non-computer degrees or no degrees at all.

Owen Taylor (GNOME) - Physics

Jerome Glisse (AMD driver) - PhD in Biology

Matthew Garret (Kernel, power management) - PhD in Biology

Ben Skeggs (Nouveau driver) - no degree
A company founded...14 years ago.
What you say is true. What I said is true too. Both statements are true. Bush II tax cuts are a very large portion of the current deficient that we have. Taxes are currently at a 50 year low as a percent of GDP. Bush II taxes greatly increased the deficit. Other tax cuts have too. I was just giving an example of the statement that I responded to being false.
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Filename: models/nickler.php
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Seems like you are using PHP, Codeigniter, and you haven't configured them properly for a production server.
Not what you asked but you might find it very interesting:
https://class.coursera.org/pgm/auth/welcome
I have a graduate physics degree and I am working on a second one. As far as I can tell so far you will be quite competitive with CS graduates, though you may have to start off at a lower position than some. The other thing is you will have to know exactly what kind of job to apply for and have skills specific to that area. No matter what I think you should have a good grasp of optimization and vectorization of algorithms as well as knowledge of parallell and massively parallell programming. The programming jobs that I have seen that want physicists tend to want them to make math do very complicated things very quickly. The other thing people want physicists for is to model complex systems. There is no shortage of people who want physicist for that. Sharpen your mathematical programmign skills. You don't necessarily need to be able to optimize for that but it will make you look better and earn you better references.
LDAP was, in fact, developed after the rise of the Web. By Netscape!

(And SMTP, gopher, and finger were developed before the rise of the Web.)
I think it is pretty simple. Apple and any other company is required AND expected by its shareholders to minimize taxes paid and keep all expenses under control. Saying "well gee we should pay more tax, it's really the right thing to do, lets change around a bunch of stuff so we pay a higher rate of tax" would never fly.
The Normal distribution is part of the parametric derivation of the Black-Scholes pricing model [1]. It really does seem to be part of the model's key assumptions.

Can you expand on how the Volatility Smile demonstrates that traders model fat tails in their options pricing strategies. It wasn't clear to me from the wiki page you linked.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes#Notation
You're hired! :-)

Really tho--if you have a passion for CS, but studied Physics, you have the capacity to excel. I fell in love with the ordered-ness of computers and self-taught myself programming in my teens. I went to college and studied Physics knowing I would likely not continue as a career physicist. During college I found that between my basic programming knowledge and physics requirements I had covered a large portion of the CompSci major (except for the upper division classes). I tested out of some and then took the others to end up with CompSci + Physics degrees.

Since graduating, I've benefited from my CompSci degree in areas like data structures, runtime complexity and parsing--but the rest of my CompSci skills were self-taught before or afterwards ("the Internet" was not in my CompSci curriculum).

I believe I've benefited more from my Physics training. Specifically--the Socratic method of looking at root causes in a systematic and problem-simplifying manner. And I've never been daunted by a hard problem or one that needs theoretical analysis for an elegant solution.

Given all of the above, some of the best programmers I've met have no degrees--so passion and willingness to self-learn trump all.
Not much: you will need to find a job after you get a degree. Which will most probably not be physics, so you might as well find it more useful to spend your student years on something that will give you more possibilities.

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" – H. Schopper

But you can also spend your student years working for others to be disposed of by policy and find that your most valuable young years were invested in something you will not be able to benefit from yourself.
It's certainly an interesting perspective on things. I would argue that the internet has had an impact relative in scale to that of electricity or the car but it is true that things seem to have stalled.

Instead of working on world changing technologies using the amazing tools we have at our disposal we are building hundreds of photo sharing apps, check in apps, and social networks in the hope of a big exit (I guess Twitter & Facebook have changed communication so there are some exceptions).

I don't think this just applies to science/technology though. If you look at culture (music and art specifically) we are also in a bit of a slump compared to the early/mid 20th century.

It could be that this is a cyclical thing and societies naturally go through periods of rapid innovation and creation, and and other periods where change is minor.

Nb: It's easy to call out the author for being a hypocrite (why doesn't he do something world changing?) but that's not very productive. I have just agreed with him but I don't think I'm going to be the one who creates the next great invention. I'm sure most people want to change the world but it's easier and less risky to build a simple, high growth app or product with a high chance of making them a lot of money.
For the time being, yes.
> Firefox is not a good citizen on any OS other than Windows.

It's not a good citizen on Windows either.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574973
One thing to bear in mind is that for these really big companies, the huge attraction of Ireland is not the low corporate tax rate, it's that profits can be easily and legally sent to Holland, from where they can be sent to the Caribbean. I've seen similar stories from Google and Ikea, I believe they both pay low single digit tax rates on their non-US income due to this arrangement; in Ikea's case this is nearly all of it. It's really difficult to compete with that.
Did Ed Thorp ever publish his formula? I'm flipping through his book Beat the Market now, and so far I've only seen two rules of thumb for pricing an option, which would only be useful for identifying the most absurdly mispriced options.

An option should be worth at least its intrinsic value, I agree. But how much more? You don't get Nobel prizes for stating something that's common sense.
Also, you have nothing to lose by trying.
Ouch. This is not a good outcome. A Facebook 'like' can be a pretty strong statement, and it should be protected speech.