skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem as I see it is that most companies are looking for the all-in-one perfect candidate. There is indeed a shortage of such people.

Say you need someone who knows a lot about Hadoop and Amazon EC and is also intimately familiar with most learning algorithms and has a PhD. You are having trouble finding the guy. You start crying about "the big data talent shortage".

And here is the problem. Most PhDs have no experience with Hadoop or Amazon EC. Some of them might know Java well enough.

Now, consider a smart guy with PhDwho knows Java and has done something parallel with it, working on real "dirty" data. He can pick up Hadoop in no time from your software engineers. He will learn to tweak and optimize in his time - it is domain specific and cannot be learned off the job.

Will he be hired? Probably not. But people will keep crying about shortage.
Go for a half hour walk. Twice a day if possible. Alone. No distractions or talking.

It will work wonders. I promise.
More stuff indexed, for one thing, paper books and videos included. And hopefully, more intelligent interpretation of queries, though that's more debatable.
They're already locked in.

See comments in this thread "I find myself frustrated any time I run into an open source project whose git repo is not on github." and elsewhere.

Many developers at work don't know how, don't want to learn, and don't want to use any system that's not github.

Github has such a huge first to market advantage, it is/will be extremely hard for better solutions to ever get noticed.

paypal, ebay, (in some peoples opinion gmail and gsearch) all demonstrate this same effect.
You do now there is a place for rich media on the web and it is very popular. Don't you?
Just to expand this for people who aren't familiar with this idea, which has a nice analogue with complex numbers, one can take the number a + b sqrt(5) and represent it as the matrix:

[a, 5b]
[b, a]

This implements the multiplication rule for such numbers as a matrix multiplication. There is a straightforward generalization where you replace 5 with -1 and get complex numbers, which is one of the easiest ways to see that the complex numbers are scaled rotation matrices -- which is the easy way to see that a holomorphic function preserves angles and obeys the Cauchy Riemann equation ∂f/∂y = i ∂f/∂x.

It's very cute mathematics, but it's still not O(1). At the very least, exponentiating to the n requires log(n) matrix multiplications.
This is a very good point. Google is more accurate, and faster, but in the end it does the same thing. It helps the user find information on the web. It's not a great new idea, it's an improvement on an existing idea.
I find it quite hard to understand the reasoning of people that downplay the affect the internet has had on our lives.

I dont fall out of contact with the people I grew up with (at home or university / past jobs), I am flying out tomorrow to meet with good friends all of whom I would have never known if it wasnt for the internet, my career would not exist without the internet.

The worlds knowledge is now categorised conveniently into a website which you can download and carry around wherever you go, that was science fiction 30 years ago. Almost the entire population of the world has access to enough knowledge and resources that they can become a leading expert in pretty much any field they want to.

Sure we dont have our promised jetpacks and its easy to be dismissive because some people post inane stuff on twitter, but I find it really hard to believe the last 50 years is some form of lull in innovation, I cant imagine any other period of time being more exciting to live in.
The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
The real important aspect of the new BMesh stuff is that it's a non-manifold representation. It's crazy to see that level of technology in Blender. :)

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.6/Source/Modeling/BM...
Yep, tried to reflect that in my comments.
If you calculate the implied volatility (volatility is not readily observable) from the option prices at different strikes, you will get different values. Ergo, the traders are not simply plugging a single volatility value into the formula for pricing.

BS does assume a normal distribution; the point is that people do not strictly take the output from BS and say "tada, here's the price."
One hint, some analytical models used in physics are very useful in finance. I have a friend doing his physics masters degree in analytical finance. It seems very promising for him.
Every time I read about these tax schemes, I think, "I want to do that, too." Is there any company out there that will help the little guys making all of their money online complete a double Irish Dutch sandwich?
Firefox was never the best Cocoa (i.e. OSX) implementation of Gecko, Firefox aims to be the best CROSS PLATFORM implementation of Gecko. Camino has always been the OSX optimised browser, but unfortunately they don't have the same level of support and they can't do as much as they would like.

While I have more then enough gripes about the mozilla project, this just comes off whiney. Have you checked Bugzilla? Have you discussed on the Mailing list? Is there a Request for enhancement? Is their code in the repo that is about to drop in an upcoming release?

From memory the firefox UI is coded in XUL, so the actual changes are to the XUL controls, which have to be made as close to identical between all supported platforms. Not in the case of look, but in the scroll gradiant and event chain.

While its easier to take pot shots from your blog and HN you could actually help the situation by advocating it as a priority to the developers by talking to them, by testing code and even contributing. People have already pointed out that most of your complaints are already coming in later versions.
Linux kind-of moved. I think it was a temporary mirror, maybe, I'm not too sure.

Edit: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/09/05/1138255/linux-kerne...
I think this is generally a good idea, but the danger is that programs start checking for implementation instead of supported features (or quirks). It's important to make sure that the dictionary definition stays updated with features (or quirks) to prevent this.

See the HTTP User-Agent mess to see what can result if this goes the wrong way.
Sure, I'll try. Here is an example:

Assume that you want to buy an option on Apple stock - 3 months in the future. Assume that price today is $500. If you want to buy an option with strike=500, you will pay 50 vol (BS as a formula will just convert the price in vol terms into a dollar cash price). But - if you want to buy an option struck at 400 - you might pay 75 vol. And if you want a 300 strike - it will be 100 vol.

As you see, volatility will RISE the further you move away from spot price (ie where it is today). So while BS calculation assumes constant volatility to convert vol to dollars, traders always ask for higher vol, as you move out to less likely scenarios. That is how they deal with the world being non-normal. It really is options 101 - so any writer who talks about BS assuming Gaussian probabilities is either lying or doesn't know anything about the subject.
Taxes are purely a construct of law though. The only reason it's immoral not to pay taxes is because it's immoral to break the law, at least if the law is just. But we're not talking about people breaking the law, we're talking about people obeying the law.

Think of it this way: if you can get an effective tax rate of x% by doing this and y% by doing that, and x < y, what's the moral difference between doing what you need to do to pay x% and the government changing the tax rate so you pay x% either way? It's not a question of what's the most moral percentage to pay in tax, it's a question of whether or not you're defying the law, which you aren't in either case. If the government lowered the tax rate to x% and you decided to cut out the middleman and just pay it, no one would howl at you to voluntarily pay more. So why do people howl at you for obeying other laws that allow you to effectively lower your effective tax rate to the same amount?
Top White Lies Entrepreneurs and Startups like to Tell
Binet formula needs not to be implemented using floating point numbers:

https://github.com/xyzzyz/FibBinet
We should be shaming the politicians who created this mess, both at the state and federal levels.
What a stupid article, short, vague and resentful.

Most industries are getting disrupted and mainstream doesn't notice. The ripple effect takes a long time to reach incumbents – they can still get loans and legislations catered to keep them afloat for a few more years.

meh.
I learned to program when I was quite young but was talked into studying physics at university by teachers and parents. I've never used the physics I learned there in my work as a programmer - the maths on the other hand has been very useful. I've never had a shortage of work: on the contrary, I've always had lots of opportunities to choose from. This has of course been conditional on actually being good at programming, and most CS degree programmes don't actually teach you that either. So if you want to be a programmer: practice!

By the way, your time at university and your degree will still be useful: use that time to make friends and work on projects with like-minded people, and generally have some fun. Use the degree to get past CV/resumé filters that screen for having a degree.
The change mostly benefits 4chan extension/userscript developers (like 4chanX) and board archivers, which have to parse the DOM (the only public 4chan API) back into data. If you look at the current markup (the new markup isn't live yet), it's a total mess of tables and font tags.

Also as mentioned, it has a responsive layout for mobile screens.

I'm pretty sure the new markup is designed by moot (the 4chan admin/creator) himself, so it's fairly clunky for 2012 (wrapper divs and spans everywhere, inline javascript and styles), but again, it's still a vast improvement.
News Alert | News Alert
Not in Flash. If it were an HTML5 application I'd have been breaking it apart.
No, the time between when the first PS1 was printed and when he pressed ^C was approximately 13 seconds.
But among friends, more flamey rhetoric is acceptable.
I'm very curious to know what APIs people are paying to use these days. Would anyone care to share a few that you are using for your own startup or place of employment?
Sometimes a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. For example, motorcycles are just faster horses (in some ways worse, like for off-roading), but you could hardly argue they are the same thing. I would argue that google is substantially more useful than altavista, or dogpile, ever were.
If they repealed all the Bush era tax cuts, the deficit would still be growing at a higher rate than before. Obama has run up the deficit at a faster pace (approaching double) than Bush and those tax cuts aren't even the major part of it.

The biggest problem is the lack of a passed federal budget in over a 1,000 days. This is causing a lot of budget increasing in a time when we cannot afford it. What the media and politicians (from both sides) chose to concentrate on is emotion grabbing (good for votes and ratings), systemic issues with how the government is being run are boring and not emphasized.

Low taxes don't kill budgets (check right after WWII when they had to drop), it is runaway spending. Income from taxes of all sorts has averaged 19% GDP, spending above that is the problem.
An extreme change in accuracy and speed might as well be...a revolution.
> I am a Physics (specifically Engineering Physics) major who works with programming, and yes, you will definitely be able to compete.

Hell yes. It will mean that clueless recruitment agencies won't even bother contacting you or doing anything for you, because they don't see you as suitable for anything related to IT. Whether that's a good or bad thing is questionable. It does however mean that getting the foot in the door, i.e. getting into a position that requires a Bachelor in IT is a lot more difficult, in them not wanting to take any risks. The only thing you need to do is prove to them that there is no risk.

Between casual IT work (Sendmail, Exchange, Adobe, Linux/Mac OS, Windows Server and end-user support skills) next to my degree and my Physics degree, I was able to pick up enough skills to get a job. It helped that my Physics degree forced me to learn all of Assembly, C, LabVIEW, LaTeX, Mathematica, MATLAB, Python (Project Euler, actually, is the thing that started forcing me to really know Python) and to a lesser extent Bash and Scheme.

Being able to put ten languages on top of Perl, PHP, JavaScript and others I knew already or know outside of my degree, probably really helped in getting a position programming in a niche language. Given the ten programming languages you're likely to learn in a Physics degree (with a bit of interest) and considering that's likely to be more than you'll get from a Bachelor in IT or maybe even computer science, you're in luck :)

So, in a nutshell, and riffing of another comment here, learn version control and unit testing and know at least one programming language like Python or JavaScript inside out and you're pretty good. Brush up on your design skills and you're done - for now :)
Look, this job title is at most 2 years old. How can someone have years of experience in this? OTOH, there are plenty of people with strong applied math and good programming skills.
Smiths, Maceys, Walmart, Costco
Space does not have air friction, but it still has gravity, which you still need a large amount of energy to counter, if you want to move a massive object to a specific spot.
Andrew Ng's machine learning class on coursera is a very nice, easy introduction to the subject.
The rubber band is terrible, I wish it would stay out of the desktop OS.
We Are The Porn Generation
I've been wondering this as well, except my degree is in medical science. I'm graduating in 4 months, but I like programming too much to continue working in a lab. I've been programming since I was 14, but I only feel like I've recently become good at it. Consistently seeing "Required: Computer Science Degree or equivalent" is discouraging. Hopefully these aren't stringent requirements.
The implied but never fully-articulated point of this article is that high-tax domiciles resent it when rational actors having a choice in the matter will routinely structure their business affairs to incur tax to the maximum extent possible in low-tax as opposed to high-tax domiciles.

The issue becomes almost formulaic. Given (1) rational actors, (2) freedom to choose and to structure business affairs using a multiplicity of entities for different purposes, (3) resources with which to hire and pay for the talent needed to sort out the tax issues and their complexities, (4) a business goal of maximizing after-tax profits, (5) a multiplicity of domiciles from which to choose, and (6) a ready means by which to direct resources from one domicile to another (as with digital assets), it inevitably follows that every sophisticated company meeting these criteria will avail itself of the tax avoidance/minimization strategies. As the article notes, it is perfectly legal and every big company does it (see, e.g., this similar write-up from a couple of years ago on Google's comparable tax strategies: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815195).

Nothing, of course, stops a given company from voluntarily subjecting itself to higher tax rates by declining to follow this formula but why would it? Big companies will routinely want to avoid high taxes if they can. So too do small businesses. People may have social views that higher taxes are desirable but, as individual economic actors, they will seek to avoid them. This may be right or wrong but it is reality.

This means that high-tax domiciles will have no choice but to continue to remain frustrated that they cannot have unchecked means of taxing their citizens. As long as people have freedom, governments have to strike a balance that people can live with. And that is not a bad thing.
Fair point. It just seemed odd to use Procter & Gamble as an example of the most innovative companies while ignoring a < 15 year old company which now has a higher market cap than P&G (200M to 177M).
Python is a little better than Perl or PHP on this; it won't treat the string "0" as false. It does, however, treat both 0 and None as false, and also 0.0 == 0 == False, which is the same kind of potential bug.

Generally I find that Python's avoidance of implicit string type conversions means that I almost never have this kind of bug in my Python.

On another note, `myvar is 0` is undefined behavior; Python implementations can perfectly legitimately return False for that even if myvar is, in fact, the integer 0. Try this, in Python 2.7.3:

>>> x = 257
>>> x is 257
False
>>> x = 257; x is 257
True
>>> 257 is 2**8 + 1
False
>>> 256 is 2**8
True
>>> x = 256
>>> x is 256
True

That's because `is` denotes object identity, not value equality, and for immutable objects like integers, strings, and tuples of immutable objects, object identity is fair game for optimization. In the above, "is" gives us a fascinating window into the particular optimization decisions taken by the CPython 2.7.3 interpreter. But, child, if you want your code's behavior to depend on some problem domain instead of interpreter optimizations, don't use "is" to compare integers!
The problem of "low innovation" in relation to the internet seems to be a problem of infrastructure.

Building Google lead to building Google maps which is now leading to building a self driving car which is a problem that when/if it is solved will save millions of lives and billions of dollars.

Not a perfect example, but it is an instance of not being albe to solve important problems without the necessary infrastructure.
Unless I'm mistaking inertial scrolling has nothing to do with it bouncing back specifically, it's inertial meaning having inertia, the tendency for something in motion in this case tr window to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Bouncing when you reach the end would be a simulation of elasticity not enertial
Disclaimer: I have a degrees in both CS and Physics.

If you learn C/C++ programming, you'll be able to get a job at an investment bank and won't have to worry about money. If that's something that attracts you, study (and write code) in a field where Monte Carlo simulations are used, like lattice gauge theory, which is a lot of fun and will help you understand QFTs. Here's some links to get started:

http://latticeguy.net/mypubs/pubs.html

Some C code:

http://thy.phy.bnl.gov/~creutz/z2/

If you want to do something like a web startup and learn Ruby on Rails, then Physics won't help you much. You'll just be on equal footing with CS guys, if you put in the time.

PS: Most physicist I know are absolutely terrible software engineers. If you're going to write larger programs, please read some books about how to write larger programs!
Change majors, do a second major, etc. "Assuming I know the relevant programming languages and have some experience" is a big assumption. Computer Science (or any science major) is very hard to pick up part time. For your first job you will be competing with CS grads. I bet it will be an eye opening experience for you since CS grads do get an unfair advantage in the industry. The chances are you will have to take a much less lucrative position and will be playing catch up for many years. Ask yourself - why go that route?

If you decided to do programming - do programming. Consider yourself lucky to have it figured out while you are still in school.
Yes, and I started that before realizing that I need more background knowledge, hence starting with some math. :)
I don't doubt that, but I never see links to the SFW boards. I almost exclusively read or get sent links to /b/.
Javascript Completion (including frameworks) for Emacs in CEDET Trunk
You don't get Nobel prizes for stating something that's common sense.

True. You get Nobel prize for assuming that returns follow Normal distribution, which goes against common sense.
Taxing money when it is earned instead of when it is spent will result in the money being shuffled around the globe in complex ways. I always get blasted for saying this, but the only way to get taxes from these profits is by shifting to a sales tax model instead of an income tax model.
I would love to have my house wired with 24V (instead of 240V).

At the very least it would mean I won't one day be electrocuted by my power-shower.
whoa! http://www.lycos.co.uk/
I once purchased a cheap FM transmitter that had a USB port for charging your device. Super cheap. $5, I think. It sounded like crap, so I decided to open it up and see how they managed to build it so cheap.

The first indicator that it might be super cheap was the fact that it would transmit on two frequencies; if I recall, those were 88.5MHz and 106.2MHz. "That's strange", I thought, "most North American FM radios won't tune an even-numbered frequency (the .2)."

Once I got inside, I realized the magic. The FM transmitter section was based around a 17.7MHz crystal. 88.5MHz was the 5th harmonic, and 106.2MHz was the 6th harmonic. There was a single transistor that was used as part of the oscillator. "OK", I thought, "that explains the bad sound quality."

Then I started looking closer at the PCB and discovered a few parts that were missing. The scariest was in the USB power section: instead of a 5V regulator (as indicated on the board), there was instead a jumper directly from input to output. That is, it was pumping the noisy, spiky, 13.8V from the car's ignition system directly into the USB port. Luckily, I didn't ever actually plug anything into that port, but it could have gone miserably bad...
The thing that made Google unique is that they ranked pages according to the links between them (i.e. PageRank), as opposed to more traditional document ranking methods that are keyword based.

As a result, Google found showed you content that people liked (and linked to). From the end-user's perspective, Google search was noticeably better and more relevant.

As far as I know, it was the first massive application of data mining graphs, which now drives social networking, content recommendations and more.
California is "struggling" because of atrociously bad management. It's not like the state lacks in physical or human capital. I mean, Jeebus, the Golden State is home to the capitals of two of the world's greatest industries (entertainment and technology). It takes world-class incompetence to squander such riches.

Don't blame the state government, though. The problems are structural, not personal. If we replaced the current slate of corrupt, incompetent politicians, new ones would take their place. The internal incentives of the system would see to that. In modern politics, corruption is a winning strategy.

On the other hand, if the state government of California were run more like, say, Apple, they wouldn't be in such a bind. But that would mean running California more like a for-profit business. This suggests a possibility: the problem may not be that capitalism has gone too far—it could be that it simply hasn't gone far enough.