skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Getting another interview at a place you recently turned down? 
Im an undergraduate about to graduate with a double major in math/cs. I had two interviews with a company whose software executes trades in the financial sector with extreme speed. I passed both. I was however worried about my possible position within the company, as it seemed like I would mainly be doing web development for them (this is what was described in the interview). Seeing as how the cs market is hot, I was thinking I could do better elsewhere.

Generally most of their employees went to ivy league schools. I never responded to their request for a third interview, as I was suspicious about how good of a position I would get in the company. Was this a stupid decision? Many of their developers are very accomplished individuals, writing really fast low latency c++ code.

Is it possible to get a low level job at one of these shops and expect to move into these domains of the company in the future? If so, how does one go about contacting them successfully so as to secure another interview?

Whats more, if one wants to get into the domain of high frequency trading, but perhaps doesn't have the pedigree to get a job outright, where is best to start? Would any old c++ developer role do? Should I target a database job? As a young intelligent individual where is best to start if one wants to maximize their income within the financial industry?( This is assuming I cannot work at Microsoft, google amazon)…messed up my amazon interview.

Furthermore, I am looking eventually to make into a hedge fund as a developer (and lateral within the company once there). I have been considering, and was advised by an executive at a hedge fund, that having math + cs and a masters in accounting would be a stand out pedigree as opposed to MFEs and the like. Has anyone here heard of such a combination, and can you give me insight into the advantages such a skill set could present?
That's the beauty of measuring perception instead of the real thing.
Prismatic has a much larger vision of bringing together elements from my AI and machine learning research background along with modern interaction design to build smart everyday consumer products.

The current app is just the first step in a longer roadmap of building smart products. Currently, we're great at discovering new articles, but in the future will include discovering relevant apps, music, movies, and local events. Don’t be too surprised if we’re on your TV soon.
I just realized you can edit files. Is that new too? Or is it only the file creation that's new?
One of their advantages is that they're not dependent upon advertising money
NSA is an intelligence agency, not a law enforcement agency. They don't operate within the court process. Which means they don't really do subpoenas or warrants. Furthermore, any data covertly collected by the NSA would be inadmissible in court anyway, which would make it impossible to get a subpoena or warrant based on it anyway.
How the first letter was written
I'd disagree that R is trivial to pick up. I find a lot of impedance crossing tool boundaries, and much of R is written by (and for) advanced stats use, making trivial application somewhat daunting.

Which isn't to say that it's not a phenomenally powerful and capable tool. I'm just referring to its accessibility.
I wonder if it would be best to measure the impact of corruption instead. For example lots of small bribes to a cops Vs corrupt regulators allowing an large oil spill to happen for example..

IMHO, a lot of third world countries have endemic corruption and they live with it as long as it is bearable, but when it comes to large impact issues (A contaminating mining development or large water usage), locals are much more willing to go out on the street and protest (sometimes riot) to stop it than people on developed countries where almost nothing happens (the 99'%s protests for example)
When I think about what I want the future to look like and what's missing now, a smarter news aggregator isn't on the top 10 list. I have no problem wasting infinite amounts of time with existing entertainment technologies. At the same time, thousands of engineers clearly disagree with me as they are risking their livelihoods and investing their their talents in that field.

I do find the whole field boring. Making a news aggregator that's X% better than existing ones doesn't improve the world a whole lot, or even offer a compelling consumer value proposition.

I don't want to sound like I'm against all consumer entertainment tech. It's clearly something that people enjoy, and it's exciting for some people to make. But this particular application is one whose value I am very skeptical of.
Banks are a hard place to work in IT. But the pay is good. In New York, I've seen a lot of good engineers get sucked in. I worked as a consultant at Citi for a year.

I wouldn't quite write someone off because they worked at a bank. It can be hard to walk away from 33% of your salary to do something more fulfilling. Just because they exist in that environment doesn't mean their passion is dead.

EDIT: By the way, I work at a Silicon Valley engineering driven startup working to fix financial software. If you have passion and want to start solving the problem rather than contribute to it, we're hiring great engineers. I know there are some in the big banks. http://careers.addepar.com or R2@addepar.com
Well, I guess they decided to follow this route. For example github receives a very important amount of traffic targeting accounts that are completely free. Even a very small textual AD adsense-style could mean a lot of money. But they don't do it.
Incomplete combustion is a much bigger problem for complex molecules like hydrocarbons. Even with catalytic converters, small-scale consumer engines throw out a lot of toxic crap besides pure CO2.
Something that would be truly revolutionary: A site that compared policies. I have at times done some googling for that type of info. It appears to essentially not exist.
Would you be able to describe how a TopN report helps here?
I don't know about cancer, but definitely some chemical poisoning -> thus proving pavel_lishin's point :).
So, I've started using R for some stuff I'm doing at work. I have to say that I'm basically treating it as a non visual spreadsheet. Seems everything I've used it for so far, I could have done with excel. Am I doing it wrong?
I have kind of mixed feelings about this. I worked at Citi, and the average person there is actually pretty smart. They're just tied down by all the bureaucracy, which ends up killing their creativity and motivation.

This can turn into an advantage once you leave, though. Once you join a decent company you get very motivated to do your best, because you never want to go back.
I did my master thesis stat works in R. it was a pain at the begining because I was not very good with stats. so learn the stats alongside.
Tent is at least equally proven. I'm following 157 people (maybe ~50 are consistently active users). Within only a few months of existence, Tent has attracted development of an Android app[1], two iOS apps in beta[2], a very smooth and sleek OS X app[3], and several alternative webapps[4], all made by third-party developers with no relation to the startup that created the Tent protocol.

I don't mean to be rude or dismissive towards another open-social project, but I have been unimpressed with the design and usability of Identi.ca. OStatus seems to be the work of idealistic folks who hoped they could just make an open protocol and people would flock to it, solely because it was open. Predictably, that hasn't happened. Open is great, but software also needs to provide a great user experience. I think the Tent community gets this.

Tent is also more than a Twitter clone. It already supports private posts, long-form blogging and social bookmarking, unlike OStatus, and in the months ahead it will do much more.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monstarlab...

[2] http://signup.tentrapp.com/ and http://bivy.me/

[3] http://jabs.nu/Tentia/

[4] http://zelten.cc/, http://essayist.mndj.me/
Lol, good answer. Though it would be a lose/lose bet with you I'm afraid.
I totally agree, I consider myself in that category. Although to be fair I'm in IB, not retail.
It's all up to methodologies used to gather evidence, how to interpret the evidence and ultimately how to weigh different aspects of perceived/suspected corruption.

We need more transparent and more open societies. Look at SOPA, look at the ITU meetings held behind closed doors, look at G8, ... People should be able to surveil governments and those in power, and not the other way around. Yet, we're going the exact opposing direction.
Only file creation is new. I had been wondering where file creation was since they added editing though. This is very welcome.
Here's the resources I've used and found helpful (plus notes) for getting a least a basic grounding in statistics.

Khan Academy + "Head First Statistics"

-No matter what direction you want to go with your learning and before you start getting into street fights over Bayesian vs Frequentists philosophies, "stats 101" is the common base of 'statistics' for: Physicists, Engineers, Sociologists, Doctors, Economists, Journalists and more. Yes there are many "truths" in 'stats 101' that can be questioned, but this is the common language you'll want talking to any of these people.

"What is a p-value anyway?"

-A very quick, non-math heavy read on avoiding magical thinking in classical statistics.

"Data Analysis with Open Source Tools"

-I really love this book because it steps way out of "stats 101" land and gives a lot of really great real world advice and touches on many mathematical tools that can help you understand data. The chapter "What you really need to know about classical statistics" gives a refreshing overview of all the basic stats you've covered and explains many things that seem strange. Also the bibliography/recommended reading list from this book is fantastic.

The biggest thing I've noticed as I've learned more is that statistics is a gigantic field, and can mean extremely different things depending on what field you're in. Obviously learn the advanced statistics relevant to your interests, but when you get a chance listen to how other people think about stats, and keep learning.
Thank you for the kind words! Indeed, the NLP and ML behind Prismatic are pretty intricate. Not just because they use something mathematically sophisticated, but you have to make a lot of good decisions about what can be tackled with a simple approach and when to spend a month thinking about a harder problem.
Ah, but you miss the crux of my point: people act inconsistently with their own choices! You're right that it's not up to me to decide what's good for people, but what gets me is when people decide for themselves what is good, and then find themselves unable to do it.
That's a very charitable reading.

It's a PR play for the training outfit, and not a terribly good one, IMO.
Full Show 12/4/12: TPP: The Corporate Power Grab
How do you get that?

By my estimate (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879046), they should have seen a reasonable payout. As was explained in the blog post, TechForward sold all the company's assets except the lawsuit. So the original shareholdings should all be in place, minus whatever additional equity they had to sell to the investors to get the small amount of additional money needed for the lawsuit.
This is Cisco Nexus gear with Bridge Assurance enabled, probably 5K to 7K uplinks, IMHO
Can't upvote this enough. Quite a cool project, open source, runs on Node, and is very featureful.
But you also work for Facebook, and consequently have slightly larger scale problems than most get to worry about.

True multi-datacenter availability in an active-active manner is actually fairly difficult to achieve.
Completely OT but I just don't get anime at all. What am I missing? I got 10 minutes through Episode 1 at that link expecting something to happen - nothing did. I don't even really follow the storyline - a wimpy kid who can only stop himself throwing up by running onto the school roof.

It's like cryptic crosswords, god and football matches - I must be missing a part of the brain.
That depends on the statistical moments you're calculating. For sums and means, yes. For percentiles, standard deviation, and other moments, you'll need to operate on the set as a whole, which either means re-reading the dataset or processing it in memory.

That said, I've got my own univariate statistics generator written in awk that can handle sets with millions of values readily on desktop/laptop hardware.
Thank you! We're offering this course as a way for talent to level up.

As to the potential in the talent pool, you're judging people on the wrong factors: Big banks may not have the slick interfaces of a Square or Simple, but they also have the most complex, least-error tolerant customers and regulators.

Banking functions without downtime, and the world in which does so is extraordinarily complex. Ignoring either of those when you discuss the potential of the people that make it work is silly.
There could also be an incoming relevance filter. I'm sure the NSA has no interest in archiving all the pornography, spam, and cat pictures ever transmitted.
Yelp already has ratings for individual agents. More useful, however, are the insurance ratings published by J.D. Power, based on consumer surveys: http://www.jdpower.com/consumer-ratings/insurance/index.htm.
It's much easier to lower prices then raise them?
Marketing Influenced Application Development
It's a meta-study aggregating about 13 surveys. The things being measured by the underlying surveys vary but mostly seem to center on government-employee bribery and misuse of public funds.

Most of the surveys are expert surveys not of the general public, and some of them use out-of-country researchers. It looks like 3 of the surveys reported data for NK and they're all outsiders.
We have a variety of these websites in the UK, such as gocompare, comparethemarket and moneysupermarket.

All of them list quotes ordered by price, from lowest to highest - and while some companies aren't listed, I have yet to find an unlisted company that offers a better price.

How does your product compare to these?
Thanks! Take the source. Use it at home. Tell your friends.
What odds are you giving on that?

https://twitter.com/markimbriaco/status/276438853257162752
Agreed. Finance trains you extremely well for many challenges. Sometimes it's bureaucracy and that has to be untrained :).
Tooting my own horn here, but here's my own little "Minecraft" renderer in Neja, circa 2005 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v... ). Over 4 years before Minecraft, and even then that was nothing new. It was kinda cool for JavaScript, in 2005, but all things considered, it was pretty lame compared to Ken Silverman's voxlap for instance.

The "cool" thing about this demo, was that Canvas was not widespread back then so I generated all the chunky effects on the fly as 24bits BMP image, then made a data: URI and update an IMG tag.
As someone who backed them on kickstarter I probably have a biased perspective, but it seems to me that the product is coming along very nicely. They are quite open to with the development of Pixate to backers. There is also a Pixate demo app on the app store to see how it works on a device. Pity they haven't been so open with nonbackers.
Elon Musk doesn't regard Fisker as a serious competitor. He said something like: "Fisker is headed up by a car designer, not an engineer. The reason we haven't had electric cars isn't because they looked bad" (or words to that effect).
Awesome. Were you recently laid off?
You're wrong. And I vow to talk down your site to everybody around me if you think you can simply sacrifice my comfortability in browsing just for conversions.

To hell with ya. This is MY internet.
So, is it an Apple Ping 2.0? Destined to the same fate, I suppose.
What are you looking for? Comparing policies in terms of what?
But would the 11k laid off be average employees, or the bottom 5%?
Prismatic are doing something wrong with the way they message the sender or the recipient because when I clicked a button saying 'invite these friends' I didn't realize it was going to Tweet them all DMs. I got about 10 messages varying from "have you been hacked" to "don't spam me".
>> Making a more recent branch the new master

Why don't just use "git reset --hard <sha-of-the-better-branch>"?

At least if the better-branch and master commit in common is the last commit in master so no history rewrite will happen when pushing.
The concept of using the social graph to create a better dating app is certainly not extremely groundbreaking, but I'm curious about the naming. The claim that "Haystack is an extremely likely name for a dating app" is a weak one - the fact is that no one thought about it up until a few month ago. On the other hand - I doubt someone would just steal the name of a potential competitor. My theory is "unconscious plagiarism". Someone on that bus heard something about the original app, didn't really remember it, but when the guys brainstormed about the name - haystack popped up.
There's a "rel=vcs-*" microformat :

http://joeyh.name/rfc/rel-vcs/
Are there plans to make it possible to just receive the bitcoins directly rather than a cash payment in a bank account? I'd like to accept bitcoins but have the coins transferred to my wallet.
Trouble in Coupon Land
Where is the CA social media archive?
I'm taking this right now. Can somebody provide some perspective on how thoroughly the course prepares you for using R? Does it give you a good enough grounding in statistics so that you won't shoot yourself in the foot with R?
What about creating a folder?
So, I'm a little confused. This is something I do myself pretty regularly but there are conflicting things here for me.

The photos I usually want to print are almost never ones taken on my phone. And because the photos I actually send to people are from my camera I end up using my PC and just upload them to the company and choose the location. Costco, Walmart, Target all offer the ability to print at various locations.

I guess I don't see the benefit here. Driving to the store is the inconvenience in the end. That's why people attach photos or upload them on Facebook instead these days. Perhaps if it automatically snail-mailed the photo to a family member it would be more useful. But even my 70+ year old grandparents prefer I email them photos now anyway.

Edit - Just to add some context, I'm a father with multiple kids with parents and grandparents who demand photos of them every day. :)
Pirate Bay spin-off site Promo Bay to be unblocked
Great Jobs: Kutcher praised for biopic
Co-Founder Wanted Get 5% of my start up for $25 in an auction
Come on San Francisco, I was expecting this to be a much more collaborative, entrepreneurial adventurous city. I have an accelerator very interested in my Gamerholic.com platform. I need a co-founder.

Give me a call for an interview 415-867-5336 Anari. You can also join an auction for 5% of my brand if you are cash limited. You pay only $25 to join the auction http://www.dreamybids.com/contest.php?id=331

Who wants to play a part in building the next big gaming company?
With such comprehensive layoffs (4% of the company), I can't imagine they wiped out 80% of their bottom 5%.
Really, with all the social media companies in San Francisco, I'm surprised a company from NC did this first.
Don't know why they didn't settle, but

+ $140M in revenues
- $22 million in favor of TechForward
- $5 million in punitive damages
- X million in lawyers fees

Best Buy still did alright if you ask me.
That's a great point, we've created an issue to track this on Github - https://github.com/balanced/status.balancedpayments.com/issu...

PS - Pull requests with solutions get free t-shirts :)
Right, so you retrain people who think that way to think some other way. Maybe. On the one hand, people rarely change, but on the other, getting fired could be a wake-up call that you must change.
I really, really, tried to like Kicksend. The usability was horrible though. My main use case was that I'd upload some pictures and share them to a list of family and friends of the new baby - keeping the pictures off of email and gaining some small increase in control.

Then we get into the problems...

There was no good way to bulk maintain pictures. Horrible. Lists? They didn't work. Half the time the email wouldn't be sent out to the group after I shared something. Fail. So, the last time I tried to use it - and realized that nobody got what I sent out, I spent an hour manually deleting every file in my account (since, again, there were no bulk interactions). On top of that, there was no way to simply delete my account.

Kicksend was good in concept, but execution and reliability of it working was one of the worst of any apps I've used in the past few years. I finally ended up switching to a Pro Flickr account and just share things via Guest Passes. Works as expected.

Kicksend was something I really hoped worked well, but all it was to me ended up being a pretty UI that I couldn't trust to work at all. I would have paid for an account had it - since I really did like the interface.
I work with a great dba who came from a bank.

One fun fact about working in banking: customarily you're required to take at least 10 consecutive days off every year.
Thank you for the links oscilloscope, jit resources. Not having Malta in there was killing any european biz intel graph.
How To Instantly Draw Better
Your response is a little disappointing here.

Your belief appears to be that things you have a hard time noticing, like "feel" and "ease of use", are entirely subjective.

That's definitely not true. You not seeing X isn't proof that X doesn't exist. Germs are too small to see, but they matter a great deal.

The same is true of usability. You can definitely measure it. It isn't subjective, but it is personal. Even so, it still matters, because those personal factors have a lot of regularity across individuals that can be exploited. A great example is the iPod. It wasn't the first MP3 player, and it arguably wasn't the best when it came out. But it crushed the existing players because Apple spent a lot of time on making it easy to use and slick.

The amazing thing to me about the iPod isn't that it was better than the competition. It's that the competition never caught up. Precisely because, like you, many of their engineers and executives never took usability seriously.
Hi, We’re Bitmaker Labs
The smartest people will often end up performing terribly at bad companies. Being unable to act is not a huge deal for an average person, but it can be devastating and demotivating for someone who's used to getting shit done.

And honestly? I don't believe Citi management knows enough to know who their bottom 5% are.
Sadly not available yet, sorry. It's a hassle to get new projects open-sourced, and given that HPC codes traditionally require that you have a million-dollar supercomputer anyway...
I didn't downvote him, but even if Brubeck's career was benefited "MASSIVELY from being white", this has absolutely nothing to do with whether he was a good human being or took a stand against racism.
Since it looks like this is going to take a while (long long long after anyone will care), here's where I am now:

https://gist.github.com/4220255

All it does is take a random quote from the array and stick it in an extra table row, and there's a link that alerts text selected by the mouse (which is currently pointless) and I need to do all the localstorage stuff but yeah.
Game theory was my favorite course in college. I really think it should be offered at more schools to wider audiences; I had to take it as an economics minor elective during summer classes.