skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's pretty much impossible to find even the crappiest home here for under half a million. For what you describe, even if it's next to a freeway in a "bad" neighborhood with a crap school district, that'd be a few million easy.
This is a seriously awesome podcast. Consider listening to it, the amount of knowledge combined with two bsd-loving hosts is amazing!
I really have no idea, but off the top of my head, perhaps you could invite some companies for talks or visit them to check with them if they could use any mathematicians.

Maybe some could use maths but don't know it yet.
You seem to be conflating your requirements with your current salary. Those are not necessarily the same number, your current salary could be significantly lower than what you require to jump ship.
Show HN: Mindura – Data driven flashcards (mindura.com)
Finished setting up and bootstrapping my little side project. Would love to get some feedback, thoughts and ideas.

I originally built it for myself to boost my own memorization speed while I was learning a new language. I am hopeful that it can turn into something that others can benefit from.

If anyone is interested in spending more time and actually trying out the service please use the "contact us" option and I'll set you up with a free account (as long as I don't get too many requests :P)

Thanks!
"because they wanted a clear seperation between health care and employment. "

And yet... there's very strikingly little political movement to reduce/remove/eliminate "benefits" which include health insurance provided by employers.
Are you really saying that a metal bucket full of saltpeter (tree stump remover) is “exotic” compared to a giant electrical battery based on lithium, a metal which doesn’t exist in nature, violently explodes on contact with water, and needs a solid-state electronic charge controller to keep the battery from exploding when you charge it? Why would you say something like that?
Yes I did. I was addressing other commenters here who advertise the idea of the "first to call a number loses". Thanks for your consideration though, it's indeed not very clear from my message.
These privacy bugs are well known to the people who put them to use.
Sadly, to some extent the data integrity is part of the business logic. For example, if products can or cannot be sourced from multiple suppliers
Emojineering: Machine Learning for Emoji Trends – Instagram Engineering blog
I think the idea is that you don't have to version and maintain it, your database layer changes far less frequently than your code does. Kind of like how servers used to be managed back in the day. Rebuilding one of those was a major life event, and much of your experience revolved around managing servers through scripts and whatnot, so you didn't sweat the lack of versioning much.

Of course nowadays with easy cloud provisioning and tools like Docker, you can version server configurations, so you don't have to put up with it if you don't want to. But databases, I think are at that same in that you should really understand the one you're working with such that you could replicate your current usage from scratch if you really had to, but honestly the chances of you being called upon to do it are minuscule, and the costs of such are going to be borne by the organization you work for anyway.
This is true, but I doubt they are just looking to see if you can find the answer. From my experience, they are much more interested in seeing how you approach the problem and can analyze your own algorithm's performance. I think if anything the latter is more important than coming up with optimal solution.

I've definitely encountered questions where I wasn't familiar with a certain topic, and usually they'll realize it and just give me hints. I did also have interviewers who just watched me struggle though.
CoinToss – Online coin toss app
Open source software doesn't die until the last user stops using it. That's the point. If it were proprietary it would be dead.
I've also had a bad experience with hired. Seems like they do not run a tight ship at all.
A quote from the article: "You don’t have to be a benighted creationist ..." Can we please keep these type of articles off HN please? I don’t come here to be insulted. I have other sites for that!

Sir Isaac Newton was not a simple nor stupid man and he gave honor to the Creator. Just because science has not figured God out, does not deny His existence.

A whole lot of reasons for what allowed the Internet, HN, science, and technology to be where it is at today came out of a nation (silly apparently to the writer) which put "In God We Trust" on everything.
Seems similar to what ocamldebug does in ocaml (which itself was copied from the SML debugger).
Egg yolk is only yellow when whole. Whipped yolk is whitish.
I am confused. What does Diaspora have to do with popular Content Management Systems? I thought it was about de-centralized social networking. Well sure, Facebook uses PHP, and Twitter got going with Rails, but this comment seems out of place.
I'm referring to the hypothetical situation in which Java did not come along, not to modern Java vs. modern Python.

Yes, I think we'd have been better off with Python + C++ (which is likely had Java not come along).

w.r.t Speed - one of the reasons Python's speed is (still) lacking, is because it never got the amount of work Java did. JavaScript is no longer lacking in speed, and neither does Lua - and both are as dynamic as Python. Lua is much more impressive in this respect - LuaJIT's speed, the work of one person, is comparable to the best JavaScript engines, works of multiple big multiperson teams.

The original Java was a little safer than Python, but definitely not on par with what you'd consider a modern staticly typed language. There were no generics, and everything was cast all around e.g. if you used a dict/map container. It was easy to have static typing locally, but not globally. The standard library at the time was really, really bad. I think I considered it acceptable only with Java 1.5.

A lot of modern Java is like it is because it was in widespread use, and it was so bad to begin with. Had it been Python instead, perhaps Python's bad parts would have been addressed earlier (including lack of type checking and lack of speed - both of which are coming of age)
My guess is that your body would somehow react to the idea that "hey, this is a question I need to cheat on!" in some measurable way.
>> The polygraph foremost is a way to arbitrarily filter people for reasons that interviewer would rather not reveal, and secondly to select for people willing to put up with the theatrics of procedures while being indifferent to their supposed purpose.

That... That was beautiful!
I don’t like comments, because having to comment a piece of code means the code itself does not express everything there is to know.

False premise. Comments often serve to explain things that are not immediately obvious. Consider a code base for a domain-specific application that you're unfamiliar with - you can learn by studying function and variable names and so forth, but since many of these are domain specific it may not be at all obvious what those things are for. Likewise, in complex code bases you might have to deal with a variety of edge conditions, and those by definition are frequently not obvious, or we'd have far fewer bugs.

It's true that if yo stare at the code long enough you'l eventually work out what it all does/ But that's like saying that if you wave a narrow flashlight beam around in a dark room for long enough, you'll eventually work out the contents of the room, or that if you look at enough individual bricks, you'll work out the shape of the building.
http://rdcu.be/cIqD
Sure, clearly his cueva activities of selling ARS for USD and vice versa are illegal; I was just talking about the Bitcoin trades.

I think you may be mistaken that “selling commodities for foreign currency is illegal”, because every Coto grocery store has a sign at every checkout counter explaining that they accept US dollars and Euros for their groceries, and at what ratio to the peso. And they’re enrolled in Precios Cuidados, so whatever illegal things they do, they pretty much have to do them in secret. There might be something illegal about selling Bitcoin for USD, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not simply that it’s selling a commodity for foreign currency.
> I don't know any really popular web/CMS/project that is not written in PHP.

You need to significantly update your knowledge of the current state of web tools, then. All the world isn't Wordpress and Drupal.
Ask HN: If you self publish a book and sell via iBooks can you do well?
Hi guys,

I've put together a draft of a book - it's a photo book with quotes from a bunch of inspiring people. The pictures are great, the quotes are cool and it's about 100 pages long. I've created the book via blurb. My question is has anyone published this type of book (picture/photo book) via the iBooks store? And if you have, did it do well?

I am not so interested in making money but instead getting eyeballs on it. Is iBooks a possible way forward do you think? Any other advice?

thanks!
??? I think there are a lot of really popular applications that aren't written in PHP. In fact, excluding Facebook and Mediawiki, I can't think of anything I would classify as "popular" that is written in PHP. (Not sure whether to count PHPBB or not, seeing as although none of the sites hosted on it get a ton of traffic, cumulatively it must be one of the most popular pieces of web software ever)

Rails, specifically has Github, Twitter, Basecamp, and Discourse, just off the top of my head.
The other side of the coin is that you probably won't need to scale.

The performance differences can be staggering: I've replaced Java-based procedures which took more than an hour to execute with Stored Procedures which completed within milliseconds. That's an extreme example - the original code was simply incompetent - but I regularly see significant (100x) performance increase in core functions through the switch.

Still, nowadays I prefer to have as much logic as possible in code because it's much easier to test and is more flexible than SPs; and it's always possible to move logic to SPs later..
I think you'll be crucified because it's a bit of a weird conclusion to draw.

PHP was popular for ages, and loads of great things were built on top of it. With modern development practices and improvements in the language, it's even possible to build better tools using it. But it's not like it's easier to build excellent tools than any of the other environments available – Rails, or Django, or Play, or whatever.

I don't think the development toolset would have any impact on the success or otherwise of the project, at the end of the day. Sure, maybe it would be a problem if it were some rarely-used, obscure system, but that hardly applies to Rails.
CakePhP vs. Codigniter
I started off in MySql and then moved to PhP and then ultimately to Codeigniter. (I have built 5 sites on Codeigniter) Recently, I took a new full time job where the website was built in foreign country and it was built on CakePhP. So now it seems like I have to downgrade my knowledge of MySql and Php.

Thoughts? Is there any easy way to convert CakePhp to Codeigniter or maybe Larvel? (Probably not, but I thought I would ask.)
It does mean you need to treat your data schema and functions as code.

My short checklist for doing database centric development (postgresql centered):

* Database schema is kept under version control ( essentially all the DDL for a given database is kept in one place and managed as a unit ). You can use `pg_dump -s` to extract the schema from an extant database.

* data types and functions are kept in separate files under version control

* the database is built and filled automatically for tests, for migrations and for upgrades. Shell script, Makefile, Chef; the tool doesn't matter so long as the process is repeatable and automatic.

* data fixtures for testing are kept separate from the code ( own repo usually, since you want to be able to add edge cases and errors to the test database ).

* migrations on the production database are run immediately after a backup.

Nothing too fancy, just basic hygiene. But staying on top of that means you're ready to do things like build your application onto a new set of machines; or make drastic changes to how your data is structured.

There are a number of tools that do much of the scutwork for you ( South for Django, ActiveRecord::Migration for Rails, etc.) but the tools are not a substitute for understanding what your database is doing.
I am of the opinion that the successful interviews are not improving my job hunting skills. Only failures do. Since in these cases I got to the money talk I consider this successful.

> but here is an alternate ending: they regrade the job req to meet your requirement. They won't always be able to do this, but when they can you win big.

I find it very unlikely that a company that cannot even afford my minimum rate is going to turn around and "win big" unless winning big means getting what I already have with less job security on top (if I am pushing well beyond the salary range - I am the first one to go when the money runs dry).

I am not a celebrity programmer who is worth keeping around just for the bragging rights, I survive by selling the value I add at discount. If this value is unfavorable then neither myself nor the counterparty benefit from such a business.
I think the best thing you can do is encourage them to take math related courses that can lead to non-academic jobs, such as statistics, machine learning, data science, bioinformatics and quantitative finance.
What area of math are you in?

(After googling): Number theory. So obviously NSA is an option. They hire grad students for the summer, encourage your students to do this if it interests them. Also encourage students with programming chops to spend a summer doing an internship at a big firm that owns their own low-level compute stack, which will necessarily include crypto components. Intel, Apple, Microsoft, GPU manufacturers, ARM, Broadcom, etc. It may be hard to get your first few students in, but once you place a few and get introduced to their bosses you'll have contacts and it'll be easier.

Cast a net outside your field, too. Some students are studying number theory because it's interesting, but aren't wedded to doing it forever. It's worth talking with them about what they're really looking for and nudging them to take some CS / stats / finance courses if they have wider interests.

Finally, as a former math grad student who left to go to industry 10 years ago, thanks for even thinking about this. Most professors don't, and you're already doing your students good.

I'll send you an email with some more suggestions.
> The company is in the UK so there are laws governing use of information.

There are laws governing the use of that information in the US as well - some of which exist federally, as well as some on the state level (which may be stronger than the federal ones).
The interesting thing about polygraphs is that they can be an effective interrogation tool as long as the subject believes they work. (but then again so Santa Claus if the subject believes in him)

For instance the interrogator says, "the polygraph says you're hiding something from me, are you sure there isn't something you want to get off your chest."

The should however, be banned completely because the false positives are so high that we are crippling many of the agencies that rely on them. We're forcing them to drastically reduce their potential talent pool based on pseudo science.
Yes, this is a very bad idea. Due to the way that query planners work, it's not even a good idea to vary the shape of the dataset between testing and production. If you have a different (bigger, higher stddev, etc) distribution of data in column x, the planner will often complete a query differently
As a 10 years Rubyist I'm conflicted about this.

First, if I wanted to use a static typed language I have plenty of them to chose from, when I started using Ruby and more right now. One of the reasons I'm using Ruby is that it works well enough without having to tell types to the interpreter (which is already pretty strict about them because - example - it doesn't automatically cast strings and numbers into each other like JS and Perl do).

However, in some very rare cases an object without method M gets passed as argument where an object with method M is expected and the code fails at runtime. It would be nice to catch this in advance, but if the price to pay is to start declaring types like I did in C and Java, no thanks. The problems I had because of dynamic typing have not been big enough to go through all that pain again (and code pollution.)

We'll see what Matz ends up proposing to us, then we'll discuss it. I hope to be able to keep my code free from type declarations and optionally throw in some constraint when I really want to be sure that an object belongs to some class or has some methods. Nothing more.
Stack overflow is popular and it's C# IIRC.

I think PHP in general is popular because it's made for web and very easy to get started. This has cause a disproportional market share where the bulk of the popular site, cms, project are PHP. But that doesn't necessarily means other languages can't compete, it just mean PHP have a good market share.

Another arguably popular website is OkCupid and that was coded in C++.

I also think PHP will stay popular because of Facebook. They have contributed to several important projects including a pretty good VM and there are a resurgent of momentum imo. Most of it are copying what RoR group have pioneer.
Neither Github nor Twitter nor Basecamp are opensource. Now I know Discourse, I don't think it's really popular as a "forum" plateform.
Announcing edX for iPhone and Android
It's like poker, if you're not willing to risk and don't play aggressively you have less chances to win. To play aggressively you need to be in an advantageous position, in our case it means being good, otherwise you just won't have the necessary leverage to make the game go your way.
it was heavy enough to get deleted by the mods

good job covering your ass, ycombi
I can still remember the half-disgusted and half-suprised faces of my fellow students when I was eating fries with mayonaise while studying abroad in the US. As a Dutch guy, I grew up with "frietje-met" (fries with mayonaise). In turn, I was surprised most Americans eat fries with ketchup.
Stack overflow isn't an opensource plateform like Diaspora. You could talk about Umbraco and such that are popular in the .NET space but you can't really compare SO and Diaspora.
What's with the asterisk in the name?
It's incredible to me that he watched Simple Made Easy (which is an incredible talk), and his mind went to "stick more stuff in the database". Not because that approach wouldn't work, but to me a clear sign of complection would be conflating the medium of data storage (a database) and the business rules that govern the data itself. But I guess that's the the sign of a good talk. It's open to interpretation.

It also complicates your scaling story, your caching story, your ability to change databases and a great number of other things.

If you're building an app that has no chance of ever possibly needing to scale, or use a different database for caching, searching, or analytic reasons, then this approach may be optimal, but if any of those levers need to move at some point, I think you'd be in for a world of hurt.
Asking a recruiter for a range sounds like a good idea, but in my experience they often won't provide it (perhaps they don't have the authority). I gave up on one tech firm as the recruiter would not provide any salary range, other than the word "competitive" (which, in my experience, means nothing). The only way to find out an actual range involved traveling to their headquarters for a day long interview. I declined, unless they could provide a range. They declined to provide it. That was the end of that.

I suspect the hiring managers were never told the real reason I never interviewed there.
I imagine other people are like me and are curious about the actual usage numbers for Diaspora, so I will share the results of my 30 seconds of research on Google. Although I have no idea how accurate these numbers are as the decentralized design of Diaspora makes it hard to capture everything.

Rough estimates look to be about 1.2 million accounts with 81,550 active in the last 6 months and 20,207 active in the last month. There have been a little under 4 million total posts. [1] For sake of comparison, it takes Twitter roughly 10 minutes to accumulate that many Tweets.

[1] - http://pods.jasonrobinson.me/
Flaming is often a creative exercise because it can mean writing with full consciousness of its effect on the audience. A lot of flaming behavior is generated in an effort to create interesting discussions in the midst of cliche or superficial analysis. In many communities flame wars are some of the most interesting content and that's why it becomes an acceptable pattern.

One of the things I love about HN is that there are so many Really Fucking Smart People® with something interesting to say that flaming [along with inside jokes] constitutes some of the least interesting content. Indeed HN has even suppressed snark.
I for one I'm glad to re-discover this and although 0.5 does not sound like a "major version" as the post says, I am inclined to give it a try.
In 1996 I ported a large bunch of code from NEXTSTEP to Windows using the GNU runtime. That was all pre-OpenStep (OK, it wasn't, but the code didn't use Foundation, had no UI, etc, so it didn't depend on any class libraries beyond the runtime itself). But it has been possible for at least twenty years! (And there was always GNUstep.)

Another interesting thing is Apportable's Foundation implementation, it's really nice and is LGPL'd. I wonder if MS licensed that.
It does, however, become a Lovecraftian relic, unchanging, undying, until the stars come right or the users return.
The article advised just that: state the salary range that would be ok for you. In your example, you could have said just that: my current experience makes me feel comfortable with a range between X and Y.
Serves both yours and the recruiter's purposes very well.
Google Chrome now contains answer to life, the universe and everything
Interesting to see that Dispora is still alive.