mattrepl

There's been an active Smalltalk community in Vancouver, BC. If you want to stay in the U.S., then Seattle or Portland may work.

And replaced with the other legendary game programmer, Tim Sweeney (Epic Games founder).

This article appears to be a response to the new Journal of Computational Science whose editor-in-chief promotes computational science as separate from theory and experimentation.

The inciting text can be found in the description section here (click to expand the full Aims & Scope section): http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home...

An excerpt:

"Computational Science is a rapidly growing multi- and interdisciplinary field that uses advanced computing and data analysis to understand and solve complex problems. It has reached a level of predictive capability that now firmly complements the traditional pillars of experimentation and theory." - Peter Sloot, Editor-in-Chief

I'm not sure which schools you're referencing when you write about that status of academic teaching. If a university has a statistics program they must offer something beyond a course in basic statistics.

Grants for statistics research do seem to be relatively lacking. Possibly the increased emphasis on statistics in data analysis and machine learning will change that.

The listing of good statistic programs is missing at least a handful of schools: UCLA, UMich, UWisc, CMU (machine learning dept), and GMU (computational stats PhD).

I'm coming from computer science, but it appears the state of statistics in industry and academia is improving. Off the top of my head, here are some tech companies that depend on and employ statisticians: Facebook, Google, bit.ly, FlightCaster, Twitter, BackType, OkCupid, and Microsoft. The title might be Data Scientist or Search Engineer, but it's still statistics and probability.

Mongrel2 is still in early development, but may be relevant to you. There's a chat demo in the source repository.

http://mongrel2.org/home

Pretty good rip on a few annoyances of C++ in Zed's fantastic ranting style.

Financial compensation is only part of it. Most startups include longer hours and additional responsibilities that limit what else you can do with your life, such as have a relationship, spend time with friends, or work on a side project.

I'd guess you're at an established startup if you're only making ~$10k/year less than your last job in the defense industry. Pre-Series A startups are unlikely to pay even a third of what you'd make in that industry.

Employee compensation from startups depends on many factors including how much they value employees, but it's really important for prospective startup employees to understand that you'll probably work longer hours, have more responsibility, and earn less than if you keep your day job.

Someone with experience in a great "normal" job may be surprised that the compensation, including equity, of a first employee is usually significantly less than what they're already earning. A first employee is taking a risk in opportunity cost by accepting a lower salary, but the risk should have an associated reward, namely equity. However, if a company has to do well just for the employee to break even with the opportunity cost, joining a startup doesn't seem like a sound choice. And not just in terms of money, but also general wealth and quality of life.

Further, the hours conserved by remaining at the day job can be used to build your own product. When the risk-level is acceptable, leave the day job for your own startup where you can maintain control and keep a meaningful equity percentage.

There are benefits to being a startup employee, such as the exposure to growing a company and the opportunity to join a support network and work with good people. Those things have value, but not always enough to offset the opportunity cost of either keeping the day job or founding your own startup.

Personally, I'd still consider joining a startup as an employee if it was a great match.

As a side note, RethinkDB has done a great job with posting a mapping of position/experience to compensation. They set compensation expectations before a prospective employee has even applied.

Here's one using a list comprehension to make it more closely resemble the Python example.

    (require ['clojure.set :as 's])

    (-> (for [c (s/intersection (set "letters in this sentence")
                                (set "and this one"))] (int c))
        sort
        reverse)

That's what I liked about the old Facebook, there was a deterrent to mass friending.

For those interested in reading more:

The presenter is Daniel Cook (Danc) who worked for Epic Megagames long ago doing game art and design.

Some of his essays have made it to HN before, those and some of his art can be found at his site: http://www.lostgarden.com/

An old article, but seemed appropriate to repost.

There was an article a few years ago on how the time investment of learning new programming tools is often worthwhile. I believe awk was included as an example.

Anyone recall it?

Good, and bleak, point about dying once you retire.

I wonder how retirement costs compare to lifelong cost of being obese. According to stats cited by the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/causes/economics.html) about 9.1% of medical costs can be attributed to treating conditions associated with being overweight or obese.

Very interesting. I'm interested in hearing about working with open source projects, selling data, and customer support; I'm especially interested in how startups handle bugs in newer open source projects. Do you spend time identifying the cause and submitting a patch, switch technologies, or work on something else and punt the decision?

This is a specific system design question, but I'd also like to hear about choosing between job queues (e.g., Beanstalk) and batch systems (e.g., Hadoop) for soft real-time data processing.

Interesting startups to interview:

- FlightCaster and BackType (lots of data, users get product for free, discuss process of finding and selling to customers interested in associated data; both also deal with real-time data)

- Shopify (supporting users that use your product to sell their product)

- banksimple (regulated industry)

- DuckDuckGo (building a system to compete with a wealthy behemoth)

- WakeMate and Square (designing and manufacturing hardware)

Stoicism is not about masking pain, but understanding that no one has control of their environment. To violently react to that which we cannot control is damaging to the individual.

A Stoic will grieve like anyone else, but find comfort in reason.

Seconded, I've owned both SR-60 and SR-80 headphones and love them. They are open-backed so would not work well for mowing, but they're fine if you're in a lab or airport.

I'd suggest earplugs over headphones for mowing, unless you're trying to lose your hearing (or have a really quiet mower). =)

One thing I considered was living in San Mateo or even Mountain View where you can rent a room in a house with a yard and keep your dog. If you must be in SF, then find a roommate and rent a townhouse with a yard in Potrero Hill.

All easier said than done, but I could never leave my dog.

Good luck!

I'm not familiar with kanban, other than by name. Site is visually appealing, but I'd suggest reworking the design to use a portion of the empty space on top of many of the pages.

I owned this domain for awhile, glad to see someone from HN using it now.

I've enjoyed reading your posts over the years, thanks for them.

You're correct that a message queue isn't necessarily a job queue, I was referring to job queues.

There are some tasks, such as asynchronously-generated web content, where a message queue is the obvious solution. But there are a class of problems where either a message queue or batch processing system (e.g., Hadoop) could be used. Consider the summation of user mention counts from the Twitter streaming API for an example; either a job is put on a queue for each tweet containing a mention, or each of the mentioning tweets are thrown into a bucket that is used as the source for a batch job that recurrently executes.

From what's mentioned in the article, it sounds like some of the tasks that Beanstalk is being used for at PostRank are the same type of tasks that other companies, such as FlightCaster, are doing with Hadoop/Cascading.

The trade-off seems to be that message queues are more flexible and can offer lower latency of job completion but batch processing systems provide better support for admin concerns like adding worker nodes, debugging, and reporting.

The above post was random but Osmos is worth playing. It can be relaxing, though gameplay varies from slow and methodic to frenzied.

Instant community: audit a course at your local college or university.

Even if uninterested in a degree, attending a class helps keep motivation and meet peers.

There will be CS influence in informatics and data science, but I'm guessing the influence will come from individuals with CS backgrounds rather than CS departments. These individuals will leave CS departments to join other departments involved in domain-specific data science or more formal data analysis and learning methods (e.g., statistics).

The modern field of CS is too broad for a single department. Perhaps more universities will follow CMU, creating a school of computer science with specialized departments. Until then, expect to see CS undergrads and Master's students involved in informatics/ML joining non-CS Ph.D. programs.

Agreed, didn't mean to imply otherwise.

"Google" is mentioned 22 times in the article.

It's the use as an adjective that's disconcerting. But as you stated, sounds fun in a way.

NoVA and the DC metro area is huge, we have lots of restaurants. Yes, some are chains, but there are a ton of awesome local places as well. I cringe when you suggest there are no good, local places to eat here. Yelp is decent for finding some of them.

I actually like Five Guys, their Cajun-seasoned fries are amazing. There's also Ray's Hell-Burger, Foster's Grille, Tuskie's (amazing lamb burger), and others in Alexandria, Arlington, and DC.

There is also igraph, for Python, R, Ruby, and C.

http://igraph.sourceforge.net/

The lectures have been recorded and made available in four parts at http://had.blip.tv/file/3375517/.

The overflow error is certainly not a reason to dismiss a candidate. The excerpt from the Wikipedia article doesn't imply that everyone had the same error.

Also, the page provided by sanj contains a recount by a Google employee where he and most of his fellow CS Ph.D. students at CMU were unable to provide a correct implementation of binary search.

Sometimes smart people make dumb mistakes, especially when rushed or stressed.