lifebeyondfife

+1 to Edinburgh, from a biased local.

Most (but far from all) startups in Edinburgh are based in the Codebase building: https://www.thisiscodebase.com/. We also have a couple of unicorns that were started here, Skyscanner and FanDuel; Amazon and Smartsheet also have offices; and Rockstar North is where GTA is developed.

All of the above companies are within 10-20 minutes walk of the Edinburgh Waverley train station. Public transport is awesome mainly because the city is quite small and buses are frequent and cheap.

There are plenty of meetups too - see https://techmeetup.co.uk/ for the biggest general one, which is also live streamed. There are others on security, JavaScript, Go, Machine Learning etc.

If you like hiking/camping/hill walking then Scotland is a great country for you - you have a view of the Pentland hills from the city, and Arthur's Seat in Holyrood park right next to our parliament buildings. You can be in the Cairngorms national park within a few hours by car/train.

Upper end for Senior Engineer take home pay after taxes is around £4,000 pm. You could rent a nice apartment for £1,000 pm, but could get something small and habitable for £600.

Edinburgh is Scotland's most international city, which is a double edged sword as the tackiness of the tourist shops up and down the Royal Mile showcase. But there's lots of great things to do and see, and varied places to eat and drink. The University of Edinburgh is one of the UK's best (I recently walked past Prof Peter Higgs :) and students come here from all over. The Edinburgh Festival is (one of?) the biggest arts festivals in the world and runs for the whole month of August. The Fringe Festival is a world famous testing ground for stand up comics - there's a great Netflix special from Hannibal Buress about his experience of the Edinburgh Fringe.

Big downside to the city is that it doesn't have a tech sector as well developed as, say, London. Also for as stunning and booming as the city is, the weather is pretty bad especially owing to its unpredictability i.e. four seasons in one day. It's drier than most of Scotland but that's not saying much. It's cold and the winters have short days. The flip side is that a sunny summer's day will be one of the most enjoyable of anywhere in the world.

EDIT: and yeah, I echo other warnings about waiting until the Brexit debacle has concluded to see what things are like for the UK

SKYSCANNER | LONDON/BARCELONA/SINGAPORE/EDINBURGH/GLASGOW/BUDAPEST/SHENZHEN/SOFIA | ONSITE | Senior Engineers/Principle Engineers/Data Engineers

Skyscanner - the global, online travel search company. We're hiring for various engineering roles in the locations above, see https://www.skyscanner.net/jobs/productengineering/ for more details.

Ask me questions. iain@ my HN username .com

Read about Stoicism. There's a quote - which is apt considering it's nearly Christmas - about what to give someone as a gift. I can't recall it exactly but goes along the lines of, "Don't add to a person's possessions, but rather free them of their desires."

    *At what point does almost anything else you mentioned help the business?*

Firstly, it's a market place. The business and investor need to find each other.

To create the market place, you must understand that different investors and different businesses have use cases that you don't need, such as "almost anything else" I mentioned.

    *Everything else seems likes gambling, imho*

One of the dimensions is risk profile. Some investors want risky positions in highly leveraged trades e.g. buying a lottery ticket. Some though want a minimal return on an almost sure bet e.g. Italy won't be beaten by San Marino at football.

At the very highest level, you have two groups of people: investors and businesses.

Investors have capital, and want to see somebody produce something extra with that capital. The main variables are the size of the capital, and the risk profile the investor is prepared to accept.

Businesses require funding to grow[1]. The main variables are the nature of the reparations, and the control they are willing to concede.

The scale of the four dimensions above means that there is no one size fits method to transfer capital from investors to businesses and vice versa. For instance, Capital: $2 to $2bn; Risk: I'm prepared to lose it all, to I want guaranteed, fixed returns; Reparations: I'll pay 20% interest, to you can have non-negotiable dividend; Control: you can own debt, or you can have a seat on my board.

The evolutionary nature of the finance industry has gone from age old future contracts ("I'll give you $100 next October for your crop of wheat") to other more exotic derivatives e.g. Snowball Swap. Even if you as an individual do not need complex options like that, you may invest in a 401k that does.

[1]not limited to pure funding. Consider a manufacturer that makes a product that takes a year to make. If they sell to a foreign market, they cannot risk working and consuming raw materials for a year in one currency to be paid in another currency at the end of the order that varies. Thus, an FX Future gives the manufacturer the confidence to agree a deal and concentrate on the business fundamentals, not global currency markets.

Echo Chamber Club exists to inform people with progressive views, alternative viewpoints on stories they wouldn't normally encounter within their own social media circle.

https://echochamber.club/

> Would you be offering Linux support in the future?

Answer can be inferred from my previous comment :)

Seriously though, thanks so much for the interest. The tech stack is C# and WPF specifically which Microsoft does not appear to be keen to port to any other platform.

If this version takes off when finished, I could be convinced to recreate as a web or Android app.

As someone who has spent the last 3-4 years on and off making a Football Manager game (https://github.com/lifebeyondfife/Cm93) that started as a weekend project - I loved this.

I recognise so many of the bullet points the author recommends avoiding, and why they're so tempting, but ultimately it's all great advice. The last ones like this I remember considering were Steam integration, and database encryption to make cheating harder _shakes head_.

I'm determined to finish within 5 years, and never start another Duke Nukem again.

Do you tend to swallow raspberries whole, or chew them first?

Parallel Processing Units?

As a PhD survivor, I liken it to a pyramid scheme these days. There aren't enough tenure track positions to have viable careers for all, so do not go into a doctorate program without considering your non-academia route to happiness and fulfillment.

My experience of getting the PhD was pretty positive (finished after three and half years, good university, good subject, great supervisor) but I still see so much truth in these essays: http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/

Or to be more succinct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

First I'd ask what's the skill you want to gain?

Do you want to learn how to setup Hadoop clusters and Zookeeper etc. on bare metal and understand all the maintenance of such a system. Or do you want to learn how to use the tool for enabling data science projects?

If it's the former, companies like Databricks are becoming popular because they abstract a lot of that complexity away: https://databricks.com/try-databricks

Because you're coming at it from scratch I'd strongly advise you look at the future trend and start straight with Spark. It is also made by Apache and is the next generation solution. https://spark.apache.org/

To give an idea of the difference, Hadoop uses Map (transform) and Reduce (action) higher order functions to solve distributed data queries and aggregations. Spark can do the same but it has access to so many additional higher order functions as well. This makes the problem solving much more expressive. See the list of http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/programming-guide.html#t... and http://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/programming-guide.html#a...

The Spark documentation and interpreter are good places to start.

https://github.com/apache/spark/tree/master/examples/src/mai... (Scala) and https://github.com/apache/spark/tree/master/examples/src/mai... (Python)

Thanks for the interest.

http://github.com/lifebeyondfife/Decider

As someone with an open source C# constraint solver hobby project, used by my former employer Moody's Analytics, I can see many similarities.

However, I can see the differences... I haven't spoken about it at conferences, or entered it in any competitions, which explains why it remains a largely ignored repo.

This is a good write up that shows one route of what's required to take something from a bit of fun, to your full time vocation.

With you on Google lock in. I'm off all significant Google services except Gmail. Still waiting for a paid, web based mail provider with quality search.

I agree that we should choose the best in class wherever possible, but doesn't Apple assume that you're all-in? The reason I bought an Archos when the first iPods came out was because it let me treat the mp3 player as a portable harddrive i.e. I wasn't locked into iTunes.

Some Apple products are second to none but for reasons of pragmatism, I'm Windows + Linux VM + Android phone.

A friend of mine was involved in this documentary about a similar situation going on in neighbouring Nepal: https://vimeo.com/115894458. Interesting and sad to see the human side of how unreliable access to such a basic human need, affects life.

Don't want to start an argument but perhaps why it's rare to see is because many people realise commenting on code as a rule leads to: https://twitter.com/nzkoz/status/538892801941848064

Commenting on the purpose of a file is reasonable, as it explaining why a piece of code works the way it does e.g. if an external constraint is in play. But explaining how in code comments is redundant if the code is well written and the functions and variables are well named.

To be fair to mercurial, of which I have no experience, the point I'm really making here is that distributed version control has won. Seeing as you're arguing for SVN, you're in favour of non-distributed version control.

With regard to technology choices, there'll never be complete consensus. Many people still choose to write in C++ despite other languages having similar performance and features (Go, Rust, Java).

SVN may work for some people but by having the same power on the client as the server, I believe you fundamentally have a better tool. The functionality to work on, say, three independent changes on my development machine and jump between them is at the heart of git and for just that feature alone, I'd never go back to using SVN or Perforce.

Maybe some don't want to migrate to git but distributed version control is the paradigm the majority of the world is heading to, if they're not already there. We can agree to disagree because, in terms of tech choices, I assert that git has won comfortably and with good reason.

I know most people have moved to git (or mercurial) but after running some internal training sessions at work, still I think some devs want simpler introductory material.

This work-in-progress series of blog posts is my stab at introducing the lightbulb moments as simply as I can, and in as small steps as I can.

'Sorry, "Bort" is not in the boys name database.'

This! Looking back at my career I didn't really learn to program properly until I was in an industry job staring down the barrel of a massive codebase collaborating with colleagues across different teams. It was great.

But time and time again I find my strong theoretical grounding in computer science coming in handy. The last time I hit the front page of HN was with a blog post about how I spotted an NP-complete problem in $m+ enterprise system for insurance companies. It would have gotten to clients with unresponsive brick-like performance if they upped a couple of parameters because my colleagues didn't understand the Curse of Dimensionality and why it was important.

I'll admit that college professors can live in their own world of academic navel gazing, but there is an actual point to theoretical computer science. And the best time to learn is when you have the time and freedom from short term goals and arbitrary client deadlines. If only there were a few years we could devote to such endeavours before entering the workplace. Hmmmmm...

You can be a fanboy about something and still want to understand why people prefer the alternative.

Beat me to it.

Ah ok, I think I understand the concern. So 'git fetch' and 'git merge' explicitly will stop an upstream rebase from making destructive changes to the history of your local branch(?)

As you say it's bad practice and shouldn't happen. I use gitlab and GitHub where branches can be protected to only allow merges via their web interfaces.

> hint, if you ever type "pull" you are doing it wrong

Genuine question: what's wrong with executing 'git pull' on a branch you haven't changed locally?

Anybody more familiar with this care to compare and contrast with Apache Thrift?

Saw this link on a previous HN thread: http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=4...

I like how it describes the negatively reinforcing cycle of closer scrunity which results in worse performance etc. I'd also suggest personal coaching: don't tell your devs what to do, get them to realise what would be the most expedient method of proceeding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GROW_model).

> the two parties have to "sit down and talk" [quote from the article]

As the paper is addressing a social problem rather than a technical one, the definition of what a 'real solution' may be is debatable.

I definitely think the paper provides suggestions about how to reverse such a cycle.

IaaS - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure

I thought that would be a fairly obvious one.