Hacker News Reader

upgrayeddon NLP Class is live

So far there's a few forums for these new online classes, like the AIqus site[0], Udacity forums for CS 101[1] and CS 373[2], and a lot of IRC channels, the main hubs being at #free-class, #udacity, and #mitx on irc.freenode.net[3].

There's individual channels for each course as well, for Coursera courses they follow the pattern of the class url preceded by an octothorpe, so for the Design and Analysis of Algorithms I class at http://algo-class.org for example, the IRC channel for it is #algo-class. For the Udacity courses, they follow the pattern of ##udacity-<course number>, so for example ##udacity-cs101 and ##udacity-cs373

[0] http://www.aiqus.com/

[1] http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs101/

[2] http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/

[3] http://webchat.freenode.net

upgrayeddon LulzSec brought down by own leader

So these dox were accurate after all?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2697398

upgrayeddon An HN style social news site written in Ruby/Sinatra/Redis/JQuery by Antirez

Join us in #lamernews on freenode, also if antirez reads this you're welcome to ops.

upgrayeddon Rage against the machine

  arc> (not (hacker-news-p))

  T

upgrayeddon X Factor & fox.com hacked, contestants database leaked

People get pwned, dbs get dumped, and sites get defaced e'eryday. This is nothing new.

upgrayeddon Why the US can beat China: The Facts about SpaceX Costs

Crazy how far a bunch of Goons from Something Awful can go. Kudos to you all and wishes of great success!

upgrayeddon Beijing Property Market Plunges

Can anyone qualified/familiar with the situation comment on what the probable effect the (likely) QE3 in June will have on the Chinese housing market and consumer buying appetite?

upgrayeddon Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1

Ah yes, that is true. The 150K figure is of the usual (ballpark) total cost of a Masters in Financial Engineering program.

upgrayeddon Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1

Awesome, thanks for the great response. Curious if you're familiar with the common trend in the last half-decade~decade or so of Masters in Financial Engineering degree programs popping up.

Would you say spending the 150K+ and years needed to do well on the 7City exam to work as an "official quant" at famous investment banks is reasonable? There seems to be little hiring/demand for quants coming out of these programs, despite the as-of-now still high admission and graduation rates.

If the job description is as variable as you say it is, would it not make more sense to work on becoming a trader at a number of different banks, firms, and prop shops and not waste all the time and money on getting an MFE? It was popular pre-housing bubble and apparently job placement for graduates was high, yet I'm not sure this is the case is now. Could you comment on this, seeing as you're working there already?

upgrayeddon I've decided to stop upvoting articles that have nothing to do with startups

Us old-timers know Hacker News was originally called Startup News but got changed to Hacker News back in 07: http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

pg explains his reasoning pretty clearly there.

upgrayeddon Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1

Ah, I see. I guess I'm just trying to flesh out the difference between all the terms I hear thrown around all the time that seem to overlap; day-trader, quant, HFT partner, etc. I see it's not as clear-cut as I thought. Thanks.

upgrayeddon Ask HN: How should a beginner learn to code?

Also, check out the Ask YC Archive curated by the noble Gabriel Weinberg: www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

A real treasure trove about basically everything and anything you'd be interested in for entrepreneurship, job finding, programming, school, life, ...anything.

upgrayeddon Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1

Thanks, good links in the blogroll as well, appreciated.

upgrayeddon Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1

hmm: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/quant.ly :(

Is it just quant talk though? Isn't there enough of that on NP, Wilmott, and QuantNet?

Or am I silly in assuming quants on those sites work mostly for i-banks, hedge funds, and more established players?

Do partners in HFT firms function on the same level, as say the guy structuring CDOs at Bear Stearns? I thought there was a difference, but this is another reason for the wide questions; the nature of what HFTs do is a little vague and not clear from Google searches.

upgrayeddon Ask HN: Automated trading on April 1

Related: are there any good sites/communities/blogs to discuss HFT that anyone can point to?

Am really interested in this field, anything like a crash course in what it involves would be nice by anyone familiar.

How much cash do you generally start with, and how liquid are you?

upgrayeddon Vi Hart: Every school should replace calculus with recreational math

Everyone here on HN always seems to say the same thing: the way math is being taught in most schools sucks, we need to change it. Math is glorious, it's the kicks, etc.

I'm curious why everyone is so enamored with mathematics here though; I've tried to understand what is so captivating about the subject but have failed to do so for years.

I've never gotten past trigonometry and algebra myself, and this idea of Calculus being more than the tedious integration work that textbooks I tried to self teach from said it was is intriguing.

Enlighten me, how is mathematics not just a bunch of rules and methods to solve problems within constraints, and that some professional practitioners are forced to prove...

How many of you programmers and software engineers here even interact with the Calculus you learned in high school/college on a day-to-day basis in your apps/software projects?

upgrayeddon How not to protect against SQL injection (view source)

Sorry, I just don't do any apps that touch the internet...just some programming for fun on the side.

The only thing that I've written that could be applied to this is our POS system at the restaurant I work at as a dishwasher and cleaner for. It's in Django though, and the Django project takes care of most issues with that...not that they're really priority #1 security-wise...

upgrayeddon How not to protect against SQL injection (view source)

I don't do webapps, but I'm sure everyone's vulnerable somewhere, if they do.

I just dislike the whole "upvote for x" comment that dredges up from Reddit.

'Just lowers the signal-to-noise ratio, and I hate to see things like that creep up on HN.

upgrayeddon How not to protect against SQL injection (view source)

How about no.