I am software engineer for last 10 years, I am interested in Phd in statics/Math and live in silicon valley. what is the starting point for any courses or degree, any recommendation would help.
This is one of the most annoying part of stack overflow,instead of closing the discussion,they should have a provision to move to more opinionated discussion list.
They do. When you vote to close a question (and anyone can do that, not just moderators), you have to give a reason. One of the predefined reasons is "belongs on SuperUser stack exchange," and another where you can fill in a reason, such as "belongs on Programmer stack exchange." (Programmer is for code review, style questions, opinion-based stuff, etc.)
My experience is that programmers.stackexchange is even more militant about closing questions than stackoverflow. I guess they got tired of receiving all of the unwanted garbage and it makes them extra sensitive.
It can be, I've just launched https://myshopdata.com where online retailers can scrape their own content for synchronising with third party marketplaces.
My Shop Data is all PHP & MySQL, with Slim, Twig & Bootstrap.
The web scraping aspect is another product of mine (forgive the clunky homepage, I'm going to turn this into an API platform) - https://grabnotify.com
GrabNotify is Node.js, Mongo, PHP, Bootstrap and PhantomJS. The undocumented API allows you to create a web crawler but define a JavaScript algorithm to extract the data off the page. Some retailers have dropdowns which update stock, images, etc, so this crawler can simulate mouse events, etc. My Shop Data will supply a custom crawler algorithm for each e-commerce web site through the API.
And finally, I've written a HTML to Markdown translator to extract page descriptions but keep some formatting while being transferable to other systems that don't support HTML.
The whole legality issue of web scraping is an interesting one. I'm planning to position GrabNotify as a web crawler, page monitor and HTML -> data tool, but only if you own or have permission to scrape the original content but need a simple way to grab and monitor the HTML into data. I'm not really interested in building a business of scraping other people's content without their permission.
I started running few years back, but I couldn't run more than two miles, I used to get pain in my ankle. I know this is due to my snicker shoe. So, I bought 5-finger shoe, after that I can't stop running. Now I run around 6 miles, but I get bored beyond that, I think can do more than that.