GuiA

There is no better time than now for collecting oral history, interviewing people, asking them about their stories, etc. All of this knowledge and stories can get lost very very fast.

40% of gross income becomes 77% of net income given 48% of deductions. 48% of deductions for a grad student making $25k a year would also be insane.

How sad was I to realize that I was the only one in my PhD program who had chosen that route because I was as passionate about teaching as I was about research!

Feynman:

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

http://www.math.utah.edu/~yplee/teaching/feynman.html

Well in the end I dropped out (:

Spending 80% of your income on housing is just poor budgeting no matter how you look at it.

If someone decides that accepting a ~5 year position that pays close to minimum wage in one of the highest COL areas in the country is the right choice for them... then what?

Academia is kind of like the video game industry - plenty of young people with a dream who want to get in, get abused and spat out by the system. Because guess what, it gets even harder after your PhD. You’ll be paid barely more, except with even less job stability (you’re now looking for a post doc every 1-2 years, or jumping from adjunct contract to adjunct contract) and more stress and responsibility. And of course by that point the sunk cost fallacy has fully set in, you now think of yourself as an Anthropology Professor and there’s no way you’re going to go back and pick up plumbing or programming.

Ideally grad students would stop pouring in, free labor would dry up at universities, and they’ll have to raise grad student salaries to acceptable wages again. Seems unlikely given how badly people want to do anthropology PhDs, and that there’ll always be people who can afford to take a poorly paid position like that because their partner or parents are paying the bills. Maybe unions are the right call, but seems like a strong uphill battle.

Don’t worry, good design work takes time by very definition. Telemetry/spying does not magically fix that, and instead tends to lead to worse designs because people miss the forest for the trees.

Would love to see the work!

I wish that this was a feature throughout the OS. Being able to bind a foot pedal to pasting from the clipboard, or a slider to a variable in your IDE, or a rotary to a control in a video editing app, would be amazing and open up entirely new avenues for computing and letting people customize their setup. Particularly thinking of the accessibility implications.

> I initially preferred native French speakers, but after taking lessons with non-native speakers, I found that I couldn’t really tell the difference between natives and non-natives.

And indeed, with a batteries included kind of solution like PHP/MySQL, one can build a basic Facebook like in a week long workshop or so. You won’t understand everything that’s going on under the hood of course, but the fact remains that it’s way more accessible than the webpack/Babel/react.js/etc stacks that web devs push these days (waiting for the inevitable “oh no one uses webpack anymore, it’s all about ChirpChirp.js these days!” :)

1. as the truth or facts of a situation; really.

"we must pay attention to what young people are actually doing"

Can't find more about this by Googling around... anyone knows what the crude message was and where it was hidden?

We have more sub fields, but that’s not particularly a problem - once you’re an effective researcher, jumping branches - and even trunks - is far from impossible. A few months surrounded with talented people and dedication is typically enough - eg my grad school advisor, a CS HCI professor, got into genomics when meeting his wife and went on to publish, as first author, genomics papers in nature.

See also the recent rise of machine learning - many of the top contributors to that field were not doing machine learning research 10 years ago.

Similarly, motivated high schoolers now learn things that you needed a PhD to tackle 100 years ago.

Knowledge is weird and non linear, and as humans we have many super powers: we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors, we build better ways to preserve knowledge, to share it, better ways to teach, better ways to test our theories, etc.

It took thousands and thousands of years of man hours of work to get us to basic calculus, something that a motivated high schooler can get very comfortable with in a few weeks at most. The most educated Roman citizen would take a bit of time to compute something as straightforward as (8238*2949), which is now something you expect elementary school students to compute in minutes at most.

If we could jump in time 100 years in the future and see what 18 year olds know and can do then, we’d probably be blown away.

Wacom is a $500M company. They don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Any trail that can be found with a basic google search on the weekend is just not worth it.

If the framework were even a tiny bit useful, wouldn’t it have made you at least an okay salesman?

Conversely, wouldn’t the great salesmen be great regardless of how valid a framework is?