blastbeat

My first thought reading the headline was 'great, yet another "The Onion" article'.

Anyway, it seems that some German delegates pushed the wrong button too:

https://twitter.com/woelken/status/1110657088177487877

Evil to him who evil thinks.

> I enjoy getting my work done, so then I can work on my other projects or look for new jobs. When my required work is done, then I don't feel bad about doing other things...

Do you work remote, or does your employer allow to go earlier/work on your own stuff in your office?

I would finish the master thesis first. Publishing a half finished app doesn't make sense for me. The whole thing rather sounds like some kind of procrastination. Successfully finishing university with a good degree on the other hand is a sure shot and something you can build on later in any case.

> May I ask you what gave you the confidence to say you "would not have a problem getting a quant position"?

A lot of contacts , some of them I could activate at any time. For instance, one of the first students of my advisor owns a fintech company today. He actually offered me a job some time ago. One guy I shared my office with started his own fintech startup during his PhD. Basically 10-20% of my alumni hold a quant position, with or without having a PhD. It's seems to be a common career path in Germany for mathematicians.

I agree, doing a PhD can still be worthwhile. It's just a considerable gamble in my opinion.

> I don't agree. I work at a large industry research lab, and every position basically requires a doctorate.

I should have been more precise. If you want to do research outside of academia, you will need one obviously. Also, it depends on your field and your location. For instance in Germany, doing a PhD is mandatory if you're wanting to pursue a career as a chemist. On the other hand, having a PhD in humanities will significantly worsen your job prospects outside academia in Germany.

Assuming you run a legit SSH server on port A and an SSH tarpit on port B. What hinders an attacker to connect to port A an B at the same time? What is the advantage having an attacker connected for weeks on port B?

Earning a PhD is though, and can be very hard, depending on your advisor. But even if you've managed to finish it, you face a relentless fight for permanent positions, which according to the statistics, you're going to loose.

Once you've dropped out of academia, the prestige of the PhD will matter for nothing. What could maybe matter, are some skills/contacts which you hopefully acquired during your PhD studies. But whether this justifies doing a PhD is IMO questionable. A topic in statistical machine learning sounds good. But then again, I did my PhD in pure math, and would not have a problem getting a quant position.

If you don't manage to finish your PhD, which is quite possible, you certainly don't have any prestige, and you will in addition face the pain of failure, which can be huge in that context.

In short, don't underestimate the task of doing a PhD, and don't overestimate the impact of having one.

> Vikernes himself, who has never shown any remorse for the murder, has called the film “slanderous garbage”, objected to his portrayal (“I have never participated in a threesome in my life”) and – since he is a virulent antisemite – taken umbrage at being played by a Jewish actor.

Hilarious! Can't wait to see the movie. Thanks for the post!

> By turning sleep into a life goal, we’ve paradoxically made it harder to simply fall asleep.

This is not my experience. My sleep improved tremendous since I started optimizing for it. Sleep hygiene tips should not be seen as todo lists before bedtime, but as suggestions to reduce friction. They are exactly about getting out of the way.

Same trend here in Germany.

> Clinicians should be conscious about the choices they make in relation to their app use and, when recommending apps to consumers, explain the potential for loss of personal privacy as part of informed consent.

That's for me the most important point of that study. It's no good if you avoid data kraken where you can, and meanwhile your physician unwittingly distributes your sensitive data via the latest health app.

Depends on your definition of "safe" and "social media". I would certainly not post pictures of myself to Facebook/Instagram, let alone flaunting my kids.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19450689

> The hard truth is that most things in your life – good and bad – are your fault.

I find the premise of the article a bit simplistic. I'm all for an active mindset and ownership. But the hard truth is, that most things in our lifes are beyond our control. That's the whole point of e.g. stoicism: distinguish between control and non-control, and let go if necessary.

> Instead the study suggests pro-social religions appeared after complex societies had already emerged.

This completely makes sense. I've always seen monotheistic religions in particular to be cunning policy strokes, which violently unified diverse groups and rites behind their (processional) banners. This reduced diversification and complexity, and accumulated power to the present day. In fact, the current monopolisation of the once so decentralized internet is an amusing reminiscence of that tale.

How I read the article it's due to a sense of entitlement and sanctity, accompanied by the fear of status loss.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652

Do you talk about math lectures? Because during my university time I seldom met people, who understood a math lecture during that math lecture. Especially in advanced topics like category theory, algebraic theory, fractal geometry etc. Usually people understood topics and concepts for the first time long after the lectures, often not until after a second exposure in the next course. Also, in many courses you had to take notes, because the lecturer would use custom symbols and definitions. So I agree, taking notes can be distracting, but in most cases it should help your understanding, especially if you lack preliminaries.

One could argue that one has to be weird to try drugs. I know one guy for sure how went straight to psychiatry right after first time mushroom usage. I don't know whether he was beforehand that weird, but he needed a long time to recover afterwards. And he did never drugs again afaik.

> But how about creating the LaTex notes after class as a method to help retain the information?

I recommend solving exercises instead (with pen and paper), and creating flash cards for memorizing.

Golden rule: Use LaTeX only, if you really need to publish something for a wider audience. It's relevant for your thesis, research papers and math books. For everything else, LaTeX is nothing but a huge time sink. Even if you communicate math via email, try to avoid sending PDFs. Use common LaTeX syntax in your email plain text instead.

Don't abuse LaTeX for procrastination.

In my math classes there was one guy who took notes with LaTex. He was quite fast due to his tweaked Emacs environment. He also uploaded his notes and the sources to some public SCM server. What sounds like a good idea turned out to be nonsense. His scripts where ridden of typos and serious errors. There where only a few people who tried to volunteer and edit the sources, but it did not do any good. The lecturers weren't impressed by the quality, and even warned students to not use those notes for exam preparation.

In the end nobody could use the notes, including the guy himself, as he underperformed in exams. Instead of concentrating on the content, he was concerned with LaTex aesthetics, fixing typos and tweaking his environment.

I would never ever recommend anyone to type math lectures/exercises in LaTex, if this is not required. Just use pen and paper and profit:

https://www.quora.com/It-is-true-writing-things-down-using-p...

Where I grew up, basically every youngster did drugs to escape the boredom of the 90s, as being trapped in their smallish german home towns. People did mostly cheap drugs like cannabis, binge drinking, magic mushrooms and crystal. Many of them eventually abandoned their habits, apparently without much damage. But I know quite a few who suffered from drug-induced problems like psychosis at some point in their life. Many of them are basically disabled now. Some of them live still with their parents, condemned to take medication for the rest of their life. All of them smoked weed, but only one of them smoked it exclusively. In the other cases where in addition drugs like crystal meth involved.

My guess is, that for some people those drugs act like a tipping point, and bring underlying problems into full blossom. In my case, it was developing an anxiety disorder. Thus, as you don't know where or what your tipping point is, I'm strongly against taking those drugs. Even a one-time experiment with mushrooms can wreck your life.

No TV consumption, no social media like Reddit, Twitter or Facebook. I don't buy newspapers and seldom magazines. My smartphone is only for traveling and snapshots, I leave it at home most of the time (it has no SIM card). For phone calls I use an internet-less dumbphone instead, which is annoying to use, to use it as little as possible. In addition, I try to outsource as much communication as possible to email, to slow it down. I have the luxury to get away with reading work mail only at work. My private emails are filtered and freed from annoying subscriptions and newsletters. I have only a handful of websites I visit on a regular basis, which is still time consuming enough. If I need specific information, I web-search for it. Apart from this, I actively try to scrutinize information to avoid bias, but that's almost hopeless.

Lesson of the article: Professional poker is surprisingly hard and people regularly get broke because they don't factor in their expenses. Now, if one replaces "professional poker" by "life", than this article maybe meets the requirements of its headline.

That's pure clickbait. Here one can find the original speech of Maas:

https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/maas-konferenz-2...

He actually said, he "dares to predict the next war will be fought not only by means of megabombs, but also by means of megabits and megabytes, as already done with [smart] bombs today". He explicitly refers to electronic warfare. However, this reference is peculated and distorted by the linked article. I'm not a fan of Maas, but that's nevertheless another example of journalistic degradation of Heise Online.

If you're studying math, that's what you usually do in the first year: constructing and proving the obvious via axioms. It's an exhausting and tedious exercise, spread across different topics like analysis, linear algebra, probability theory, and separates the wheat from the chaff. After that, you are prepared for the interesting and non-obvious math topics.

Ok so the author inherited a project (in R!) as an intern, and successfully finished it in 3 months. He delivered, that's good, not bad. After that, he wished to reinvent the system to make it better. That's not per se bad, but the problem IMO is that his wish was granted (maybe due to his earlier success), clients payed, and apparently he wasn't accompanied by a senior during that task. Somebody should have explained him earlier, that everything has its tradeoffs, including OOP and all the other stuff. Now the author curses OOP and flirts with microservices. For me it seems that he is not a bad programmer, but works in a company which does not care enough about its junior devs.

I haven't been in the situation you describe, but in my experience there are times in life were you simply cannot find internal peace easily. Changes needs to be initiated first. But it's difficult to reason about what in your situation is(are) the exact problem(s) without more in-depth background information. That said, I doubt that vitamin D or some kind of spirituality will fix it. I would suggest meeting a therapist who offers cognitive behavioral therapy, to discuss your issues and fundamental life questions.

I can somehow relate to that. I'm suffering from an anxiety disorder since I was 15, was diagnosed with 18 and started some (unhelpful) therapies in that year. Later, during my masters, at some point I finally had a mental breakdown and ended up 3 months in psychiatry. I was simply overwhelmed by a) coping with panic attacks before, during and after lectures, and b) coping with the increasing pressure to perform. But the major issue behind that breakdown was actually the decision between coming of age, or letting my anxiety take responsibility for my life.

I decided for the first. After psychiatry I was basically able to leave my room and go to lectures again. I took another 2 years ambulatory therapy to take full responsibility for myself, and 5 years to finish my masters. After that, I started a Ph.D., and during that time my mental condition went from like "cannot imagine how the fuck I ended in psychiatry" to "one final straw, and I'm back in psychiatry". Although it went well, I certainly would not do it again.

That said, I obtained my masters/Ph.D. at some no-name university in Germany. I was able to pay back my student loan during the Ph.D. studies and left university with savings. Also, I'm not in ruin because of a 3 month hospitalization. Thus, reading about insane performance/financial pressure at (elite) universities combined with the questionable health care system in the US for me is terrifying.

> So no, I’m not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan’s pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days.

This is pure comedy gold, thanks!