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smanzeron Against a Tax Increase on Berkeley Students

Exactly - appreciating this fact could help clear up other disputes in this thread. For STEM Ph.Ds you are really only a "student" for 1-2 years tops (when you actually take some classes) - after that, you are an entry-level employee. Your advisor is more of a boss than a teacher.

smanzeron Against a Tax Increase on Berkeley Students

I finished a chemistry Ph.D. at Berkeley in 2016 - the way that the university handled "tuition" for science graduate students always seemed like a scam to me during my time there.

In the early 2010s, we all made ~$28K/yr, while the university pocketed a comparable sum from the funding agencies as "tuition." I assume that they spent it like any other general tuition funds. For the vast majority of the time during a typical graduate career, everyone was working on individual research. I suppose the "tuition" could be interpreted as paying for the 1 hr a week of meeting with your advisor (when they weren't blowing you off for conference travel), but that seems like a stretch. That money should stay in the sciences, and ideally be used to pay grad students more.

So it would be good for universities to get rid of this money laundering scheme, but I worry very much for the folks that I know who are still in the system who may be hurt by this. I think this problem should be treated in some way less likely to hurt vulnerable people.

smanzeron What My PhD Was Like

Sounds like you played it smart developing industry-relevant skills. I lucked out with that myself and got a thesis project that helped me get a software engineering job afterward. This is really one of the things they should emphasize to new students: the odds you will get a good academic gig, even if grad school works out well for you, are very low, so make alternate plans. Glad to hear things have gotten better for you after getting out - good luck!

smanzeron What My PhD Was Like

A few words of caution from a recent Ph.D. graduate: a big problem you will face if you do this is the all-or-nothing nature of the degree. If you are five years in, you will put up with a huge amount of abuse to avoid throwing away that time. Departments and your advisor know this - they will abuse you in lots of ways (stiffing you on reimbursements, making you teach constantly, etc.) because you are stuck - if you leave, you will be perceived as having failed and derive little career benefit from those years of your life. I would also caution that the author's good outcome (assistant professorship at a top tier school, straight out of grad school), would be considered impossibly unlikely in my field, chemistry. I can't speak to CS though.

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

Citations help you out in the long-time limit for sure; "worlds 7th most cited chemist" is definitely an improvement on "another dude with a bunch of Nature papers." But I would imagine that when you are going toward important early-career milestones (postdoc/assistant prof/tenure), they are mostly looking at your recent work, which will not have had time to accrue too many citations unless it is the absolute hottest thing. In those cases, journal ranking may be a bigger differentiator. I don't know how one would fix this.

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

Usually being on the general university network is sufficient to get journal access. Using the university network credentials for the academic, it probably goes SciHub -> School -> Journal. So the school would have to block SciHub/discipline the academic. Disciplining people with tenure is hard, although maybe it is just graduate students giving the credentials idk.

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

Previous HN discussion (article has neat details of how sci-hub works): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074638

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

(1) Yes. In USA anyway. Creator is not in USA, however. (2) Academics donate their institutional login credentials to the site.

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

They do. They route it to the editor (senior academic), who routes it to appropriate reviewers. I think that the editor does it for free too in many cases. I feel like running ads on the site would pay for the bandwidth, only thing a totally free service couldn't replace is the prestige :(

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

Well, I'm not from Silicon Valley or YC, and I avoid torrenting music etc because it takes more directly from content creators, but the publishers' business practices put this on a whole different level to me. Also, half the time for the old-school stuff that one has to cite in the introduction for a paper, the corresponding author is dead but the paper is still under copyright.

smanzeron Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

Good for them. For the last article that I published, the publisher "value added" consisted of highlighting all the all-caps names in my document and asking me to define them as acronyms. Literally the only thing they did, and it wasn't even right.

smanzeron Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

I did my bachelor's from ages 14-18; there's some things that you can't really do (frat parties) but most of the social opportunities are open to you. It helps to make friends if you are in a group-centric major - I was a chemist, so lots of long hours in the lab with cool people. There's been some questions about whether the parents push too hard in these sorts of cases; for me, I was definitely motivated more by my own desire to get out in the world and start getting real things done. This isn't always a productive desire - I wish I'd taken the time to learn more about the stuff that grew to interest me later (math/CS), instead of blitzing through all my chem requirements. I guess for other people doing the same thing the only advice I'd have is that while the cliche is that life is short, it's really longer than you think it is at that age and you shouldn't feel like you need to rush in order to maintain a position in some sort of race. It's not bad to progress fast, just make sure it isn't at the expense of finding what you really love to do.

smanzeron Is Money Corrupting Research?

I remember being interviewed randomly on the street by local TV news for a "student's opinion" on Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute, which was funded by BP. This was during Deepwater Horizon, and they were despised as much here as anywhere. The research seemed pretty useful though, and it's great to get that kind of funding given how tight grants are these days. When the goal of the corporate funding is to build something, rather than to "impartially" assess policies on which the corporation has a well-defined self-interested position, then the process seems less prone to corruption.

Still pretty controversial though now that they are pulling funding:

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2015-...

smanzeron The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Armed Jews vs. Nazis

It does seem rather dubious to talk about "resources diverted" as a sufficient metric for success in this context, but I think that this story is also not a particularly strong rebuttal to the NRA claim. From the article it appears that the rebels were initially armed with a very small number of poor quality low power weapons. We're not talking about the NRA utopia of widespread ownership of accurate semiautomatic rifles here.

smanzeron Your DI framework is killing your code

This. There may be other reasons to dislike the email.send() formulation, but it seems like the need to support other mail APIs could be handled relatively easily within this type of OO approach through the use of default values.

smanzeron Bloomberg Runs on 25M lines of Fortran (2006)

(we need the math speed, and all the C++ matrix libraries involve compromises of one form or another).

Are you using lots of really tiny matrices? I would think pretty much all the libraries could just be linked with a good BLAS distro and then it would not matter what language that you use. Personally, I'm a big fan of the Armadillo C++ library.

smanzeron Bloomberg Runs on 25M lines of Fortran (2006)

Unhappy academic here - codebases with millions of lines of Fortran are very prevalent here as well. It is both better and worse than a lot of people think; like a lot of the other comments said, that code is rarely touched, but when you need to touching it can be very painful. Modifying old Fortran is rough, mostly because of that awful, awful IMPLICIT keyword. Though I will say that the native multidimensional array support does make certain sections much easier to read than corresponding vanilla C code.