throwawayarnty

This is extremely selfish.

A founder has a team (investors are part of that team) that trusts each other to have incentives towards having the startup make it big.

Ditching the team and investors like that is extremely distasteful and shows that the founder does not have the qualities to be a leader.

The founder didn’t do the right thing, he did the selfish thing by throwing his employees under the bus.

Variable rates are great until rates dramatically increase.

A huge number of Canadians will not be able to afford their mortgage payments over the next 5 years because they did not calculate rate rises when buying home. Furthermore, they won’t be able to sell the home without taking a huge loss because housing prices will have plummeted due to rate hikes.

Combine that with rising cost of food and gas, Canadians are in for a wild ride.

Is this handbook still relevant in modern cars? I feel the new cars have so many hidden panels and electronics that you’re not expected to fiddle with the insides.

One model of how science progresses is a few pioneers breaking new ground and then everyone else rushing in to pick up low hanging fruit in the new field.

Looks like Weissman lab has consistently been breaking new ground over and over again. Extremely impressive and very few labs in the world have such a track record.

One needs to think of a PhD like doing a startup.

Your output needs to align with the “market”. In academia, the market is the scientific landscape and the customers are other academics who read papers (market place of ideas).

You have lots of customers when your ideas are well received and people want to hear and read your work (success in academia).

Just like in startup, you have to iterate until you get the right product fit. You also need to market your ideas by writing and speaking well. Finally you need to build a brand so people can recognise your work as part of an overarching research program.

What’s the evidence that being gay lowers job prospects?

I doubt you can pick out the gay people from looking at resumes and a 30 minute interview.

I wonder whether these private schools are a net benefit to the country.

In recent generations, I have not really noticed that UK as a whole has been particularly innovative relative to its European peers.

It sometimes feel the whole fancy school system in Britain is just a way to maintain an immutable social hierarchy rather than actually making the country more competitive globally.

It's difficult to systematically predict Karikos. Probably impossible with very low success rates.

A possible way forward is to simply give out grants randomly to all those that pass some minimum score. After enough filtering, all grants are essentially indistinguishable in quality.

Little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

And as more and more information is distilled into sound bites, tweets, and simplified visualisations, I am afraid more and more people will spend their brain power acquiring little bits of knowledge, never going deeper than a 10-minute TED talk.

The end result will be great cocktail party conversations, but very few people actually solving real problems.

The replication crisis is not largely due to the math/stats used in studies.

It comes from trying to make inference from noisy and often confounded experiments from limited data.

Libre office and gimp to me both crash too often to be reliable for professional work.

At some point in your life a crash is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you might as well pay Microsoft and Adobe for the peace of mind.

Exactly. I care about how a PhD astrophysicist thinks about data just as much I care how a biologist, psychologist, or sociologist researcher thinks about data.

That is, not so much.

At the PhD and research level the data types and questions are so specific that the analyses often are bespoke (in academia, the more bespoke the analysis, the more you can sell its novelty). PhD-level data analyses have very little relevance outside of its own field.

There is nothing profound to be had here, even if they have the prestigious title of "PhD astrophysicist".

It’s about 150 eur/month in some places in Europe (all inclusive)

https://www.reddit.com/r/breakingmom/comments/qtk3d8/how_we_...

So the difference is conservatively 2000 extra per month per child.

The point is this scales linearly so two kids is 4000, three is 6000.

The amount of child expenses in Europe goes up hundreds per month. In USA it goes up by thousands a month. That’s an order of magnitude difference.

More kids, the better Europe becomes compared to USA.

Day care for infants and toddlers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/cqegh2/daycar...

I think the main factor is how many kids you have.

No kids: USA > Europe

1 kid: they are similar

2 kids or more: Europe > USA

In the USA each kid is an extra 3000 usd a month expense at least, more if one goes private and include university tuition.

How parents can pay for two or more kids’s education in USA (or UK) is beyond me.

With two or more kids in USA you essential force your children into wage slavery by going into huge amounts of college debt.

One example: people who simply state “women make 82 cents for every dollar a man makes” to imply the advantage of being a man vs a woman.

The reality of how this number is calculated (eg averages across professions, even though men and women tend to work different professions, part time vs full time is not taken into account) suggests the conclusions that come from this 82 cents number is more nuanced than the initial statement.

There is something wonderfully persuasive when someone can connect a modern topic to one that has already been addressed by the ancients.

It feels as if the topic, once thought unwieldy and complicated, becomes tractable and clear.

Perhaps the way to handle complicated nuances situations in life is to connect them to a classic problem.

I feel this strategy also works in mathematical fields.

No, my criteria is whether you can understand the original source without relying on another person with real ability to process the source for you.

For example, if you want to write the work of a mathematician but cant read or understand the writings of the mathematician, then I would be uncomfortable with that.

Lecturing on “historical mathematics” without being able to follow a mathematicians papers seems dubious to me.

Lecturing on music without being able to play music is also suspicious.

I would feel very fake if I were one of those people.

You would only be able to use second hand sources where someone with real ability has predigested the original works for you.

Another related academic field that has this quirk is musicology.

You can have a successful career writing books and papers on musicology without needing to know how to play or write music.

To me it feels analogous to an academic who writes on history of math without being able to prove or understand theorems.

The worst part of these accusations is that your reputation is tarnished whether you are guilty or not.

This instilled a sense of fear in every person even if they are innocent because you can still be targeted and your career ruined.

If this scientist was just stating out, rather than already established, he would likely have had to quit science.

There should be some penalty for false accusations that can compensate for these people.

Yes. And academia is made up of fellow researchers. We are putting the blame on a private company putting a price on a product that researchers will still continue to pay.

The hate should be against other fellow researchers and hiring/grant/tenure committees. They cannot judge the work of a researcher without counting the number of Nature papers they have in their CV.

I can guarantee you that if these committees did not care about the number of Nature papers a researcher has, nobody would pay that price or even go through the brutal review process of publishing in the top journals (or in CompSci: the top conferences).

This second price is obvious for anyone who has downloaded a Gb worth of classic eBooks and realised their life is not long enough to read through them all.

Owning a library is not so that you’ve read every book In collection, but it’s a research area where you can spend time to read new books. Some of the books in your library may never get read, and that’s ok because they’re always close at hand if you need it.

I heard the actor Brendan Fraser got completely screwed by the alimony system.

He was ordered to pay 50k a month (900k a year) for 10 years. Not even many wealthy would be able to handle that type of alimony.

It can still be anti Semitic because you need to compare with the base rate of a peer institution that does not have anti Semitic recruitment practices. Comparing with the overall population is a fallacy.

I remember him talking about eating a small piece of bread and feeling like I was part of the grand universe. He’s got amazing perspective.

Seems like a huge risk to marry someone when there is a big discrepancy in income and assets…

Agreed. There are situations where frequentist guarantees is what you want rather than optimal estimates of parameters.

Frequentists consider the model parameters fixed and allow the data to vary. Bayesian consider the data fixed and allow parameters to vary.

For example many software engineering, drug testing, and large scale pipelines want frequentist guarantees, because your system will have varying input data and you want theoretical bounds on what inferences you can make.

I would say it depends on how “good” (defined by academia) you are. If you think you’re a super star, then academia all the way. If you think you’re about average (especially at the phd stage), then industry may be more attractive.

Being a successful academic (eg consistent publications in top conferences or journals) brings a qualitatively better life style than SWE at a company.

You are globally recognised as an expert, can travel to meet like minded colleagues all over the world, and have full control of how you spend your time.

If however you’re struggling in academia, then it can be brutal because you spend more and more of your time trying to attract resources to continue your work.