smanzer

6 ms·

1.
by smanzer 9y ago
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 emplo
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by smanzer 9y ago
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, wh
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 n
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 ti
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 imp
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by smanzer 11y ago
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&#x2
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by smanzer 11y ago
Previous HN discussion (article has neat details of how sci-hub works): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074638
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by smanzer 11y ago
(1) Yes. In USA anyway. Creator is not in USA, however. (2) Academics donate their institutional login credentials to the site.
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 totall
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by smanzer 11y ago
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
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by smanzer 11y ago
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
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 che
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by smanzer 11y ago
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
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 appear
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by smanzer 11y ago
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.
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by smanzer 11y ago
(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 an
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by smanzer 11y ago
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 ne