Not really.
You could maybe squeeze another $20K-$30K in gross salary out of what NSF/NIH allocate for PhD students. But even that is still WAY below starting rates for the quality of folks you need to run a research lab.
647 karma · joined January 24, 2022
You could maybe squeeze another $20K-$30K in gross salary out of what NSF/NIH allocate for PhD students. But even that is still WAY below starting rates for the quality of folks you need to run a research lab.
Suppose I told you to develop good software that's novel enough to publish about, but only gave you enough budget to pay your SWEs a maximum of $30K/yr. That's one zero, for those reading quickly. Additional non-beneifts:
1. Unlike literally every other job in the country, you don't have budget to pay FICA taxes for your employees, and tax code allows this. This means your employees don't even have the USA's paltry social safety net to fall back on if they are hit by a bus or graduate into a massive recession, and their years working for you do not count toward social security or medicare retirement benefits.
2. Obviously, there is no budget for 401K retirement benefits
3. No CoL raises
4. Healthcare benefits will be paltry.
5. Your SWEs need to serve as a teaching assistant every once in a while. This likely means grading homework and a few late evenings of grading exams. No overtime for those late nights, obviously.
6. All travel, which is mandatory and often international, must be paid by the employee up front and reimbursement can take 1-3 months. We don't trust $30K/yr drones with corporate cards. Good luck making rent after a conference :)
Just to reiterate: You need to hire SWEs. You pay $30K/yr (less than some Amazon warehouses!), benefits package is literally worse than a part-time gig at a supermarket or fast food joint, and your employee is expected to give you $2K-$4K loans a few times a year while living paycheck to paycheck.
I just roll my eyes hard when I see complaints about garbage research code. Almost everyone in my PhD cohort had FAANG or finance offers; we were all taking 5x-10x paycuts to work on interesting problems and do science. If you want productizable research prototypes, hire PhDs to do science for you.
(And I say this, for the record, as a rare PhD who during their phd wrote code that is well-documented, well-maintained, and still used by dozens of companies for business-critical processes many years later.)
Generalizing individual experiences to general prognostications sells well as a genre, especially in software. This writing pattern was epitomized by OOP thought leaders in the 90s/00s, but was also present in the process evangelists who followed and the more iconoclastic folks like Dijkstra who preceded. However, actually following such general advice without taking into account the author's context can easily end in tears.
Ideally, these sorts of pieces should be written up as case studies rather than as general prognostications. With the context that a case study provides, these pieces can teach us a lot about how to engineer systems. Without that context, the reader is left to blindly follow advice that may not be relevant to their context. Or, best case, reverse engineer the context.
The exception is a splash pad playground, so not really indicative of any sort of trend (except perhaps that our summers got a lot hotter over the last 20 years).
There are parks that do not have any playground, but those are mostly either dedicated sports fields, "adult-oriented parks" (eg the city commons), or nature-oriented parks (with trails, trees, and water). So not the sort of parks that ever had playgrounds in the first place.
Additionally, we now have some parks with natural climbing walls that you need to bring ropes to use, which is quite a bit less safe than marry-go-rounds and what-not. (I've never seen them used without adult involvement, but TBF a fall from the top would probably actually kill/seriously harm a kid).
You're clearly not an actuary or -- more importantly -- an insurance exec. Just because there isn't a perfect causal link doesn't mean that the correlation isn't useful for minimizing risk.
I'd wager that at least a double digit percentage of young males are as careful as young females in their driving behavior. From the insurance perspective, who cares? The risk pool still pays a premium.
Regulations prevent this from happening with health federally and life in certain states. For now.
Insurance companies are dinosaurs but they're catching up. Lots of new VP and up AI/ML positions that report directly to the CTO office are spinning up. Suffice it to say that after my latest job search, which included senior roles at insurance cos, I switched to cash for sin purchases.
> I'm genuinely asking...
Your questions are not serious. You are not genuinely asking. If you want interlocutors to engage with your questions with anything other than dismissiveness, try asking questions that are not prime facie dismissive.
> Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.
I am.
In principle, a patent should cover specific machinery/process/material designed for a task rather than the underlying more ephemeral/indefinite concept powering the invention.
The interesting thing is that, of those, machine and process seem like the least conceited. Composition of matter seems more like sticking a flag in infinite ground. But in practice it’s the former two that power most of what I consider an abuse of the spirit of patent law. But perhaps that’s just my personal bias and the bio or materials people will disagree.
What can we say? Profit motive is a strong incentive and lawyers/judges are clever.
Anyways, with 7B people and counting, a term limited right to one idea in the infinite space of ideas seems less harmful than perpetual rights to a piece of land.
You can be. But you can also cause more harm than good as the zeroth responder (removing an impaled object, moving someone with a back injury).
Fortunately, there are affordable high-quality first responder courses. In the extreme, becoming a certified EMT takes only 100-200 hours of instruction, and there are many training options that are much shorter and cam be completed over a weekend.
>> In that respect it's also a story about the poor state of American infrastructure.
It's not just "equipped to help". It's also that random untrained people can do more harm than good. Hell, even random trained people can do more harm that good when there are too many people around.
I'm not a medical professional, but I have some first aid training and have been the most-trained first responder in not-even-crowded areas on a few occasions. Even with only 10 people around, managing the crowd while providing care becomes difficult.
The article even mentions:
> “It was a wonderful problem to have,” said school district superintendent, Eric Hoyt, “but we probably had too many volunteers show up.”
In a town of 171 people. Just 171 people, and crowd management became a problem.
Now drop into Manhattan, with approximately 1.629 million more people. If "everyone" showed up to an incident, you'd have at least an order of magnitude more deaths from the stampede to help than from the original event.
People in dense cities move away from the scene of an accident in order to get out of the way, which in most cases is genuinely the best thing they can do to help.
Refineries don’t fall out of repair overnight. Underinvestment is strategic, market-driven, and goes back over two decades. Politics is an excuse, and blaming a current crop of politicians for 20 years of underinvestment is prime facie bullshit.
My high school did not offer CS except as an independent study (you could technically do anything as an independent study, so "offer" is shorthand for "convince a teacher to let you sit in their classroom during planning period and find a way to sit for the AP CS exam").
There have existed high school CS courses since the 80s. (The AP CS exam was introduced in 1984.)
Is your position that oil companies under-invested in oil refineries, which are now being decommissioned due to being out of repair, because Trump was radically anti-oil? I don't think oil companies even believe that Biden will have a friendly legislature in 2023...
This reeks of "something I might believe after a beer listening to a cable news channel but not something I would bet $150K on". Again, I tend to ignore what people say and simply ask: "what are you doing with your money?"
If the answer has anything to do with your political emotions, well, good luck mate.
At most places I've interviewed, each interview question is a 25 minute - 30 minute session. Since white-boarding the solution takes perhaps 5-10 minutes max, in this case, there's plenty of budget to refresh definitions and provide a clean interface from which the actual task begins.
Critiquing "insert into DLL" as an unreasonable question does a disservice to the "less leetcode" position :(
In case of the former: the crusades, any of the millions of athiest or non-christian pacifists, and... I can't believe this needs stating, but shooting someone in the face with an assault rifle is an exercise of "might".
More importantly, having the general problem solving skillset to reason through this problem in 20-30 minutes seems super important to many aspects of front-end development...
I'm not sure who you are talking about.
Domestic producers start talking about "switching modes to returning value to shareholders" in mid-2020.
We were headed for higher oil prices regardless because shale producers were sprinting to stand still in terms of production. The pandemic certainly pulled that future forward. Certain other politicians orchestrating supply-side cuts without demanding price stability on the rebound [1] -- despite obvious impending bullwhip -- probably didn't help.
Generally speaking, though, when it comes to oil prices, it's best to avoid discussing politics and let your personal investments do the talking. I've been selling XLE.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/business/energy-environme...
The stock is so big relative to the flow that I can't imagine how anyone has confidence in claims like this. Even if we will completely run out of extractable oil in N years, consumption could continue to grow for the next M << N years.
I've always heard teenagers need more sleep than younger kids. I've never actually verified this claim.
In my area it's the opposite, and the reason is simple: high schoolers don't need childcare.
> School is off in hot summer and cold winter, I would prefer they study on campus then, so they can enjoy longer break in spring and fall, where outdoor weather is much better to get around.
That's a pure anachronism, but switching costs are genuinely high so not totally irrational.
(Point is, most legislation and XOs are largely bipartisan. Policy is driven much more by the machinations of hundreds of thousands of faceless/nameless actors than by the guy at the top. In both good ways and bad. The same is true in companies. The genius of leaders is mostly in their salesmanship.)