Hacker News Reader

RKon The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples

Here's another interesting "radiation enthusiast", who visits nuclear sites and collects radioactive memorabilia. He actually works as a nuclear engineer.

http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/

Highlights include Chernobyl trips, a trip to "Soviet Ground Zero", and a how-to for DIY uranium chemistry.

RKon The Tyranny of the Forced Smile

I don't know how we are in relation to Czechs, but one of things I hear as an American is that we are often too quick to talk about politics. Whereas, in many cultures, politics is considered almost taboo to talk about with all but the closest friends and family.

RKon Enough's enough: Contract teaching at a Canadian University

As a grad student in the 2000's I was told by a professor that the department would take into consideration the expected attrition rate (typically ~50%) when admitting grad students. The idea being that they would have enough TA's for intro classes. Attrition would make the number of advanced students more inline with the money available to fund PhD students till they graduated. In other words, they purposefully over-admitted to get TA's, most of whom would leave with an MS as best.

This was in science departments. In departments that had few or no "general ed" courses, such as engineering, and thus little need for TA's, the graduation rate was much higher.

RKon Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?

graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05

This was true in my experience as well. I applied to grad school for 2004 and heard lots of crazy stories from programs about high applicant numbers and quality. I ended up at a "hidden gem" versus a top program. A couple years later I re-applied to PhD programs and got accepted everywhere.

In today's markets it's a little hard to believe that people would be flocking to grad school due to a poor industry market, but it seemed to be the case across science and engineering fields. I'm sure that influx also made the bad academic job market even worse, unfortunately.

RKon People Who Collect Radioactive Glass

If you're interested in the chemistry of Uranium, here's a do-it-yourself guide. The uranyl compounds are what fluoresce:

https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistr...

RKon The peculiar status of PhD-employees

Which country are you discussing?

RKon How to choose?

The ANU Quantum Random Numbers Server:

http://150.203.48.55/index.php

RKon How to choose?

My advisor in grad school once gave the following advice algorithm for making a decision:

1. Flip a coin.

2. If the result of the coin flip makes you hesitate at all, you know that was the choice you didn't really like anyway. Go with the other choice.

RKon Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes

In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people").

Here's what Wikipedia says:

* The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups

RK on The Crisis in American Walking (2012)

I visited Melbourne for about a month a couple of years ago and was excited to use the train to get around, but people there routinely said I was crazy for doing that. People often offered to give me a ride to the train station (usually a few blocks away). I got the overall impression that Australia has a very similar car culture to the US.

RK on New York City photographed with the Game Boy Camera in 2000

My best friend had one of these as a kid and we made epic backyard GI Joe movies.
Incidentally he now works as a film editor.

RK on Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

No write-up, but people I know have left physics for:
* Quantitative finance
* Insurance (working on models that were beyond what the actuaries were trained to do)
* Data science
* Scientific equipment R&D
* Scientific equipment sales
* Popular science writing (this is a bit of an outlier!)
* Defense contracting (engineering, "scientific" programming, etc)
* Programming
* Door-to-door insurance sales (no joke)
I usually tell people to brush up on their programming skills as much as possible. If you're a theorist who only does pencil + paper or maybe Mathematica, it might be hard to find a decent job. Also, it never hurts to talk to / network with any industry people that are related to your field (software or hardware vendors, etc).
I'm now doing data science, but have also done hardware development and electrical engineering related things (signals). When I was transitioning to data science I also did some very specialized consulting related to my PhD. A few people paid me to do simulations and/or help then implement some techniques that I worked on as a grad student.
Also: I had a very supportive advisor, who encouraged me to accept a job offer before I graduated.

RK on Don't Become a Scientist (1999)

I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse.
Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Harvard. He was unable to get a tenure track job, primarily because in that 4 year timespan only 1 faculty position opened up in the entire US for his (tiny) field. He now works at Google.
In fact I'm not sure that anyone from my cohort is still in academia. Other students used to come ask me questions all of the time, because I had worked in industry before going to grad school. Their questions were always some variation of "what are my options if I get out of physics?".
Edit: I'll also add that most grad students I knew gave little thought to their post-grad job prospects before starting grad school. It seems now that the message has trickled along a little better that the outlook is very poor.

RK on The Curse of Dimensionality in Classification

You could make a plot like Figure 1. Look for the turning point (do some calculus if you can, i.e. d(perf)/d(dim) = 0).

RK on Bringing Silicon Valley to the Midwest

Los Alamos is in the middle of nowhere, but Sandia is smack in the middle of a metro area of ~1M people (Albuquerque).

RK on Ask HN: Idea Sunday

I'd like some UI element that lets me know how long it's been since I read/used a tab. I tend to open lots of tabs and then browse them as is convenient later. Sometimes this means tabs get "lost" (i.e. become stale before I read them). This would let me know which tabs I might have overlooked or should close, bookmark, etc.

RK on 1930s immigrants who Americanized their names earned more

Many Irish already had their names Anglicized by the English before they left Ireland.

RK on SR-72

I'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part:
A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility. In fact, an SR-72 could be operational by 2030.

RK on Python Language Features and Tricks

Nice reference.
1.29 happened to be exactly what I was looking for:
for subset in itertools.chain(*(itertools.combinations(a, n) for n in range(len(a) + 1)))
I spent way too much time writing a function to come up with these combinations.

RK on A software engineer's website

I just checked put my sites using elinks and fortunately they came out pretty well.
One is based on bootstrap and one on skeleton. I just made some links that are icons (github, twitter, etc) visible in elinks by adding img tags with src="" alt="some text" style="display:none". Seems like an OK hack.

RK on How the world came to hate Silicon Valley

On the other hand Mel Gibson was Aussie and became American. He's not claimed anymore.
According to Wikipedia, Mel Gibson was born in the US to American parents and moved to Australia when he was 12. Somehow I remembered that factoid when I read your comment :)

RK on Who's Writing Linux?

For those wondering:
Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization that works on consolidating and optimizing open-source software for the ARM architecture, including the GCC toolchain, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces. It was announced at Computex in June 2010 by ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments in a joint press conference. It also provides aligned engineering and investment in upstream open source projects, a monthly release of tools and software and support to silicon companies in upstreaming their system-on-a-chip (SoC) support.
That makes sense why Linaro is the 5th biggest contributer. (I'd never heard of them.)

RK on Jeopardy's controversial new champion is using game theory to win big

I don't know that much about Jeopardy strategy, but it sounds like he's following Ken Jennings' suggestions.

RK on We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer

Just FYI, there are a couple of initiatives in the medical imaging world to reduce over exposure:
* http://www.imagewisely.org/
* http://www.imagegently.org/

RK on What If You Combined Co-Working And Daycare?

Employee memberships could be an interesting option for companies that aren't set up to do on-site daycare and willing to have remote-ish people.

RK on FBI files on Richard Feynman

From page 151:
is so unpredictable that "you cannot determine what his reaction would be in any particular set of circumstances." ____ stated that FEYNMAN was known at Los Alamos as a reactionary, because he was so conservative in his ideas and would not go along with the ideas of many of the people there of the same profession who were much less conservative in thetr thinking than he was. ________ stated he considers FEYNMAN to be a person of good character and completely loyal to the United States.
...
____ stated that FEYNMAN is not the type to be influenced by people such _______ as he makes up his own mind concerning every problem and a inclined to make a decision although this decision will not be popular with the group with which he is in contact.

RK on Dad gets OfficeMax mail addressed 'Daughter Killed in Car Crash'

Not quite the same, but I used to receive junk mail addressed to "Jesus Christ" at an old address.

RK on The Jobless Ph.D. Generation

My limited experience is that the German perception of science degrees is that they prepare people for a very broad range of work, not limited to academic science. When I was in Germany studying physics I was always blown away by the large class sizes. I was told that many/most of the students had no plans to continue on in physics, but rather in industry of some kind. I also once saw a billboard in a train station aimed at recruiting physics and chemistry graduates for some company.
In contrast, I'd guess that 90+% of my physics BS classmates in the US went on to do PhD's in physics or something very closely related. Of my PhD classmates, I'm not sure any are working tenure track jobs 3-6 years after graduating... I switched over to data science.

RK on Hacker News Trends

Interesting to see the trends about HN (plateaued?) and pg and YC (declining).
Other things are relatively predictable: NSA, bitcoin, docker, or diaspora.
Android reached parity with iphone around the end of 2010.

RK on What do PhD Scientists in America Have in Common with Unmarried Women in China?

I agree there are far more options if you look outside your small field, but I think it's not uncommon for employers to be skeptical of hiring someone with a PhD. Some of their reasons may be borne from experience and some may be simply due to stereotypes of PhD holders (e.g. too easily bored with "normal" work). My personal experience has been that many prospective employers seem to think that someone with a fresh PhD is both over and under-qualified (which is twice as scary?).