chasedehan

> Advice: Get a job, the PhD will be waiting for you in 2 years if you decide you want it then. Plus it sounds like you are thinking about getting a PhD because looking for a job is hard.

Almost no one who takes that advice returns to get a PhD, the income is too hard to give up and often life moves on which makes it hard to take the financial hit and devote the time.

The only way it worked for me was to not need much money (tuition covered and receive a stipend) and have 80+ hours a week to geek out over things that interested me. Absolutely no way I could do that now with kids. That may be one of the reasons almost everyone in my program was in their mid 20s, and the hand full in their 50s after their kids went off to college.

I have a PhD in Economics and was a Finance professor for a few years before realizing that life in the academe wouldn't suit my skills. I now work in Data Science and couldn't be happier.

The question of, "is it worth it?" is complex and only can be answered for yourself.

Most people will say that if you don't plan on working in academia that the PhD will lead to a suboptimal career income. You could spend that 4+ years building your skills working for a company and end up earning considerably more. The other side effect is that there is a definite bias against PhDs for most jobs in industry.

For me, it was all about the journey and I wouldn't change any of it for the world. Any decent PhD program will expand your horizons more than nearly anything else. There is no way I would be in the same position now without my previous experiences. I do have to say though that my "detour" through grad school and being a professor means that I didn't start earning real money until my mid 30s and puts me financially behind some friends of mine who started earlier. Seriously though, the experience was amazing as it expanded so much about how I think about the world.

If you do a PhD, you should be doing it for yourself and your own learning. If you do it for the title/paycheck, there are far better ways to get there.

Totally happy with my SE (I am locked into Apple phones unfortunately and this is my only option).

Outside of the headphone jack, I also really like the smaller size. Plus, I love people's reactions "how old is your phone!?" and then get surprised when I say I bought it new 6 months ago.

While at first I saw this announcement and applauded (it seems like something Stripe would be great at administering), the structure of these loans is almost exactly the same as a payday loan, even if the APR is dramatically less.

What is crazy, is how eerily similar Patrick's response is with the Payday Industry's response about why Payday Loans are good for consumers.

>the downside risk of credit obligations they can't meet ... substantially outweighs the theoretical "risk" of a higher effective APR.

"The $15 cost of a $100 payday loan also pales in comparison with the lost income when a car is out of commission and a job lost. Good payday lenders clearly disclose their loan terms and conditions, including the dollar amount of any fees and the APR."[1] Payday loans are clearly bad for the consumer, even as much as the industry tries to defend it.

[1]https://www.americanbanker.com/opinion/why-payday-loans-are-...

You don’t have to have paypal for that. You can easily contest any payment from your credit card.

I also work fully-remote and the dependency on Slack (prioritized over email) makes it near impossible to communicate with my coworkers during outages because I can't just go over and talk to them.

I really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other) company has. The outage is frustrating.

No one is going to give you a seed round with you still in your current job. At that point you would be all-in if you raised a seed.

I much prefer mapping caps lock to ctrl. That reach is much more difficult for me

“It never gets easier, you just get faster” -Greg LeMond

The issue with ebikes is on hills. Sure, regular bikes have no problem on flats and especially on downhills but if you are going uphill it can disconcerting when an ebike flies past you at 20mph.

I’m a pretty serious mountain biker and that is the main reason ebikes are being banned on a lot of trails.

Huh? Every data scientist I have worked with who writes production code uses classes.

I continue to be amazed by releases on Macs about how "powerful" they are.

I use a Dell XPS running Ubuntu with 12 cores and 32GB of ram with a 1050 in a 15 inch. It is a really amazing platform, doesn't have these keyboard or screen issues, and cost less than a MacBook Pro.

Just use Google Scholar - it aggregates across all versions and you can typically find a working paper version pdf no problem.

No reason to add an extension.

Those robo-advisors definitely shook things up, but it seems like the giants (Schwab, Fidelity, etc) have rolled out their own in order to compete. It actually is now a really competitive landscape where the incumbents can offer additional support for a fee which Betterment and Wealthfront aren't able. And a lot of people get comfort from knowing that they can pick up the phone and call someone.

Note: I'm not in that camp, I have multiple Wealthfront accounts (Investment, IRA, and child's accounts) and am really happy with it, but I don't need or want to ask anyone questions about my asset allocation

I have had the opposite experience. 5 years ago I moved away from my local area to another state that didn't have a branch and signed up for an account at Wells Fargo. It was painful, the UI sucked and the phone app was terrible compared to my credit union.

I'm still with them today and almost never have to go to a branch. They have a great mint-style money manager, mobile deposit, and bill pay. They obviously spent a lot of time working it out. Plus, you don't have to deal with all the BS you do at for profit Wells, Chase, etc

Note: this is for Mountain America Credit Union in Utah

This isn’t time series data so don’t need to worry about stationarity.

It’s common in the US to be asked to leave when you give notice. One place I worked had security escort people out of the building by the end of the day they gave notice.

I also worked in restaurants through college and while you weren’t asked to leave, you were taken off the schedule and not given any shifts.

(edit) The security walking out wasn't this big show of force, it was mostly to turn in laptop, badge, etc. Security was nice about it, but it was still security (end edit)

As an economist I love this. People respond to incentives and making the decision visible, not making it a tax by letting the coffee shops keep the surcharge, and making it possible to keep prices the same (including the surcharge) is frankly a well designed law/experiment.

The misnomer. Title of post says “data scientist” but then says “sr data analyst” in the first paragraph.

Many commercial leases will pay to make renovations up front based on signing a long term lease. Many of these renovations can be in excess of the entire first year's lease. These can be quite large expenses and the owner would need to make sure they could recoup the cost.

Some strip malls in less desireable areas work they way a residential lease would, but those wouldn't be the best place to do it.

> Taxis and Ubers are forms of public transportation, and likely reduce the overall number of cars on the road.

I read a study not too long ago (sorry couldn't find it), but it found the opposite - that ride sharing increased the amount of congestion.

At first it didn't make much sense to me, but the study did acknowledge car ownership decreased, but that there was more congestion. This was largely due to the time between trips for Lyft and Uber - driving from a dropoff to a pickup.

I wouldn't pay attention to these groupings. They are artificially grouping on arbitrary factors and paying attention to the pros/cons could lead you astray.

For example: Regression shouldn't be it's own group because regression is commonly used in many decision tree algorithms. This group would be more apt to be described as 'linear models'. There are many different types of dimensionality reduction algorithms that are very different from LDA or PCA. The ensemble group are mostly decision tree algorithms and while technically they are ensembles, that is not what is thought of by most DS. AND, the NN categories show some of the elements of an algorithm (back-prop for example) as being an actual algorithm. I could go on...

> When was the last time you heard a seminar speaker claim there was ‘no difference’ between two groups because the difference was ‘statistically non-significant’?

I'm an Economics PhD (And former professor) and if someone were to say those lines at an academic conference there is a high likelihood that they would be literally laughed at.

Maybe it is because of my background in a quantitative field where we place a huge emphasis on statistical rigor, but t-tests were pretty much dismissed by anyone serious 20+ years ago. Seems like the issue stems to those disciplines without a stats/math background to just point to t-stats. My wife reads medical literature for her work and I gag pretty close to every time she asks me to look at the results.

Waffle House is perhaps the only reason I would return to the South.

Having spent many years in the Carolinas, it was a special time with my daughters that we would have “our time” at the Waffle House. My wife from New Jersey never understood and was happy to let us go.

There is just something about the simplicity of the place that just makes me happy. Now that I live Out West nothing comes close - not IHOP or Denny’s or anything.

The parent comment speaks to whether many people at the same org are making commits on the weekends. If it is just one person, no biggie, but if it looks like everyone you find is commiting on the weekend then that is a bad signal.

The other edge case would be an environment where every employee is super active in OSS.

Listening to my father and his work friends at Microsoft in the late 90s talking about their upcoming retirements from their investments solely in Cisco and MSFT.

It sounded so glorious, yet... my dad is still working.

The logo is whatever, what I don't like about it is that the desktop app is now the blueish color vs the old black.

Example would be the above comment about "There is a cow in that field". It would be to then ask, did I see the cow move, eat, or do anything else that you would expect a cow to do - rather than just seeing the silhouette?

I generally think the point is that you oftentimes have beliefs about why something broke and that it is important to check your beliefs.

I second triplebyte. I liked their process a lot even though I didn’t accept a job through them.

I actually found my current position through HN. Check The Who’s hiring threads.