fastaguy88

ROI of whose investment?? The parents? The federal loan forgiveness program that puts social workers in poor neighborhoods? In general, the student is not providing most of the investment, and the investors (parents, government) are probably happy with their choice.

Pretty much every faculty member at any university has chosen quality of life over getting rich. Most of them did not inherit or start out rich.

For a somewhat different (more technical) perspective, look up Robert Heil, who died recently.[0]

I found this story [1] fascinating, and really enjoyed this interview [2] where he talks about working with Joe Walsh, a fellow amateur radio operator, and many others. He had a very midwestern modesty.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39573756

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111005221916/http://www.perfor...

[2] http://www.famousinterview.ca/interviews/bob_heil.htm

I think in the intro they show a Nikon on a motorized panning head.

If (non-profit) hospitals that made profits were taxed, those hospitals would simply start building, donating to their charitable foundation, or using some other accounting tricks to make that profit disappear.

It would be good to define "rich" here. Probably not most of the top 5% (50% of 15 million people). Perhaps "most" of the top 0.1%? Any data?

I have no problems connecting with Cisco AnyConnect

(1) The big problem I have is transitioning from RStudio to a pipeline (so I end up not using RStudio). A traditional pipeline is going to be a script with some set of arguments -- parameter values, fitting functions, and data file names, that I put into a shell script and say:

my_plot_script.R --plot_col=g_max --output_type=pub_quality data_file1 data_file2 data_file3

It's possible to use optparse/OptionParser() to get that information (but you have an option for every argument, no --param1 X --param2 Y file1 file2 file3) but it is much more difficult to fit those arguments into the RStudio environment. I want an RStudio to be able emulate reading command line arguments (since they do not exist in RStudio). Right now, I have to check to see if there are commandArgs(), and, if not, do something else to get the information to the RStudio script.

(2) There needs to be an option that says STOP if something doesn't make sense. I have dozens of beautiful data plots that look great, but in fact do not in fact plot what I think they do, because factors have not been properly assigned to colors, shapes, or linetypes. (And it can be really hard to recognize that the data has not been plotted properly.) Give me an option that says, if I did not explicitly declare a column a factor, and I did not specifically associate colors/shapes/lines with factors, then the data will not be plotted.

An interesting demonstration of the difference between number averages and mass/size averages. Did great on the big countries. No idea where San Marino was, so lots of relatively smaller countries pulled my average down. By mass/size, probably 90+ %. By number, only 70%.

While there may be general agreement that Pascal is a great teaching language and a weak systems language, I believe that early versions of mac operating system (system N, not OSX) relied heavily on a modified version of Pascal. Perhaps Steve did not get the memo.

How hard would it be to include one graph that plots the relative contributions of solar, wind, gas, coal, etc to total energy usage, rather than growth in energy usage?

If the growth over the next 2 years is 10% of current total, having it mostly be renewable is nice, but not very meaningful. It is reassuring that coal growth is negative, but what is the total? Negative 2% is very different from negative 20%.

Lots of interesting data, but for me, clear examples of why histograms are not particularly useful for comparing performance. Box plots would have been much more informative, particularly for comparisons of M2/M3 and memory effects, where the histograms look a little different, but it is unclear how different.

In interpreting the number of “administrators” at different institutions, it is useful to have an understanding of when one is classified as an administrator. At my institution, there are basically three types of non-wage (classified) positions: tenure track faculty, research faculty, and administrative faculty. Librarians are administrative faculty, as, I suspect, are football coaches.

There are, of course, administrators among the administrative faculty, but far fewer than it appears.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490...) suggest that in 2017, 8% of the US adult population had a felony conviction, 24% of Black adults, and 33% of Black males. But for TSA Pre/Global entry, the relevant number is the number of fliers, where I suspect the felony rates are lower.

For a different, more quantitative perspective, take a look at timetree.org. Timetree.org makes it very easy to see the evolutionary times between pairs of organisms.

2.5% of the US GDP ($26 trillion in 2023) would be 600 billion. At its peak in 1967, the Apollo program budget was 3 billion, while the US GDP was about 850 billion. So 0.35 percent. US government spending in 1967 was about 112 billion, so closer to 2.5 percent of the federal budget, not the GDP. Converting to today’s 6,000 billion federal budget, about 150 billion today, or not quite 20% of the defense budget, the largest federal expenditure after Social Security (the defense budget is essentially tied with Medicare).

Those lists would be far more informative if they had some years associated with them. Many of the cancelled projects were prop-planes cancelled in the 1940's and 50's.

There seems to be some confusion about precheck. Most people get precheck by doing “global entry”, which dramatically shortens the time required for US citizens to re-enter the US. Pre-check is a side benefit of global entry. Global entry pre-dates precheck.

All I can say is that you go to very different doctors than I do. I have quite a bit of confidence that my doctors know a lot more about the risks of different treatments than I do. If I had your doctors, I would try to find doctors I had more confidence in.

> It has the same problem all socialized health care programs have: the people who are actually getting the care, patients, have no idea what it costs, so they can't judge whether the care they are getting is worth the cost.

Let’s imagine (unrealistically) that through some technical breakthrough, patients knew the cost before making their purchasing decision. They still do not know what it is worth, because they have no idea what the risks of not being treated are. There is a problem that your doctor also probably does not know the cost, but they are the only person in the decision making process with the information necessary to make a rational recommendation. (And, unfortunately, they usually have a conflict of interest.)

Healthcare is different from buying cars or groceries - even if you know the relative costs, you are unlikely to know the relative benefits.

I recommend this book to anyone starting CS and wondering "why do I have to learn all this stuff?" "What good is data structures and algorithms?"

Read from a certain perspective, TAOCP is less a book about how to do things better (the focus of many CS courses), and more about "wow, who would have imagined ...". I think CS students might find their curricula more engaging if, rather than having a set of concepts to master, there were actually interesting puzzles to solve. Thus, I suggest reading TAOCP not as a text book, but more as a novel. Take a look at the parts that interest you (how many ways of sorting 10 numbers can you think of just using paper and pencil?). CS is a lot easier to learn as a process of surprising discovery, than as a set of barriers that must be overcome.

MAD Magazine 1957, not 1967.

Yes. The concentrations of the antibiotics are too low to select for resistance, because they do not significantly affect bacterial growth. (Without selection, no resistance).

What a brouhaha. Apparently the people buying MacBook Pro's are so non-professional that they are duped into buying a machine with too little RAM? I think they get a 30 day return free, so if they find out they were duped, why not just upgrade. And while the upgrade cost may be extortionate compared to NewEgg, a 16Gb machine is just $200 more, still considerably cheaper than the same model was in the Intel days.

I suspect that people who have decided to pay extra for the Pro model may actually have some idea how much RAM they need.

I don't think I said that philosophy taught me things that the "rest of us" find useful. I said it taught me things that I found useful. And I'm happy to argue that many non-technical subjects that I might not consider useful are useful to people in other disciplines (including disciplines that measure success by income levels).

Modern methods of scientific enquiry. Most scientists no longer look to the bible or tea leaves.

I am not particularly knowledgeable about philosophy as a modern discipline, but taking philosophy courses as an undergraduate taught me a lot, particularly about the limits of knowledge and scientific enquiry. I'm happy to argue that there are a lot of courses taught at university that are considerably less useful than philosophy -- but I'm sure there are lawyers (classics and rhetoric) and screen writers (comparative literature) who can point out how those disciplines contribute.

I made a wire transfer to the escrow agent.

If you are buying a house with cash, you are likely to be transferring $500K+. I do not think an attorney is necessary for the transfer.

I very much doubt that the widespread misuse of the term "homology" for "identity" by biomedical researchers reflects their deep understanding of mathematical concepts.