skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should I go back to academia?
I'm 30 and have worked as a software developer for the past 10 years. Travelled the world, worked with amazing people, and for inspiring companies. I don't regret any of it and have learned a tremendous amount during this time.

Recently however I've been feeling a bit burned out and the idea of doing something for myself (and nobody else) such as studying, has really inspired me to take a deep look at my life and see what I should be doing about it.

I can continue doing software development, which will involve working for others of course (as most other jobs require). Or I can of course start my own business, which I also tried and seemed like in the end I was still doing things for other people - after all, markets are driven by users' needs.

After thinking about it some more I thought, why not go back and finish my CS degree? I have about 2 years left (have 2 left from my younger years which I can reuse). I saved up enough to afford it - fortunately here in Europe university is pretty cheap. It feels like it will be one thing I can do for myself and will not regret. I'm a bit scared about leaving industry and not being able to find a job once I'm done, but I figured, I'm not going to study gardening - a CS degree could perhaps give me even better experience than other 2 years of "burned out" industry.

I was wondering if any of you have had these thoughts as well (mostly doing things for yourself, like studying) and whether you think going back to study is a good idea or not.
How AI Will Change the Way We Make Decisions
I typically have several books in progress. I'll read a chapter from whichever one I'm in the mood for when I have some time for reading. Currently in progress:

"A Book of Abstract Algebra: Second Edition" by Charles C. Pinter [1].

"How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg [2].

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared Diamond [3].

"Introduction to Analytic Number Theory" by Tom M. Apostol [4].

"Algorithmic Puzzles" by Levitin and Levitin [7].

I've also got a 46 books in my Safari Library queue, although only about half a dozen are actually in the in progress state.

In addition to the above, I'm about 3 years behind on Analog, the science fiction magazine. Those are all on my Kindle and I'm slowly trying to catch up.

Recently finished:

"Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by Joshua Foer [5].

Probably going to pick up soon:

"The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far" by Lawrence M. Krauss [6]. Flipped through it at a bookstore and there were some very interesting things in it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Book-Abstract-Algebra-Second-Mathemat...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G3L6JQ4/

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Analytic-Number-Theory-A...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remember...

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Story-Ever-Told-So-Far-ebook...

[7] https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Puzzles-Anany-Levitin/dp/...
I don't know why you would say it's nonsense, just compare to how mozilla talked of flash back in 2008[1], instead of "bringing greatness and innovation to the web" it was all "dangers of the proprietary web", "They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money", " Adobe's long-standing refusal to provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users" , "If you consider proprietary technologies, think hard; are you really trading convenience in the short term with independence in the long term?" and "proprietary solutions running on top of the web are trying to take over".

But the guy who championed this stance has since left mozilla in 2015 after 17 years to pursue his objective of changing the world with Open Source and Free Software and the Web.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081227145942/http://news.zdnet...
Actual business value of DevOps and Agile practices still elusive
> Blocking the crosswalk is also a traffic violation.

"Except when necessary to avoid conflict with other traffic..."

Washington State Law. RCW 46.61.570. https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.570

Your mileage may vary though depending on your legal jurisdiction, but lawmakers generally do not write 'average' laws to be unreasonable in eyes of the average person.

What is "supposed" to happen in lawmakers eyes, is that traffic grinds to a halt. Pedestrians stop crossing the road at that particular point and thus don't get hit by cars, and either the Uber driver intentionally causing all these hardships moves or gets ticketed.

Unless crossing the road, or moving around traffic is a matter of life or death ... no one is supposed to break the law and everyone is supposed to be temporarily inconvenienced. Just because someone else broke the law doesn't give the next people rights to break the law in order to ease their convenience.
> An open source flash player will most likely be used standalone, and not in a browser.

It'll most likely be modified to run in browsers, too, e.g., via compilation to WebAssembly and suitable web-platform replacements for the low-level IO, etc., implementations.
No one who has used both significantly really thinks HTML5 can provide an equivalent alternative to the Flash platform today. Sure it can cover a lot of the common use cases and it can be made to work, but it's really a poor substitute (albeit without the security and other issues). HTML5 is the future, but it still needs work.
> UDP is not streamed but message based protocol. As WebSockets implement their transport layer over pure TCP, WebUDP could implement it's own layer over pure UDP for various reasons.

As soon as your message exceeds the MTU, things get complicated. Sure you can layer something to re-assemble, but if packets are dropping, this is going to start getting problematic really fast. And if packets are not dropping, then TCP shouldn't overly increase latency anyway.
There was a guy calling for a communist-style "purging" of anyone involved with this company in the last thread. I think you're underestimating how mad people get about free plugins for their (incredibly bloated and inefficient) code editor.
Foxconn Says It Plans to Build Factory in Wisconsin, Adding 3,000 Jobs
I'll give them credit, Facebook figured out how to monetize themselves.

Versus say, Twitter, which i don't use and still don't understand how it even exists.
If you accidentally posted a red-pill talking point with internal logic that requires the loss of agency from one party then I do apologize for making assumptions.

We can move on, and now you know that this is a rather famous thing to say among people who are angry that women are allowed to choose who they wish to pursue them romantically.
"can be reproduced" means true.

If you can reproduce the experiment, so that approximately the same data comes out, but the paper turns out false, that can only be because the paper makes a flawed interpretation of the data.

But that has nothing to do with reproducibility; you can tell that a flawed conclusion is made from some data without reproducing the process which produces the data.

If the analysis is correct and the empirical results can be reproduced, then the research is true. Or something like that.
How an IT debacle left Sweden's government on the brink
> They can't discharge all of that cash without suffering severe consequences due to their need to sustain a high credit rating.

What do you mean by this?
I put most of it together off the top of my head, from knowing a bunch of the companies that were cash rich, then checked on a few I suspected were (like Samsung), and then finally cross checked a few lists for any stragglers I missed (eg Amgen). I dug through some of China's companies (eg BABA or CHL), but didn't run across any offhand that made the list (their banks obviously do as with US banks).
If your address on ripe.net doesn't match any of your local interface addresses, then that's NAT (or perhaps a transparent proxy) by definition.

Well, in some environments, it's possible to bind() to an IP address that's not actually present on a local interface, but it's unlikely that your browser would support that.
I wonder how the Souregraph guys feel about Github getting into their territory..
Toggl.com

I time everything down to the secomd and every task has a ticket # or a helpful description.

I can tell you down to the minute of how much effort some task took or what I did at time T on day X.

It feels ironically liberating (and I used to abhor timesheets and tracking)
Competition doesn't have anything to do with number of players. As long as there is more than one party and they are not colluding, they will compete for each others market and push prices down or increase the quality of service.

Pro-competition laws aren't about what's fair for other people that might want to compete, they are about what's best for consumers.
Last time I tried it was working surprisingly well. Even if it's dead it can be useful.
There's no stupid question.

IIANM, no it's not. We don't have the source for flash player and none of the open source alternative have ever been complete.
I heard on the news that 10,000 construction jobs would be created, so perhaps both are right - 10,000 temporary construction jobs, and 3,000 permanent/plant jobs.
It is odd, but not as ridiculous as it sounds. For one, many companies couldn't issue 10s of billions in debt so you do have access to that much capital (normally at reasonable costs).
Swedish Government Scrambles to Contain Damage from Data Breach
You're comparing quarterly numbers with annual numbers.
Aren't more of recent application for Flash is to deliver DRMed video while rest moving to something else like HTML5. If this is the case opensource Flash won't really help...
> I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on

I'm not sure what you mean when you say you don't click on ads.

I don't click on ads. None of the ads I've clicked on have resulted in purchases. Instead, they've resulted in me swearing at the website showing a popup or otherwise being deceptive about user interactions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qrfSh07rT0 -- Taleb on p-values, technical, but pretty interesting.
Fair point. Maybe instead: 'enough' questions? The point I was driving at is that having children is perhaps a default behavior, but the dynamics of our industry (and of modern society more generally) have evolved so that the decision creates a lot more friction than it may have in the past. The questions it seems wise to ask (at least to me) are related to mindset and tradeoffs.
It is fine to super size your value meal as long as you don't touch the receipt.
> I'm very[1] familiar with the IP family of protocols.

Great, you have an expertise to contribute. And with this discussion you already are.

> If you don't know what your requirements are, you shouldn't be choosing a transport technology. It sounds like you want an library that wraps WebSockets or WebRTC and handles most of the complexity.
There are "libraries" that wrap over some protocols. They don't make adoption of underlying technology easier, WebRTC in this case.

This effort is to establish clear requirements, not yet to propose exact solution. So this discussion is just a process of establishing those requirements.

High level requirements are clearly stated in the document, and important one is: simplicity. Currently there is no simple solution for low-latency server-client communication.

> > WebUDP could implement it's own [transport] layer over pure UDP
> Then you want TCP. The only reason to use UDP is to avoid the complexities of a transport layer. Transport reliability is very hard; this isn't something that is easy to re-implement by yourself in UDP.

Layer on top doesn't have to involve full on replication of TCP techniques or alternatives. Just like WebSockets only adds very little to pure TCP in form of a data framing (header) for messages.

> More importantly, I take it you don't know what your MTU is? The Maximum Transmission Unit[2] the maximum packet size. On ethernet-based networks, it's probably ~0-100 octets less than ethernet's 1500 octet MTU. You need to keep UDP packets under this limit, or they will fragment. Fragmented IP packets may not arrive at all and even when they do, the OS will wait until all fragments arrive before passing the data up to the app. If you're insane and send HTTP headers in each packet, you've wasted most of your data space. Each packet? Shouldn't we send headers in the first packet only? Except that every packet IS the "first packet" in stateless protocol like UDP. It's the transport features of TCP that create ordered-data semantics.

This is really valuable input, and is exactly what is needed to fuel further requirements for an implementation.

You know, you can provide valuable input without trying to "argue" ;)
There's also a tool for converting flash to html5, but i'm not sure this would work 100% for games.
I guess I lucked out, my workplace and apartment both offer free L2 chargers
I'm inclined to agree with you, despite everybody else seeming to fundamentally disagree. I'm not convinced by either of the arguments in response to your comment. We have huge amounts of unemployment in the west and an economy that is tending towards more automation and fewer jobs for humans, so why would a decrease in the size of the labour force matter?

It's clear that people will continue to live longer and that birth rates will continue to fall, either by necessity (overpopulation) or due to factors like this. I hold the view that far too many people unnecessarily have children due to societal norms, family pressure, a bizarre and slightly narcissistic desire to have their genes passed down to future generations (adoption is incredibly important.) Obviously I'm not saying having children is wrong, just far too many people see it as a necessary part of their life when it really shouldn't be. Having children is an inherently selfish decision and unless you're prepared to sacrifice a huge amount of freedom to afford your children the best upbringing, then maybe having children isn't for you.

Maybe I have too much faith in modern medicine (I doubt it, modern medicine is incredible) but I fully believe a trend of dropping sperm count is not apocalyptic. It'll probably result in benefits such as fewer undesired pregnancies. The important thing is to ensure that people of any economic status have access to fertility clinics, and for IVF and related procedures to not be cost prohibitive for non-wealthy people.
Moore's law has not held for long-haul bandwidth for quite some time. Moore's law is for semiconductors and that has little to do with signal efficiency.
Decrease you mean I think
C's lack of array size info strikes again:

memcpy(current_wmm_ie, ie->data, ie->len);

where "ie" points to data obtained from the net.
The reasoning there is kind of lame, every filter knows how to pass SCTP or UDP and doesn't pass SCTP since it is unpopular and UDP because stopping it is most of why you are filtering.

Making an SCTP web standard would improve endnode support (and actual app use) which is beginning to wane and are SCTPs adoption problems.
WHY - would it be "especially helpful to hear from people who decided to remain childless?"

Would it be "especially helpful to hear from people" who were going to learn to Scuba dive...and then didn't? How could they help you learn to navigate - what they didn't actually learn?

You're not going to get quality advice from people with comments like this. It's clear you don't like the trade off, so it would leave the reader to guess that you don't have any?

So - what are you looking for? Agreement?
I think it's different based on the use case.

For a document editor or spreadsheet, continuous or even regular updates aren't important as long as it has the base features you need.

When you have a CRM that integrates with other systems, an accounting package that has to stay up to date with policies and laws, or even an IDE that can support numerous languages, regular updates are more valuable and in some cases necessary.

I used Office 2000 until I decommissioned my last Windows machine (dual boot even then) in 2010/11.
The pen is the toughest choice!

I like the Uniball Vision Elite with the bold point in blue.

I've run out today and am reduced to a US Government Skilcraft pen. A decided downgrade
It is pretty hard to ensure you are vulnerable.
Should Chef gather anonymous usage data?
I have zero association with Moonlight. It just looks promising to me and I am interested in supporting gig work done right. So I have promoted them to people looking for work.

Thus, the excess of developers on Moonlight maybe partly my responsibility. I have made a mental note to look for opportunities to promote them to people who need someone to code for them to try to balance that out a bit.

I do freelance writing through a portal. It is a well designed, well run system and some people genuinely support themselves. Due to my medical situation, I only work very part time and I don't yet make the kind of money I want, but it is trending in the right direction. So I think a well done portal can work. The fact that there are lots of busted ones out there in no way proves this one is also busted or that a portal is hopeless.

I have seen some articles that suggest that gig work is the future and that up to 40% of work will be done in this fashion by 2020. I think the trend is unavoidable. So, the question here becomes "How do we do this in a way that works well for all parties?" I am interested in promoting platforms that work well for all parties, including the worker.

So, I am sorry you have had negative experiences, but I see zero to believe that the existence of multiple terrible platforms in any way suggests this particular platform is doomed to failure. Hopefully the remarks in this discussion will help the founders to focus on upping their game on finding folks looking to hire programmers, since that is currently a weakness.
Microsoft for example has $76 billion in debt, accumulating at a rapid pace. Apple is in a similar situation. They're adding debt at a historic pace.

Despite the immense profitability the companies have, their debt holders will get freaked out if those large cash piles were to get discharged down toward zero. For example, Berkshire Hathaway got slapped for allowing its cash to drop a bit low (relatively speaking) a number of years ago (also coincided with the worst of the great recession), their credit rating got dropped a notch in part because of it (despite it being very unrealistic they were actually more risky just because cash was briefly at $30 billion versus $50 billion). You'll often see the ratings agencies & analysts talk about wanting to see Berkshire maintain a large amount of cash due to its obligations.

Apple and Microsoft are paying very, very low interest rates on their debt. Given the scale of those debt piles now, they'll desperately want to maintain those low rates. Maintaining a sizable pile of cash will assist them in doing so.
FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE Now Available
That's not going away, though. Adobe Animate isn't being EOL'ed.
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) – Full DNA Analysis
The trick for me is page numbers and a table of contents
Antarctica. You drill down into some millions-of-years-old chunk of ice and drink that.

Draw whatever conclusion from that you like.
This is something that worth exploring further to identify if it is a requirement for a WebUDP implementation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_authentication_num...

If a bank doesn't offer something like that, but still happily does online banking, I'd take my money... anywhere else, even a mattress or the sugar jar.
I believe Facebook is very perfected form of Dopamine delivery and it's leveraging the attention deficit behavior of entire generations. Could it fizzle out the way you anticipate? We have seen it before but if you look at Zuckerberg's ambitious vision for Facebook and the new verticals he plans to enter/trail-blaze then there's reason to assume the goal is not to ride on Facebook's success but to continue aiming at the next place the population will look for it's fix.

If you look at some of early data and research about the effect fake news spread via Facebook has had you can see Facebook has itself firmly planted in millions of American's everyday life to the extent where it's platform can distort the very perception it's citizens have of themselves. Certainly not all but healthy chunk, large enough chunk for there to be real effects.

As far as market saturation, again I'd point to Zuckerberg's heavy investment in VR and plans to invest in more emerging verticals going forward. Not to mention that Google has been at market saturation, especially in America, for many years and we do not see it's ad revenue waning in any substantial way. And Google took that ad revenue and put it into various risky forms of R&D that has now clearly lead to potentially enormous new growth verticals like Waymo.

I'm not an avid Facebook user but I get roped back in by push notifications of someone mentioning me or tagging me in a picture. In addition, about a year ago I got so tired of only seeing "mostly older people and Walmart shoppers, posting angry bumper sticker nonsense about Obama or Trump" that I searched for my favorite tech, science and political media sources on Facebook and followed them so now my feed is of more utility to me but still not ideal.
How to make a racist AI without really trying (word2vec is racist by default)
Some things I did to manage my 4plex remotely:

- keypad locks om common entries

- emergency keys hidden in lock boxes

-landscaper/grass cut/snow company

-couple handymen that i regulatly give work to that willingly would love to make $50 bucks to show up and coordinate something for 30 minutes
How should (s)he approach the decision?

By looking into one's heart, and deciding what one really wants out of life.

Financial constraints are one thing. But one really shouldn't sacrifice truly important life goals (like having children; or even moving to the same city to be with one's partner) for the sake of this industry's (really quite shallow and ego-aggrandizing) "meritocratic" standards. Or even weigh them on the same scale.

To put it another way: By all means, don't give up your creative and intellectual goals -- and don't foolishly neglect your baseline financial goals, either. But really, just screw this idea of "achieving a senior title", or "becoming an industry leader", or any of that stuff.

I mean, these things OK if they come as the result and after-effect of creative and productive work. But the moment one starts to think "Wait, should I have kids with this wonderful person like I've always been dreaming of, or... should I keep plugging away in the hopes being... recognized and chattered about in major media outlets" -- I'd suggest that that's not only where one starts to lose perspective on what's really important in life; one also starts to lose perspective on what it really means to be genuinely creative and successful (by personal, or any other standards) in the first place.

Which after all comes down to: throwing caution to the wind, and putting all your energies into what you think is important and meaningful - and not what other people think is important. (And certainly not what journalists in the business media think is important).

Should a really ambitious person seriously consider not having children at all?

I would put it this way: decide what your ambitions really are, and act accordingly.

If having kinds happens to fall into the space of "ambitions" for you - that's great. If not, that's fine also.

But the "should I have kids or follow my ambitions?" line of analysis seems like a mental trap.