skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone have experience with being a non-traditional PhD student and doing your PhD later in life?

I worked a bit and want to return for a PhD in CS. I took some courses at a nearby (and good) institution and did well (for fun). I want to continue taking graduate courses and and get involved in research before I apply for PhD programs (since I been out of school for a while).

Curious to hear from older students their experiences or from professors on thoughts about older students (say late 30s/early 40s) and whether there are job opportunities in industry for folks in this age range upon completion (in say applied areas).

I’m doing it because I really want to do research and enjoy hard theoretical problems outside the scope of your regular SWE job.
> Mind you: this is not part-time work, or even standard 9-to-5. It is hard, continuous work, with weekends and nights spent in the lab or writing research papers (see e.g. here). Journals advise graduate students to work most weekends and long hours, because that’s how you succeed.

Or could the “because” be that you find the work deeply intellectually stimulating to the point where it’s hard to step away? I guess maybe that crowd isn’t writing about it, since they’re off doing, you know, science. This is my problem with the monthly “down with PhDs!” screed that shows up on the front page of HN. There is a huge anti-survivor bias.
This leads in turn to testing/developing in prod. I do not personally miss it. If you have CI/CD you should not be able to skip it.
Maybe putting it under a feature flag would be a safer alternative.
"There is no doubt that in the US in a lot of universities graduate students are a cheap workforce that reinforces corporate interests through research that is funded by them to sway public opinion in certain directions."

Citation is needed for this subject. Large amount of research in University is funded by NSF or the Federal Government. While industrial interest also contribute significantly to research fund, it is excessive to accuses a lot of universities to be a crony in a corporate-academic-complex.
It's both moral and economics.

Basically every country already passes on costs for pollution and emissions. This is not a new problem.

Some do it in complicated hidden ways, and some have the price set too low but in general it's happening, because it would be stupid (and immoral!) not to.

China now has a national carbon price for example and is responsible for more than half of all coal usage.

They're not doing that to be woke, it's just efficient, and it'll almost certainly mean their nuclear plants run more than they would otherwise. And make investing in renewables, which they're already world leaders in, even more attractive.
Yep, and I am seeing it moreso in traditional engineering where the white collar criminals, er,management accountants (PWC, McKinsey, Boston etc) have somehow managed to insert themselves and convinced the larger companies that "those engineers, they are great guys, but they don't understand your business like we do, so why don't you let us tell them what to do and we will make sure they don't screw you over or do shit you don't need".

So thereby inserting themselves at great cost, muddying the waters and actually ensuring that the engineer is so far removed from the actual need that they couldn't engineer a value solution unless they lucked in by chance - it becomes all abot cost and nothing about value and while some of those guys are smart people, very, very few of them understand engineering in the particular detail needed to really specify and return the best result.

I guess that is why you see a lot of them advertising for engineers to join them these days, it seems like they want to become the engineers as part of the management group.
To be fair their mobile app was really really bad the last time I used it.
Life implies death. When will these systems implode under their own complexity?
No business wants to sell to consumers, they are irrational and a huge liability. Much better to have some poor schmuck deal with that and be universally hated.
But who doesn't love a trip out to Oz to 'meet the team'! Same thing with lots of US companies in Ireland (whilst mostly for tax reasons initially, Ireland now is stacked with talent) - trip to Ireland to 'meet the team', pre-covid ain't no one going to say no to those off-sites.

It is going to be an interesting decade, the rise of working from home and ai creeping into every profession will make for some radical changes. Engineering managers can only hold their accountants overlords back for so long. I do hope SFO stops being the centre of the tech world as it is very inefficient, but that's probably 30-40 years away at the earliest unless all out war is triggered.
> In my opinion the pandemic era saw a significant increase in employee headcount

I am interested in hearing why you think that. I would have thought that the whole "Great Resignation" theme of the two pandemic years would suggest that people are instead looking to move away from the established companies.
Have you tried a more "modern" language recently? By trying I mean using it for more than 6-10 months. I've been one of the PHP "supporters" until I've found Go and Rust. PHP was really nice to get into programming and make a spaghetti website but the language itself and the ecosystem always felt like a hacking project.

The killer feature of PHP has always been the hosting ecosystem. A simple FTP upload would do the job without knowing much about the hosting infrastructure. Recently we've got that kind of "serveless" experience for other languages as well but the deploying is proprietary and the providers are very few. I'm aware only of Google Cloud Run.

As for JavaScript even its inventor said it's time to move on. It's time for a new language and a new DOM interface. Maybe we can fix the "language" issue with WASM but we are still left with the DOM.
From someone who is not a lawyer, but was responsible for GDPR compliance at a major hospital in Germany: You may want to switch your lawyers.
It's trivial to configure PHP to store sessions in redis.
I don't know how people can buy Samsung. Their Android distribution is the worst crapware I have ever seen. You will hear me ranting on mobile OS from miles away anyway but Samsung software is in a league itself.
are you meant to download the image some other way?
OpenGL direct state access (DSA) is actually part of OpenGL 4.5! You still need to set up a lot of state for draw calls, but changing little pieces of state has changed from (pseudocode, and I'm showing a worst case for pre-DSA here):

const int oldTexture = currentTexture();
switchToTexture(myTexture)
setTextureData(myRgbImage);
switchToTexture(oldTexture);

to:

setTextureDataDSA(myTexture, myRgbImage);
I will always like lichess more because it the platform that brought me back to chess.

Also, i find the UX generally better and less clunky, but that's personnal preference and is subject to change.
^ This. Not so long ago, I had worked in the finance department of a $350M company as one of the five IT guys and we had just begun implementing Step 2, after OriginalOneBigServer had shown its limits. DBOneBigServer was really big though, 256 GB RAM and 128 cores if I remember correctly. So big in fact that I implemented some of my ETL tasks as stored SQL procedures to be run directly on the server. The result? A task that would easily take a big fraction of OneBigServer memory and 15 hours (expected to increase correlatedly with the revenue) is run in 30 minutes.

It's worth noting that when I left we still were nowhere close to saturate DBOneBigServer.
> simply because the latter offers superior game analysis experience.

But it does so once per day, unless you pay (the low depth analysis you get for free on chess.com is not great to put it mildly)
That’s a quite obnoxious way to go about competing with open source.
I didn't open the link when I commented, my guess was right. It's like this anywhere I think an immigrant will always be seen immigrant first citizen last. In the US intel agencies spy on naturalized citizens same as foreigners, they act like a citizens rights don't apply to them.
There is plenty of room for all of Chess.com, Chess24 and Lichess to exist.

Lichess has the best platform to play on and is free to use.

Chess.com is a business. As such they want to earn money.
However, without a large, online chess community there will be no subscribers.
The amount of effort chess.com has made to sponsor events, streamers etc.
is tremendous.

Making a living as a chess professional is tough.
Streaming/YouTube has opened the field somewhat: it is no longer
required to be in the world top 20 to make a living in the field of chess.

The Chess24 initiative is without doubt inspired by Chess.com.
Chess24 gives yet another way for chess players to earn money.
Via Chessable (owneed by Chess24) players can sell chess online book/booklets.

If Hikaru has a clause in his contract with Chess.com, that he can't play on Lichess - then the just can't play on Lichess. That's simple.

Would Nike be happy if Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo suddenly appeared in Adidas shoes?

It works the other way too: Wen did you last see Magnus play on Chess.com?
[I am aware that Magnus as owner/investor in Chess24 makes his own rules - and plays on Lichess]
Your real world experience is an advantage, try to position yourself among relatively young scholars (recently tenured) and write one paper and submit it before entering grad school.
This is an interactive course to learn programming in a stripped down to the basics programming language with built in graphics commands. tiki.li is a test variant of easylang.online with a 2D coordinate system with bottom-left origin. I hope to gain insights on what is easier for beginners to understand. Some arguments for "bottom-left": the y-value corresponds to the height, in school it is taught that way. Some for "top-left": this is common in 2D computer graphics, it is easier to deal with a grid of rows and columns.

The same course with "top-left origin": https://easylang.online/apps/tut_learn.html
>I had a look at your job postings being located in the DACH region myself but I must admit I’m surprised you find anybody willing to work for the salaries listed.

Austrian law is funny. The law says that job ads have to list the MINIMUM salary. Now what companies do is they leave the word "MINIMUM" off and kinda weasel around it in the rest of the sentence. The weaseling here is "Depending on education, qualification and experience, a substantial overpayment is possible".

The "minimum salary" is usually a mandated minimum that has been negotiated by the unions. Paying less than that is illegal.

Good developers in Austria aren't willing to work for those minimum salaries of course.

>I get that you’re not competing with FAANG salaries and kudos for mentioning them upfront but sub 50k gross would not even convince newly grads,

Note: Its 14 salaries a year. And part of the health insurance is not included in the negotiated amount but has to be paid by the employer. It's a DACH thing, as you know. So from an employers point of view, if you negotiated X gross with the employee, you have to actually pay at least 1.5 X, up to 2 X, for him.
Thoughts on the Software Industry
I have empirically observed that talking with friends about problems, meditation, and other things that help me carry less stress in my body significantly reduces or eliminates my back and neck pain. My hypothesis is that my back and neck muscles have nervous tissue in them and the level of muscle tension is influenced by the state of my brain.

The body keeps the score.
You're not alone - it's nuts how much JS has changed over the last decade.

I don't know if I can offer any suggestions beyond just Googling syntax you don't understand and experimenting with it until you feel you understand it. From there it just a matter of time before you can glance your eye over the code and understand what it's doing without needing to decipher every line. I just want to say you're not alone. I think most frontend devs have gone through something similar at some point over the last decade - I know I have.

As for deprecated dependencies, that's a huge problem. Senior devs generally do care and will be selective around dependencies. One of the problems is that the ecosystem is evolving so quickly. Libraries come into and out of fashion almost over night so frequent maintenance is needed to keep dependencies up to date. My guess is that either devs are not putting enough thought into what dependencies they're using, or your not currently assigning enough time as a team to review & maintain your existing dependencies - this is definitely something worth raising with your team imo.

The last thing I'll say is that the use of ternary operators are something I'm very critical of and it's interesting that you mentioned them in your post. A lot of devs seem to have this mindset that if you can convert 5 lines of code to 1 or 2 that's always a good thing, but compressing 5 lines of code to 2 often comes at the cost of clarity and readability. It sounds like you might need to think about coding standards with your team. Is part of the problem here that the team is writing confusing / messy code, and it's that coupled with your lack of knowledge of modern JS that's resulting in the stress you're feeling here?
> If you do this then you'll have the hardest possible migration when the time comes to split it up. It will take you literally years, perhaps even a decade.

At which point a new OneBigServer will be 100x as powerful, and all your upfront work will be for nothing.
> chess.com has more intuitive UI

This is just mindblowing to me. It's not just that I disagree but I think the opposite is true, and by a very large margin too. I guess people just have different preferences when it comes to UI but especially for fast time controls, I don't get how people put up with chess.com, it's outright unusable for me.
This is a well known cycle in software. Systems grow in complexity until they collapse under their own weight, then a new system is created that steals the most valuable ideas from the old system. Repeat.

It happens in nature too. Your skull has fewer bones in it than the skulls of many fish and humans do not by any stretch have the largest genome in nature.
its just one persons opinion based on his experiences, I do not share his views because my experience was completely different, for the sake of having a different perspective let me share how it went for me:

I did my PhD (and an MSc before that) in EU, as a PhD I was paid an above average salary and it even provided me enough time to work as a consultant in parallel where I was able to get a few patents - which also look good from "academic perspective"

my phd advisor didn't really care at all as long as I was producing papers that got accepted to conferences / journals and he was a co-author even though he literally never even talked to me about any of the topics of my research, so basically zero supervision as long as I produced "academic results"

I finished my PhD in 3 years (normally it should have taken more) and went straight to running my startup

would I have done it again? sure

can it be done better? sure - science and all the institutions around it are just "processes" that the collective mankind came up with over last few centuries, there will always be outliers that do not fit in, I never did fit in myself, but i sucked it up and made the best out of it, and that is what i believe the greatest thing that phd thought me - persistence under extreme pressure, and i still do that to this day - the pressure is much higher than it was back then because the stakes are much higher, but phd was the first step - breaking the barriers showing that even I can push the boundaries of what is considered possible

if money are an issue - just do a phd in EU, here I never heard of an unpaid phd position
There's more than 10 developers working on Grafana (i work at grafana).
I don't know for big instances of Laravel, for every deployment pipelines of Symphony I've seen were far from "Drop that file on the server. The end."

In the most primitive ways, you would at least do cache warming, which usually means "building" the app instance in a separate folder and swapping the active directory served by the web server. That's basically what a basic Capistrano deploy would do.

Nowadays I'd expect most shops to be using containers for PHP too, and that means building your container like any other language.

What I'm saying is, the days where PHP deployment was simple have been long gone, for at least a decade in my experience.
I feel like search as declined too. Still leagues ahead of bing.

Obviously, it sin't solely google's fault. They are exploited by content creators (and i will count geekforgeeks and other copycats as content creator there) and with the space those takes, it is now way harder to do an accurate selection.
Yeah - there is a download button, and that does put their logo in the corner.
Pelosi heads to South Korea after whirlwind Taiwan trip
Toyota warns Government it may stop manufacturing in UK if it bans hybrid cars
> They they they

I’m, aren’t parents supposed to be keeping track of their own kids, not some company?

The stuff you said in the last half there is insane to me, so I’ll assume you’re either trolling or perhaps we have a very different view of certain things.
> the level of anti-TikTok sentiment seems really weird, it really does just seem like sinophobia

"It's so weird how scared people are of falling under the control of a foreign government. Don't they know their own government is just as or even more corrupt?"

Granted social media have less influence than a government, but that doesn't make the risk go away. And yes, the same logic applies to US (social) media in other countries, though the relationship between countries should be taken into account when assessing that risk. Though that relationship is itself influenced by media..
Threema Libre: Full Independence from Google Services
Archive: http://archive.today/2022.07.30-223736/https://www.telegraph...
He wasn't necessarily lying but from the given information I don't think that you can conclude with certainty that he wasn't lying.
As someone who hates schools and formal education with a passion, if money was not an issue (say I win a big lottery) I would be motivated by a phd (crypto in my case because I suck at it). The level of research and work demanded of you honestly feels like it would be worth it and you actually do stuff instead of pass exams and write papers the way the teacher wants it writtem and all is good, you have to have results and original thought.
I, too, wonder why people uncritically parrot the fossil fuel industry's anti-nuclear talking points without even having the decency to be paid for it.
What are examples of things/changes the C-levels did?
I've been dealing with sciatic nerve issues for the last 2-3 years. Currently I'm in my 17th year of being in IT (sitting 10 hours a day).

I had to go to a physiotherapist to heal my sciatic nerves when they blew up for the first time. It was so bad, I needed injections at the hospital just to not be in pain and took rather strong pain killers for a week.

A combination of the following has drastically changed my back health in the last 2 years.

* Basic weight lifting/strength training 2x per week focusing on shoulders/back/chest. Just 20-30 minutes. Nothing extreme.

* Switching from sitting in a chair, sitting on a yoga ball, laying on a yoga mat on the floor, and standing desk every hour. According to my physiotherapist, any one position for long periods of time is bad and present their own issues; the key is not staying in one position for more than 1-2 hours at a time.

* Yoga is good

* Chiropractors are good.

* Firm mattress.
Even when not required under GDPR, those banners may be required under the EU e-Privacy Directive (2009/136/EC ).
> I agree that many organisations will never get to the scale where they need it as a performance/data size measure, but you often will grow past the reliability level that's possible to achieve on a single node.

Many organisations have, for decades, exceptionally good reliability numbers using a backed-up/failed-over OneBigServer. Great reliability numbers did not suddenly appear only after 2012 when cloudiness took off.

I think you may be underestimating the reliability of OneBigServer.
I run klipper on all my printers and the worst-case scenario to get klipper comparability is a mainboard swap ($50-ish), but most are “if the controller is supported, just make a printer.cfg file”.
I would love to know what makes chess.com UI more intuitive in your eyes. They seem quite similar.
Lots of comments here about consulting an legal expert. If GDPR is so complex it requires legal advice, is it then fair to say the law is ambiguous and unreadable for the layperson?

I really like the list of scenarios in the post. It is exactly what EU lawmakers should have published when GDPR launched. As often, EU tech-related laws are well-intentioned, but clumsily implemented.
> There is no need for them

I agree. They should undo the law that created an artificial need.
All creators are hacking the algorithms. More subscribers, more views, more comments, more like etc.

As the hacks get more open , Youtube needs to include more granular details from user perspective. Like community subscribers, comments, retention cohorts for the channel etc.

Also, feel that youtube is pushing monetization a lot.I am seeing every creator putting 3-4 ads in good videos.
Defining big obvious functionality is usually easy to get from people. It's all the finer details that people might not know. You might have a feature that's been relatively untouched for a while, but people still use, so the devs have either left or forgotten from their past "drive-by development".
You can go from undergrad to phd???
No, we don't need to abolish the PhD. We need to regulate and modernize it. Some of the perks of STEM PhD students in the Netherlands (and I would guess elsewhere in Europe):

* Full employee status, including pension benefits. You're still underpaid of course, compared to market rates. This also addresses issues like parental leave and holidays.

* PhD contracts are fixed-term, 1+3 years. If you are given a third fixed-term contract, you are entitled (by law) to convert your contract to indefinite term. This makes it hard to keep around students for longer than needed as cheap workers.

* The typical format for a STEM PhD thesis is "story chapter" + peer-reviewed publications in verbatim. Which means you can spend more time on research instead on an exercise in futility.

* PhD defense is purely ceremonial and timed. OFC, you can still be made look like a fool.
How is carrying money around subverting government authority? You can carry 500K in your wallet on your bank card but if you carry 10K in cash it's somehow different?
> We need unions to make our voice heard. Both in the mega corps and local/state/federal governments.

We have them; it's why education and policing is so fucked.
The real solution to this is how we solved it last time we were here: abandon the mainframe and go back to local applications on PCs.

The cloud really provides two things for most applications:

(1) Data synchronization at scale. This could be provided by a much, much thinner cloud that basically just syncs files but using CRDTs to make that more robust. Applications could use these services to sync state for collaboration. The vast majority of the brains could be at the endpoint.

(2) The cloud is copy protection and DRM. It gives software publishers an easy place to put a toll booth. This could be solved by a reboot of the concept of local licensing, or by just periodically calling out to a license server. Yes people will pirate your software but those people aren't going to pay anyway.