Viewing profile — cmckay

The tension in education between the study of skills (what you would call preparation for your career) and the study of values (what you refer to as creating "well rounded people")…

This is true for some fields, at some schools. Median salary for an associate professor (the first rank with tenure) at my institution is 63k.

A better way (in my opinion) to ask the question of whether or not your business model is sustainable/ethical/scalable is to ask the question: are you adding value? I think in this…

I'm surprised they didn't mention the best tribute to sriracha of all: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/sriracha

One data point: I teach at a small liberal arts college. Our endowment is roughly of the same order as our annual budget. Annual draw-down on the endowment is 4.5% or so, which mea…

Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with …

This is more a meta-comment about slideshare than about this presentation in particular. I really like being able to access the slides of talks I've seen, but for talks I haven't s…

The problem with capping highly funded projects ("hits") is that they make up a pretty small percentage of the Kickstarter project space, but they get a ton of press. It varies by …

Are people hiring freelance/part time for data science work? I'm a physics professor at a small liberal arts college, and would like to move my career in the direction of data scie…

Yes, because it's clear from the context of the article that's what the author meant: "Kickstarter intentionally makes failure a hard thought to stumble on. Its website does not sh…

Two points that indicate that the author doesn't really know what he's talking about: 1. "Estimating the number of failed projects is difficult because of these tactics, but most i…

These isotopes have limited (and sometimes quite short) lifetimes. Bringing them closer to the patients means that they can be produced in smaller quantities on an as needed basis,…

I see that part of the posting didn't go through. Reposted as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4281053

I tried posting this earlier, and something went awry; the majority of the post didn't go through. Here it is in its entirety. I recently launched a Kickstarter project: ( http://w…

There are a host of manly-gear-related sites (uncrate, gear patrol, and the like) which would seem to be the obvious venues for this sort of thing, but they haven't responded to ou…

For product design projects, kickstarter requires that you have a working prototype and a manufacturing plan. Most of the other project areas don't have that requirement. I just la…