Viewing profile — smanzer

Exactly - appreciating this fact could help clear up other disputes in this thread. For STEM Ph.Ds you are really only a "student" for 1-2 years tops (when you actually take some c…

I finished a chemistry Ph.D. at Berkeley in 2016 - the way that the university handled "tuition" for science graduate students always seemed like a scam to me during my time there.…

Sounds like you played it smart developing industry-relevant skills. I lucked out with that myself and got a thesis project that helped me get a software engineering job afterward.…

A few words of caution from a recent Ph.D. graduate: a big problem you will face if you do this is the all-or-nothing nature of the degree. If you are five years in, you will put u…

Citations help you out in the long-time limit for sure; "worlds 7th most cited chemist" is definitely an improvement on "another dude with a bunch of Nature papers." But I would im…

Usually being on the general university network is sufficient to get journal access. Using the university network credentials for the academic, it probably goes SciHub -> School ->…

Previous HN discussion (article has neat details of how sci-hub works): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074638

(1) Yes. In USA anyway. Creator is not in USA, however. (2) Academics donate their institutional login credentials to the site.

They do. They route it to the editor (senior academic), who routes it to appropriate reviewers. I think that the editor does it for free too in many cases. I feel like running ads …

Well, I'm not from Silicon Valley or YC, and I avoid torrenting music etc because it takes more directly from content creators, but the publishers' business practices put this on a…

Good for them. For the last article that I published, the publisher "value added" consisted of highlighting all the all-caps names in my document and asking me to define them as ac…

I did my bachelor's from ages 14-18; there's some things that you can't really do (frat parties) but most of the social opportunities are open to you. It helps to make friends if y…

I remember being interviewed randomly on the street by local TV news for a "student's opinion" on Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute, which was funded by BP. This was during D…

It does seem rather dubious to talk about "resources diverted" as a sufficient metric for success in this context, but I think that this story is also not a particularly strong reb…

This. There may be other reasons to dislike the email.send() formulation, but it seems like the need to support other mail APIs could be handled relatively easily within this type …

(we need the math speed, and all the C++ matrix libraries involve compromises of one form or another). Are you using lots of really tiny matrices? I would think pretty much all the…

Unhappy academic here - codebases with millions of lines of Fortran are very prevalent here as well. It is both better and worse than a lot of people think; like a lot of the other…