Hacker News: RK

Autonomous Taxis Would Deliver Significant Environmental and Economic Benefits

RK — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 16:40:02 +0000

Article URL: https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/07/06/autonomous-taxis-would-deliver-significant-environmental-and-economic-benefits/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9858995

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Crayfis: The app that turns your phone into a cosmic ray detector

RK — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 04:48:35 +0000

Article URL: http://crayfis.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431483

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by RK in "The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples"

RK — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 04:26:40 +0000

Here's another interesting "radiation enthusiast", who visits nuclear sites and collects radioactive memorabilia. He actually works as a nuclear engineer.

http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/

Highlights include Chernobyl trips, a trip to "Soviet Ground Zero", and a how-to for DIY uranium chemistry.

New comment by RK in "The Tyranny of the Forced Smile"

RK — Sun, 15 Feb 2015 19:42:07 +0000

I don't know how we are in relation to Czechs, but one of things I hear as an American is that we are often too quick to talk about politics. Whereas, in many cultures, politics is considered almost taboo to talk about with all but the closest friends and family.

New comment by RK in "Enough's enough: Contract teaching at a Canadian University"

RK — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 07:20:58 +0000

As a grad student in the 2000's I was told by a professor that the department would take into consideration the expected attrition rate (typically ~50%) when admitting grad students. The idea being that they would have enough TA's for intro classes. Attrition would make the number of advanced students more inline with the money available to fund PhD students till they graduated. In other words, they purposefully over-admitted to get TA's, most of whom would leave with an MS as best.

This was in science departments. In departments that had few or no "general ed" courses, such as engineering, and thus little need for TA's, the graduation rate was much higher.

New comment by RK in "Ask HN: What was the job market like during the dot-com crash?"

RK — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 05:23:17 +0000

graduate school admissions were ridiculously competitive in 2003-05

This was true in my experience as well. I applied to grad school for 2004 and heard lots of crazy stories from programs about high applicant numbers and quality. I ended up at a "hidden gem" versus a top program. A couple years later I re-applied to PhD programs and got accepted everywhere.

In today's markets it's a little hard to believe that people would be flocking to grad school due to a poor industry market, but it seemed to be the case across science and engineering fields. I'm sure that influx also made the bad academic job market even worse, unfortunately.

New comment by RK in "People Who Collect Radioactive Glass"

RK — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 03:40:01 +0000

If you're interested in the chemistry of Uranium, here's a do-it-yourself guide. The uranyl compounds are what fluoresce:

https://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistr...

New comment by RK in "The peculiar status of PhD-employees"

RK — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 18:38:27 +0000

Which country are you discussing?

New comment by RK in "How to choose?"

RK — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 14:20:04 +0000

The ANU Quantum Random Numbers Server:

http://150.203.48.55/index.php

New comment by RK in "How to choose?"

RK — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 06:18:31 +0000

My advisor in grad school once gave the following advice algorithm for making a decision:

1. Flip a coin.

2. If the result of the coin flip makes you hesitate at all, you know that was the choice you didn't really like anyway. Go with the other choice.

New comment by RK in "Anthropology: The sad truth about uncontacted tribes"

RK — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 06:45:28 +0000

In theory the rule is that you're supposed to refer to people by what name they prefer (e.g. "Little people").

Here's what Wikipedia says:

* The terms used to refer to Native Americans have been controversial. According to a 1995 U.S. Census Bureau set of home interviews, most of the respondents with an expressed preference refer to themselves as "American Indians" or simply "Indians"; this term has been adopted by major newspapers and some academic groups

New comment by RK in "The Crisis in American Walking (2012)"

RK — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 04:32:11 +0000

I visited Melbourne for about a month a couple of years ago and was excited to use the train to get around, but people there routinely said I was crazy for doing that. People often offered to give me a ride to the train station (usually a few blocks away). I got the overall impression that Australia has a very similar car culture to the US.

New comment by RK in "New York City photographed with the Game Boy Camera in 2000"

RK — Mon, 19 May 2014 04:03:14 +0000

My best friend had one of these as a kid and we made epic backyard GI Joe movies.
Incidentally he now works as a film editor.

New comment by RK in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

RK — Mon, 19 May 2014 03:46:49 +0000

No write-up, but people I know have left physics for:
* Quantitative finance
* Insurance (working on models that were beyond what the actuaries were trained to do)
* Data science
* Scientific equipment R&D
* Scientific equipment sales
* Popular science writing (this is a bit of an outlier!)
* Defense contracting (engineering, "scientific" programming, etc)
* Programming
* Door-to-door insurance sales (no joke)
I usually tell people to brush up on their programming skills as much as possible. If you're a theorist who only does pencil + paper or maybe Mathematica, it might be hard to find a decent job. Also, it never hurts to talk to / network with any industry people that are related to your field (software or hardware vendors, etc).
I'm now doing data science, but have also done hardware development and electrical engineering related things (signals). When I was transitioning to data science I also did some very specialized consulting related to my PhD. A few people paid me to do simulations and/or help then implement some techniques that I worked on as a grad student.
Also: I had a very supportive advisor, who encouraged me to accept a job offer before I graduated.

New comment by RK in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

RK — Sun, 18 May 2014 19:16:43 +0000

I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse.
Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Harvard. He was unable to get a tenure track job, primarily because in that 4 year timespan only 1 faculty position opened up in the entire US for his (tiny) field. He now works at Google.
In fact I'm not sure that anyone from my cohort is still in academia. Other students used to come ask me questions all of the time, because I had worked in industry before going to grad school. Their questions were always some variation of "what are my options if I get out of physics?".
Edit: I'll also add that most grad students I knew gave little thought to their post-grad job prospects before starting grad school. It seems now that the message has trickled along a little better that the outlook is very poor.

New comment by RK in "The Curse of Dimensionality in Classification"

RK — Tue, 13 May 2014 22:12:52 +0000

You could make a plot like Figure 1. Look for the turning point (do some calculus if you can, i.e. d(perf)/d(dim) = 0).

New comment by RK in "Bringing Silicon Valley to the Midwest"

RK — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 17:29:13 +0000

Los Alamos is in the middle of nowhere, but Sandia is smack in the middle of a metro area of ~1M people (Albuquerque).

New comment by RK in "Ask HN: Idea Sunday"

RK — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:00:14 +0000

I'd like some UI element that lets me know how long it's been since I read/used a tab. I tend to open lots of tabs and then browse them as is convenient later. Sometimes this means tabs get "lost" (i.e. become stale before I read them). This would let me know which tabs I might have overlooked or should close, bookmark, etc.

New comment by RK in "1930s immigrants who Americanized their names earned more"

RK — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:44:30 +0000

Many Irish already had their names Anglicized by the English before they left Ireland.

New comment by RK in "SR-72"

RK — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 22:01:29 +0000

I'm not that familiar with military aircraft development timelines, but this stuck out as my favorite part:
A hypersonic plane does not have to be an expensive, distant possibility. In fact, an SR-72 could be operational by 2030.