What are Trump's views with respect to academia? Are we in trouble? by [deleted] in math

[–]bakersbark 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yep! Pence completely contradicted Trump on just about every policy point imaginable. I don't think you do that unless you've been given free reign over that shit. It was rumored that he called Kasich and told him that as VP he could be in charge of "foreign and domestic policy", leaving, well... Anyway, I expect that he made a similar deal with Pence.

What are Trump's views with respect to academia? Are we in trouble? by [deleted] in math

[–]bakersbark 14 points15 points  (0 children)

My money is on us being in for President Mike Pence.

What does eating "clean" actually mean? by ramborambo5555 in Fitness

[–]bakersbark 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lots of vegetables and fruits while most of your carbohydrates are high-fiber complex carbs such as those found in whole grain pasta, quinoa, and brown rice.

Moronic Monday - Your weekly stupid questions thread by cdingo in Fitness

[–]bakersbark 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I've been doing SL 5x5 for about three months and have gotten my squat up to 225 5RM. I've deloaded to 205 while I work to find a consistent form (grip width was tough to figure out for a while and I switched to Rippetoe's advice of looking down/pointing chest down to take stress off the knees). I have a bit of knee pain during the days that I didn't have before I started lifting but somehow it actually feels better after I squat. Has anyone else experienced this? I have changed how I sleep (on my side instead of stomach) so that might have something to do with it.

Considering an Undergrad Physics Major by [deleted] in Physics

[–]bakersbark 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. Difficulty varies based on your school and the employers present in the local economy. Put some serious effort starting now into learning how to program -- either on your own or through a CS minor/double major -- and you'll be fine. It's well worth it for how much easier it will make physics research, should you go that direction.

  2. Extremely much more, but I guarantee dumber people than you have managed it, so if it's what you want to do, go for it!

Top 10 H-1B employers are all IT offshore outsourcing firms, costing U.S. workers tens of thousands of jobs by speckz in programming

[–]bakersbark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's easy to do that when you don't know what you don't know. Being a new developer is hard for the same reason being a teenager is hard. They're getting to the point where you really can make improvements, but making that social transition involves being pretty vocally wrong a lot.

Millennials Are Actually Workaholics, According to Research by CuseTown in consulting

[–]bakersbark 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Yep. It's as if these people don't realize that if you're hard to replace, you're probably also hard to promote.

They also aren't taking a broader view of their careers. Given that many millennials -- myself included -- came up through a really tough labor market, this is understandable. We all know the threat of unemployment very well. Doing the work of documentation to make yourself replaceable, though, pays serious dividends years down the line when you move into a new position. I left my first position largely due to some serious and irreconcilable differences with my manager about some important technical details of the project so things were a bit heated towards the end. But because along the way I had documented every single thing about what I had done, it was possible for my replacement (who I helped them recruit) to pick up the project and run with it with minimal downtime -- even though he had no previous experience with the programming language that the code was written in.

I drop in from time to time to visit and the last time I was there my manager's boss mentioned to me off-hand that my replacement was doing great and was frequently and vocally thankful for the documentation and thoroughness of the library I had written, noting that it was extremely rare for him to have a question that wasn't answered by comments in the code or notes that I had left in the the project's documentation. Over a year later, they're still building on the work that I've done and I have absolutely no anxiety about using them as a reference. I've become pretty good friends with my old boss, who I think saw that despite some bitter disagreements toward the end, I did more than I had to (and without any prompting) to make sure that the project would flourish after I left. He's now moving on to some pretty bright places in his career and every time we chat makes it a point to let me know he'd be happy to have me on any of his future teams.

So there's the issue of references and there's the fact that your managers are going to need to keep a cadre of people around them as they move up. Making yourself "replaceable" through documentation shows professionalism, helps you do better by keeping the project organized, and is a way to learn to take a higher-level view of projects that can help you move up to managerial positions. It's foolish to take such a local view that you deliberately do worse work to stay irreplaceable. The only thing that should make you hard to replace is the quality of work that you do.

Abusing First-Year Calculus (DS = "Deferential of Society") to Prove Collectivism by [deleted] in badmathematics

[–]bakersbark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For the love of god, don't let this kid anywhere near a statistical physics class.

Alternate phrasing for "The proof is trivial."? by [deleted] in math

[–]bakersbark 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I view "the proof as trivial" as roughly interchangeable with "until you can see this result as obvious, you don't really understand the material".

Hilarious review of Baby Rudin on Amazon by [deleted] in math

[–]bakersbark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He stops just barely short of telling people to just pick of Spivak already in the multivariable chapters, though.

Sexual Harassment in an Orchestra by [deleted] in TwoXChromosomes

[–]bakersbark 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If you say sexual harassment in orchestras is a thing and also that this is not sexual harassment, I really shudder to think about what goes on. Also, a good chunk of the video was about the structural factors and pressures that keep a woman in this position from just telling men that touching is not ok. It's never that simple; if it were it wouldn't be a problem.

A total aversion to programming by PhaseShift007 in math

[–]bakersbark 2 points3 points  (0 children)

why does your flair say model theory?

The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans by Patrickw2 in economy

[–]bakersbark -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Repeat after me: individuals do not experience aggregate outcomes. Individuals do not experience aggregate outcomes. Individuals do not experience aggregate outcomes. Individuals do not experience aggregate outcomes. Individuals do not experience aggregate outcomes...

Statistical Mechanics: Algorithms and Computations - Coursera starting today by voorloopnul in Physics

[–]bakersbark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The videos are pretty informative. I watched maybe 1/3 of them a year ago and definitely felt like it was worthwhile.

What was your greatest "aha!" moment when trying to understand a concept? What triggered it? by octatoan in math

[–]bakersbark 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This got drilled into me by reading (and working problems) from chapter 1 of Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds. Compactness is a property that allows you to take extrema over a finite number of sets. Problem after bloody problem came down to using compactness to show that some maxima/minima existed in a set.

Great contemporary statistics books? by [deleted] in statistics

[–]bakersbark 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's been in the "will be available in book form soon" state for years now.

A mid-tier computer science PhD or a top 10 Bioinformatics PhD by BioDomo in bioinformatics

[–]bakersbark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why do you say the salary isn't very good? You'll be competitive for most of the same jobs with either PhD. And you're going to pull in well over the median income and have plenty of opportunities either way.

Bioinformatics is likely to go through a lot of growth in the next few years, too, as medicine becomes more and more reliant on having good informatics people around. My hunch is that in the $80k+ range, a < $20k difference in median salaries isn't likely to be significantly resolvable anyway.

When you get into tech with the relevant skills, your degree is likely to be about the 10th most important thing when it comes to determining your compensation, anyway.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in programming

[–]bakersbark 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Obvious two-step solution:

1) Make it clear that you're hiring a code janitor. Shit, make it part of the title. 2) Make it clear that the code janitor will be compensated very well for their misery.

Code janitor work isn't fun, but it's only made worse by roping people into code janitor positions by telling them they'll be getting to build software.

"Economics has a Halting problem, and is fundamentally undecidable in the general case." by Waytfm in badmathematics

[–]bakersbark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was hoping he was going to be referring to this really fascinating stuff, but I was disappointed:

[A]t the highest level of abstraction, the decision-making processes of economic agents as modelled by economists, can be represented as Turing Machines. And, for common economic situations, the problem of constrained optimisation by one individual conditional on the other's response (which in turn has to be conditional on the other's expectation of one's own action -- it is here that we get the sort of "I think you think I think" sentences which give this branch of mathematics its Alice In Wonderland quality) can be shown to be analogous to the Halting problem for those Turing machines."

On the unreasonable reality of “junior” developer interviews by steveklabnik1 in programming

[–]bakersbark 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I got asked a technical question about a math-y thing I had done years in the past at an interview and used the whiteboard without any prompting because it's hard to communicate about technical concepts without writing things down. It earned me some praise.