academonia's comments

academonia | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Do software engineers have leverage?

What's wrong with boring, especially if you have a family?

Not everyone is up to writing textbooks and compilers all day.

academonia | 4 years ago | on: Americans Are Keeping Their Cars Longer, as Vehicle Age Hits 12 Years

That might be more of a Honda/Mazda thing than an old/new one.

Hondas have a reputation for being fairly bulletproof and cheap to maintain. Mazdas have a reputation for being fun to drive and occasionally going "bang".

You might be pleasantly surprised by the TCO of a new Civic or Accord.

academonia | 4 years ago | on: Americans Are Keeping Their Cars Longer, as Vehicle Age Hits 12 Years

There are plenty of base-model US cars from the mid-90s without airbags.

It's not as crazy as it sounds; with the front-impact ones, wearing your seatbelt works about as well, and you don't have to worry about Takata syndrome.

academonia | 4 years ago | on: In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical Renaissance

The "one laptop per child" program put some thought into the connectivity problem. They actually designed their machines around the idea of distributing content via meshing and intermittent "sneakernet" deliveries.

Sadly, the price/performance wasn't quite there in the mid-2000s, but it seemed like they had some good ideas:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...

Maybe the mesh networking could have worked better if it were used exclusively for distributing small files, like a P2P Whispernet.

academonia | 4 years ago | on: Universities have formed a company that looks a lot like a patent troll

Post-graduate education is kind of a raw deal for people with undergrad degrees in computational fields. It might actually be worse than "free labor", if you consider the alternative of going to work after your first degree.

In the US, you're looking at paying $20-50k/year, and while most students will get tuition waivers and small stipends, those often disappear if you do any contracting or work on the side to supplement your meager income.

Meanwhile, $100-150k is a reasonable starting total comp right out of school, especially after the recent rash of inflation. And a good worker can realistically double that in the 4-6 years that it would take to get a PhD.

So the opportunity cost is staggering, but wait - there's more. The job market for tech positions has been very hot for the past decade, and the global economy is on the verge of a rebound. If you want to learn about a specific field like ML or aerospace, you can just get a job in that field. Kids graduating today have the option of learning from talented and driven people while earning a reasonable salary.

Research certainly has its place; most of the work that we do is based off of concepts that were pioneered decades ago. But from the perspective of a prospective student in the 2020s, it's a hard sell.

Especially since the current advisor/advisee relationship is rife with perverse incentives. This whole wall of text assumes the best case scenario, where you don't end up in a toxic lab.