The off-ramp of nearly all of my crypto endeavors has been very easy in my experience. Not always simple, because a lot of parts of moving money on various crypto chains is unintuitive and well in-need of improvement, but definitely easy once you know what to do.
The most annoying part, somewhat surprisingly, is always with regards to United States KYC restrictions. I've had a fair bit of annoyance trying to move crypto off of services that were once accessible to US customers and no longer are.
I personally cant wait to start seeing sob stories of how people are having thier account permanently locked after making big wins. Thats what happens when you bgive money to unregulated casinos every tine and is the exact reason there are so many gambling laws and restrictions.
have you tried to turn crypto into cash money in a real bank account? have you tried to do it with large amounts? would you describe that process as easy?
yes. For crypto platforms specfically, those "large amounts" can be pathetically small. Ive had no end of trouble even with amounts as low as $50 getting my card blocked until I call the bank
Increasingly men have been disenfranchised over the last decade so the only way forward is to take on such titles to at least appear successful.
It looks like normal behaviour to me.
For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).
27 percent is roughly the same percentage of white men that are in that age bracket in the US. The lower 21 percent in the humanities could be explained by there being less interest in the those fields from the white male population in the first place.
I wouldn't call that disenfranchised; I'd call that a correction. I suppose you could make the argument that more white men should be incentivized to go into the humanities though.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue.
It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices.
Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
I'm not so sure. It's definitely the de facto standard, but I suspect minimal HTML is better. Just enough tags to add structure and meaning (H1-H6, p, a, em, section for structure including nesting, maybe more). LLMs were trained on a lot of HTML, they're good at processing it. HTML requires more tokens than markdown but I believe it's worth it. I'll find out in a few weeks as I experiment with both.
My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.
Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.
Not sure about that. How would a university test scaling hypotheses in AI, for example? The level of funding required is just not there, as far as I know.
Universities are also not suited to test which race car is the fastest, but that does not obviate the need for academic research in mechanical engineering.
Perhaps but the fastest race car is not possibly marshalling in the end of human involvement in science, so you might consider these of considerably different levels of meriting the funding.
Your attempts to smuggle your conclusions into the conversation are becoming tiresome. Profiling a private company's computer program is not impactful research. The best-fit parameters AI people call scaling exponents are not properties like the proton lifetime or electron electric dipole moment. Rest assured, there remain scientists at universities producing important work on machine learning.
There are a million other research things to do besides running huge pretraining runs and hyperparam grid search on giant clusters. To see what, you can start with checking out the best paper and similar awards at neurips, cvpr, iccv, iclr, icml etc.
This issue of accessibility is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but it doesn’t mean that only large companies are doing good research.
Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom
I came across a good example of that a few years ago. Caltech had a page on their site listing Caltech startups.
There were quit a few off them--by number of starts per year per person Caltech was actually generating startups at a higher rate than Stanford. But almost none of those Caltech startups were doing anything that would bring them to the public's attention, or even to the average HN reader's attention.
For example one I remember was a company developing improved ion thrusters for spacecraft. Another was doing something to automate processing samples in medical labs.
Also almost none of them were the "undergraduates drop out to form a company" startup we often hear about, where the founders aren't actually using much that they actually learned at the school, with the school functioning more as a place that brought the founders together.
The Caltech startups were most often formed by professors and grad students, and sometimes undergraduates that were on their research team, and were formed to commercialize their research.
My guess is that this is how it is at a lot of universities.
Every university I've worked in has been dominated by this paradigm, has an office set up to support it, and a bunch of policies around what it means for your doctoral supervisor to also be your employer, etc.
That's a specific field at a very specific time. In general there is a difference between research and development, you're going to expect the early work to be done in academia but the work to turn that into a product is done by commercial organizations.
You get ahead as an academic computer scientist, for instance, by writing papers not by writing software. Now there really are brilliant software developers in academic CS but most researchers wrote something that kinda works and give a conference talk about it -- and that's OK because the work to make something you can give a talk about is probably 20% of the work it would take to make something you can put in front of customers.
Because of that there are certain things academic researchers really can't do.
As I see it my experience in getting a PhD and my experience in startups is essentially the same: "how do you do make doing things nobody has ever done before routine?" Talk to people in either culture and you see the PhD students are thinking about either working in academia or a very short list of big prestigious companies and people at startups are sure the PhDs are too pedantic about everything.
It took me a long time of looking at other people's side projects that are usually "I want to learn programming language X", "I want to rewrite something from Software Tools in Rust" to realize just how foreign that kind of creative thinking is to people -- I've seen it for a long time that a side project is not worth doing unless: (1) I really need the product or (2) I can show people something they've never seen before or better yet both. These sound different, but if something doesn't satisfy (2) you can can usually satisfy (1) off the shelf. It just amazes me how many type (2) things stay novel even after 20 years of waiting.
reply