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Mine is a Panasonic and I’ve been using it for thirteen years now. It’s bulletproof and cooks rice like a champ.

Tangential to the content of the blog, I’m always weary of anything being labeled “anonymous” if it contains a lot of text that you personally wrote. Stylometry is a thing and it apparently works (I do need a citation, but on mobile and don’t have time - a quick Google search will return some results). I can see a future or even present where all it takes is a snippet of text that somebody knows is yours, and then a model to provide the probability that any given text off the internet (comments, blogs, etc) is written by you. People write and speak in very unique ways. As you increase the amount of your text, it becomes even more unique, like a blog.

I had bad insomnia during graduate school, tried just about everything under the sun (medication, sleep studies, lifestyle changes, herbs) and eventually did CBT-I with a therapist, and that was my ultimate solution. She had me start with going to bed at 3am and waking up at 7am for a week. I was absolutely exhausted, felt like my days were dreams. Then, we pulled forward he’s time to 2am. Checked how long it took me to fall asleep, and if I reported it was quick, then pull it to 1am, etc. until I was falling asleep quickly but also felt refreshed. I kept this all down on some worksheets provided.

The key was absolutely no matter what, no matter how tired I felt, I had to wake up at 7am and get out of bed. No naps.

We found the optimal spot to be 11pm lay in bed, and wake up at 7am. I always keep that schedule, deviating only by 30min or so even on weekends. Haven’t had trouble sleeping since!

I also think going from graduate school (little solid schedule) to a corporate 9-5 job helped. Covid has mangled that a bit, but I still keep the same sleep schedule.

tl;dr- CBT-I was a life-changer for me.

Some of these salaries are hilarious. I work in a small city in the Southeast at about 250k cash comp and feel blessed because of it. Leave it to HN to make me feel that tinge of envy. The weird thing is, I never get jealous/envious of someone my age making 1 million. 2 million. Or hitting the jackpot and selling their company for hundreds of millions. Doesn’t give me one iota of “wish I had that”, but the 400k starting salaries really make me wonder if I should be starting the job search again and uplifting the family out of the Southeast lol. I wonder if it’s because I can envision myself working for those companies and actually making it (versus founding a company and making millions). The mind is an interesting thing. I am very grateful to be making what I do, and even more grateful that people who practice my trade (in some form or fashion) are getting paid well for it!

I store moderately sensitive files in VeraCrypt containers. Are there post-quantum encryption algorithms on the roadmap for this type of storage software?

Methamphetamine is a prescription drug in US, brand name Desoxyn.

I get the same weird anxiety reading these threads. I was making 50k base as a post-doc, anxious about ex-academic friends making 80k in the "real world". Then I got a corporate job making ~$120k, and felt anxious that I wasn't making the ~$150k some of my bosses and friends were making. Switched jobs, making ~$200k in a small southern city, and I come into threads like this ("$500k comp at FAANG) feeling anxious that I'm not making enough in my mid-thirties and don't have enough saved up for retirement.

The crazy thing is, going from 50k to 200k, I can't honestly pinpoint whether I'm signficantly happier or not. So I try to not get envy about even the more ridiculous salaries. How does one get off the hamster wheel and feel content enough with salary to just live?

I posted this on the other discussion related to this, but would love to get feedback here.

----------------- I can understand this position, but I'd be curious what your thoughts are on how to best (I realize there is no perfect) keep your data private from snooping employees, hackers, or law enforcement.

I've thought about this over and over, and it's hard to come to a solid conclusion about keeping personal data safe (in this context I mean emails and files you may store in the cloud, not browsing history, social media posts, etc.). There are so many options with downfalls for each, and I'm not a security expert. So every time I get excited about trying a new service geared towards privacy, or setting up my own instances, inevitably somebody points out the terrible pitfall in it and I get discouraged.

1. Don't use the internet or internet services, period. <- Not tenable for most of us.

2. Use services who market themselves as geared towards privacy. <- Can't actually trust those services, even with E2E encryption because they could be running different code from what you think they're running.

3. Use regular cloud options, but stack stuff on top - VeraCrypt volumes or Cryptomator with Google drive, GPG for email, etc. <- Really difficult to setup and have a nice reliable way of accessing data on mobile/desktop/etc. No security audits on a lot of the open source software.

4. Host your own services - i.e. a Nextcloud 14 instance on EC2 with an S3 backend, then use client-side E2E <- Difficult to make sure you set the service up in a safe way, and not even a fraction of as much resources in auditing code as, say, a giant corporation.

5. Spread what you do out over multiple services - FastMail for email, DropBox for cloud storage, Standard Notes for notes, etc. <- A real pain.

I know there will never be a consensus on this, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the best way to keep my personal files and notes personal to me. Let's assume I'm not a target of any spy agencies or whatnot, but I want to make it very, very difficult for anyone to read my person notes and files but me.

I can understand this position, but I'd be curious what your thoughts are on how to best (I realize there is no perfect) keep your data private from snooping employees, hackers, or law enforcement.

I've thought about this over and over, and it's hard to come to a solid conclusion about keeping personal data safe (in this context I mean emails and files you may store in the cloud, not browsing history, social media posts, etc.). There are so many options with downfalls for each, and I'm not a security expert. So every time I get excited about trying a new service geared towards privacy, or setting up my own instances, inevitably somebody points out the terrible pitfall in it and I get discouraged.

1. Don't use the internet or internet services, period. <- Not tenable for most of us.

2. Use services who market themselves as geared towards privacy. <- Can't actually trust those services, even with E2E encryption because they could be running different code from what you think they're running.

3. Use regular cloud options, but stack stuff on top - VeraCrypt volumes or Cryptomator with Google drive, GPG for email, etc. <- Really difficult to setup and have a nice reliable way of accessing data on mobile/desktop/etc. No security audits on a lot of the open source software.

4. Host your own services - i.e. a Nextcloud 14 instance on EC2 with an S3 backend, then use client-side E2E <- Difficult to make sure you set the service up in a safe way, and not even a fraction of as much resources in auditing code as, say, a giant corporation.

5. Spread what you do out over multiple services - FastMail for email, DropBox for cloud storage, Standard Notes for notes, etc. <- A real pain.

I know there will never be a consensus on this, but I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the best way to keep my personal files and notes personal to me. Let's assume I'm not a target of any spy agencies or whatnot, but I want to make it very, very difficult for anyone to read my person notes and files but me.

I'll be completely honest, as your standard "data scientist" who hopped on the bandwagon and came from having a PhD in academia in an unrelated field, I cringe at these articles. I'm not entirely sure why. I think it may be two-fold:

1. A little bit of the selfish "oh no, the secret's out, at what point is my salary going to drop when the demand is met by the dedicated Master's degrees and bootcamps?"

and

2. These articles seem so incredibly corny, it's almost embarrassing. The "hottest job"? Ahhhh, stop it. But these things go in an out of phase, similar to back in the day when "anesthesiologist assistants" (CRNAs, AAs) were the hottest thing for Bloomberg to talk about. It will not last forever.

The irony is that I probably only knew "data science" (always in quotes) existed because I read one of these cheesy articles. I mean, we all know that statistics have been around forever, but that there were dedicated positions where you could run stats, build models, and then deploy them all in a single role was foreign to me.

So it's a combination of a potentially irrational fear of self-preservation, and laughing at the state of affairs where some basic stats work will pull in that kind of money.

I tend to have fears about the future, always wanting to hedge myself so I don't become outdated. In the data science sense, I see the field becoming super super broad and eventually saturated with new supply, so I debate on whether I should pivot into management of analytics in general or not. I.E. getting my hands off the keyboard. Ultimate goal would be to help define, strategically, how statistics/data mining/machine learning/yada/yada/yada are used at a company.

I have always had impostor syndrome, but also a somewhat revelatory idea that most people are just human beings full of shit too. Let me explain.

In college, I revered my professors - always thought of them on a higher plane, so much smarter than everybody. Same with doctors. Then I go to grad school, and realize that my fellow classmates (who have become professors, or the ones in MD/PhD programs doctors/surgeons), are smart indeed - but not on some super-human super-intelligent level who's batting way above my level like I felt in undergrad. It's like all of a sudden I realized that people in those positions are humans like me and aren't on some higher plane. I mean, maybe there are a few people who truly are. But most of the people I revered are regular joes (who most definitely work hard). Similar to looking up to adults when you're a kid, then realizing they're human beings with flaws once you grow up.

On the flip side, I constantly feel like I don't know what I'm doing compared to other people. Doesn't matter what level I reach in my career, it's all the same - that data scientist over there truly knows his stuff, I'm just faking it. That manager over there truly knows his stuff, I'm just faking it. And you know what? Maybe there's some truth to it. But the truth I've found is that if that's the case, there's probably an exceeding number of people who are 'faking it' too, so I'm in good company at least.

I also tend to conflate 'faking it' with confidence. In grad school, all of my published papers would have so many caveats - "the results suggest that maybe possibly potentially .... " or "the results suggest that ____, with the caveat" or "we possibly found evidence..." My advisor always had to change my wording around to be at least a little more definitive because journals would pick up on the wishy-washy statements. Now in the corporate world, people expect definitive statements because putting 'possibly, maybe' in every sentence doesn't exude confidence that higher ups or customers want. So in a way when I say something in a confident manner when I'm only 80% to 90% confident, I feel like I'm faking it.

I'm genuinely interested in hearing pros and cons on the Chinese government from Chinese who are currently living in mainland China. Particularly on the topics that are the biggest flash points on HN - government censorship/great firewall/surveillance/social credit scores, etc. Do you have any English-language resources for this? Or decently translated sources? No snark or sarcasm - I've searched before, but either find nothing or hit a language barrier.

I've wanted to run forensics tools on my computer for a while, just to see what type of information I leave behind. Will that old resume I deleted 5-years ago show up on my HD? Will my personal backup SMS files that I copied to a Veracrypt volume and deleted with BleachBit still be retrievable? Not sure how to be able to access the "real-deal" forensic tools.

Isn't the issue that they are discussing getting rid of term limits altogether? As opposed to setting a higher term limit? If so, how is it a fair comparison to Germany or Japan? I'm sure we'd have even more outrage if any number of countries decided to get rid of term limits altogether. I could be misunderstanding you though.

I was in graduate school in the biological sciences, and the vast majority of papers were formatted using word and some extension for reference management. At one point I really wanted to switch to LaTeX, but it was too much of a learning hurdle given all the other stuff I already had to do.

I've started my search to buy a place in Midtown, precisely because of the walkability. The prices really do reflect it..

Can someone more knowledgeable than me in regards to this vulnerability tell me:

1. How to best protect my local personal data from being subject to this?

2. Whether I should seriously consider pulling all my cryptocurrency off of any exchanges?

My entire life, but especially in graduate school, I've had horrible sleep. Both falling asleep, and staying asleep.

I did multiple sleep studies, used sleeping medications, took supplements, tried to meditate, etc. and had no luck.

I went and did CBT-I, where they had me change my sleep hygeine (all your standard recommendations of "no TV in the bedroom", etc). But the biggest thing was they had me start off by going to bed at 1 am and waking up at 5am every day for a week or two. I'd be so insanely tired, I would start falling asleep quicker and staying asleep less interrupted (this was recorded on a worksheet). Then they had me go to bed an hour earlier, record it. After a while, we found my optimal schedule (bed at 11am, wake up at 630am), and I stick to it no matter what, every single day.

It's solved my sleep issues, full-stop. I get tired by 11 pm, and wake up at 6:30 am feeling just fine.

FWIW, grad school - with no solid schedule - was disastrous on my sleep. Moving to my 9-5 corporate job has made scheduling my sleep a whole lot better.

Just my experience.

Devil's advocate on this - what if the general population of your customers don't want to support a company that pays the salary of a murderer? Then it affects your bottom line. Would you still be ok with it?

I grew up next to (literally) the Yamaguchi-gumi headquarters. Never once did I feel unsafe there, or anywhere else in Japan. It really is a night and day difference.

What's the VeraCrypt container for? Isn't the DB already encrypted?

I was doing fMRI work around the time this paper was published. It astonished me that people would simply set an uncorrected voxel-level threshold and call it a day. No FWE-correction, no cluster-threshold - just an 0.001 uncorrected threshold. It was sad that this paper needed to be published to get researchers to start paying attention to that.

I'll be honest - when the paper was published I was thinking "no shit - why do we need a paper to tell us what we all learned in stats 101 about multiple comparisons??" And then realized the quantity of fMRI papers that used uncorrected thresholds.

Very similar feeling when the "Voodoo Correlations" paper came out. Except I was admittedly guilty of having presented correlation coefficients from clusters that had already been identified using thresholding. So that paper really did make me take a closer look at some of my figures/conclusions.

I always ask this on the VPN threads here, and don't feel like I get a solid answer (I'm not particularly well-versed on the topic so I'm genuinely curious and would love to be corrected).

If I go to Bob's website on my computer without any VPN, and Bob wants to find me, all he would need to do is get my IP, call my ISP with a warrant, and then get my information.

If I go to Bob's website while logged in with a VPN, and Bob wants to find me, he first sees that he's getting tons of hits from this IP because thousands of users are sharing this same VPN. So then he uses some kind of fingerprint to figure out my unique user sessions. Then he calls the VPN company, and asks them to associate the IP and specific browser sessions with me. In that case a) the VPN really does store logs even though they advertise they don't, so they're able to associate me with my activity, or b) they really don't store logs and have no idea which one of its thousands of users logged into his website with that IP.

It seems in the latter case, even with a malicious VPN, it's one additional (maybe trivial step) to associate me. But it's still better than just using your own ISP. Isn't that why people use VPNs to avoid DMCA letters from their ISP?

So what is the downside to using a VPN if you're aware that they aren't foolproof vs not using a VPN at all?

If you roll your own VPN on AWS or the like, don't you lose the benefit of sharing the VPN with thousands of users? Wouldn't it be easier for Bob to call AWS with a warrant and get your account info than mess with some offshore VPN provider?

I think there's different things going on here.

If I were to point out women that I find physically attractive solely from a set of pictures, they'd probably skew to the younger side.

But in reality, the important aspects of a life mate for me go way, way, way beyond just being attractive physically. That 23 year old on OKC might spur a momentary sexual fantasy, but never in my right mind would I truly want to date someone of that age.

In other words, I picked my mate because I find her very attractive - physically, intellectually, and emotionally. But that doesn't mean younger women aren't attractive in a putely physical sense.

I'm rambling now.

This is something that's always been fascinating to me. In any thread about privacy, there's always a comment along the lines of "if your threat model is a nation-state, then you're screwed." You hear it about DDG, Tor, client-side but web-delivered encrypted email, etc.

What if your threat model is a nation state? What's the proper way to ensure your privacy that does not require abstaining from the internet? Is a high degree of privacy even possible?

Sort of tangential, but I felt this exact same way when I moved from being a post-doc in neuroscience to being a data scientist. The impostor syndrome was so strong it was painful. It has subsided now a bit because I know I'm able to bring value to my company - despite the fact that I know there are much more capable and qualified data scientists (by a large margin) out there, and despite the fact that by-and-large 'ML' and 'AI' is definitely a buzzword around here. But it really, really motivates me to strengthen where I'm lacking.

The funny thing is, it took me about a year to find this position after a good amount of rejections. About a year after I got my data scientist title, I've been contacted by recruiters from places I would have never expected to be contacted from (Amazon, Microsoft, FB, etc.). Did a few interviews, and realized during those interviews that I still have a lot to learn.

For one of the interviews, they gave me a take home assignment where they literally duplicated a column in the feature matrix... I didn't catch it, and during the phone part of the interview I get asked 'do you know notice something interesting about those two feature distribution plots you have there?'

"Hrmm, no I don't. Oh, wait, they look pretty similar."

"They're exactly the same."

"... shit."

Question:

I use a commercial VPN primarily so that my IP is shared across hundreds of other users (as opposed to using it so that my data is safe being transmitted through coffeehouse WiFi), and thus would make it at least marginally more difficult for someone to track me.

Is this reasoning false?

I had a much different experience applying for jobs as a data scientist in Atlanta - of the companies I got offers for, the base salaries + total comp were similar to what glassdoor reported for data scientists in silicon valley, albeit just a hair lower. According to the various online cost-of-living calculators, I'd have to be making about $200k in the Bay Area to be living the same lifestyle.

Though looking at glassdoor data for Atlanta, it does look like data scientists have an average that's almost $34k lower than san francisco. So maybe I just got lucky.

I'm not super knowledgeable in this field, so maybe somebody can set me straight regarding VPNs.

I have always assumed that VPN services like PIA, AirVPN, etc. are useful for, among other things:

1. To make the content you are viewing private from your ISP, employer, public WiFi, etc.

2. To make it more difficult for some remote host/website/actor to link your activity on their site with you.

Isn't point (2) negated if you host your own VPN on AWS? In the sense that if you're in a country with a nefarious government, wouldn't it be easier for them to subpoena AWS than to get info from some VPN service over in ________ country that doesn't store logs, and has a million other users using the same IP?

An example situation might be the RIAA notices that an IP is downloading Janet Jackson MP3s, and all they need to do is subpoena AWS if you're hosting your own VPN which has a unique IP, versus tracking down some Caribbean company who has given you an IP that's shared among thousands of users and has a public reputation for trustworthiness to hold?

How does this compare to something like VeraCrypt?