alexschiller

Re:Ask HN: How many of you are employed, self-taught SWEs? on Sunday August 30, 2020 @06:03PM (#24326307)

- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

I liked playing with data in R and saw there was potential to do cool things if I learned more code during my PhD in Cognitive Psychology.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

Mostly front-end work at Amazon. I love it. I get to feel productive in ways I never experienced in academia.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

I knew some people at a science focused non-profit. Interned while in grad school and signed on full time for 2 years before moving to my current role.

- What were you doing before this? Grad school in psych.

- Any tips for the rest of us? Keep grinding on projects you find interesting. It takes time to get good at writing code quickly. Review your own code as though it were someone else's.

Re:Thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @03:12PM (#17182112)

The American Psychological Association tried and they quickly backtracked after blowback: https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670...

Re:Darpa Wants to Build a BS Detector for Science on Sunday July 30, 2017 @03:35PM (#14887413)

There have been some efforts. For example, there was a betting market on the psychology reproducibility project, see http://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15343.full

Re:Coding Is Not a Life Skill on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @11:34PM (#11999323)

To me, the value in learning just a little bit of coding is in recognizing when something should be done programmatically and when something should be done by hand. Even a little bit of coding knowledge can allow that to occur, or allow the person to get the right person to automate it for them. The number of person hours I've seen wasted by not recognizing this is astonishing.

Re:Ask HN: Is there a site providing example files for “all” media types? on Thursday June 16, 2016 @07:03PM (#11919583)

https://github.com/alexschiller/file-format-commons

Here was my stab at that problem. Somewhere near 70 files, many are variants on text files/code files iirc but a lot of data centric files as well. There is a small neglected WordPress site linked to it.