throwaway4585

>maybe they have a reason for not providing everything

Not my problem. You make your http resources accessible, I'll download them however I want.

A strong quality label is that twint's twitter account got suspended - evidently Twitter doesn't like that a third party tool scrapes tweets better than they allow to.

Oh, then if you're counting industry PhDs I'm not sure how your argument about Americans getting a premium is that well-founded. The US (like many Western countries, but to an even greater extent) has a very strong NIH syndrome, and Europeans themselves are often taught endlessly to sell themselves because they're not assertive enough in their presentations, CVs, SOPs, what have you.

And of course there's the matter that most wages in Europe in the qualified labor force are way lower in general than their American counterparts. I've always thought it was more or less due to research being underprioritized in Europe but maybe that's about to change in the light of current events ;-)

Like I said, this is my (limited) experience and that of people I know. It was also a number of years ago. But good on you for taking the time to correct me.

>there's a reason US biology/biochem/bioME PhDs are paid a premium over their European colleagues internationally

Are they though? In many academia institutions wages are fixed.

Many PhDs in America expect you to be self-supporting, so you have to take up a loan. I believe the practice is explicitly forbidden in most European countries, so you have to earn funding before starting your research (I could be wrong on this, especially regarding the social sciences). PhDs in America also last way longer, 6+ years vs. 5 years max, generally 3 or 4 in most of Europe.

Also, and this is veering into anecdotal stuff, PhD students in Europe tend to be fresh out of university, in their early to mid twenties, and their life is still a bit of a mess in many aspects, much of it due to their being in the middle of a PhD with a close and looming deadline. Their American counterparts tend to be more stable and 'adult', have a spouse and kids, maybe partly due to the fact that they start later and take longer.

There are other aspects such as many American labs being much larger so the PI can become some sort of distant god-like figure that you hardly ever meet. Of course all of it is a huge generalization from my lived experience and that of people I know, so other people should feel free to chime in and correct what I've said.

Some things don't change though - everyone is underpaid.

PhDs can be markedly different depending on your boss (advisor). They are also very different from America to, say, Europe.

Yeah most people think evolution is just natural selection and accidental mutations, which is a high schooler understanding's of it. I'm not being derogatory, it's literally what I learned in high school and I don't blame people for not digging further if they haven't taken classes afterwards.

The main issue of Stack Overflow is the YX problem. The YX problem is, of course, the reverse (perverse?) of the XY problem, whereby, confronted by a question that stumps them, an SO user will, instead of admitting so, do one of the following:

-Attempt to second guess your use case for you. Are you sure you really want to do X? Don't you want to do Y instead? (No thanks, I really must do X and can't do Y because I have Z, A, B and C constraints.)

-Claim your use case is wrong, should not exist, or at the very least is exceedingly niche, and they couldn't possibly imagine why someone would have your use case

-Claim your use case is literally impossible to fulfill with the constraints you've given. While this may well be the case it is a way stronger claim than most people realize.

-If someone does provide an answer to your use case, will scramble to insist that this solution is clumsy and shouldn't have be written in the first place because it could give people wrong ideas.

-Insist you didn't do the research and if you did you'd find the solution is Y. (Yes I did, and it really isn't Y because my problem is X, thank you very much.)

-In the worst case, wrongly mark your question as a duplicate of Y

The strength of SO is that it is purely a question and answer website: I give question, you give answer. Forums always sucked because the question askers were often new and inexperienced and formulated questions the wrong way, and the entrenched users were patronizing and insisted a certain way of solving questions be used or say useless stuff like "I don't owe any of my time to you" (yeah well why are you bothering writing this post in the first place then?). With SO's system of questions, answers and comments, everything is clear or clarified, all the chitchat is dispensed with and no room is given to subjective stuff like 'is your question correct?' Because no matter how good of a hacker you are, your knowledge can't possibly cover 100% of all computer programmers' use cases.

I'm not pessimistic as other people as to the future of SO and I still think it is and will be an invaluable resource in the following years but if trends of the YX problem go for the worse it could mean a return to the forums that sucked.

SO is still good, what they mean is that it has peaked or in the process of peaking. Just like previously-cool bars or festivals are still good but just 'not the same' and on the verge of becoming bad. It's a very specific mindset where you must be growing (not just growing, the growth rate must also be growing) and avant-garde all the time, and it's not really surprising to see it on a forum about startups.

I'll also add that although SO was of course invaluable to me as a reader, the few times I've had to actually ask questions because I couldn't find what I needed, other users were stumped as well. Just adding my little anecdote to yours

Again, there's a lot more nuance to this. Look into the rabbit hole of cadherin/catenin or how epithelia are formed to see how a tissue is much more than a bundle of cells.

This hierarchical way of thinking is only designed for humans - because it helps us think more clearly. It's a crutch when you're attempting to learn, but at some point it becomes a hindrance when you want to run.

Linux is a fine desktop OS. Been using it for near 10 years now, can't see myself going back to Windows.

>Hierarchies [...] are often found in [natural] systems

Nah they aren't. The 'tree' of life is more of a full-fledged graph and the whole kingdom-order-genus-species thing is muddy and ill-defined. Most of the 'hierarchy' we find in natural systems is just our own projected deformation of much more complex relationships.