I have the opposite experience on this site. I am not a software engineer, so every time I see the word "go" in a submission title, my first thought is of the game.
Primark is a very cheap store - t-shirts for £2, trousers for £8 etc. It is fast fashion so stuff changes rapidly and frequently. If there is something on the catwalk at a fashion show that causes a lot of interest or someone famous wears something particularly noteworthy in a magazine photo, Primark will have something very similar to it in their stores within a week or two. Primark is hugely popular in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Tourists at the central London stores (which are HUGE by the way - the size of a typical department store of years past) literally flock there.
The shopping experience is often chaotic (clothes strewn all over the place) and quality is generally not thought to be great - stuff might last only a few washes ... but it varies - I have a generic blue hoodie from Primark that cost less than £10 but it has lasted literally years and has some high quality features like the ends of the draw strings are finished in metal (not plastic and not just tied) so have not frayed or come apart. I don't think their quality is any worse than other high street retailers though - often they charge 3x 4x or more prices for equivalent quality.
I will certainly be using this guide in the future to pick the finest Primark has to offer!
I always wondered about those draw strings (what they are really for?) and at some point decided to just take them out after buying a hooded vest. Given that I only rarely even put up the hood over my head, when would I ever pull the draw strings tighter? (except when doing a Kenny from Southpark impression)
Very rarely I leave them in (when they have a contrasting colour that looks nice in combination), but usually it's just two bits of wire that are dangling in the way a lot of the time :)
Same experience here, Primark clothes are always dirt cheap but the quality varies wildly. As I can't tell the difference, I have T-shirts from there that have practically self-destructed after one wash, and others that have kept good and comfy for years!
When you source from the cheapest vendors, sometimes you get lucky with a quality manufacturer that just happened to have excess capacity to make some stuff from Primark or whoever else.
His full titles were prof. RNDr. Jiří Matoušek, DrSc; where the "DrSc" part was more than what is now recognized as a PhD. Scientific titles used to work differently in Eastern Europe.
I suppose this is as an appropriate time as any to ask for advice: I am a multimillionaire from inheritance, and am about to complete my masters in physics. I wish to work on long term theoretical physics problems that do not seem to be possible under the current publish-or-perish academic system. The plan was to complete a PhD, then leave academia, but lately I have been having severe doubts about continuing onto a PhD, partly due to the cruft that comes with academia. Obviously, future employability due to financial reasons is completely irrelevant to me.
It sounds like you are in a good position - you can have total control over what you work on. You could even write your own grants and get other people to research what you want alongside you. Since the traditional PhD path isn't showing that much success, doesn't it make more sense to just research what you want?
All the papers are free online and authors will generally discuss their work with you if you have intelligent questions.
BTW, this is what I do. I freelance about 20% of the time and spend about 50% of it reading physics papers. So far I haven't produced anything new, but I have greatly increased my intuitive understanding.
Completing your PhD would give you credence, being taken seriously even if you are right can be an issue (and justifiably so, evaluating new ideas take time and lots of cranks come up with new ideas). Also making contact in academia certainly can't be bad.
I've been reading this site since 2009 and can barely write anything more complex than Hello World. The guidelines on submissions say nothing about software engineering, and the definition of hackers as written by Paul Graham does not limit it to software engineers.
Agreed. Within my own field, there are less than 10 people who are presently working on the same topics as I do. Consequently, we are constantly asked to review each other’s papers, and it is pretty trivial to tell who the author is, either because of the views and interests shown in the paper, or because of language use (i.e. you can tell that the author is a native speaker of the language in which the paper was written, or from their unidiomatic skills in it you can often guess at their native language).
The hard part in this is remaining silent and pretending you don’t know anything about this, when you meet your peers at conferences.
It is not blind for most science fields (I was not aware of any that were blind before reading this. PhD in Earth Science). What fields do you know of where journals send out papers for review with the author and his/her affiliation removed?
I've seen it exactly once (in a numerical analysis journal). Authors were blacked out. This was undermined almost immediately when the authors wrote in the introduction "... following previous work of the present authors [1]...".
Even if all these clues could be effectively removed, the nature of the research work, tools used, writing style, all unambiguously indicate authorship to someone in the field. I think for this reason double-blind review is not popular.
Which is not to say that it would be great if it were possible...
