willpearse

Senior author here, any questions please ask! As a long-time lurker, it's wonderful to see biodiversity is so popular here!

This is a risky thing to do when the patient's name is attached to it. Insurance companies, salesmen, etc., could do quite a lot with such information.

I whole-heartedly support the general idea, and making a centralised database of things like this would be great. Such a database would probably make it easier to anonymise the data as well.

Very picky, but beware constantly using "set.seed" throughout your R scripts. Always using the same random number is not necessarily helpful for stats, and makes the R code look a lot trickier than it need be

...not anymore. Thanks!

I get a message saying it's not ready for Hacker News yet, so I can't even see what's going on :-(

I can't comment on much of this article, but it doesn't apply to the UK (as is implied), where essentially every student has full funding for their 3-4 years. Sometimes people hang around for an extra six months, but it's nothing like the US system.

I'm a post-doc at a university. I asked around at conferences, and emailed people whose work I liked. I'd be surprised if the process is very HPC-specific; you'd be trying to make scientific job-hunting more efficient. But please do that if you can :D

Points 2 and 3 make no reference to previous years' data, so aren't really talking about trends. Point 1 ignores the (trend that they state) that there are more post-doc positions.

Post-docs are safer jobs, because you know what will happen at the end of them (you get kicked out and find another job). Fewer people going straight into tenure-track means fewer people spending years at an institution, not getting a job (because they lost the race) and starting elsewhere. Sounds very healthy to me!

Some confidence intervals on these graphs would really make this a lot more useful...

I can't even load the page, so... "was bubble sort the wrong way to go?" ...I hate myself a little.

Good points. I also feel people tend to tweet that they are enjoying everything, simply to make themselves look like they are always going to interesting things and thus worth following. Similarly, no one can say anything negative, since they are essentially going behind the speaker's back (...in public...)