
A Survival Guide to a PhD - wlrd
http://karpathy.github.io/2016/09/07/phd/
======
stared
Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more
Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise.

Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science
(and how it made my life much better): [http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-
data-sci.html](http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html)

I understand that Andriej Karpathy (my favourite author/lecturer in Deep
Learning, by a large margin) had a wonderful PhD, in a fast-growing field,
with a golden fall-back option. But most PhD students I know (including my
former self) do things in disciplines no-one else cares about and are tied to
their institute/advisor/place with little to no opportunity to change things
when they go awry (cf. it's super easy to change a company). A non-trivial
fraction of my friends suffered from depression or had a serious mental
breakdown (again, including myself).

In this light, while it contain a large number of helpful tips and valuable
pieces of advise, why is it called "survival guide"?

~~~
karpathy
It seems that a larger-than-I-expected fraction of the response to my post
concentrates on a very small part of it, especially the part where I enumerate
some considerations for thinking about whether a PhD might be a good fit for
you.

By far the largest fraction of the post is concerned with tips/tricks for
effectively navigating the PhD experience once you commit to going through it.
I jokingly refer to it as a "survival guide" because (as I mention in the
_disclaimer_ paragraph) the experience is by no means a walk in the park.

~~~
thr0waway1239
Also do you mind modifying the title to say a Survival Guide to a C.S. PhD?

Absolutely everything the GP says is spot on, the C.S. PhD is really atypical
amongst all the Ph.D. disciplines. E.g. the resource constraints that exist in
many disciplines don't even exist in C.S. - it is almost completely the
product of thought/ideas and ever cheapening computing power. I would suggest
sending out your article to Ph.D. students in different disciplines, look at
all the feedback, and then incorporate them if you are so inclined. The
article might look quite different.

Edit: after reading the comment from pgbovine, I felt I made an unnecessary
personal comment, which I omitted. I rewrote the sentence to keep the main
point.

~~~
pgbovine
My unsolicited advice: Don't change a word.

At most, link to this HN thread so that readers can see different
perspectives, but you wrote the article you wanted to write, not the one that
anonymous online critics wanted you to write. If others want to write a
response saying why you're misguided, by all means go ahead.

------
glangdale
I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD
and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it
worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian,
I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do
if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false
dichotomy between industry and academia that he creates.

A _good_ PhD leads to many of the nice things he describes: freedom and
ownership and personal growth and all that stuff. An average PhD (or worse)
leads to pretty much the opposite. Most of the superstars I know went on to do
pretty much whatever they are interested in at top schools. The non-superstars
(and the real lumps, like me) can easily wind up in a death spiral - where
your mediocre publishing record and mediocre PhD afford entry only into 3rd-
tier institutions, where you will work with worse and worse people, more or
less guaranteeing steadily declining quality of work. A mediocre result more
or less guarantees that you will be a low-status drone in academia, trying to
wedge world-class work in with a bunch of other activities (teaching, being a
glorified research assistant, and other 'service').

No-one sets out to do a bad PhD, but people need to understand that the
average outcome isn't nearly as glowing as Karpathy outlines. Similarly, the
outcome of going to industry also has a huge range. I found myself immediately
- I mean on Day 1 - doing more pure Computer Science going to work for a
startup than I had any reasonable hope of doing as a semi-failed academic, and
have had a steadily improving experience subsequently (some of this stems from
a rather delayed growing-up on my part, so it's not entirely a judgement on
industry vs academia).

~~~
shas3
I think it's more of a continuum than you suppose in your comment. It's not a
binary of "great" vs "average" PhD. There's plenty in between and many types
of averages. Karpathy had it good, as did Might, Guo, and other purveyors of
wisdom on PhD. But that doesn't invalidate their arguments and observations.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
I wouldn't say Guo had it good, I mean his book is called the PhD grind;
that's not a particularly happy sounding title.

~~~
pgbovine
best comment today :) thanks. i managed to recover, though, thankfully. should
write a new epilogue sometime, but haven't gotten around to it.

~~~
gajomi
Well now I feel a bit embarrassed about the sibling comment I made... since
the man himself has appeared I just wanted to reiterate that I enjoyed reading
your memoir, as did several students in the lab I worked in. We even went and
tried out IncPy for a bit, which was fun :)

------
michaelvoz
"I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-
large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the
following properties appealing: ..."

Why is every conversation about PHDs always cast in the light of as-opposed-
to-working-for-the-man? I don't see discussions ever bring up the plethora of
other life courses one can take. It is though the author sees a very clear
binary: PHD or go work on fixing bugs in Gmail (or some other such cog-in-a-
machine project).

Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company?
Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path
to glory?

I am all for PHDs, and all for people pursuing, and pushing, the boundaries of
human knowledge. I would just like to see that discussion live on its own,
without comparison, if that is possible.

~~~
throwawaymsft
"Properties you find appealing..."

    
    
      * Freedom
      * Ownership
      * Personal freedom
      ...
    

<Later...>

    
    
      * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references
      * Student adviser relationship
      * Pre-vs-post tenure
      * Impressing an adviser
      * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths
    

Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a
level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn't enter
academia. I still pursue my academic interests on my own.

Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has
politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99%
(politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.

~~~
eanzenberg
From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more
important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked
US schools for PhD programs.

~~~
pgbovine
Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means),
"politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's
what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there
is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at
also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy
and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend
the system in their own unique way.

~~~
stared
Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and
bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).

------
aab0
All valid advice, but god is some of it depressing. Papers can be evaluated by
flipping through and looking for pretty graphs and equations. Incremental,
replication, or comparison work is discouraged. Never include the dead ends or
what didn't work. Get into only the elite colleges and betwork at conferences
as much as possible - it's not what you know but who you know. Hype up and
make your paper as sexy and short as possible. Tell a story. Good teaching,
blogging, and sharing software probably hurts you.

~~~
wodenokoto
> Good teaching, blogging, and sharing software probably hurts you.

Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software. His code and
blog post about recurrent neural networks practically got him a language model
named after him.

He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure
what you are getting at.

~~~
aab0
> Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software.

Yes, he's famous for that, but that didn't earn him his PhD nor would it have
gotten him tenure. As he remarks about his teaching of his course, him doing a
good job actively worked against him because... it's not writing a sexy new
paper or networking.

> He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really
> sure what you are getting at.

Releasing code isn't the same thing as creating polished end-user applicable
stuff on the level of char-rnn. In ML, you're increasingly expected to at
least chuck over the wall a barebones implementation to demonstrate it works
at all, but there is no expectation that it will be generalized, well-written,
or polished, or maintained, and typically they are not. (Most ML releases I've
looked at are kind of horrifying from a software engineering perspective. Just
thinking about improved-gan makes me shudder.)

~~~
wodenokoto
Most of the "Release your code" section is about how you should put your code
in public _because_ in makes you do the extra effort to write a better
implementation.

> but that didn't earn him his PhD nor would it have gotten him tenure.

He doesn't have tenure. He works at a private organisation. We don't know how
he landed it, but I think his internet famous helped.

In the "Don't play the game" section, which is where I think you got the
"don't teach"-thing, he writes:

> but I did them anyway, I would do it the same way again, and here I am
> encouraging others to as well.

How you read this as anything but an encouragement to teach, write software
and blogging is a mystery to me.

------
fatjokes
I feel one disclaimer that karpathy modestly left out is that he is perhaps
one of the most successful PhD students in his field. This likely impacts his
view of a PhD program. I personally survived a PhD myself (also in CS, also in
ML, also in Computer Vision!), and I've passed through without so many warm,
fuzzy feelings.

~~~
Rainymood
Could you maybe go over some experiences of your PhD that are orthogonal to
those of Karpathy? I'm really interested and I'm sure there are others who are
as well.

------
sndean
With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments:

> Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in
> today? Sure.

This is largely true, but only if you're on good terms with your advisor and
they're happy with your progress. God, I miss being able to sleep in until
2pm.

> Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology

Yes, it's definitely a roller coaster. I know what happens to your body after
a month when your only calorie source is peanut butter and white bread.
Depression, random trips to Canada, and more.

> Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school

No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best school
where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating class.
You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters (Malcolm
Gladwell's talk [1]).

> So you’ve entered a PhD program and found an adviser. Now what do you work
> on?

You will not be interested in the same exact topic for ~5 years straight, so
keep that mind. Try to keep it broad.

> Giving talks

Do this / practice this as often as possible. It's how you'll get hired (or
not). I've had to sit through some embarrassingly bad ones, where the
candidate then has to survive the next 7-hours of interviewing where everyone
knows they're not getting hired. (In my experience the talk is first thing in
the morning.)

[0] He gave the fields of "Computer Science / Machine Learning / Computer
Vision research" as a disclaimer, my disclaimer is that I only know about
experiences in molecular biology / chemistry / materials science / synthetic
biology / microbiology. [1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc)

~~~
laxatives
> > Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school

> No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best
> school where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating
> class. You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters
> (Malcolm Gladwell's talk [1]).

Isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens after you want to progress to the
next environment?

Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere? Isn't that like being the best
graduate ever from a small program, or the best in a decade at a larger one?
You're not competing with a large population anymore, you're competing with
someone who has passed dozens of filter steps in their lifetime and have
gotten just as far as you have.

~~~
sndean
> What happens after you want to progress to the next environment?

It does sound odd, or just wrong. But from Gladwell's example [0], and others,
top students in their class, regardless of the school, perform better than
expected following graduation. From my experience, that's at least partially
due to the increased attention (and better training) that top students
receive. The lower ranked students are more-or-less ignored and pushed out.

> Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere?

No. But you may have a higher chance of being a top student at a cheap in-
school school than at Harvard.

[0] [https://ideas.repec.org/p/van/wpaper/vuecon-
sub-13-00009.htm...](https://ideas.repec.org/p/van/wpaper/vuecon-
sub-13-00009.html)

------
morgante
These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly,
inaccurate.

> Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs.

Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance
rate.

> you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and
> many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or
> with a higher starting salary

This is 100% false. Many many people have found a PhD to be a handicap when it
comes to getting a job, particularly in software engineering. A large number
of employers have anti-PhD biases which will work against you.

> Ownership. The research you produce will be yours as an individual. Your
> accomplishments will have your name attached to them.

My experience with academic research is just the opposite. I think it's
patently ridiculous that professors get "authorship" credit on papers even
when they had a minimal, at best, role in it. Meanwhile in companies you can
have a tangible impact and see real results/credit from it (bonuses,
promotions). Not to mention that many universities have draconian IP policies.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
>> you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and
many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or
with a higher starting salary

> This is 100% false. Many many people have found a PhD to be a handicap when
> it comes to getting a job, particularly in software engineering. A large
> number of employers have anti-PhD biases which will work against you.

I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience? I may be
naive for not believing this in the first place; why would there be disdain
expressed towards PhD applicants at a company? Is it a business perspective
("PhDs are too expensive"), technical ("they are too specialized, cannot
practically implement solutions we expect of a new hire"), social ("I don't
understand academia and couldn't achieve that high"), or something else?

~~~
morgante
> I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience?

I do not have a PhD. My experience is based on personal experience with hiring
people, speaking to friends and other hiring managers, and anecdotes from HN.

In general, the reasons are (for better or worse):

1\. PhDs aren't very good programmers or don't follow software engineering
best practices.

2\. PhDs want to do "research" and will get bored with the basic software
production required for 90% of industry jobs.

3\. PhDs expect to be paid/respected at a higher level of seniority, even
though skill-wise they'e often barely above a recent BA graduate.

I don't know how valid all of these are, but in general I would personally
always choose someone with 5 years of industry work experience over someone
with a PhD for a software job.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
If you hire PhDs for software engineering jobs, then obviously there's a
mismatch of skillsets.

~~~
thr0waway1239
I agree. If you are not having even a single problem in your company which
makes you wish you had an expert (not that all PhDs are experts) in a specific
domain (all the more if that domain is specialized in a way that you do not
normally encounter in a typical software engineer job), it will be an unhappy
marriage for both employer and employee.

------
enmi2015
A PhD is super fun and super hard. But it is key to be realistic about the
outcomes. It is a life changing experience, but definitely have a plan for the
end of it. There are so few academic tenure jobs and so it pays to do a bit of
research on what you want at the end off it beyond just academic life. If you
can do that the experiences are amazing, learning to think and work at the
higher level and learning to compromise and work through others work is
utterly refreshing. It is definitely a space to let yourself really explore
thinking and researching.

~~~
johan_larson
> A PhD is super fun

Experiences differ. A lot. Personally, I had an awful time during my PhD, and
between the penury and the toil and the bleak prospects afterward, I'd say
you're definitely in the minority on this one.

I wouldn't recommend a PhD to anyone who isn't dead set on a job that requires
one.

~~~
gajjanag
> Personally, I had an awful time during my PhD, and between the penury and
> the toil and the bleak prospects afterward, I'd say you're definitely in the
> minority on this one.

Do you have any evidence for the minority claim beyond the personal anecdote?
Also, this is field dependent, so a mention of the field could be helpful.

~~~
johan_larson
My claim is based on my own experience as a CS PhD student and my
conversations with other graduate students within the department and outside
it during my studies. Christ, there was so much bitching. And it consisted of
the kind of grim complaints I never heard during undergrad days or later on
the job.

That said, CS PhDs are pretty lucky. The worst case fallback position of a job
as a software developer isn't bad. It gets much worse for less commercial
disciplines. God help the poor blighter with a PhD in Medieval Literature who
doesn't snag an academic post.

~~~
tgarma1234
Yes... the two languages requirement is A LOT easier in technical field than
in the humanities. Try being fluent or functionally fluent for an exam in two
human, spoken, academic languages vs learning a couple of programming
languages. At least that was the experience I had. Learning enough French and
German to read and write in French and German at the PhD level was absolutely
soul destroying whereas now that I have had several normal business jobs and
been asked to learn various programming languages as part of the work was
basically... easy by comparison. A few jobs in software development are
rapidly becoming the "webmaster" of our time.

------
slashblake
I just finished my PhD in CS. Took me about 7 years, damn it feels good to be
done.

Mine experience was completely driven by my choice of advisor. He did not push
me and therefore I had complete freedom. I was glad to have the funding
through him, but did not get much direction. I did almost everything.

And while it took me 7 years to complete, I don't look back on the experience
as only "getting my Phd". I learned so much about myself; I traveled around
the world; I received my private pilots license; I learned about cars; I
played a lot of golf; I had a great time. There were some shitty times where I
had to push through, but I have no regrets. Most of my friends are buying
houses and having kids, so I'm a little behind on my career/savings. But hey,
I have three degrees in a pretty good field and my career is full steam ahead.

------
elmar
How Academia resembles a Drug Gang

[http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-
academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179)

------
ppod
>Over time you’ll develop a vocabulary of good words and bad words to use when
writing papers. Speaking about machine learning or computer vision papers
specifically as concrete examples, in your papers you never “study” or
“investigate” (there are boring, passive, bad words); instead you “develop” or
even better you “propose”. And you don’t present a “system” or, shudder, a
“pipeline”; instead, you develop a “model”. You don’t learn “features”, you
learn “representations”. And god forbid, you never “combine”, “modify” or
“expand”. These are incremental, gross terms that will certainly get your
paper rejected :).

This seems unfair. Many otherwise good students don't get taught this coded
language. I understand that heuristic or incremental developments might not be
accepted at top conferences, but the work should be judged on what it does
rather than the inexact word choice of a student. It feels a bit cliquey.

~~~
robotresearcher
> Many otherwise good students don't get taught this coded language.

Almost no one is taught this coded language. You absorb it by reading tons and
tons of papers, then more papers. Karpathy is unusual and fun to make it
explicit like this. He's a canny person.

------
jccalhoun
I got my phd in the humanities. After following academic and grad school
subreddits for the last years I could almost be convinced that grad school in
the sciences is a pyramid scheme.

So much of the crap that I see people complaining about in the sciences simply
doesn't occur in the humanities. Some of it I wish would (co-authorship would
be a good way for those of us in the humanities to learn how to write an
article for publication) but I am glad I didn't have to deal with a lot of the
lab and advisor drama that I have seen (or arguing if someone should be fifth
author or sixth...).

Of course I was making slightly more than half my peers in the sciences at the
same university were making and they have a lot more career prospects than I
do so maybe it is worth it....

~~~
xaa
18 papers now (bioinformatics & molecular biology) and I have never seen a
single authorship dispute. If you are a middle author, complaining about
position is biting the hand that feeds you. Most people know better than that.
Also, it doesn't even matter as there are only 3 real positions on papers:
first, last, and everything else.

Coauthorship IME has always been extremely amiable. Often, when I am a middle
author, I almost feel that I'm being done a favor by being put as a coauthor
when I didn't do that much work (but I did make a material contribution).
Conversely, as a first or senior author, it costs you nothing to add coauthors
and gains you goodwill. It's win-win. It's very easy to get coauthorships if
you keep your eyes open.

In my experience, if you want to succeed as a Ph.D. in the sciences you have
to find a niche that puts you in the position of being useful to other people
rather than in competition with them. If you don't, you will fail. If you do,
it is almost comically easy to be at least moderately successful.

------
lifebeyondfife
As a PhD survivor, I liken it to a pyramid scheme these days. There aren't
enough tenure track positions to have viable careers for all, so do not go
into a doctorate program without considering your non-academia route to
happiness and fulfillment.

My experience of getting the PhD was pretty positive (finished after three and
half years, good university, good subject, great supervisor) but I still see
so much truth in these essays:
[http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/](http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/)

Or to be more succinct,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law)

------
shazam
Does anyone have advice on applying to a PhD from industry & without
significant research experience (but a BS + MS degree from Stanford)?

~~~
sevensor
I walked this path. Think about where you want to be when you're done. Are you
married? Do you have kids? Do you want to do those things? If you want to be
an academic, you have at least a decade of grueling work ahead. That's 4 years
to do the Ph.D., and another 6 to get tenure, which is like doing three more
dissertations worth of research while trying to manage a small group of young,
inexperienced engineers. And that's if everything goes well. Precious little
time for a spouse and kids. Ignore this ridiculous talk about learning to golf
and taking vacations abroad. Nobody I know did that.

Personally, I finished the PhD in May and moved on to a really fantastic job
in my field. I have time and money that I wouldn't have as an academic.

I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions I had about the academic lifestyle
going in. This is about the professor job, not grad school.

1\. Being a professor is not about teaching. I went into grad school thinking
I could make a difference. Address the rampant gaps in my colleagues'
education. It turns out that professors generally abhor teaching, and that
departments actually use teaching assignments to punish underperforming
faculty. Performance means papers and even more importantly grant money.
Teaching doesn't enter into it.

2\. Professors do not have any free time. Even tenured ones. That appealing
academic calendar is a mirage. If you are a professor, you're a professor
every waking minute. You spend your vacations at conferences, your summers
trying to get ahead on research. You read papers before breakfast and after
dinner. Or you burn out after getting tenure, get a heavy teaching load as
punishment for your lack of productivity, and turn into the kind of professor
everybody has an anecdote about. The one with nutjob politics who never turns
up for office hours, or the one who lectures while hung over or still drunk.

Sorry to rant, grad school is no picnic and I wish I'd gone into it with my
eyes wider open. I'm happy with the end result, personal growth, seeing things
on a higher level, being "doctor" so-and-so, having an awesome job, but it's
not at all an easy way out if you're tired of what you're doing now.

~~~
chronic102
Less than half of CS PhDs have aspirations to become a professor. Most are
dead set on industry -- usually machine learning or cutting-edge technology
projects at companies.

~~~
sevensor
Fair point, that's not my field. Just be warned if you _are_ interested in an
academic career: you won't fix, or even make a dent in, the competence gap in
industry by becoming a professor.

------
crististm
"It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have
a reasonable attack." \- That was the most non-obvious and profound thing I
noticed when I saw and read Hamming about this.

It practically is a litmus test on answering what you should do, not
necessarily in research, but in life.

For those interested, Hamming course on "You and your research" is on Youtube
and has a _ton_ of _practical_ advice to future engineers.

------
makeset
> Status. Regardless of whether it should be or not, working towards and
> eventually getting a PhD degree is culturally revered and recognized as an
> impressive achievement. You also get to be a Doctor; that’s awesome.

Ha, sarcasm, very funny. Seriously though, outside of academia, if you're at
an actual cocktail party or something with normal people, don't ever say that
you have a PhD. It's like admitting that you're into some really weird shit.
If anyone else mentions it about you, quickly change the subject to something
less cringeworthy, like herpes.

And for the love of God, never _ever_ call yourself a "doctor." WTF is wrong
with you? No.

If you're still a graduate student ("working towards"), this is all moot,
because they shouldn't have let you into the party.

------
hiq
> You’ll sit exhausted and alone in the lab on a beautiful, sunny Saturday
> scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic
> trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries.

You get around USD 70k per year in Switzerland for a Computer Science PhD in
Switzerland (at ETHZ or EPFL). You could get up to five times this amount
working in the industry, but usually not much more than that, especially when
you have just graduated. It is definitely worth it to take the salary into
account when you choose which universities to apply to for a PhD.

~~~
argonaut
I think the larger point is that you won't have _time_ to take those
vacations. That being said, a fresh grad that can make it into a top PhD can
probably pull 200k+ in Silicon Valley.

------
iamtrask
many people seem to discount this thread because "Karpathy is one of the most
successful PhD students in his field"

perhaps instead of discounting his experience... it would be better to take
his advice

------
maxschumacher91
"If you’re unsure you should lean slightly negative by default" ha. that's a
good heuristic!

------
akhilcacharya
> You’ll struggle with the realization that months of your work were spent on
> a paper with a few citations while your friends do exciting startups with
> TechCrunch articles or push products to millions of people.

Love Andrej but really, this isn't a common experience.

------
avmich
> I can’t find the quote anymore but I heard Sam Altman of YC say that there
> are no shortcuts or cheats when it comes to building a startup.

Yeah, I've heard someone - Euclid may be? - said something similar about the
road to science... :)

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adamnemecek
Does anyone have a link to his phd thesis btw?

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karpathy
I happen to :)
[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf)

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adamnemecek
What sw did you use to draw those pictures btw?

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karpathy
Google Drawings (or Slides) is good, and Pages/Keynote is very nice too.

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wuschel
1\. Never give up. 2\. Get to work.

