grueful

Are we reading the same articles?

The Python 3 support page is full of "this should work in theory, it's very under-tested, almost nobody is using it, don't blame us if you try it anyway and get rooted."

They did everything to warn you short of installing giant neon signs saying "radioactive, don't use in production."

Make up a number. Double it ASAP. Then double it again.

Then move to daily billing, or project-based billing if you have a lot of high-similarity work with relatively time-definite scoping. Either way, not hourly.

For a developer, floor should be like $50 if you are REALLY new, and totally lack confidence to pitch any other way. Then with the doubling after you have some success to bolster your confidence.

Typical rates for iOS are north of $100, often well north (think multiples). Really, really north if you use project-based billing and leverage a domain specialization.

Books are typically quite a bit out of date if it's a rapidly progressing field.

More stuff ends up in journal articles, but about a year or so behind the actual work, and at a level of detail which is often problematic to reproduce. You typically have to treat it as a reverse engineering problem - but once you know the core ideas, that's often possible.

Then there's the mountain of "trade secrets" which never get published anywhere. A lot of compelling work in e.g. graphics falls under this case - although you might see a demo and overview at SIGGRAPH.

Publishing tends to be a net positive for serious commercial research work, even if the release has to be delayed. It's a solid process for documenting internal knowledge. It's also one of the main things that's going to interest other researchers in working for you.

Or find people who know they're doing something inefficiently, but need it done badly enough that they're doing it anyway.

Ridiculously common case.

New pricing strategy: the low-end tier is metered.

That's also a big argument in favor of formulating seat-based pricing models as blocks as opposed to per seat. It reduces the update frequency.

Failed according to you, me, and the prevailing majority of the medical community isn't equivalent to failed in the minds of the overwhelming majority of the public. The segment which believes or doesn't strongly disbelieve things like homeopathy is manifestly non-negligible.

Anti-vax nuts wouldn't be the public health threat that they are if there were two of them in a pool of hundreds of millions. The segment acting on these beliefs is manifestly large enough to enable outbreaks of diseases we otherwise could suppress almost totally.

I'm all for that. The key problem is defining it. There exist historical examples of quackery which wasn't, e.g. hand washing.

Stricter rules about null hypothesis testing would be a start, but the bigger problem is one of education. We're still plagued by government that gives the nod to creationism and horrifically distorted sex ed in public schools.

I'd like to say we've become empirical enough about what practices we place belief in that we could just treat all cases of quackery as malicious fraud - but the very prevalence of such issues tends to support the opposite conclusion.

I did this once, decided it was a dumb idea, then quoted the next guy triple. It was a good learning experience, if nothing else.

The current market is drastically tilted towards the engineering talent, provided that you actually negotiate. If companies want freebies in spite of this - walk. It's a target-rich environment.

I think one of the major turning points in the future will be to trigger a "space race" which makes a grand project of developing substantive improvements to medical care and quality of life.

There have been significant improvements here motivated by e.g. battlefield medicine, and great results out of academic or humanitarian labs, but much of our current work is stuck in a loop between patents and the FDA approval process. Good intentions aside, the system acts to motivate certain patterns of action in order to stay profitable and continue growing year-to-year which aren't optimal for our long-range interests.

How one would go about motivating such a grand project - I have no idea. Perhaps it's a matter of continuing to make such small improvements as we can until the system is primed for one giant leap. The road of progress was never a well-paved or straight one except in hindsight.

I think that small teams and open sharing of knowledge are both key ingredients. The amount of resources currently in play in medicine is staggering, but social systems tend to lose efficiency very quickly as they scale. Perhaps startup culture will be a key piece in making this happen, but the timescales involved in speculative medical research tend to be beyond the scope of the typical VC-backed endeavor.

It's also way the heck easier to get emails, provided that you give them some motivation to sign on. It's inherently a private, low-risk transaction (provided that your signaling is consistent).

As to domain expertise, "well-known value-producing field" x "very specific customers whose needs you deeply understand" is both sufficient and awesomely effective.

"Actual customers" is about as overloaded as "talking."

You need people you can connect with, provide value to, extract value from - and you have to make all that into a reproducible and reasonably predictable process given all of the constraints in play.

If you can do that, you're often well down the path towards a viable business. If not ...

It's also functional, in the "tell me three times" sense. Effective teaching tends to involve lots of repetition.