I noticed I saw way less information about shows in my area, the only thing I used facebook for. I missed nearly two months of shows at my local venues due to relying on facebook before I realized something had changed. Maybe they increased how much you had to pay to advertise or increase reach? No idea!
Looks like I'll be writing my own scraper, fun times are here.
American fixed rate mortgages are locked in for the life of the loan. If you get an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) this is not the case. A fixed rate mortgage is a hedge against rising rents and rising interest rates. New landlords buy in at higher rates/higher prices and rents will increase as a lagging factor.
Yes, everything that goes wrong with the house is now your responsibility. Yes, you will pay property taxes. Landlords are not in the business of renting at a loss in cities just yet. Occupancy rates are still high.
The original concept was that universities were places of basic research, and more translational (read: monetizable) research was thought to be done at corporations.
That theme changed after 2008~ when NIH was flat funded and most universities were gazed upon by the Eye of Sauron for funding. A lot of places that were basic science focused, let's say at the level of studying a set of proteins in mitochondria, had to figure out how to connect the dots to disease or therapeutics. Not everyone made it.
Also, universities got into the game of stacking patents to license. I don't know the arc of that, but I know for sure after 2008 my Office of Technology Transfer was really into it.
Ex before: "We study apoptosis signalling in mitochondria, to understand how mitochondria are related to cell death."
After: "We study apoptosis during heart attacks, and how mitochondria contribute to cell death in ischemic conditions."
Totally! Most of our best equipment was stolen and modded from materials science imaging or manufacturing automation. There was a budding industry for automated fluorescence imaging, but they were still finding their legs.
We had a couple electron microscopes that we modernized from film, and the companies we contracted with mostly dealt with materials people.
I would say that is a very strong criticism and very warranted! For note, I witnessed the immolation of two careers over retractions of papers that could not be replicated. You could say that the system worked. That was a while ago, and I'm sure the paper mill phenomenon is in full swing. You get echo chambers of PIs that rubber stamp each others work.
In my case, I was in basic science which hit a crisis near 2008 when the NIH was flat funded. This caused a come to Jesus moment, where suddenly all basic science labs were rebranded as translational medicine. My department was absolutely gutted, down from 15 or so PIs to maybe 8ish in the span of a year. Our field was bioenergetics which at the time was pretty competitive, and easy to link to diseases/metabolic disorders. We didn't work with pharma, some labs received contracts for small work. NIH was by far the biggest funder, followed by DARPA and other smaller health organizations.
"If it always worked, it would be business. Let's go to the pub." -- Me, consoling a grad student after experiment failure #24.
More seriously, if you're in basic science, your skills are valuable in transforming the work into a more useful thing to be used later. Using your science factory model, you have created a reusable widget that other people can use. The science factory model does work, you can see its results in things like MIAME: https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1201-365 Where large pooled datasets are used to get insights otherwise impossible.
There's not a ton of low hanging fruit in some fields, as time has gone on the edges are harder and more expensive to see to be at the cutting edge. Ex: you spend $2M on a microscope that does a cool thing and two years later the new model is all that, a bag of chips, and a soda for the low price of $750k. You hope you have a good enough relationship with the vendor that they will either mod or upgrade your system, or that those two years were enough for you to get ahead. It probably wasn't. And you now have a not as fast ferrari for more money than the fast ferrari.
There is a massive glut of international students willing to work for basically nothing, beholden to your PI by their visas. I say this not as xenophobia, but I was the only working class American (my parents do not have degrees) in the department. All students/postdocs that I worked with were from other countries, or if they were American, their families were doctors, or a faculty member. More generally, the kind of people that might own horses :D.
No firm would take this work on, as the profits are not clear, and the time scales for success range from two years to never. In this case success is "great job publishing, we'll give your lab another 2-3y of funding." After which, you better get good at writing books and eating pasta.
Ah, the uManager guys! Great software, sits on top of ImageJ (open source image analysis).
Our software was a custom C+Win32 app that was ported from CodeWarrior on MacOS 7/8. Windows timers were so crap that I ended up using Ryan Geiss' timer from Milkdrop: http://www.geisswerks.com/ryan/FAQS/timing.html
Yes, that Ryan Geiss, the Winamp one. He now works for Nvidia I think.
Our machines were bristling with serial ports, driving high speed filter wheels, lasers of every color we could get our hands on, special shutters coated with teflon, fast expensive cameras, and more! Their work is very much in my old field, I was in bioenergetics, specifically mitochondria and their dysfunction.
This looks great, and I would have loved to see this when I was in the lab.
When the software industry says to you: "We will nearly triple your salary, you don't have to work weekends, and you also don't have to feed the mice on a Sunday night."
You will 100% take this deal.
I was a 10yr+ academic tool maker in biochemistry, built cutting edge microscopes, hardware, and image analysis software. My lab was successful in our field. I got some papers out of the deal. I also saw things that no human had seen before in a microscope. I worked with very interesting people from around the world. The work in academia is great. You're moving the needle, new data, new failures. These are the perks. It is also highly possible that you have complete creative control of your project. I did, and it was amazing. Custom designed UIs to streamline our experiments, derived from watching students use the system to do their work. A decathalon of software design.
Some reality: Your PI and organization will never compensate you the way the software industry will. In pay, expectations, and benefits. When you're over 30, and you don't technically have a real 401k, you are still paying your student loans that you needed to get into this field, and you're still in the same shitty apartment, something has to give.
Comparison is the thief of joy, and when you see your cohort of computer science graduates your joy will be stolen :). It's good, honest work. A short tour of duty would be useful, and can teach you the difference between splitting the atom and splitting the check.
Academia, at least in bioscience, is still very much an ivory tower. You don't have enough letters after your name to matter, and you will likely be a pet instead of a peer.
Don't stay underwater for too long. Life is short. :D
If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them.
Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this.
As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers.
The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving.
How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.
I believe my point was that a modern torpedo hitting a ship is a very high kill probability (mobility or other), being it is guided and explosive.
I would say a missile is more similar to a torpedo. We can look to the Falklands as to how dangerous missiles are against ships. This isn't your grandfathers WWII torpedo.
There is only one other case of an anti-ship missile I can think of off hand, in Desert Storm when a Silkworm was shot at a fleet and shot down with a SeaRAM(?) I think.
I am surprised at the downvotes, but I guess also not. Either way, the information is out there. I agree with the article in that military software is generally awful, but I'm guessing it is not easy to innovate.
Trading company is separate from the foundation, purpose is to split the edu org from the industrial org. For those that don't know, raspis are bulk ordered for industrial use and this part intends to escalate that part of the business. RP2040 is an example of spinning off raspi tech for use in other boards.
If you look back, you can see where Upton and friends are good stewards of the raspi foundation (separate).
hn community is so used to companies being two-faced and kicking the ladder out when they "make it", but I don't think this is happening here. Even if it is, its fair to say we've gotten a lot from raspi.
Totally! To be fair, I would not trade it for anything. I saw things no person had ever seen in the world. It's tough when you're in there though, the feelings of no escape really get to you.
I paid a very high price in opportunity costs, and additional degrees. If you want to peek my cohort, I am behind by about 5-7y if you were to look at salary min/maxing.
You are right in that the skills I have gave me some opportunity, but I think I could have done without the last 3y of academia trying to make it work :).
I spent a decade doing sexy problems in science, got paid squat.
Now I'm in tech making 4-5x what I was doing, while using the skills I gained from there in a less sexy but much more lucrative pursuit. My team is great, so I am lucky in that regard.
Make hay while you can. The fact you have these choices is great, but career progression is what you make of it.
Another source of info.