31–40 of 306 posts
Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
Even one's with a biologist as a founder? (Also not snark)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.
Salaries are determined by the market, but no one ever mentions how the market determines it... which is usually some combination of scarcity, quality, and, more realistically, how many connections you have, etc. These things give you bargaining power which you can use to negotiate salaries. (This is all very basic stuff but it's more fleshed out than just saying 'the market determines salary'. The market isn't a mag…
> I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.
Salaries are determined by the market, but no one ever mentions how the market determines it... which is usually some combination of scarcity, quality, and, more realistically, how many connections you have, etc. These things give you bargaining power which you can use to negotiate salaries. (This is all very basic stuff but it's more fleshed out than just saying 'the market determines salary'. The market isn't a mag…
Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
Aren’t salaries determined by the market? Just to be clear, this isn’t snark. I’m curious how salaried are determined.
Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
There's also an entire field of computational biology where you apply (and innovate) on huge datasets using ML/algorithms.
In both types of roles you can remain fairly close to biology while still writing software day to day. Many biotech companies will even compensate at bay area tech salaries.
I read this and it it fills me with so much melancholy. I took biology 101 in college and what I thought would be really interesting turned out to be SO unexpectedly meaningless. Now years later all I recall is the memorization of phylums and kingdoms on one test and cell structures on another test and sitting in a large auditorium looking at the map and not the territory. The course was so much about WHAT and never…
Ah yes, the recurring obsession hacker news has with biology - except that no startup would pay a biologist a software engineer's wage. Talking about biology is nice. But what's nicer is dismantling the elephant in the room.
This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed.
Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks like.
So, extrapolating to other areas, it seems like school needs to do a much better job of explaining the focus on vocabulary. The language of Algebra, the language of Organic Chemistry, the language of Music Theory, etc, etc ... what superpowers does mastering those languages unlock?
To me, watching someone work who already mastered those languages in action can be very inspiring, even if haven't reached that level of understanding yet.
"I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names" This is a common complaint when learning many subjects, and many teachers don't explain why the names are needed. Take music theory, it has an insane amount of vocabulary and concepts to assimilate, but if you watch any of the popular music theory videos on YouTube around these days, you get a glimpse of what mastering those terms looks…
Maybe think of it this way: it isn't unlocking the superpowers, it's an ultrafilter. If you aren't capable of performing precise and contextualized recall of trivia, then your engagement with the subject is going to be limited to diletanttery. When I was a biochemist, there were several critical instances when recall of some minor thing that I had learned years or even a decade ago, sometimes even an offhanded comment in a journal club, enabled debugging a situation where there wouldn't have been time to "go to the library" much less even know where to start looking.
I know it's fiction, but think about the show House. Would House have been as effective if he didn't have an encyclopedia of knowledge at his fingertips? You have to be able to not just think about things from first principles BUT ALSO literally have indexable fast-access knowledge.
Since you bring up music theory, in jazz, it's one thing to know the theory of what a 2-5-1 pattern is, but if you don't have it in your fingers, you are not going to be able to make good music, imagine a jazz pianist constantly searching the keyboard for the correct notes.