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Why the Fuck?

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: Why the Fuck?

#231

Post by antidaily »

whatusername wrote: post #103
justsee wrote: post #72

Elon Musk chose to do PayPal (a rather disliked company on HN) which enabled him to work on Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX (which HN rather likes). Isn't it possible that some of these people toiling away in the corporate womb are acquiring capabilities and capital so they can be reborn to do important, but potentially unprofitable 'change the world' projects?

Paypal is awesome. It's 2012 and I'm still not aware of any other company that allows me to sign up (for free) and start taking payments straight away (for arbitrary items no less). See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html (Note: Stripe have a schlep blindness in International Transactions. I still can't sign up for Stripe. Last Week I was recommending a friend use paypal)

Well even if it does suck now (I think it does), it didnt suck when Musk sold it.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#232

Post by mangler »

Because millions of others have a much more desperate need for some love and some feeling of self worth. Even a surrogate one. There's no insulin for that...

Re: Why the Fuck?

#233

Post by gus_massa »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #128
glesica wrote: post #37

To launch a Facebook clone you sign up for Heroku or AWS, push some Rails code, and start promoting yourself. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you. Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw u…

. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you. I know someone, kind of financially successful, who swears by everything that his team developed a cure for AIDS, but they found out after years of politics that they will never get approval from legal entiti…

Do they have any available information? Preliminary test? Cured it in vitro, animal models, a few humans? Patents? Any other interesting medical/biological result published?

There are a lot of people that proclaim that have cure for AIDS/cancer/whatever, and many of them blame the establishment for blocking it. The same history appears with perpetual movement machines. Without more proof, probably it just another too optimistic investigator, a scammer or a crackpot.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#234

Post by Ingon »

stingraycharles wrote: post #79
Ingon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most scary moment - one of the applications we've written was used to take life-saving medications on time. Scary stuff I'm telling you.

Off-topic, but I'm curious how you handled that situation. Personally, a safe-guard I might build in would be to audit our code by an independent third-party. Was this at all feasible in your situation, and/or how did you handle QA?

Well... External QA for app which costs 2.99$ (or less at times)? No. We just tried to make sure it worked properly - some code reviews, several unit tests to cover some nasty edge cases and that's it. I really hope everybody is alive and well. :)

Also it did help that the users grew confident in it over time. It was not like these overnight success stories (not even success story) which you hear all over the news :)

Re: Why the Fuck?

#235

Post by flipside »

raganwald wrote: post #102

My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some footba…

As someone who switched from a nanoengineering phd focused on medical diagnostics and blood analysis (including some diabetes work) to an internet rating startup, I have some opinions on this matter.

1. The time scales are completely different for internet and biotech. A/B testing online can take hours or days while biotech experiments take months to years. In fact, I came up the idea for the startup while I was waiting 4 months for a substrate to be synthesized!

2. The costs are also dramatically different. The limiting reactant isn't people, it's $$$. Biotech is extremely capital intensive. Equipment, reagents and people all require significant amounts of money over a long period of time.

3. Lastly, hard sciences do not have a monopoly on "big problems". Maximizing my impact is a desire I share with many of the HN crowd. For me, the impact I foresee by improving rating systems dwarfs what I thought I could accomplish in bio-nano. Don't get me wrong, this was simply the right decision for me, which is why I dropped out a year ago with zero regrets.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#236

Post by quasque »

Draiken wrote: post #198
quasque wrote: post #180

Funnily enough, this is exactly why I gave up on software development and went to study a degree in the biosciences. Ten years of fixing crappy websites, writing dull database interfaces, troubleshooting bugs in shit code written by people who didn't give a damn -- and for what purpose? The paycheck was good but money is not everything. It felt like such a colossal waste of life. My mind is my best asset - I want to…

Wish I could have the choice of a career on any kind of research where I live, 3rd world countries just don't have that luxury. Good for you that you made that move... Wish you best of luck!

Thank you! But sorry to hear your choices are more limited than you desire.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#237

Post by mindcrime »

mindcrime wrote: post #194
bhickey wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue. Type I (juvenile/auto-immune) is more interesting. Sugar production in the US is heavily subsidized.

Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue. Thankfully, the inverse is largely true as well. Develop diabetes, and if you lose enough weight, you can often avoid the need for meds altogether. I was just diagnosed as a…

Also, just to be clear... I'm not suggesting that diet soda is exactly good for you. I plan to try and wean myself off of that as well, over time. But the sugar (HFCS really) in plain soda is just horrible, horrible, evil stuff... especially when it's in soda, since sugar that comes into your body in such a ready to digest form seems to hit your bloodstream much faster than, say, a piece of orange, which also has plenty of sugar (fructose) but has to be digested to get to the sugar.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#238

Post by studentrob »

You don't need great skills to make an impact. I work in Cambodia and there are plenty of opportunities for web developers to bring opportunities and learning here for the local culture. Also I would compare the existing base of developers here to what I imagine it was like in the US in the 70s. Computer Science is just picking up steam and the folks who learn it are very bright. Quite a cool climate to be in, in my opinion. Cost of living is dirt cheap, you have all the western amenities, and internet is fast enough (5 Mbit down via my phone).

Re: Why the Fuck?

#239

Post by mmagin »

noarchy wrote: post #185
bicx wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly I'm working for the wrong employer

It must be a "Valley" thing (and the associated cost of living), because depend on one's location, 100k would be a good figure for a project manager. Someone straight out of school? Not a chance.

And in the "Valley", with rent and (California income) taxes what they are today, 100k isn't as great as you might think.

Re: Why the Fuck?

#240

Post by redment »

berlinbrown wrote: post #98
benihana wrote: post #58

Oh goodie, another arrogant whine by raganwald where he can't understand why the greatest minds (implying people writing code are somehow the greatest minds) aren't doing what he thinks is important. This post makes two incorrect assumptions. First, that the things he derides (Google automating targeted content, Facebook introducing new search features that are tangential to their current features, Apple changing for…

There are many fallacies with the argument that the greatest minds are at the googleplex. Google does hire some smart people and probably engineer for engineer, they probably stack up better than the averages across the US. But, great people do great things. They don't necessarily work at google. And they don't necessarily advertise. Who are the people that wrote the software that put the Mars Rover on Mars? What abo…

I'm sorry but I don't see how reddit fits into this equation. It's laughable to compare the work that went into building Curiosity or Ubuntu with reddit.
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