Hi! This is the Yelling Math Fairy and THE WORD EXPONENTIAL DOES NOT MEAN MORE. IT IT IS A MATH WORD. IT MEANS e^kx. IT MEANS THE SOLUTION OF y' = ky. DOES EACH NEW ASSAY DOUBLE THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF WORK? NO IT DOES NOT. THE ADDED OVERHEAD FOR EACH ASSAY IS LINEAR GROWTH. NOT EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. I KNOW IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT TO YOU BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT EXPONENTIAL. EXPONENTIAL IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR BIG AND EXPONENTIAL GROWTH IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR FAST. THANK YOU.
Heroku for Science
31–39 of 39 posts
Re: Heroku for Science
#32I'm a huge fan of SolveBio.com
Re: Heroku for Science
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey! Founder of Transcriptic here. This is exactly what we are. We're growing quickly and have customers at over a dozen academic institutions now. One of our key issues right now is that biologists aren't programmers and so we're doing a lot of hand-holding - we'd get really excited about someone building higher level tools (Heroku to our AWS) on top of us for specific domains that you know better than we do. If any…
Hi Max, I took a look at your jobs page and my heart sank at this: https://jobs.lever.co/transcriptic/e1cfcb93-05d8-4026-8f70-3... The first two bullet points there are like the two biggest red flags possible in an ops job post. It reads as a development team that has built a fragile and unreliable system and is looking for a superman to dump it on. It will matter much more if your VP of Engineering position can capa…
Hey, sorry that it came across that way. The ops position is definitely not about looking for a superman to dump a buggy system on. Issues are root-caused and it's a point of culture that we don't see the same bug twice.
Another Transcriptic just Slacked everyone your comment here which has prompted a discussion about what we're really looking for in an "ops" person. The "exceptional coding skills" bullet is in almost all of our engineering job posting, and we thought such skills would apply to really good "devops" people, too; maybe this is wrong and asking for the wrong skill set. (The SREs I know at Google are all really good developers.)
Being an "on-call position" is a side effect of our volume and the fact that cells don't stop dividing at 8pm. Depending on when projects get started we often end up running reactions all the time, and so yes there is a (metaphorical) pager involved. Even minor failures here are very time sensitive due to the biological nature, and lost samples can be extremely costly (and devastating to our reputation with customers). I think this ops role is more about setting up the processes rather than being the only person (people) to respond to issues.
We'll be reflecting on that job description and update the posting.
Re: Heroku for Science
#34DIYbio has already started on this:
Experimental Robot for $4k: http://www.opentrons.com/
Re: Heroku for Science
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The startup equivalent would be "it's easy to build the app, it's hard to get users". Not all apps can yield users, but lowering the bar to launch will certainly yield more opportunities for successful apps.
You are right. I think we would all appreciate making more stuff that we do automatable and outsourceable. I guess where I was trying to go with the comment is that it would be nice if there were similar tools for design and analysis. Oh automated paper writing would also be much appreciated.
Experiment is working on that. :)
Re: Heroku for Science
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Max, I took a look at your jobs page and my heart sank at this: https://jobs.lever.co/transcriptic/e1cfcb93-05d8-4026-8f70-3... The first two bullet points there are like the two biggest red flags possible in an ops job post. It reads as a development team that has built a fragile and unreliable system and is looking for a superman to dump it on. It will matter much more if your VP of Engineering position can capa…
Hey, sorry that it came across that way. The ops position is definitely not about looking for a superman to dump a buggy system on. Issues are root-caused and it's a point of culture that we don't see the same bug twice. Another Transcriptic just Slacked everyone your comment here which has prompted a discussion about what we're really looking for in an "ops" person. The "exceptional coding skills" bullet is in almos…
Cool thanks for taking the feedback. And careful with the "because google" line of reasoning, whats right for them is very often not right for non-drowning-in-cash/monopoly-holders.
Re: Heroku for Science
#37Hi! This is the Yelling Math Fairy and THE WORD EXPONENTIAL DOES NOT MEAN MORE. IT IT IS A MATH WORD. IT MEANS e^kx. IT MEANS THE SOLUTION OF y' = ky. DOES EACH NEW ASSAY DOUBLE THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF WORK? NO IT DOES NOT. THE ADDED OVERHEAD FOR EACH ASSAY IS LINEAR GROWTH. NOT EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. I KNOW IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT TO YOU BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT EXPONENTIAL. EXPONENTIAL IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR BIG AND EXPONENTIA…
Keep fighting the good fight, Eliezer.
To add on: Some words have valuable and specific meanings! We don't have a good substitute word for "exponential" that means the same thing. Please make an effort not to do this!
Re: Heroku for Science
#38Hi! This is the Yelling Math Fairy and THE WORD EXPONENTIAL DOES NOT MEAN MORE. IT IT IS A MATH WORD. IT MEANS e^kx. IT MEANS THE SOLUTION OF y' = ky. DOES EACH NEW ASSAY DOUBLE THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF WORK? NO IT DOES NOT. THE ADDED OVERHEAD FOR EACH ASSAY IS LINEAR GROWTH. NOT EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. I KNOW IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT TO YOU BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT EXPONENTIAL. EXPONENTIAL IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR BIG AND EXPONENTIA…
Keep fighting the good fight, Eliezer. To add on: Some words have valuable and specific meanings! We don't have a good substitute word for "exponential" that means the same thing. Please make an effort not to do this!
Sorry, but in this case, it's actually N^x. Even running PCR and gel analysis requires steps where the time is dependent on the number of samples (e.g. pipetting, walking to the centrifuge, making multiple gels)
Re: Heroku for Science
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep fighting the good fight, Eliezer. To add on: Some words have valuable and specific meanings! We don't have a good substitute word for "exponential" that means the same thing. Please make an effort not to do this!
Sorry, but in this case, it's actually N^x. Even running PCR and gel analysis requires steps where the time is dependent on the number of samples (e.g. pipetting, walking to the centrifuge, making multiple gels)
Generally speaking, running double the number of samples requires approximately double the amount of work, maybe a little less since you're doing it in bulk.
Are you really saying that going from 10 samples to 11 samples causes a doubling (or 1.2x-ing or tripling or whatever) of the time/work required? That's what exponential means.