Agreed on that front. I've used R & Mathematica as a swiss-army-knife for those things as well, although the stats stuff I do is a lot more basic than the stuff you do professionally. I'd like to get more proficient at J & APL, but that is a long road I've found.

Glad to hear y'all found something after Kerf. I would've guessed there would be some market for a tsdb cheaper than kdb+ (what I assume y'all were trying to do). Your blog post mentioning overhyped tech really gave me a chuckle. In college I started to focus on nanotechnology before going to a career fair and talking to some companies. Thousands of students getting degrees focused on that and there are only a handful of startups hiring researchers and only so many grad-student type jobs. I had a physics professor tell me a niche field comes up like that every decade which gets a lot of funding, but essentially under delivers and dies out. I think there is some benefit to nano materials like high strength cables, but not the miracle sauce that is getting preached everywhere.