mswen

In the past year I have worked on a side project web application that provides a tool for managing and calculating a multi-factor value assessment for major decisions. The twist is that it collects the assessments of each decision option against the decision factors from whatever advisers or stakeholders you the decision master invite to participate. During collection of the assessments each person is also invited to indicate how confident they are about each assessment and to add a qualitative comment as well.

In particular I have thought of corporation using this as a way to gather input from all the persons that interview a candidate for a job.

Anyone on this thread interested in seeing a demo?

I have also experienced some problems with a vps account there over the past 6 weeks. Initially they suggested that I reboot the server even though it was "online." That worked, but it seemed like every 3 or 4 days I would have to reboot the server again. Then a few days ago, rebooting the server didn't help.

Upon contacting the help personnel, they indicated that my name server wasn't pointing to my hosting server (both are services provided me by namecheap). I asked how they would have lost the connection since I hadn't made any changes to the websites in months. They didn't have an answer but redid my name server entries to get them pointing to my vps again.

So after years of good reliable service, there has been problems lately.

Too vague of description. I have no idea what you are trying to build.

What are you trying to automate? Model building? If so are you trying to make it easy for a business operations person to build their own models without help from a data scientist? Or are you trying to automate the conversion of models into production workflows that integrate with other enterprise applications? That is data engineering.

What are you trying to optimize? My time in doing analysis? Trying to guide analysis down useful paths and eliminate dead ends with features that are not actually helpful?

What do you include in your domain of data science? Sometimes people reduce it to neural networks deep learning architectures. Others include all types of statistical learning. Others include NLP. While others might focus on IoT of time series analysis. At least in part tools are tied to the specific subset of the data science domain that a person is working within.

For technical topics I often envision a smart college sophomore who might be considering a major in which your topic resides. With this I can assume a pretty decent general education but little or no domain knowledge.

Assuming a smart college sophomore means that they have ability to follow pretty detailed or involved reasoning but they need the groundwork of concepts and terminology explained.

I once faced a similar, but not quite as comprehensive inventions section to an employment agreement.

The clause that I contested and clarified was the "know how".

My point was imagine that I don't know technology X (lets say SQL) before starting this position but because the job ends up involving daily use of SQL I gain a lot of 'know how' during my 3 years working here. Now, when I leave there is a pretty clear case that I cannot go get another job using SQL because that 'know how' was largely gained on the job. I understand protecting trade secrets but 'know how' is way too broad.

I recall that we rewrote that section, and another one before I signed, but I almost didn't sign then because it was so restrictive.

Interesting cross-disciplinary use of facial recognition software to analyze common features in buildings. Thanks to Peter Christensen from the University of Rochester and https://theconversation.com/us/technology for their efforts to help scientists talk about their work to more general audiences and spread it through an open republishing policy. Invite the HN community to read and comment here.

Some like myself got a triple hit in 2008

1] Job gets eliminated just when you have been hitting a nice earning "peak". You now get to look for work along with millions of other out of work professionals and you are overqualified for many of the available jobs.

2] Home loses 40% of its value. I waited this one out and was fortunate to have not upgraded to a bigger home and mortgage when the income was flowing nicely in 2006 to 2008. In my area housing values are just now getting back in the general range of 2007 values. So waiting that one out was both possible and good.

3] Retirement portfolio loses 40% of its value. And, yes I would have been fine if I just waited it out. However, Because I struggled to get any decent paying work during 2008 to 2012 and the expenses of a family with 4 kids doesn't just stop. I ended up cashing out some of my retirement. And, some of the cashing out was done when the stock market was at its worst point. I didn't cash out because I was scared of the market going lower, I cashed out so that we could pay bills and not lose our house.

In retrospect, there are things I could have done better be better prepared when the income was flowing and to manage through the downturn. But, my point is that sometimes life's difficulties hit on multiple fronts and the choices are difficult.

Thanks for the article. I read most of it.

Parts sounded very similar to the start-up that I was referencing most directly in my comment. The big difference was that in selling to large enterprises, marketing is very inefficient at reaching decision makers.

We thought we had this in hand because our founder and a couple of key early employees were deeply integrated into the CIO community. And, we did succeed in getting CIOs on board. The real challenge though for us was that revenue depended on adoption and ongoing use within large enterprises. While CIO's were telling us this platform is really great and we will have 20 procurement projects hosted on your exchange in the next 6 months, they weren't willing to force adoption within their organization. We would get delays and then maybe 1 or 2 projects and then nothing. There was still something missing or a unidentified barrier when it came to the needs of a VP or director 2 levels down from the CIO.

Eventually we ran out of money. The technical foundation was really good and allowed the founder to run it solo until he found a larger service company that wanted to retrofit the technology to support their business model. He got a smallish buyout which in theory made him and the investors whole plus a little. The last I heard they were having legal wranglings to actually get the money paid out from the acquiring firm.

An interesting conundrum occurs to me as I read and processed this through my own largely failed or semi-failed start-up experiences. The issues is this that the failure in my experiences has been enterprise sales delivery. We built cool, even award winning tech. We delivered the product to market. We had CIOs say they loved it. But driving real adoption, selling and getting revenue not just accolades was the issue.

So in light of this article, much of the behavior that the author describes sounds a lot like "sales" the very thing I have found missing. And, because it sounds and feels like sales on some superficial level it is easy to imagine for the practitioner that they are just around the corner from the big win.

Indeed, and that is the lure. And, when we read stories like that we get motivated to press on and never give up. But who writes the stories of someone who worked on a failed project for 20 years and never got anywhere? If we persist what are the odds that we will be the one for whom it works out?

The question of when to persist, how long to persist and how to pay the bills while you persist are very personal to me.

In 2000 I and a friend did research and the very beginnings of development on a semantic analysis technique that was notably better than anything we could find at the time including from Google and other search engines. But we couldn't find money fast enough and we both had families to support so we went our separate ways and did other things that were more commercial.

About 7 years later VCs started funding similar technologies. And, somewhere around 2010 to 2013 technology seemed to have caught up to where we were at in 2000.

So should we have persisted? It kind of seems like we should have. But, I have seen enough of life to know that sometimes a group of people have a lot going for them, winning awards, raising funding, rolling out product and still end up running into a roadblock on the way to commercial success that sinks them.

Your comment echos a conversation I was having with my wife the other day as she was reading me bits from Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Book by Angela Duckworth.

As you might infer from the title the thesis is that Grit is a very powerful force. My comment in our discussion was that this whole body of social science research and life/career advice comes into conflict with other bodies of advice about cutting one's losses, the value of killing 'failing' projects early, avoiding the trap of sunk costs.

How do we personally know or offer advice to others about whether current difficulties are likely to be overcome by renewed effort and persistence and when do we say it isn't working, try something very different?

Will your outreach be noticed, recorded and stored? Almost certainly. Will it impact your ability to freely travel and gain employment? I don't know. Maybe not today, but who knows how the winds of politics will blow.

Thanks - I will mention this site to her.

I see your line of logic here and acknowledge the distinctions you make. But I agree with the main point of the author which I read as - A music delivery system that loses access to musicians isn't much of anything. And, Spotify is apparently alienating musicians.

Yes it is a bit soon, on the other hand it feels like it is good to get the word out there when you know that a change is coming.

She is located in Minneapolis MN. She would be happy with remote work.

She is smart, productive and reliable but not particularly ambitious with regard to the day job. Seems happy to take on the entry level grunt work including auditing telcom vendor bills, remotely updating router firmware and running test cycles, testing custom software portals, document/write test plans, update and clean up system documentation and whatever else the engineers don't want to do that isn't too technical.

Thank you. If you don't mind I will brag on her a bit.

Kenzi started writing fiction pretty seriously at about 14 years of age. So while 24 seems young to be a published author she has put in a decade of sustained effort honing her craft. She has completed something like 8 full length novels plus several others in various stages.

She seems to have found her daily writing pace and can write 2 or maybe 3 novels a year while working a full-time job.

She got her degree in Technical and Scientific Communication and works as a software and hardware tester along with doing some documentation for a health sensor company.

In the spring of 2018 her day job moves away, and she doesn't intend to move with it... so she will be looking for a new day job unless commercial success is surprisingly fast on the novelist front.

My daughter just had her first novels (a young adult trilogy) published a few weeks ago. Even though it is not really my genre I read it and enjoyed it. Of course I am biased....

Dysfunctional Series: Books 1-3 (Origins, Dark Imagination, A Mighty Long Fall)

By McKenzie Rae

https://www.amazon.com/Dysfunctional-Books-Origins-Imaginati...

I wouldn't. Three per day seems too much and would probably fall into the trap of being shallow knock-offs of stuff that is already being done.

What would appeal more to me is 3 per week with each idea built out with things like:

Size of potential market,

Target industries identified,

Competition and Internal Substitutes,

Educated guess as to why this doesn't already exist,

Target buyer roles within companies for B2B or target buyer for a consumer product or service,

Maybe a couple more points like this

This could get very involved - but I am thinking like a nice succinct one page version covering these points.

This is getting closer to something I would pay for.

Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/

Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath gives a good introduction to Bayesian approaches to statistical analysis https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJK6_DZvcMqNSzQdEkzvzA

Comments first

I upvoted your comment, but want to add a compliment. This kind of dialogue and knowledgeable comment are why I keep reading HN, often starting with the comments.

Thank you for addressing the previous comment in a thorough manner while not talking down to him or the rest of us who are smart and interested but not educated in the specifics of this domain.

Depends, of course. If one is original, inventive and noticeably smart with at least an MA degree then the ideal job would be working in an R&D department.

If more of a scientist mindset focus on the research side and if more of an engineer focus on the development side.

I came across an engineering agency awhile back in my city that is kind of a multi-disciplinary (hardware + software + design) group that enables companies that maybe cannot justify a multiple team member R&D department a place they can outsource development of their out their kinds of ideas.

This kind of agency might be most satisfying because of the variety of challenges and industries.

A few months ago I wrote a custom web app with data visualization that can run on-top of the old Microsoft Retail Management System. It bypasses the application itself and just taps directly into the SQL Server database.

As I was writing it I tried to make it pretty general/generic so that there was not too much code that was specific to this particular small retail chain.

I wonder how many retail chains will still be using this POS system after end of life?

I wonder if that might be the kind of niche thing that could end up being profitable? Or, would it trap me in a barely profitable situation with just enough customers that I feel like I need to keep it going but not enough to really make a comfortable living?

In your example I believe that complete mastery of ASP.net and strong competency in the adjacent pieces of the MS stack would probably generate the best job security. This stack is used in many medium size businesses all throughout the US, including many with cheaper cost of living than the Bay area. However, you need to be comfortable knowing that you will work mostly on CRUD type applications that power so many business processes.

The bleeding edge is much more interesting but also carries much higher risk and potential reward. You may find yourself expert in something that was technically very interesting but the timing is wrong or the specific tech fades quickly. So failure mode has you learning and relearning the latest frameworks trying to stay hip and potentially changing jobs frequently. On the other hand, success out on the bleeding edge might but you in an equity position in a start-up that turns into a unicorn.

I gravitated more toward the fringe and have built some cool tech but the start-ups and projects never reached market success and so I often reflect that had I picked more standard problems and tech and become expert in those I would have very high consulting rates today and plenty of work. As it is I have moderately high rates but I don't quite fit into people's mold and it is somewhat harder to stay busy with billable hours.

In the end you also have to live with yourself intellectually and emotionally. So although my more fringe focus hasn't yielded the best economic ROI - I have mostly enjoyed the choices and outcomes for my own life.

I notice the ebb and flow of productivity as well. Ken uses the term fallow period. I like the reproduction analogy. New ideas, skills, or domain knowledge are like the sperm that finds its place in the egg which I think of as the existing stable but receptive body of knowledge and skills.

There is often excitement at the beginning "I have this new skill!" However, the new skill or knowledge hasn't really integrated with the existing body of knowledge yet. Then often it seems that there needs to be a gestation period. You have the sense that connections are forming and something new is forming that is the combination of the new and the old.

And, then it feels like I am ready to pour it out. Whether it is writing an article, preparing a speech or coding up that feature or application. When that happens it feels like the "Flow." But I understand that the gestation period was just as important if much less visible and seemingly unproductive.

A well written essay and review. A few musings of my own.

Discovery has improved greatly. Even if my set of beliefs, values and preferences are quite rare I can still use the internet and related technology to discover other like-minded people. Outcasts and eccentrics more easily find that they are not quiet as alone in the world as their face-to-face experience would lead them to believe. The outsiders can find those with whom they can be insiders.

Social media and all forms of modern communication technology enable a form of community without requiring geographical proximity. But is this sufficient?

Dispersed, technologically connected communities of like-mindedness still feel hollow to me compared to villages and communities of people living together in a communal way, face-to-face, sharing tragedies and triumphs and the very human basics of sex, companionship and some form of family.

How is the instinct toward Utopia changing? What new forms of Utopian experiments are possible today that were not in previous generations?

I am 55 years old. In my twenties, thirties and early forties I ran a lot and did things like pull-ups push-ups and crunches. The past 10 years have been much more weight lifting.

I currently lift 5 days a week

MWF -- benchpress, leg press, leg curl, seated rows and back extensions

T TH --- pull-ups, leg raises, overhead press, bicep curls, deadlift, dumbbell lateral raises and shoulder shrugs

At times I have been focused on lifting heavy and relatively few reps. Currently I am biased the other way, a lot more volume at lower weight.

Mix in some walking, jogging and "sprinting" for some cardio. At times I have reduced the weight training and bumped up the cardio for several months.

Goals: mix of health, functional strength and looking good

Eating: I have been on intermittent fasting for 4 years. Style is 16:8 with the occasional 20:4 or even 22:2 thrown in. I do not really restrict what I eat, but 90% of days I break my fast around midday with a very large multi-ingredient salad so that I am starting with the healthiest food.

The key as I understand it is a period of fasting [no eating] for 16 to 20 hours a day. Your saying would work because the last thing you eat would be around midday and you wouldn't eat again until morning.

I think that many people find it easier to extend their overnight fast by skipping breakfast rather than dinner in the evening. In the United States it is also true that breakfast tends to be more of a solitary meal and dinner more of a communal meal. So by skipping breakfast one is not as out of sync with family and friends who want to include you in dinner plans.

Factors to consider:

Do you really like the working alone at home - obviously connected through modern communication apps and tools?

Do you have the ability and willingness to cultivate a local professional network that are not your co-workers?

Is the company willing to pay expenses for regular HQ visits, one week out of every 2 months so that you have some face-time with both colleagues and bosses?

Is the work itself - apart from the remote situation and more money, something that inspires or at least intrinsically interests you?

How much of a difference in your financial well-being is the combination of $45K more plus reduction in commute costs?

> If I were in charge of PE, every kid aged 10 and over would be a tumbling master. Then I would start teaching them sports.

COUNTERPOINT: At age 13 we were being taught some tumbling in PE class. A mishap caused a minor neck injury. I am glad I didn't break my neck and end up paralyzed. I wore a neck brace for a couple weeks and had chiropractic adjustments for a couple months. However, that site has ever since been very susceptible to tightening of the muscles and a locus for headaches. Sometimes quite severe headaches. Somewhere in my twenties I learned to manage the headaches better but here I am in my fifties still managing headaches.

Having made this counterpoint from my own experience I think I agree with you about tumbling and others who have mentioned judo, BJJ or other martial arts training. I suspect on average it would be beneficial but the training itself is not risk free.