I made a real estate thing that basically scraped a bunch of data and then built a NLP query interface on top to query real estate data in natural language.
Couldn't find a customer so it makes $0 haha. Here's an example of the system working, minus a pretty UI: https://imgur.com/a/ITDKtPC
I've recently realized that I've been unusually tired, daily, and lack the usually high ambition and drive I had prior to January 2020, which is when I caught COVID.
I never got the vaccine and I'm curious if my symptoms are related to COVID, or related to being a few years older, or changes to exercise schedules, or a general change in life outlook after the past few years, or even mild depression or something. It may even be completely psychosomatic.
I'm considering getting the vaccine just to see if it makes a difference. I'm curious if anyone else is/was in a similar situation.
Completely feel the same way, except I attribute it to losing my job offer due to lockdowns (pulling the financial rug out from under me for months), being isolated from friends and family members for years, losing all access to outlets other than TV and video games or whatever else I could do inside, and the constant stream of news about how the world was on fire and we're all hopeless to stop it.
It doesn't take a novel virus to see how many people would feel pretty aimless and disillusioned after that.
You'd probably be better off talking to your doctor and having some bloodwork done. It could be as simple as some kind of deficiency. Throwing a random vaccine at it for something that vaccines aren't meant to do is probably ill advised.
Being deficient in vitamin d is especially common in winter months and can cause symptoms like yours. There are probably others worth checking as well. Good luck.
Vitamin D and the omega-3 fatty acids control serotonin synthesis and action, part 2: relevance for ADHD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and impulsive behavior
The problem is what even is "long covid"? I've had a doctor tell me it doesn't actually exist, and other people tell me it's to blame for basically everything.
Has the definition been consolidated now that covid is (seemingly) a little less political?
I've been experiencing that, too, but mine started early in 2019 when I got burned out at work. I've been coasting ever since. Some weeks I get zero work done, and I struggle to do the minimum of get out of bed, exercise, and shower some days.
I don't think it's covid, except inasmuch as the isolation of work-from-home has made every day identically boring and unstimulating. The sense of looming doom -- new covid variants, long covid, and the beginning stages of world war 4 -- make it hard to care about doing anything for the long term.
I wish I had a solution. I'm considering taking a long sabbatical. My fear is that won't help, and I'll deplete my savings before the world can get any better, which I think is what I really need to overcome it.
I had had immune system issues since January 2020, where it take forever to feel better. So before the vaccines, which I did get. I am suffering now, as I write this. It comes and goes. I will go months when I am fine but then get sick and take weeks to get better. No mental issues. Not obese, run everyday, etc. If I overdo it with a long run then sometimes it will trigger it. Once its triggered, it takes a week or two feel normal. I can work and get through the day, but not much energy for much else. Feel sick in the morning. Extremely frustrating.
To be clear, are you saying this is something you think was caused by the vaccine, or something you had before the vaccines? If the latter, what are you suggesting occurred in Jan 2020?
I wanted to rule out the vaccine as the cause, since it started before vaccines were available. And wanted to offer a similarity to the OP. A virus or some illness I got back in January 2020 caused a deregulation in my immune system that I still suffer from today in 2023.
I have surface level experience in the private equity industry and was surprised that there seems to be very, very little due diligence performed on sales through microacquire, so I'm building a due diligence platform for buyers and sellers doing those sorts of deals.
I'm curious about how your buyers performed due diligence.
They asked for data about product like customers, usage, roadmap, etc and they just chat about churn and growth percentage. This took me 15 days to finish.
I've been talking about this for awhile now, but I used to run a marketing service that streamed all reddit content in real time and did text analysis and bot detection. It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot. I am entirely convinced that there are large entities (political campaigns, nations, etc.) that are using bot networks on social media sites like reddit to simulate "consensus" in online discussions and thus gently sway public opinion.
> It's definitely a rough estimate but about ~65% of text content was determined to be a bot.
A scary number. I wonder about a per-subreddit distribution, though. I imagine the primary subreddits have slightly worse human-to-bot ratio, niche subreddit somewhat better, with non-political, non-easily-monetizable subreddits having the best.
Did your analysis also attempt to identify troll farms? Would the content produced by protein bots be grouped in the ~65% of bot content, or the remaining 35%?
It's wild how low quality so many of the comments are on reddit, to the point that it makes me wonder "Why did this person comment something so empty and non-contributing to a post that already had 3000 comments?"
I don't know whether to believe people are so wasteful of their own time or whether this is just low-effort bot posting to build consensus. Combined with how harshly and instantly main subreddits like /r/politics and /r/news shadow ban accounts, it's basically impossible to dissent
If I were to restart my career, this is likely the field I'd pursue. I read The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee last year and just became enraptured in the possibilities.
I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.
> I'm wondering if there's anything I can contribute to that field as someone with general programming capabilities.
Oh there Absolutely is!
In general, there are four really high impact areas for computer folks - automation of lab equipment allows for scaling the number of experiments and the data that can be gathered by orders of magnitude; data science and engineering to sort, catalog, and investigate that data; building and scaling scientific computing systems to run analysis repeatably at scale; and even standard application building to manage and improve the overall process of tracking experiments and coordinating between groups.
The scientists and bioinformatics folks are very good at what they do, but someone who really understands how to build, manage, and scale software systems is an enormous force multiplier. If you're interested in the field, I really strongly recommend it.
That’s really not what the job is at this point. At least where I’ve been, there’s an understanding of the strengths of what compute systems and software can offer for accelerating the work that’s done and opening new avenues for experimentation and methods development - it’s very much a collaboration, not a one-sided tasking.
That said, you don’t get to just go off and faff around with code - you do have users and they do know more about you about the problem space you’re working in, so you do have to spend some time to learn to understand what you’re building and the context you’re operating in, which is different from most other tech jobs. The failure case for most software/computer folks coming into bio is not recognizing the difference between biology and physics before building systems.
If I want to do data engineering for such labs, how should I aporoach or even find such opportunities? I heard they hire graduate students for that in general.
There's sort of a running joke with how the market treats biotech as well - a bio company could announce they'd cured death and get a 5% bump in their stock price, whereas a tech company says the word "blockchain" and doubles their share price. As a software engineer, you can get pay into the ballpark of what you'd get elsewhere, but you should probably just ignore the "equity" section of that offer letter.
i imagine a big reason for this is that we don't have a silicon valley of biotech pumped with VC money. and presumably a big reason for that is there's all kinds of red tape when it comes to health and humans. no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff
Well, even getting past the human/medical side - one thing the computer/VC people miss coming into the field is Bio is both expensive and not amenable to the kinds of growth/pricing curves computers have been. It costs money to grow a cell strain in a tube, but to grow 100 cell strains, it costs… 100x as much. It takes 24 minutes for E.coli to reproduce, but in another couple years we’ll be able to get that down to… 24 minutes. There’s opportunities for improving the cost, reducing the spend on reagents (or finding better ones), reducing the number of strains required, that kind of thing, but the computer/internet/digital industry’s basically priced a Moore’s law curve in on everything, and that just doesn’t work in Bio. The capital costs are large and the time to iterate is really slow compared to digital.
> no such thing as "disrupting" if you're going to violate some intense laws and then get arrested for it or get your labs shut down. or even worse, the potential resulting violence from fundamentalists surrounding your campus, or stalking employees. scary stuff
Or, you know, actually "disrupt" something, like endocrine system of half a million people, or the entire global economy.
For the past decade, "Uber for Biotech" was my go-to scary hypothetical to post in HN comments. I'm increasingly worried we may actually get one for real.
(And to be absolutely clear: I'm fine with the biotech part itself. I'm worried about the consequences of using it to frack markets, SV-style.)
Yup, Theranos attracted more than $700 million, was valued at $10 billion, and silently returned bogus test results for thousands of people. They weren't doing anything like altering people's DNA, immune systems, endocrine systems, etc.
Yes the barriers and regulations are (rightly) much higher than just business or consumer software, but I fully expect that the VC money will be, and in fact is already moving there. VC is very herdlike, and it'll only take a few really hot biotech hits to open the floodgates. I'd predict 5-10 years away, maximum.
Couldn't find a customer so it makes $0 haha. Here's an example of the system working, minus a pretty UI: https://imgur.com/a/ITDKtPC