Turning down $1 Billion does not say he is a great founder. He was just not so much into money, and Facebook was his thing, an idea in his head which HE wanted to give a future. He was just passionate about it.
I'm a physics student. Sometimes I'm thinking if I should completely change my path to math. I always sucked at it but it seems to be so huge, exciting and powerful.
I have absolutely no idea how people start consulting. How old are they? Did they work something else before? Did they major in anything? Are they all independent or work at consulting companies?
OK, the point is any of these things could be the case, or not. Some people start consulting immediately. Some don't start until they have been working "regular jobs" for 20 years. Some start young, some start old, etc. There is no one way to start. Just start.
There's only one consistent answer to any questions WRT consulting and that is "it depends."
I've been in your shoes before, trying to figure out exactly what consultants do and how to start doing it. Once I gave up on finding a simple answer and just did it I started to understand the game.
I'm actually on the other side: currently writing my bachelor's thesis in statistical physics, having a lot to do with probability stuff, statistics and data. I'd like to take a year off and work in a company to get some real life experience before I start my Master's degree, because I don't want to stay in academia after that.
But I have no idea where I can find companies which could need my abilities and where I could work for 0.5-1 year. Any ideas? I live in Germany.
Most shops are willing to let you work remotely. Anyone that's down with stat. mech. has a solid base for quantitatively attacking most problems. Luckily the 'domain' knowledge required is general human consumer behavior, which you'll know quite a bit about already. And a surprising amount of that can be reasonably modeled by a microcanonical ensemble.
Probably not much. I started working with bigger data some months ago and now I notice that I need some real techniques and not just my "ok try this and this". I'm coding in C (where I "create" the data (numerical integration of stochastic differential equations)) and Python (plotting). I need methods/algorithms/techniques to analyse the data "on the fly" because I can't save it all (it's too much data).
Just a small tip which may ease the search for methods. The general term for "on the fly" learning is online learning [1].
The rest depends on your problem but there are often online variants of offline methods, e.g. when you work with Gaussian process regressions
I like the idea, I think it's a right step into the future of coding.
Beta Access @ $15 Pledge would be nice though, since ppl would certainly donate more money if they saw how cool the IDE is.
I assume "beta access" means you'll be providing some feedback as well, which can't apply to the lowest donation level. And I can't believe there wouldn't be screenshots and videos as the IDE develops.
