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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2935 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 8, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Let's say you're an academic researcher. You don't know how to code beyond a rudimentary level, and neither do any of your grad students/co-authors, but you need to scrape a particular dataset, or do some data analysis or munging that can't be accomplished by just pushing a button in Stata. You're willing to spend some of your grant money to pay a programmer to do this for you. Where do you turn?

I ask not because I'm in this position myself, but because I think it would be fun to take on this kind of work. I actually did this as a side gig in university many years ago, and found it really fulfilling - I just happened on one job advertised on one of the school's message boards, and from there I got lots more work via word of mouth.

I'm curious about general answers, but also if you have any specific tips, feel free to drop me a DM. To give a sense of my bona fides, I've worked as a SWE at multiple FAANG companies. I'm basically retired now, but I'm realizing I could use some structured goals in my life so that I don't end up wasting all my time endlessly scrolling.

I have a friend who did work like this and he was just enployed by the university and accessed by researchers as a resource.

You could give ChatGPT a shot. It's surprisingly good at writing code, I've seen examples of it scraping websites with ease, and applications in data science to boot.

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