3 ms·

> if you walk into any research center or academic environment If they use their institution's infrastructure, it's managed by the dedicated system admins. No

by f6v 5y ago

> if you walk into any research center or academic environment If they use their institution's infrastructure, it's managed by the dedicated system admins. No way they're going to allow this tool to be installed.

gspr 5y ago
While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point. I spent 10 years in the kind of academic setting described. A LARGE part of the work of the people in this example do their work on ordinary self-managed laptops without a sysadmin in sight (and probably very little common language in which to even begin communicating with a sysadmin, if they even know what a sysadmin is). The amount of time that is wasted by ordinary researchers being very uncomfortable with the terminal is staggering. Although I was/am a researcher in my own right, I do feel that I had an order of magnitude greater positive impact on research by helping out the approximate dozen of other researchers around me do their terminal and programming work more efficiently/better/smoothly/reliably. I definitely think there's huge room for improvement in this area. But I don't think something like Fig is the answer; safe and effective use of Fig seems to require enough wherewithal to ask someone (or google) how to set up bog standard autocompletion solution in the first place.
- f6v 5y ago
  There definitely is a point. I've witnessed too many biologists who decided to get into data analysis struggle with UNIX. I think https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu is more of an answer. Most graduate programs just assume you'd pick it up on your own, but the majority doesn't.
dangom 5y ago
You install it in your own terminal on your own computer, not on the institutions' computers. Also, for research that doesn't handle personal identifiable information (think civil engineering or astronomy), I don't think it'd be an issue to have Fig read the parts of the filesystem to which admins gave you read access anyway. Hopefully autocomplete would work over ssh.

by f6v 5y ago

gspr 5y ago

While I have exactly 0% belief in the success of Fig, and share a lot of the negative sentiment expressed in this thread, your parent post does make a point. I spent 10 years in the kind of academic setting described. A LARGE part of the work of the people in this example do their work on ordinary self-managed laptops without a sysadmin in sight (and probably very little common language in which to even begin communicating with a sysadmin, if they even know what a sysadmin is). The amount of time that is wasted by ordinary researchers being very uncomfortable with the terminal is staggering. Although I was/am a researcher in my own right, I do feel that I had an order of magnitude greater positive impact on research by helping out the approximate dozen of other researchers around me do their terminal and programming work more efficiently/better/smoothly/reliably. I definitely think there's huge room for improvement in this area. But I don't think something like Fig is the answer; safe and effective use of Fig seems to require enough wherewithal to ask someone (or google) how to set up bog standard autocompletion solution in the first place.

f6v 5y ago
There definitely is a point. I've witnessed too many biologists who decided to get into data analysis struggle with UNIX. I think https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu is more of an answer. Most graduate programs just assume you'd pick it up on your own, but the majority doesn't.

dangom 5y ago

You install it in your own terminal on your own computer, not on the institutions' computers. Also, for research that doesn't handle personal identifiable information (think civil engineering or astronomy), I don't think it'd be an issue to have Fig read the parts of the filesystem to which admins gave you read access anyway. Hopefully autocomplete would work over ssh.