adamwi

From time to time I find that I need access to deep technical expertise within a field for a small amount of time (couple of hours to a day maximum).

This could for instance be: - Code review of some critial parts of an application before it go live the first time. - Guidance on architechture decision in a certain proogramming language in the early stage of an project - Insights from someone that have worked in depth with a specific vendors system

Many of the questions can be answeard to some extent through articels/blogs/litterature as well as Reddit/Quora/etc. But often the possibility to ask detailed follow up questions and share material confidentially would be very valuable.

On the business side expert networks of this type exisits that are used during strategy and due dilligence projects (e.g GLG and Alphasight). But so far I have not seen any viable alternative for more technical questions.

Do anyone on else have this need as well? Have you found any good solution?

Currently looking at localisation for a B2B application (focus on small businesses). The technical side seems quite straight forward and now focus on translation of all texts.

Googling ends up with the following alternatives: - Google translate (not a real option) - Mechanical Turk (two iterations for proofing?) - Professional translation services

What translation services are you using? Looking for something not too expensive.

With the recent developments in the field of Machine learning there are plenty of problems that can now be solved that were not possible a couple of years ago. As someone with only a basic understanding of the field I find it hard to judge the feasibility of product ideas involving machine learning.

Given that unique and relevant data sets are often hard to come by (for obvious reasons) I'm wondering if there are any good rules of thumb to judge feasibility of different ideas.

Let me give you a concrete example; build a system that looks at medical records and approximate the risk for a certain illness. It is possible to fairly easy get overall data on the how common the illness is, which symptoms that are relevant and even if those symptoms are commonly recorded in medical records. But the granular data in the actual medical records are fairly hard to come by and would require a significant effort to collect. In this situation it would preferable to do some approximations on e.g. how many medical records are needed to get certain precision before pursuing the idea and start collecting data.

A less defined example would be; build an application that identifies if a picture contain a golden retriver dog with a red scarf around the neck. Also here relevant to have rough numbers on the number of data points needed etc (even if the actual data in this case is probably much easier to come by).

In the first case I could probably get ok approximations using statistics assuming normal distributions, but less straight forward in the second example.