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Comment by dqpb | Hacker News Reader

As one of the apparently few remaining people on HN who like Google and are excited about the technology they're producing, I applaud this effort. I've had multiple doctors in my life who were worse for my health than seeing no doctor at all. Two of them outright looked up my symptoms (in a book in one case, and some shitty intranet in the other) to tell me what I already knew from googling it myself. We can do better than that. This is the way forward.

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I wish more doctors would look things up or use computers to help diagnose. Relying on their personal memory and experience alone seems outdated and less effective.

Combine that experience with some good reference, research and consultation with lots of other doctors and you would have a much better outcome overall.

I value a doctor's ability to filter the search results. I Google technical problems all the time, what would my clients say? But it's my ability to score the answers and (hopefully) sift through the chaff that makes my time valuable, not whether or not I use Google.

We lament unrealistic conditions in white board interviews without Google, but have surprising double standards when it comes to medical professionals.

What's the problem? Nobody is going to memorize every single piece of relevant information, and they're certainly not going to memorize all the changes over time.

I'm thrilled that my GP is willing to slog through research, or look up things she's not 100% sure of. Sure, I've got access to much of the same information. She's got the training to interpret it though. We were discussing vitamin supplements and fortification at our last visit. I wasn't entirely sure about a couple of the claims she made, so I dug up some articles and emailed them to her. A couple days later I got a response with an interpretation of the articles (essentially, nothing to worry about).

Or, how about this? I've got a rare variant of a fairly common condition (such that a GP probably wouldn't see this firsthand). I'd seen a specialist at a world renowned hospital before. Those visits were expensive and not very informative. Visit with the GP? Huh that's unusual, let's see what the options are. Her conclusion? You can go through a variety of expensive tests, but unless I'm symptomatic the best course of action is no action. Now, I was curious, so I looked all that up after the visit. Fuck if I know how to discern how expensive those tests are or whether or not I'd see any benefit. There's a ton of information out there, but the big bucks are spent on people who a.) know how to find it and b.) how to interpret it.

To bring it to a tech setting -- let's think about Jenkins. I've cobbled together a build pipeline for chef cookbooks for one of our apps across our prod and non-prod environments. Sure, we pull credentials from the Jenkins credential store. No, I can't tell you off the top of my head the exact syntax to pull a secret out of there. But I can tell you where I'd look for instructions. Being able to be productive with Groovy (yuck) is part of my job, but it's not the only part of my job. Being able to find the relevant information is far more important than having to memorize it.

Just a note: The edition of Apache Groovy that's bundled with Jenkins has its collections API crippled, so it provides a less "functional" experience than when Groovy's used for normal scripting. Given that easy access to the map-reduce-filter paradigm is the main reason I'd give up static typing to use Python/Ruby/Groovy, I don't know how you put up with it.

Well, what other languages aside from Groovy give you access to the pipeline "api" in Jenkins? AFAIK there's not a lot of choice in the matter there.

Honestly though the biggest problem I have is that there's nearly zero pipeline documentation for Jenkins. The language itself is neither here nor there (but by virtue of not being a Java guy, I don't have a particularly robust development environment setup).

When we go to talk to doctors to talk about a situation in Turkey, if you just say "I looked it up internet" they interrupt you, and talk about how you can not understand anything, they treat you like an idiot and show no respect. I imagine they might be exhausted by uneducated or nervous patients, but this is not the way to go to undermine a person's knowledge.

I do not complain when IntelliJ autocompletes my lambda function in Java 8 and get defensive and yell at the IDE. (Excluding who prefer no assist code editors)

Agreed. I've had a doctor google my symptoms in front of me.

> As one of the apparently few remaining people on HN who like Google and are excited about the technology they're producing

Lol, as someone who criticized Google on multiple occasions, just wanted to point out that it’s OK to call them out when they (may be) wrong and still like their technology.

until you realize its going to be people like insurance companies using this data to deny coverage and other stuff aimed soley at profiting on the people its harvested from.

How much benefit does the average person get from being profiled like crazy across the web? Besides the (dubious) benefit of free services, there isnt much positive you can point to from such activity, and a shitload of really scummy exploitative crap.

I dont see how such medical analysis is really going to pan out much differently at scale.

Here in socialized Europe it will be very beneficial. Our health system focuses on solving problems, not selling us stuff. So this will be another great tool assisting with making us aware of what options we have in improving health outcomes.

Plenty of private for profit providers in europe too.

Yes, but since the mainstay of the financing isn't really based on private insurance coverage, the main objection doesn't apply. Really, denying insurance is pretty much the only legal-but-bad use case for such information. All other legitimate uses are good for the patient, balanced by an increased risk of crime and loss of confidentiality that may be embarassing but not profitable for anyone (well, except if there's some blackmail case).

"all other legitimate uses are good" is a tautology

No, saying that they're good for the patient is not a tautology as there certainly could exist legitimate uses that are good for someone else at the patients expense.

You can no longer deny coverage in the US, barring a change to the law (which could happen).

The Affordable Care Act, and most replacement bills proposed over the last year, protects you from this type of discrimination.

Health insurers can't deny you coverage or raise prices due to any pre-existing health condition. By law, an insurer has to offer the same rate to everybody with the same age, zip code, and smoking status.

Insurers are allowed to rebate up to 30% of your premiums if you take healthy actions (e.g., going for a run, joining a weight loss program, medication adherence), as long as those actions don't discriminate based on health status.

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