JunkDNA

This might be one of my most favorite posts of Patrick's ever. It's often so much easier to start something new than it is to sustain something old. Hanging around HN too long makes you an addict of "new". Guess what: growing and sustaining a business for the long haul is hard, even for patio11.

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto & Philadelphia

Syapse provides a precision medicine data platform that enables laboratories, registries, and providers to use molecular profiling to diagnose and treat patients.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire Customer Solutions Engineers for the Philly office. So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance! We're especially interested in people with Python and JS experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

I fully admit you may not be the right person for this question, but IBM has made a lot of hay about Watson in healthcare: lots of booths and talks at industry conferences, trotting out partner medical centers, PR pieces in the Wall Street Journal, etc... Despite all the noise, I have yet to see any sort of peer-reviewed clinical study that demonstrates the application of Watson in a real healthcare setting to improve patient outcomes. Has any study like this been conducted?

This is entirely unsurprising if you've spent time around enterprise software. I once worked in a very large, global (non-IT) company that was interested in software made by a very well-known, large, global IT company. We wanted to see a demo of their product. They pushed back saying "we don't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it. A demo isn't worth our time. If you want a demo, we will have to charge you $XX,000 of professional services". My employer at the time paid it.

Apple has been testing sapphire. It has been in the cover for the camera since the iPhone 5 over two years ago. What is interesting is that they have gone back to glass for the lens cover in the new phones. My wife had a problem with her iPhone 5 shortly after purchase. After she dropped it on the floor (not especially hard) photos had these small, magenta flecks that no amount of cleaning could get rid of. Apple swapped it out no problem, but when I first heard that they moved back to glass for the new camera in the 6 series, I wondered if they decided that sapphire just wasn't going to work for this use case.

I suspect, they've learned quite a bit from the sapphire cover on the camera, hence their comfort in deploying it to the higher end watch models.

The article addresses the so-called airborne nature of Ebola in other species and calls into question whether or not it was truly airborne in those instances. Furthermore, "very nearly airborne" is not a fair characterization. Bodily fluids transmit the disease, and Ebola's particular ability to make people spew lots of virus all over the place from every available orifice seems to be the primary way to spread. The odds of getting droplets in the eye, on a small cut on your skin, etc... as a healthcare worker are very high if someone is spraying virus-laden blood all over the place. But this is not what we're talking about with a truly airborne virus. In the case of an airborne virus like influenza, you have infection via the upper respiratory tract from viral particles that survive for extended amounts of time in aerosols suspended in the air. There is no evidence Ebola can or does spread in this manner.

Obviously nobody can predict the future, but viruses that infect via the airway are highly evolved to do so. The article touches on it a bit, but doesn't get into the real specifics. I'm going from memory here, but I recall that in things like the common cold and influenza, the viral proteins have specific humidity, pH, and temperature requirements in order to dock with receptors in just the right part of the airway in order to maximize infection. You don't get that without significant evolutionary pressure which as far as I can tell is totally absent in the current environment. The virus is easily spreading via direct contact with body fluids, so even if it develops an ability to spread by air, this offers little advantage over the plain old bodily fluid route.

I knew where this article was going before it even mentioned Chromebooks. It had the distinct smell of submarine: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I wonder if there is a way to adopt something analogous to a franchise model here. It strikes me that only the communities that are really, really engaged are going to be able to pull this off (which is true of most public works projects). That being said, it would be great to not have every small town and borough have to figure everything out for themselves. A franchise operator for a fast food restaurant doesn't have to worry about where to buy burgers, the brand of deep fryers, or even the optimal amount of time to fry the tater tots. If there was a full on recipe for doing this that is proven to work, a small number of citizens might be able to make it happen even in places where the local government is ambivalent. A proper setup would include some national branding to help with PR (I.e. Every article in every newspaper about community broadband would use the same name for it). It would include marketing materials for the public as well as briefing packs for local officials, legal briefs for attorneys, etc... On the technical side it would recommend specific hardware, suppliers, and designs.

The advantage to such an approach would be to harness economy of scale at a national level, but allow local communities to drive the process and own the network.

I'm not sure how you would structure it to avoid creating another monopoly in the parent company of the franchises. But perhaps a nonprofit or a corporation 100% owned by the community franchisees would work.

This is really nice, I've often wondered about the dearth of such things every time I look at a church website.

In the Catholic churches in my area, the company that prints the paper bulletin appears to also have something to do with the web hosting as well. I think many of them just go with that and slap something up there.

Have you thought about actually using it to build a full-blown SaaS offering that churches can subscribe to? Similar to the WordPress model? There are a ton of Churches who probably would have someone who can set up a website, but not necessarily do the whole Digital Ocean VPS thing. I haven't explored this space, but I'd bet this is one of the nicest looking things like this out there.

You're quite welcome! Definitely would love to try again in the future. Best of luck to you guys!

I ran through this for real. Here are two major issues that made this not really work for me:

The mobile experience on an iPhone left a bit to be desired. It was responsive, but not totally and I found myself panning incorrectly because of the use of modals (I.e. The phone was panning the background and not the modal). I can't emphasize enough how clunky it was. I was technically able to do everything but it was not a polished experience.

Also, it fails to ask if I have a home equity line of credit. I happen to have done an 80/10/10 when I bought my house. That makes it look as though I've got way more equity than I really do based on the questions. There is also no way to indicate if I want to consolidate said line of credit into a single mortgage as part of a refinance.

I definitely gave this some thought, I think it's not so straightforward though. There is a bit of an impedance mismatch between the things that a bug tracking system emphasizes and captures and the things a project management system captures. Simply porting bugs over isn't a clean solution and can lead to confusion among non-developers when the bugs are highly technical. Github makes it especially hard because there is no support for dependencies so you can't roll up a bunch of individual technical tasks under one umbrella without lots of extra effort.

To be clear: while I can describe the problem, I honestly don't have any ideas what the most elegant or clean solution is. I have never found a satisfactory solution. I end up keeping lots of stuff in my head and writing summary emails.

My team tried it several times over the first 1 - 2 years it was out. I have not tried it recently. That said, at that time, we could never get it to stick. It was good for high level stuff, but like all project management software, we ended up constantly working to keep it in sync with reality. This was especially acute when using github because for any stuff that was code-related, we were basically duplicating tickets and tracking in both places. So github tickets were the real source of truth and Trello always lagged. Once that happens, the non-code milestones start to suffer as you start wondering why you're doing all this in the first place.

Tracking issues in github (and we use FogBugz as well) has the benefit of being where the "rubber meets the road", so it's effortless and transparent to keep up to date. Merging non-code tasks (e.g. design work) with code is still something we struggle to track and keep tabs on.

Indeed, first thing I thought of was the radiation-using mushrooms at Chernobyl: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210932.ht...

Talk about a crazy energy source!

Wasn't comparing my situation to flyover country. I was arguing that for me, it's a turnoff to get any closer to a city than I already am, and we would actively be interested in an area much less populated if it offered quality of life benefits.

A million times this. I'm in a similar situation. My wife and I just aren't that interested in relocating to a higher cost of living area and trading our nice yard and larger house for something small and expensive. With two kids we have very different priorities than younger folks with fewer attachments. We currently live outside a major Northeast city, so we get some of the benefits of a metro area but not the full brunt of the high cost of living or super-dense housing. We pay for it with a long train ride (for me) and both of us working.

We would relocate to a less densely populated area if it meant she could be a mostly stay at home mom while roughly maintaining our existing home size, yard size, type of neighborhood, etc... We have built-in childcare being close to family, but that would be made moot by a relocation that allowed her to be a stay at home mom.

Alternatively, a total work from home position that eliminates my commute, allows us to stay put, and pays top dollar would be attractive as well. It would allow us to not have to worry about who will be home when the kids get home from school for example.

Biotech needs a serious kick in the pants. It has always been remarkable to me just how little automation is used in the field of molecular biology. There is a huge amount of work that involves humans doing repetitive tasks and then waiting for something to happen. This increases cycle times, limits the number of hypotheses you can test, and is rate-limiting for the whole field. You already have the problem that you are working on living things which need time to grow, reproduce, eat, etc...

Not saying any of it is easy to automate by a long shot. But that kind of innovation is going to be what is needed to propel the field forward.

I don't see IBM as a big player in Health IT. I think they desire to be a big player which is why there's all sorts of noise about Watson and healthcare. It's marketing aimed at the C-suite.

Epic systems is probably the IBM or Microsoft equivalent in health IT. McKesson, Siemens, and Cerner are also no slouches.

Lots of people in this thread are talking about this being scary for authors. When I was a kid, I got to read a ton of books any time I wanted. I got them at this place called a "library" where they let people come in and take books home with them to read for free.

People have always had the option to read books without buying them. In those days, going to the library was effectively the same effort as going to a book store. In fact, it was more convenient for my family. We happened to live a few blocks from the library and didn't need to drive across town to the mall to get books in dingy little B. Dalton bookstore.

I will grant that the economics in the eBook situation are dramatically different than with physical books, but I really wonder how different they really are. Local libraries already lend ebooks as well. I'm not sure why more people don't take advantage of that.

Classic example of pricing based on value to the end-user (in this case, a pretty nice fuel savings) and not on actual cost of materials. Something to keep in mind as a developer when selling your skills, software, etc...

This is just awesome. Even on my iphone it is a compelling experience.

Very well said. If I proposed this study to the IRB where I work they would likely freak out. I think Facebook should be taking advantage of their data and conducting research. But they need to do this the way most respectable research organizations do and run all their studies through a credible IRB.

From my days in pharma, I remember they are used extensively for testing anti-nausea medicines because they are some of the few animals that actually experience the symptoms nausea (many mammals vomit, but nausea is actually more rare).

You can read more about it in the supplementary material (which sadly may be pay walled). I'm not qualified to judge. It certainly sounds like adequate safeguards: fully redundant systems, access controls, air locks (or whatever they call them, I'm doing his from memory on the go). It is hard to read the description and come away thinking they were reckless.

I went and pulled the original article. The characterization of recklessness is in my opinion unfair here. It's not like these researchers were cooking this up on their kitchen counters:

"All experiments with 1918-related viruses were performed in biosafety level 3 (BSL3) agriculture containment laboratories. In vitro experiments were conducted in Class II biological safety cabinets, and transmission experiments were conducted in HEPA-filtered ferret isolators (Imai et al., 2012). The research program, procedures, occupational health plan, documentation, security, and facilities are reviewed annually by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Responsible Official and at regular intervals by the CDC and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Select Agent Program. More detailed information on biosecurity and biosafety is described in the Supplemental Experimental Procedures."

Also, if you read the discussion, there's this point:

"We found that a 1918-like avian virus exhibited pathogenicity in mice and ferrets higher than that of an authentic avian virus. Moreover, we demonstrated that acquisition of only a few amino acid substitutions can confer respiratory droplet transmission to 1918-like avian influenza viruses in a ferret model, suggesting that the potential exists for a 1918- like pandemic virus to emerge at any time from the avian virus gene pool."

The body of the paper goes through all the details of which specific amino acid changes are needed. This is important information for understanding how these proteins function. What is it about those few amino acid changes that confers droplet transmission? Others can now study the individual proteins and build off this work.

Reference: http://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/pdf/S1931-3128(14)0016...

This page has a nice, succinct definition of how the various kinds of mutations can contribute to influenza changes. In short, a percentage difference isn't that informative. It matters greatly what is actually different:

http://nieman.harvard.edu/Microsites/NiemanGuideToCoveringPa...

As a member of an academic institution, it is very likely his research had to go before the institutional review board that governs how to conduct research in an ethical manner. IRB's are far from perfect, but they are charged with weighing risk vs benefit to society.

I was a little critical of Sam Altman's post awhile back about investing in defensive biotech (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890060). Reading this, I think I may have been a bit too harsh.

Also, have some faith in the rest of us to correct a situation where someone is getting unfairly downvoted. I frequently upvote people who are unfairly being beaten up.

Typically, you want to supply the container with a mount point that is outside the container. This way, if the container is replaced, your data isn't impacted.