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abhisuri97

1,264 karma · joined August 30, 2016

MD student with an MPH and a CS degree. Personal site: abhinavsuri.com

Email: suriabhinav1997@gmail.com

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abhisuri97··on My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)
med student here: Reducing immunosuppressant not something to be taken lightly for kidney transplant patients. I was shocked when I read that sentence.
abhisuri97··on Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access
this is pubmed. Most papers that are funded by NIH research are available on pubmed if the main publisher gives access to the full text (after some set embargo period...usually around a year).
abhisuri97··on Why doctors hate their computers (2018)
Med student here: oftentimes the attendings who are googling are usually doing it because the patient's symptoms don't fit with the most common illness "scripts" we develop in our mind and have ready for the 90% of patients who walk in the door. The google is a quick sanity check to see if these symptoms are within the range of "normal" for the most likely differential diagnoses (i.e. list of most likely diagnoses based on the patient's presentation).

That or those symptoms are exceptionally vague or uncommon enough that they warrant a quick refresher on google for leads on additional questions we should ask of patients (the most common offender here is rashes/skin lesions imo since they can literally be a manifestation of super simple "oh you just changed your shampoo" to "you have a rare autoimmune condition"...asking a comprehensive history from patients can help determine what tests to order).

abhisuri97··on Bypass DeepSeek censorship by speaking in hex
I'm honestly surprised it managed to output hex and still be sensible. what part of the training corpus even has long form hex values that isn't just machine code?
abhisuri97··on SimpleQA
https://github.com/openai/simple-evals/blob/main/simpleqa_ev...
abhisuri97··on Debugging the Doctor Brain: Who's teaching doctors how to think?
Yes. Doctors in the US have to get a certain amount of Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits (usually done by attending conferences and lectures).
abhisuri97··on Cystic fibrosis breakthrough has given patients a chance to live longer
Med student here. My guess is the following: So with CF your pancreas can’t secrete many of the enzymes that are necessary to actually digest food. You can take medications to help with that digestion, but regardless, you aren’t actually getting all the calories in your food with CF because it isn’t making its way into your body (notably patients with CF have steatorrhea which is fat in their stool because they can’t absorb a lot of fat from their foods like a non-CF patient). The med helps the pancreas recover some of its ability to secrete digestive enzymes and so patients can now eat and get more from their food. The issue is that there needs to be a recalibration in terms of how much patients are eating. Previously a 2000 calorie diet may not have gotten them so far because they didn’t absorb much of it, but now they’re absorbing a lot more of it. Plus increased work of breathing with CF expends more calories compared to a non-CF patient (and patients on this drug).
abhisuri97··on Show HN: Generate quiz questions using AI
as a med student, i'd 100% pay for this service if it can take my in house lecture ppts as input
abhisuri97··on Stable Diffusion is a big deal
I’m more trying to see what the utility of stable diffusion (or just the text to image problem) in the long term. Right now people can play around with making weird art pieces and maybe it will be integrated into design tools...but then what?

Eg with other AI problems out there I can see a potential application to medicine, self driving cars etc, but I just don’t see what the bigger goal of this is going to be.

abhisuri97··on So you want to study mathematics
As a fellow penn alum, I can totally vouch for Ghrist's approach to calculus. Check out his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ProfGhristMath
abhisuri97··on Things I learned writing my first technical book
I don't think it's mission:impossible for some people...but for people such as myself, my editor really gave a sense of external accountability + pressure to finish. If I didn't have an editor, I'm 90% sure I would have stopped around 2 chapters in and tabled it for some other time (read as: never touched it again). Also, there are perks to having a formal publisher: you have reviewers, copy editors, and formatters who really make sure that things are really standardized. That really allowed me to focus on writing.
abhisuri97··on Crohn’s Disease: Is the Cold Chain Hypothesis Still Hot?
Surprised this isn't higher up. Crohn's was formally named/created as its own clinical entity in 1932 and the paper shows one of its graphs (Fig 1) starting in the 1940s. I doubt 8 years was enough for awareness to get out to the entire physician community about the existence of the disease and there were probably a lot of misdiagnosed cases in its early days (since crohn's has a clinically diverse presentation).
abhisuri97··on Stop Making Students Use Eclipse (2020)
Fully agree with this. The fact that the "hello world" program involves the use of several keywords (public static void main String[] args System.out.println) that students will have no idea about until 1-2 months later is not ideal. Compare that to python "print('hello world')" is very intuitive.
abhisuri97··on Stop Making Students Use Eclipse (2020)
I had to teach web dev to students who were coming straight out of the intro courses that used Eclipse and yeah...everything that the author is saying here is right and these IDEs do a disservice to them. A surprising amount of students don't have an idea of working around the command line, file systems, and in general develop poor debugging skills (and, in turn, poor programming skills since they're used to eclipse etc filling in everything for them).

I think a good middleground is the IDE that CS50 has their students use. It gives them exposure to the command line and allows them to actually debug on their own. Of course, utilization of that IDE in intro CS courses means that these courses won't be using java anymore (and I frankly have no idea why it's still a mainstay of cs courses to this day).

abhisuri97··on Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)
"You are free to code native JS". this really does seem like a simple/obvious statement, but I've been in the position where I've taught JS to beginners and holy crap...the amount of people that think they need to know React to do something as simple as a counter is absolutely insane. I think that the space of intro to web dev has been polluted by people pushing frameworks/libraries onto people when really just simple dom manipulation would do the trick.

I think the issue the article was getting at is that the idea of the hammer is considered "obsolete"/useless by the experts in the field, leading those experts to push tool making factories onto beginners who really don't need it for their purpose (but don't know the wiser since they're new to woodworking after all).

...or maybe i'm reading too much into it.

abhisuri97··on DNA→RNA: What Do Students Think the Arrow Means? (2014)
https://kraulis.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/why-do-so-many-scie... Also an interesting read about how the central dogma was never really meant to be presented in teh way that it is currently presented (really was meant to focus on "information" flow starting at DNA rather than show a definitive guide to the transformations between these molecules in a cell).
abhisuri97··on How the Python import system works
Despite using python for the past 4 years, it still takes me several tries to set up packages and imports correctly when I make them myself. Honestly, I wish that python had an import system similar to JS (where you can just say “I want this file” <insert path to file> and specify the exports yourself). For me, it just feels more intuitive and less “magic”-like when dealing with custom scripts you want to import.
abhisuri97··on Show HN: A Latin self study course, Khan Academy-style
Ecce Romani gets no love despite the exciting saga of the main characters being stuck in a ditch for half a book.
abhisuri97··on WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days
I think it’s just because HN isn’t really a community that has many consistent themes/cohesion. It’s very active but only on individual news items rather than across posts.

But I think if the mods could potentially put up a link for donating to something, it’d get decent traffic. I just wouldn’t expect that initiative to arise organically from the user base and get significant traction.

abhisuri97··on jQuery 3.6.0
Yep. I still use it for side one-off projects here and there. For me, there's just something so convenient about being able to make a html page that you can drop in a quick CDN link for jquery and not have to worry about compiling, webpack, create-react-app etc. I'll still use React when something is a larger project with a ton of moving parts, but otherwise I stick with jquery.

As for why I'm not using the native DOM api's...I could, but haven't gotten around to learning that syntax since I'm very used to jquery (being specific, if I want to do things that are more complicated than selecting an element + changing its properties, the native API is more complicated). jquery is just a nice default.

abhisuri97··on What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
There have been calls from our utility company asking people to conserve energy and a lot of messaging on the local news.
abhisuri97··on Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-based web browsers?
Me: There's no way that's true

looks in inspect element

Me: I stand corrected

abhisuri97··on Plotnine: Grammar of Graphics for Python (2019)
I've had to learn R for some Epi classes this semester and, coming from doing figures/stat analysis in python, it really is a breath of fresh air. Imo, The R ecosystem for stats and figure-making just has much better "defaults" than matplotlib. That being said, I have been incredibly frustrated with R error messages and some syntactical things about the language, so I'm super happy to hear that plotnine exists.
abhisuri97··on A Porsche Taycan Just Beat Tesla for the Fastest EV Cannonball Run Record
I wonder if the EV cannonball community will start to experiment with the battery packs. I know that some of the combustion engine runs have usually carried extra fuel tanks...could the same sort of idea be viable for the EV versions? (though I imagine the weight of the batteries would be too much to deal with).
abhisuri97··on Mark Rober (former NASA) launches a 30 day Creative Engineering Class
I'd spend money on high quality videos (e.g. buying an egghead subscription was well worth the money a couple of years ago for me because there wasn't anything that came close to that resource at the time), but I doubt I'd really spend $250 on stuff that (at least from the subject titles + video descriptions) seems to be very general/somewhat intro level material. Then again, I don't think I'm the intended audience here :/
abhisuri97··on Mark Rober (former NASA) launches a 30 day Creative Engineering Class
From the FAQ:

> Throughout the class, you’ll share your ongoing work and give and receive peer feedback. Mark will also be able to check out students’ work, and may occasionally answer questions and give feedback.

> We can’t guarantee that Mark will comment on your work directly, but we’ve designed the class so that you’ll get thorough feedback from your peers. You’ll get personalized feedback by submitting your projects on time, documenting your process, and playing an active role in your group.

> Mark will also have access to the peer groups to answer questions, give feedback, and post responses during class. You will have complete access to all the feedback and answers Mark gives within your peer group and even within the other peer groups in the class. There’s a lot to learn from this ever-growing library of real student feedback.

This kind of sounds like a potential recipe for disaster. $250 for some pre-recorded videos and peer (i.e. a group of other learners randomly assigned to you) assessment? I could also see people being easily upset by a relative lack of direct involvement from Rober (esp given how much this course page hypes up his involvement outside of the FAQ).

abhisuri97··on Hyundai to acquire Boston Dynamics
Hyundai Cars + Boston Dynamics Robots = Transformers?
abhisuri97··on Why most Hacktoberfest PRs are from India
Just FYI, this is far more prevalent than is implied in this thread and not tied to a particular nationality/subgroup of people on college campuses. Established clubs, fraternities, sororities, arts/performing groups, and even niche majors/honors programs all tend to accumulate "academic resources" (i.e. past exams + homework) as members take courses over the years.
abhisuri97··on ExamSoft's remote bar exam sparks privacy and facial recognition concerns
How much do people want to bet that this is using the haarcascade_frontface_default.xml classifier that's used in opencv face detection tutorials? I've seen similarly bad results on dark skin color.
abhisuri97··on Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (2018)
Hoping to be an MD/Dev of sorts depending on this med school app cycle :) what institution is this? Most of the ones I know are gobbled up by Epic.
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