alphaoverlord

I really like the visualization as gel electrophoresis. What are axis? X is the letter, color/intensity is frequency, Y - I assume is the time? If Y is the time, I can imagine that there would be mostly times without any activity punctuated by brief blips where almost all the letters are lit up.

Is it just that the time span is shorter than I expect, and that just shows a 30min interval or so? Is this just typing from one sitting?

E is typically the most used letter in plain text, I'm surprised how infrequently this shows up.

This brings to mind the excellent Feynman quote:

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”

The point that Feynman was trying to make is that you can’t just hunt for anomalies after the fact and then say they are somehow significant. You have to make predictions and do the test and see if those predictions bear out. In the same way it’s not amazing (at least statistically, although perhaps biologically) that any one person is born. It’s just like that license plate. Of course, the license plate ARW 357 is one of millions of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean that it’s amazing every time you see a license plate. They’re all one of millions, and it has to be one of them.

I came to say that, but it's eloquently copied from: http://surplusgamer.tumblr.com/post/1114853865/derren-brown-...

> Yes, neither of these companies may be offering me the best deal possible, but unless they are colluding, the government should not be involved.

It's interesting that you make a dichotomy between collusion - in which you think the government should intervene - and mergers - in which you think the government shouldn't intervene. What is the difference?

If you are such a free market proponent, why should the government intervene in collusion? Doesn't a merger just codify any such collusion?

There is an equivalent - its called Antabuse (disulfiram). It inhibits the enzyme that metabolizes ethanol, causing the bad side effects of 'Asian glow' to a more severe extent. The idea is to cause negative feedback for alcohol.

Notice by its lack of blockbuster-ness and the fact that the market for alcohol is 1000x the market for cocaine, that this "cocaine vaccine" isn't good economics.

In this case, there is no need for a trial. The evidence is indisputable and the OP admits to the action.

In a free market, I should charge what I want. Why does Comcast need to create a higher tier when 99.9% don't need or want it?

Implicit in the title of "250GB of legitimate use" is the assumption that torrenting or things of that nature are not legitimate.

And also supports Comcast's claim that 99% of people do not use that much bandwidth. Sure a bandwidth cap is not a one size fits all solution, but if this is the only guy complaining, it sounds like a one size fits most solution.

There are both vaccines for HPV (cause of cervical cancer) and HBV (cause of liver cancer).

By far the least impressive paragraph. I have the same numbers, but thats really nothing to write home about. I would be the first to admit that test scores doesn't really show creativity or potential. While the other applicants described true achievements, I think test scores only show that one has Asian parents and buckled down for a summer and studied hard.

SAT I: 2380 (V: 790, M: 800, W: 790), SAT II: Math L2: 800, Mol. Biology: 800, Chemistry: 800, World History: 800

I really hope they put the brunt of their evaluation on the interview process - I think at 20, there isn't really enough time for a track record of doing independent things well. They have clearly shown excellence at what they have been doing, but what they have been doing as a whole seems to be on the well-worn path of education and extracurricular activities/research.

Summary: Advances in medicine has increased the life expectancy of Americans. As a greater proportion of people live longer, there will be stresses on our economy and healthcare system and society's expectations/perceptions of the elderly will change. We cannot predict the future, but much medical research is being done and we hope that can address problems associated with aging.

No offense, but this article doesn't say anything insightful or novel about aging other than rehashing what is relatively obvious.

I would be interested to see how he justifies each of those 150 pills + 70 substances, much less how he priorities these three as the "top three"

I'm curious why the OP thinks the first five entries on the list are "obviously faulty entries". They do seem like a lot of money, but I am sure there can be edge cases, after all, the sample size for each of them is really small. The titles do seem rather general, but perhaps they are top positions?

Although it can be argued that current higher education is being commoditized, the OP is making an unrealistic comparison to some idealized past where education meant more and people were more educated simply because they went to college. Looking at the recent links on HN about the entrance exam to Harvard et al. in 1900s, I would be very skeptical that the students then learned greater or more applicable skills. Memorizing the philosophies of esoteric 18th century Frenchmen and the intricacies of "noble society" has equally negligible impact on real-life skills.

It is true that education is more commoditized - more people go to college and there is greater opportunity to obtain education - but commoditization by itself does not mean a decrease in quality. Because it is now a commodity, brand name means much more.

> $41M distributed among many different startups would be better for the tech ecosystem/community as a whole

In what ways? How would that be true? It's a free market - you get what you can get. You can argue fb doesn't deserve its valuation either, but there doesn't seem to be same amount of disbelief and schadenfreude-seeking.

But in this case, they are actively trying to "lock" their door. Speaking abstractly, this misalignment of interests has nothing to do with the mechanisms of action.

That's like saying the cops can use heat-sensors to look at houses, because thats just electromagnetic signal and you can render it however you want. No invasion of privacy there right?

Unfortunately, metagenomics is currently the lowest hanging fruit of genomics/biology right now. Sequencing has gotten exponentially cheaper to the point that these types of projects are feasible (the paper you cite is actually a proof of concept for their metagenomics pipeline), that everyone is just sequencing this shit out of everything. That said, there are quite a few pitfalls with this current approach:

1. Big data in biology is still lacking comparable analytical capability.

2. Most high throughput sequencing technologies (next gen sequencing) is using polymerase based technologies that have short reads. Polymerase (the basis of PCR) requires a primer to start the reaction - and the choice of primer can introduce non-trivial bias into the obtained results. Short reads are pretty good in dealing with most bacteria, but the reaction gets pretty hairy with hyperthermophiles (bacteria with regions high in GC content) and more complex eukaryotes (long stretches of repeated regions are difficult to resolve with the shotgun approach).

3. We will probably only see DNA reads that are slightly different from what we know to exist already. The generalization they make that 99% of species cannot be cultured with current methods is true - but an analogous scenario with DNA can be made. The sequencing reactions will probably be optimized for sequences with similar composition to what we already see. The task of extracting DNA from bulk material is not trivial - this can remove large swathes of species from view even if the sequencing is trivial. Complex 3D RNA and DNA structures such as hairpin loops and noncanonical pairing makes sequencing hard.

It's definitely still a difficult question to tackle, but more difficult than doing it are answering the questions "What can we learn from this?" and "What should we sequence?"

~300 million is the population of the US

We have 2.5x the population but 25x the landmass. That's an order of magnitude difference in population density. Now imagine a natural disaster.

Are they really deciding function by form?

I honestly can't tell how the plant/animal moves from a static picture, and even if its an animal, it could be a stationary animal. IE. Coral, sponge, things of that nature.

Without scales or legends, one cannot tell if the range is from "great to good" or "good to bad".

I would be interested in seeing the same information normalized to other countries or at least given some solid numbers.

13% of physicians have iPads? And 1.5% of all iPads went to physicians?

Can you give us a citation of how you got that number?

The estimate is that there are less than 1 million doctors in the US. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230450690457518...

And before October 2010, about 8.25 million iPads were sold - that number is probably way outdated though. http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/07/estimates-vary-on-number-of-i...

"The percentage of U.S. physicians who own their own practice has been declining at an annual rate of approximately 2% for at least the past 25 years."

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0808076

Most numbers I have see range from 50-60% in small to solo practice, while I would argue that this is a lagging indicator - a lot of older physicians are in solo practice and seeking to pass on their patient panel. It might be more interesting to see where current residents are going after graduation. That said, there is still a large market and I think it's definitely something that should be pursued. Good luck!

I'm interested in learning how DrChrono is planning to market to physicians.

I personally think DrChrono is going for a diminishing slice of the healthcare pie. The current trend in healthcare is that a decreasing proportion of physicians are working in small private practices - the cost of healthcare infrastructure, logistics, and billings means large practices and hospital based have significant savings on scale and tremendous bargaining power with insurance and etc. This kind of app, with the appointment scheduler and prescription system, seems very much geared to small private practices.

I imagine this kind of system will make limited leeway in large healthcare practices and large academic institutions - this is the difference between enterprise software and web applications. Epic and the like, despite being aesthetically unpleasing and rather cumbersome, is dominating this segment of the market. It's not even a question of cost - these solutions cost much more than competitors, but there is a perceived level of stability and a proven track-record. In both culture and priorities, I think YC companies are not as well prepared to offer enterprise solutions. Large institutions are fickle, full of politics, and without a dedicated sales team, difficult to sell to.

They are definitely going for the "meaningful use" incentives as part of healthcare reform - the healthcare reform gives physicians incentives to adopt an EHR (electronic health record) system and going for the sex appeal of using ipads - but I am wondering if that is enough incentive to adopt an electronic health system. Personally, I type 1000x faster on a keyboard than with an iPad, and speed would be an consideration - ie. even as a physician-in-training (hypothetically with comfort in technology), I would have to look hard to decide whether to use such a system.

As a medical student, don't think there is enough of an market for general primary care physicians and not enough specificity (currently) to most subspecialities. There are a lot of older physicians that have limited comfort in medicine. I would imagine there is a good market for concierge medicine practices - the kind of places that already have iPads and are interested in distinguishing themselves from the market.

this article simply poses the question, and does not answer it. waste of 5 minutes. for that, I will not upvote it.

Ayn Rand would like her pulpit back. jk

In the examples you cite, the benefits of progress in technology confound the changes you attribute to developments in policy and government.

If we look to only the recent example of India, it's decreasing poverty rate has been decreasing prior to "lessening of the socialist burdens" that you cite between 1980 - 2000. On page 4, it appears to be trending down in the 1970s and actually becomes stagnant in the 1990s.

Secondly, in the same study, for the time period you cite, India's Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequity, goes up.

http://www.ekh.lu.se/ekhcgu/teaching/401d4/poverty%20in%20in...

I'm all for capitalism, but I think it's misleading to think that it's everything for everyone. There are a lot of examples of great capitalism models as well as socialist models, and I think the idea of excesses in unregulated capitalism (ie. the cost and moral hazard of healthcare) are extensively documented.

What does one do if there is an entrenched competitor? Theoretically there is room for more than one right? I haven't heard of stickk.com. It'd be interesting to see what OP does with this.

I can think of some pretty ironic goal/charities:

Lose 10 pounds or donate 10$ to heart disease research.

Meat shield

I never know what to think of CEOs, founders, and large institutional shareholders selling a proportion of their stock. Everyone seeks to cite a benign reason for selling, they wouldn't want to hurt their investment, but inherently isn't selling a sign of a lack of confidence?

The article cites the idea of diversification - which at face-value seems harmles - , but is this a lack of confidence in the stock? Diversification implies to minimize risk, and that is reasonable only if Eric Schmidt thinks that there is significant risk that Google will underperform market (or at least his expectation of return in a different investment). Unless he has a specific purpose in mind with his extra cash-flow, I would imagine this can only reflect poorly on Google's future expectations.

Here's to hoping that Eric Schmidt only wants to live extravagantly for next couple of years.

Shouldn't there be some sort of parity?

A user is a user is a user. Unless google users are that much more likely to buy something after clicking my ad, why would you pay more per individual view? Sure the absolute numbers should go up with more views, but it doesn't seem like money well spent to pay more for similar adspace.

How are these statistics obtained?

I dont know. Every time I stream grooveshark, I wonder how much less energy I would be using if I just had the same 10 songs locally.