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asmithmd1on Balloon framing is worse-is-better (2021)

We had rehab work done when we moved to a Boston area house and they skim coated everything with plaster as standard of practice. That is definitely not the standard anywhere else I have lived.

Another regional difference is they put the powder room light switch next to the door on the outside, why? Has anyone seen this in any other area?

asmithmd1on Washington faltered as fentanyl gripped America

Here is a Snopes article from a year ago that claims to have duplicated the Fox News article using CDC data:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fentanyl-overdose-death/

Interesting that Google searches for this info return RT results

asmithmd1on Building a private LoRa network (2017)

Do you know of a tutorial for getting a small LoRa device up on the Helium network?

asmithmd1on Why do we call it “boilerplate code?”

Being a mechanical engineer by training, I always assumed it had come from the requirement that all boilers must have a nameplate affixed with a bunch of not really useful information about how it was tested. The hot water heater in your house has a boiler nameplate, and nuclear power plants have a "nameplate" rated capacity:

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-plant-ow...

asmithmd1on Pouring the 200 inch disk at Corning Glass Works

Polaroid was started in, and grew around Cambridge MA. It was kept alive on life support by a $1B settlement paid by Kodak for infringing their instant photo patents

asmithmd1on Why car wheels are so flat these days

Yes, you have to have caster or the car would be very difficult to drive. I had a VW bug with a worm gear steering box that was going bad. It would almost keep the wheels wherever you put them and it was scary to drive. Think about how you let the steering wheel slip as the wheels return to straight when you turn onto a cross road, you had to return the wheels to straight yourself.

asmithmd1on IKEA’s knowledge graph and why it has three layers

Digi-Key needs a sort by “most popular” You can often sort by number in stock to find a “normal” one

asmithmd1on “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

my actual example is the CTO (no background in software)

You seem to be very dismissive of people when they opine outside of where you think they are qualified to have opinions, and yet you give opinions where you might not have sufficient perspective.

Moving from linux to android for an embedded product means you basically have to rewrite absolutely everything... Great, that is information the CTO needs to know.

for a stack that is under the control of a single company, and is rarely used outside of mobile devices and automotive.

Here the CTO has more perspective then you do. Is the company about to sign a partnership with an Android shop? Is the company contemplating moving into a new product area? Yes, the ultimate problem would not have been fixed by moving to Android, but that does not make your opinion somehow factually right. Before reacting, try assuming the person making suggestions has valid reasons for making them and try to figure out what those reasons are.

asmithmd1on “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”

but I think the questions you ask may be wrong

Exactly this. You asked one question that you summarized dismissively as "...because they had read a blog post about another company doing it."

You could have stroked their ego a little by saying that you don't have the breadth of perspective that they do, before asking questions about what they perceive as the advantages of switching to React. Would it help get the team more visibility or credibility? Would it help advance their work goals?

What they should have asked you is: How long will it take to switch? What is your technical opinion of making a switch? They are not asking for push back about what concrete problems need to be solved. There are infinite ways to implement a solution, for some reason a manager focused on this way to create a solution, they want to know how long it will take and if you are interested in doing it, or would hate doing it.

asmithmd1on Deepest infrared image of universe

Are “the finest details” of an X-ray of your wrist finer than a screen grab from a camera phone video of your wrist?

asmithmd1on Deepest infrared image of universe

It is complicated and wavelength dependent. In near infrared, Hubble and JWST have about the same resolution. As the frequency moves further into infrared, JWST is better than Hubble. The other things that affect how clear an image is are “point spread function” - how much light gets scattered. And how steady the telescope can be held on one spot. Both of these capabilities are better for JWST than Hubble.

asmithmd1on Hysteresis (1997)

That is my understanding. A good example is a light switch. if you hold a switch in the middle between on and off, you don't know which way it will snap unless you know which way the switch was moved to get to the middle.

asmithmd1on Reverse-engineering the Apollo spacecraft's FM radio

Ultra premium guitar amps use point-to-point wiring:

https://secureservercdn.net/50.62.89.49/34e.08c.myftpupload....

This guitar amp wiring looks much better than the Apollo radio

asmithmd1on I should have loved biology

Yeah, I was kind of making a joke. But to stretch the analogy... Maybe there is a common source that is cross compiled to different chemistries producing a seed object code cell.

asmithmd1on I should have loved biology

the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth.

I would disagree, we see the object code. If we had the source, with comments, genetic engineering would be much easier

asmithmd1on Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

Yes. Massachusetts which is NOT a right-to-work state. That means the union can negotiate a clause in the contract that any nurses working at the hospital must join the union. Here is a current contract that includes pay ranges:

https://www.massnurses.org/public/resources/bargaining-unit/...

'Step' is years of experience

asmithmd1on The Caves of Mars (2019)

The Apollo command module environment was 5 psi pure oxygen. This gave the astronauts lungs the same partial pressure of oxygen that earth atmosphere provides. So not even 14 psi difference, but 5 psi. A difference that can be dealt with during a repair. A commercial aircraft cabin while flying at 40,000 ft has about 8 psi of pressure differential

asmithmd1on What software engineers can learn from the rapid collapse of Fast

If you lose an engine on a twin engine plane, you have to decide if you have an emergency or not. If you lose an engine on a single engine plane, you have to decide where you can make an emergency landing.

asmithmd1on Justice Clarence Thomas uncovered a seven-year-old bug in my program (2013)

Not speaking does not mean he isn't thinking. I was impressed how thoroughly he understood the issues in the Google v. Oracle Java case. He even included some sample pseudo-code in his dissent - although the code kind of sucks (footnote on page 46)

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

asmithmd1on The Uselessness of Phenylephrine

Completely agree with point 1. There are many researchers in the area who like to also practice, that lead me to ask the # of surgeries question.

My bias is towards surgery at a good regional hospital (Newton-Wellesley for example) with a surgeon who teaches downtown and does lots of surgeries.

What is my skew that that is bringing me more risk? I used to think all doctors were about the same. Now I realize that is about as true as all baseball players are the same. There are hall of famers as well as some who could be sent down to the minors. The trick is figuring out who is who, because other docs won’t say.

asmithmd1on The Uselessness of Phenylephrine

> I feel like this is one of the few applications where it could shine.

Read “The Alignment Problem”, a very good just above pop sci level book about machine learning. They have one example where ML determined seniors with COPD were at reduced risk from pneumonia, and obviously non-sensical result. Patients with COPD wound up in the hospital at a lower rate than average because doctors know they need careful attention right away.

asmithmd1on The Uselessness of Phenylephrine

For a colonoscopy I asked about the risk of a perforated bowel. Their first response was, “that is meaningless, if it happens to you the rate is 100%.” I said if the chances are 50:50, then I am not doing it. They said it has happened twice in their career and based on my lack of risk factors, it would not happen to me.

For my daughters tonsillectomy, the doctor was very happy to share how her stats for post surgery bleeding compared to both other doctors in her group, and the national average. But I live in a Boston suburb and every doctor is a lecturer at either Harvard or Mass General.

Another question to ask is will an intern take part in the surgery. At teaching hospitals the answer is almost always yes. You can ask if they operate at any other hospitals, and again the answer is almost always yes, they operate at a suburban, non-teaching hospital where they will be the only one operating.

I got a little bit humbled at Boston Childrens Hospital. I was doing some Googling about the risks of a CAT scan and asked if they did low-dose ones. They informed me that they in fact invented that procedure. Sure enough, the paper I was looking at was authored by a doctor on their staff.

asmithmd1on The Uselessness of Phenylephrine

There are some things that are helpful that they will answer that have steered me away from a surgeon: How many of these surgeries do you do per year? An answer of 50 or above is good. What is YOUR rate of <specific complication mentioned in the consent>? Keep pushing until they tell you their rate, not the overall rate.

asmithmd1on Launch HN: Helio Sleep (YC S21) – One-stop portal for sleep apnea

You know what is more ridiculous? You need a doctor to write a prescription to use this machine that ices your leg or arm.

https://gameready.com/gr-pro-cold-therapy-unit/

I think it must be some quirk of insurance that they will only pay for something IFF it requires a prescription

asmithmd1on Moving money internationally

Why does settling in dollars make any difference? Like he said, if the SWIFT secure messaging service goes down, someone at a bank in Japan has the phone number of someone at a bank in New York and can "wire" money with a phone call instead of sending a SWIFT message. Wires will be orders of magnitude slower, but money is not frozen. And the real effect is that someone in Mumbai receiving a phone call from a Russian bank today will be especially careful to cross every T and dot every I.

asmithmd1on Is the madness ever going to end?

"An engineer can do for a dime, what any idiot can do for a dollar" - Someone else

[edit] Achshually "An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two" - Arthur C. Wellington

asmithmd1on James Webb Space Telescope Launch December-22

actually...No earlier than the 24th now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29560383

asmithmd1on JWST now launching no earlier than Dec 24th due to communications issue

The James Webb Space Telescope team is working a communication issue between the observatory and the launch vehicle system. This will delay the launch date to no earlier than Friday, Dec. 24. We will provide more information about the new launch date no later than Friday, Dec. 17.

That is the total information they have released.

asmithmd1on Webb Telescope launch delayed at least 4 days

"Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter... A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band – which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter – caused a vibration throughout the observatory."

This sounds like coded speech for, "We dropped it a little"

asmithmd1on 29 Days on the Edge: The James Webb Space Telescope

The JWST will almost certainly fail. Here is that video re-edited to highlight the unprecedented risk they are taking on:

https://youtu.be/t-O_jFWX98A