chispamed

First of all congrats on building a business that focuses on tackling climate change as its probably the most pressing global issue of all right now. However I’ve been struggling with the ethics of carbon removal and carbon offsets a bit myself and would be really interested in your perspective. If the ethical goal is to have the lowest atmospheric CO2 concentration in let’s say 2050, how do you justify funding carbon removal now at a time where the prevention of carbon creation is way cheaper per ton and thus allows people to have a higher impact regarding that goal for the same cost? Is it because you feel that with the right funding now carbon removal could eventually become much cheaper? I’m not trying to criticize you, I’m just really interested in the topic as something about carbon offsets always feels pretty sketchy and I’m always looking for ways to ethically invest or donate (I gave to an anti-deforestation initiative for some years and am financing crowdfunded loans for businesses to install solar panels in developing countries right now while also leading an ethically conscious lifestyle when it comes to travel, diet, activism and general consumption).

I’m EU-based and my business is going to be B2C SaaS so these tips might not help you a lot. To minimize legal exposure the safest bet is to form a limited liability company wether that be a Spanish SL, a Dutch BV ir a German GmbH. Usually these also have a smaller counterpart which doesn’t require as much capital but still provides you with limited liability. If you need an US based corporation Stripe Atlas might also be of interest to you or if you need an EU-based one Estonia offers something called an eResidency and lets you create an EU business from abroad. Apart from that having an account take care of your taxes or at least proof-read your yearly filings seems like another step to limit you personal responsibility, even if a bit expensive.

As for VAT, I’m focusing on the EU market at the moment. EU law is that all SaaS B2C sales have to pay VAT in the country where the client resides, luckily there’s a process called mini one stop shop which allows you to file your VAT taxes in one EU country (while still indicating the country of every sale) which will then take care of the redistribution of the VAT taxes (a similar procedure exists for non-EU businesses who have EU customers, searching for EU VAT on e-Services should help you get started). With Stripe that means creating a taxId for every country and matching that with the country of residence my users have to provide on checkout when I create their session in the backend. Sadly I haven’t found any good applications that then take care of everything so it’s probably going to have to be a mix of csv importing everything into accounting software and handing everything to an account. It’s a bit frustrating tbh because it looks like accounting will be the single biggest expense in the initial phase of the business. So if anybody knows of a good solution for EU-wide SaaS B2C sales with Stripe I would be happy if they shared them. Even Quaderno and the like are not really feasible if you’re product costs less than 5$/month since they base their pricing on the number of sales.

I feel you. And even if you get everything to run well on a VPS or Netlify, opening it up to a big user base, limiting liability and generating income is another huge battle. I’m working on a side project I want to transform into an entire self-sustaining business at the moment. When I first had the idea, I got a prototype of the key parts up and running in less than a month. Now it’s been like a year and I spent my days optimizing webpack chunk sizes, trying different pwa cache busting techniques, reading Stripe-integration docs, studying international VAT schemes, legal requirements, ... The step from zero to product is way smaller than the step from product to law-abiding, income-generating service-providing business.

Edit: For those of you looking for a way to get simple prototypes working without having to use opinionated frameworks like Laravel or going down the JS rabbit hole, try Flask (in combination with SQLAlchemy and Marshmellow if you also need a simple ORM). Full flexibility, can be learned in minutes and you have the whole freedom of Python to do what you want.

In a society which doesn't care enough and a legal system that doesn't punish unethical behaviour any company tapping unethical revenue streams in addition to the ethical ones will have a competitive advantage and given otherwise similar conditions eventually outperform ethical companies. Once a sole actor goes down that path it puts a lot of pressure on all other actors to throw ethics overboard as well as otherwise their company's survival and in extension their livelihood will be threatened. This is why we can't just rely on market forces sorting everything out, consumers making decision, etc. but have to actively legislate to protect our privacy and personal rights.

While it may not completely change your life, a book that definitely opens your eyes (probably more so if you're white and male) when it comes to mondern-day racism and just how biased our thinking really is is "Biased" by Jennifer L. Eberhardt. You ask how many of the authors listed here a women but one could just as easily ask how many of the authors listed here are black and I think the answer would be just as shocking.

I don’t see it as a problem per-se, it just defies the notion of having a somehow unique, identifiable self which I understood as a condition for OP’s question and which I suppose is how most people view themselves.

As far as I’m concerned we might very well be just processes that can in theory be copied and recreated. In that case the person in the thought experiment would exist twice at a single point in time and then diverge into to different persons due to different environments and probabilistic processes in the body.

I understand where you're coming from, however I think that remembering the past is not a very helpful criterium since memories correspond to physical changes in the brain. In the thought experiment, the 1:1 molecular clone would have the same memories and think that he had lived through the same things as the original human for what it's worth. I'm not yet convinced that it is possible to define one self even though our (physiological) human experience definitely makes us feel like we were this clearly defined, independent, conscious thing.

But of course the conditions you mention are also very interesting and make it non-trivial to define the "true" essence of the person. Another interesting one would be dementia.

It's really difficult to draw a line between being our "selves" and the alternatives though.

We are not the individual cells of our body because most of them will be replaced in the next weeks/months/years. We also don't think of any body with a knee replacement as any less human. Even altering the genetic code of a huge part of your body, like after stem cell transplantation, is not commonly seen as making us less us.

Also suppose it was possible to build a synthentic neuron that behaved just like the ones inside your brain. If you started replacing your neurons with the synthetic ones, no individual neuron would "change" you. So were would you draw the line? At 10% synthetic neurons? At 20%? At 100%?

If we see ourselves as biological beings another interesting point is how you would view a 1:1 copy of yourself. If we constructed a synthetic human that had the exact same number of molecules in the exact same place as you, would that human be you? (Leaving aside that that's basically impossible, just as a thought experiment)

If you answered the last question with "no", that would also mean that not even the way we process information and think makes us us, since the 1:1 molecular clone would behave exactly the same as you in the same environment (in a purely deterministic universe at least, leaving aside probability and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).

So are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process? That would allow us to differentiate us from the exact clone. However in that case, would you be another person after being unconsciousness? What about general anesthesia? This really keeps me up at night.

It's next to impossible to define what we are and that we think of us as independent, unique beings might just be an illusion.

If you are searching for privacy-focused Google seaarch alternatives and are not happy with DDG, you may want to give Qwant (https://www.qwant.com, best one regarding privacy I've found so far but since the quarantine began it's been a bit slow) or Startpage (https://startpage.com, they actually show you google results) a try as well.

Not the person you asked, but I think so. Some fonts also convert “fi” into a character where the letter-spacing is very small and the i loses its point, so there’s definitely a mechanism for letter combination / adaptive spacing.

As someone with your exact background, I agree with you on almost all points. However I think that the common notion is less that AI will/should replace physicians but rather that AI could help physician to free time that they could then spend with patients. So the ongoing human involvement is an almost explicit goal (outside of radiology and pathology at least).

On another note and speaking from personal experience, NLP as well as patient information and note processing is something that might be less glorious than AI analysis of MRIs for example but which would have a far greater impact on physicians’ day to day life. Most residents spend like 50% of their time fighting applications with some of the worst UX I have ever seen just to get some basic information, log something or schedule a simple procedure.

For the second point, take a look at these studies:

Ferretti et al. (2020). Quantifying dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests that epidemic control and avoidance is feasible through instantaneous digital contact tracing. Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie...

Ganyani, Tapiwa, et al. "Estimating the generation interval for COVID-19 based on symptom onset data." medRxiv (2020). https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031815v...

The first study also touches on the point of transmission through surfaces which they argue should be at the very most 10% of all cases but probably less and a German virologist who's one of the leading experts in coronaviruses, Prof. Dr. Drosten, said that he and many others believe that surface transmission is almost negligible: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/coronaskript162.pdf (in German).

That's a logical fallacy. This app not being able to prevent all possible infections and having false positives / false negatives does not automatically mean that its sole purpose is to track users.

There are multiple scientific studies that support the use of an app as one of many measures for ending the lockdown which already takes away many basic rights at the moment. Even though viral RNA can be found on surfaces after hours this does not mean that surfaces are an important vector for transmission and all studies so far point in the opposite direction. What is very concerning however is that close to 50% of all tranmissions happen during the first few days of infection when the host is not experiencing any symptoms. In the absence of symptoms and given the many limitations of personal follow-up through the authorities (which gives them much more data on your person than this app ever could btw) an automatic notification system is the only way short of a complete shutdown to quarantine infected but currently asymptomatic patients and halt the spread of the virus.

Privacy-wise you would be worse of in any other situation as well. Do you want the shutdown to continue and police to be able to control you at any time when you leave your appartement? Do you want government workers asking the infected who they have been in contact with during the last weeks and them to give your name, address and contact details to the government? Do you want the economical crisis to continue and people to have to share all possible details with the government in order to get unemployment benefits? Also, Apple and Google already control your operating system and have much more data on you than this app could provide them with through their OSs and all their apps. What they could gain would at most be the knowledge of wether you could have been in contact with an infected person. Leaving aside that their system as outlined atm would not even allow them to do that, what would they gain? For most people there won't be any lasting effects so there ara no charateristics inherent to the group that can be targeted. It will also affect a huge chunk of the world's population, chances are that most people will have to quarantine at some point and then that data will be almost worthless.

You could still have geo sharding if the device also saved the location locally and shared the diagnosis for every zone it’s been in / downloaded the data for all zones. Ofc that would mean more data to process for travelers but it should still be way less than the data of the entire globe.

I'm doing it along with Ng's newer courses at the moment and I really like that he focuses on all the basics mathematically as well and not only conceptually which gives you a deeper understanding machine learning imo. However as others have said, the audio quality is subpar and personally I find it hard to motivate myself for the programming challenges in Octave. So my suggestion would be to just view the videos and take notes and then do the newer courses and their challenges.

Just to take you up on possible FOSS solutions: If anyone is looking for a private and open source video chat platform self-hosting NextCloud [0] might be worth a try.

[0]: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

I use Zotero in combination with the Google Scholar browser plugin which let's you download citation files on most pages far more easily than those pages themselves allow you to. I can highly recommend this setup

Yes, that’s a possibility and currently many monoclonal antibodies are produced that way (basically all drugs ending in “-mab”). However the process is costly and current capacities are not sufficient to supply a whole population regularly with antibodies which is why we still use some older drugs for certain diseases (think MTX for rheumatoid arthritis) and reserve monoclonal antibodies for treatment-resistant cases. I hope that it’ll be possible to protect high risk HCW and ICU patients through antibodies and thereby bring down Covid’s mortality soonish but we still need to buy some time until then and work on a vaccine to protect the population long-term. Right now what we need to do is stay at home and invest in medical care and drug development but with emphasis on the staying at home part because it’s the necessary condition for everything else to work.

If you regularly serve bigger files but have low traffic DigitalOcean S3 Spaces and a custom Cloudflare Workers CDN might be an interesting solution for you. Cloudflare Workers are based only on requests and priced at 5$/10M and if you cache everything heavily DO’s 5$ S3 plan should be enough for most use cases. (I’m not affiliated with either company)

Thank you for your comment. I often feel that a part of HN judges jobs only based on income and blames you for not focusing on one or the other and thereby losing out on income or business growth. However I, too, think that it's completely valid to stay at your main job while also working on side projects. Maybe you won't be the richest person in the room or turn your project into a huge success but being able to do stuff you love while not risking your peace of mind is worth something as well.

I can confirm, I live in a very humid city but I really like to sleep in a cold bedroom. However when indoor temperature dropped to below 17°C I had to heat it up back to 18-19°C because mold started growing near the windows. Unfortunately the house is very badly isolated so the temperature near the windows is always way lower than in the rest of the room.

Yes, sorry, should have clarified that. Although generally speaking HCM/HOCM is not a rare disease either and definitely not a negligible cause of non-traumatic mortality cause in younger people.

Prevalence is 200 per 100k so you’re almost certainly not affected. If you want to be sure a routine ECG and a trans thoracic ultrasound usually is sufficient to diagnose / exclude cardiac myopathy. 23andme doesn’t even look at the whole genome, they just look for common disease associated polymorphisms. No way of telling if you have a mutation that’s not in their database and even if you have a mutation it could be deactivated epigenetically or other factors could lead to you not suffering the disease.

Last year med student here, sudden cardiac arrest commonly occur in young people. Apart from infectious myocarditis which you might notice as fatigue and reduced performance after you’ve suffered a respiratory infection, hypertrophic myocardiopathy and especially hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy is often hereditary and can be mortal without showing prior symptoms. That’s why after a patient’s death you usually examine their broader family if HOCM was the cause as it can be detected via ultrasound and treated pharmacologically or interventionally (injecting alcohol in the obstructive parts or implanting a defibrillator).

The rationale behind not making it a tax is making it politically independent. If it were a tax any government could decide to just allocate the funds to other projects if they didn’t like the way they are portrayed on television. I’m very happy that it’s not paid for with tax money, otherwise we would just have uncritical state media.

Targeted affiliate marketing is far better than ads imo. Odds are that you’re catering to a subgroup with very specific needs (unless you’re trying to clone facebook). You can inform users about products that they might need, ideally in form of valuable content and just include links with your vendor identifier. No third party scripts whatsoever and ads the user might actually like and click.

I manage one app on a DO droplet and one on a Strato vserver and the docker setup I use for both is almost identical. So it's definitely comparable.

Strato.de (German) has some great plans. Just install docker one their linux vserver and you’re good to go. https://www.strato.de/server/linux-vserver/

Other comments have mentioned Hetzner which is good as well but for my calculations I looked at Strato vServers: https://www.strato.de/server/linux-vserver/ (in German)

A request is not a visit. Each visit might have a up to a hundred requests (or even more when showing live data and caching a PWA on first visit for example). That would translate to one user per hour or two which even unpopular side projects can get. But you're right about the free tier of course.