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helloworldon Ask HN: Fired from a company I loved- seeking advice

Have you read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People"? The book is about to celebrate its 80th birthday, but the advice is truly timeless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...

helloworldon America’s Other Drug Problem: Copious Prescriptions for Hospitalized Elderly

74-year-old Lola Cal... had a long history of health problems, including high blood pressure and respiratory disease. She was in the hospital with pneumonia and had difficulty breathing. Her medical records showed she was on 36 medications.

This would seem easily solvable by software, but electronic medical record systems are too often islands -- without bridges connecting them. So each new specialist she sees doesn't know about all of her prescriptions.

helloworldon Born to Rest

Harvard "needs to reopen a discussion about…a physical-education requirement."

It's been said that "love is a better master than duty," and requiring college students to take a physical education course sounds like a duty.

If you want people to exercise without coercion for the rest of their lives, I think you have to tap into intrinsic motivation, i.e., the unique things that get you excited. Depending on your personality and life experience, that might be novelty, socializing, recognition, or competition.

Forcing college students to exercise will backfire, leading many of them to stop as soon as the course is over.

helloworldon Soluble corn fiber can help young women build bone and older women preserve bone

I don't want to be unnecessarily cynical, but I do notice that this research about corn was funded by a company, Tate & Lyle, which provides corn-based ingredients:

http://www.tateandlyle.com/ingredientsandservices/pages/rawm...

Too bad that the researchers couldn't have found more neutral funders.

helloworldon Why Tim Berners-Lee is no friend of Facebook

Thiel’s strategy [to shut down Gawker through litigation] demonstrates how tech money...can now also suppress freedom of expression....

I think the writer is pointing out the irony that an investor who has benefited enormously from an open web has now effectively made it less open, because of the potentially stifling effect of lawsuits like his.

helloworldon Is Spelling Reform, Ten Years Old, a Success? (1916)

There's been recent controversy about President Obama's executive orders, so I found it interesting that this article describes the impact of an executive order by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 (which was subsequently overturned by Congress).

I hadn't known that executive orders began with George Washington:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order

And President Obama has issued relatively few executive orders compared with his predecessors.

helloworldon Australia's oldest working scientist at 102, fights to stay at university

He lives alone unassisted, does his own shopping on the weekends and travels to the Joondalup campus at least four days a week, making the 90-minute commute that involves catching two buses and a train.

It's fascinating -- and inspiring -- to see how mentally and physically capable some people remain into their 100s.

Is it good genes? Good lifestyle? Good environment? Good luck? Maybe it's all of these.

helloworldon Bill Gates Interview (1993)

Oops! Sorry about that. I wasn't aware of the guideline, but I'll certainly comply in the future.

To help others follow this guideline, how about a small change to the design of the Submit page? Instead of title, maybe the first text box could be labeled original title. Or maybe add the note, "Please use original page title" after the text box.

helloworldon Amazon launches a fund to expand digital reading

I love the convenience of Kindle e-books -- readable on my phone, tablet, and Kindle device -- but I miss the ownership benefits of physical books. It's nice to be able to freely lend, sell, or donate books. I think that laws need to evolve to guarantee that e-book owners have the same options.

helloworldon Leonard Guarente's Anti-Aging Pill

In a first-world, disposable income scheme of things, I guess $60 a month isn't bad. Your cellphone bill is probably higher.

But what Bill Gates said last year in a Reddit AMA resonates with me: "It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer."[1]

I'm reminded of an inscription that appears on English gravestones going back to at least the 1500s:

  If life were a thing that money could buy,
  The rich they would live and the poor they would die;
  But God in His goodness hath ordered it so
  That the rich and the poor they together must go.

Maybe not for much longer.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-ti...

helloworldon Google Contributor

Sounds like a variation on Tipjoy (YC S08):

https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/20/tipjoy-heads-to-the-deadpo...

Good luck, but 20 years of failed micropayment-for-content startups don't bode well for this.

helloworldon EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

You're right. With some Googling, I learned that the FDA does indeed have a "Human Factors Pre-Market Review Process."[1]

But for EpiPen, it seems that the process didn't work, because 60% of consumers apparently can't use the device reliably. I hope that EpiPen is an anomaly, and not typical for FDA-approved lifesaving consumer medical devices.

[1] http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...

helloworldon EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

The fact that three out of five people trained to use this lifesaving product weren't able to.

helloworldon EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

In the study below, moms of kids with severe allergies were trained to use the EpiPen. Six weeks later in a simulated test, only about two out of five were able to successfully deliver a lifesaving dose of adrenaline.

Shouldn't the FDA require that manufacturers provide evidence that consumer medical devices can be used reliably for their intended purpose?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654245/

Patients’ ability to treat anaphylaxis using adrenaline autoinjectors: a randomized controlled trial. Allergy. 2015 Jul; 70(7): 855–863.

helloworldon EpiPen Price Rise Sparks Concern for Allergy Sufferers

Why haven't competitors entered the market with cheaper products?

helloworldon Taking the final wrapper off of Android 7.0 Nougat

Also, no update for the Nexus 7 (2013) tablet:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/android-nougat-drops-...

[I]t's too bad that the support lifecycle of the most consistently updated Android devices is so much shorter than what Apple achieves with iOS, especially since the hardware should still be more than capable of supporting Nougat.

helloworldon The Race for a Zika Vaccine

[National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony] Fauci is frustrated that Congress still hasn’t authorized emergency funds for the Zika effort. (President Obama requested $1.9 billion in February.) “We have had to borrow money from other accounts to get our work started,” Fauci said.

This is an epidemic. Why hasn't Congress acted?

helloworldon Emerging Technologies of 2016

Horizon scanning for emerging technologies is crucial to staying abreast of developments that can radically transform our world, enabling timely expert analysis in preparation for these disruptors.

Who are these experts? And have they ever accurately predicted the future, much less helped us prepare for it?

helloworldon Facebook’s Point System Fails to Close Diversity Gap

The article doesn't mention any focus by Facebook on diversity of age.

Along with data on race and gender, does the company make public the percent of its workforce that is over 40 or 50?

helloworldon With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

Maybe this can be read as a cautionary tale about how easy it is to convince yourself to cut ethical corners when money is involved.

In an honest moment, I suspect that many Microsoft executives would acknowledge that the behavior described here is morally dubious. Yet they've allowed it to happen.

This reminds me that it's a daily challenge to avoid temptation and do the right thing. I hope that at least a few people in Redmond are thinking the same thing.

helloworldon Google Duo, a simple 1-to-1 video calling app

Sounds like Duo has a simple user experience, which is great. But it doesn't solve the eye-contact problem with video calls today.

When you look at the person on the screen whom you're talking to, that person sees you looking away, because you're not looking into the camera, which is somewhere on the edge of the screen. So you don't make eye contact with the person you're talking to.

And for me, that makes video calls feel weird.

helloworldon Tim Cook, the interview: Running Apple ‘is sort of a lonely job’

In Tim Cook, it's interesting to see a leadership style that's so different from the Jobs/Ellison mold. Cook seems to have a very humble manner, and he emphasizes listening to and learning from people both inside and outside Apple.

In the startup world, I wonder whether founders can find success in emulating Cook -- or whether a harder-edged, harder-driving style is required.

helloworldon An introduction to Japanese

Len Walsh's "Read Japanese Today" is a gem. By exploring the history behind the symbols -- using what the author calls a "pictorial mnemonic method" -- it's easy to learn many kanji in an enjoyable way.

Before a few-month stay in Japan, I sampled a variety of books and audio programs. Now, looking back many years later, Walsh's simple introduction is the one I remember best.

https://books.google.com/books?id=QcrXBQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PT...

http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Read-Japanese-Today/Le...

helloworldon Most olive oils sold in the United States are adulterated or deceptively labeled

The five-year PREDIMED trial found that daily consumption of olive oil reduced by 30 percent the risk of stroke or heart attack.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1200303#t=abstrac...

helloworldon Journalists confused an opinion piece for an alcohol-cancer study

Actually, this might be an example of the "healthy user" bias in observational studies.[1] Although epidemiologists do try hard to include all of the relevant variables in their analyses, there are likely unidentified individual differences (perhaps including personality and lifestyle) that distinguish people with better health outcomes.

That's why double-blind, randomized, controlled trials provide more compelling evidence of cause and effect.

[1] Do we really know what makes us healthy? NY Times Magazine, Sept. 16, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t....

helloworldon I Hacked My Diet with Science

Tuna seems to be high in mercury:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/tuna.asp

You might want to substitute some lower-mercury alternatives:

http://www.nrdc.org/health/effects/mercury/guide.asp

helloworldon Dear YC: Please stop downvoting thoughtful comments you disagree with.

N.B. The Hacker News Guidelines:

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

helloworldon Source code from Apollo 11 open-sourced

Um, dude, back in the day, all you got were CAPS. (And that was still true ten years later, in 1979, with my Apple II Plus.)