jacobrobbins

This is really interesting and seems like a great example of how small businesses are better for their community than chains. When I lived in Fort Greene brooklyn I was surprised by how many barbershops and hair salons there were, like 5 or more on the single little triangular block at fulton and greene. It seemed clear they were providing more of a community function than just the utility of getting a haircut that i was familiar with. On a side note I never got comfortable with making conversation while getting my haircut and eventually settled on just cutting my own hair at home. That said I never tried the barbershop-type places and usually went to pretty generic haircut shops.

wood expansion is a big factor for wide flat pieces. Non directional wood products like MDF are used in cabinetry because they do not expand to anywhere near the same degree as solid wood. If you want to use solid wood you have to float it in panels, like you sometimes see on doors. But that adds a lot of complexity. For cabinets where you have dozens of moving pieces using MDF (or plywood) is much better for the reliability of the moving parts.

it would seem likely that if they discover a physical mechanism at work in select individuals brains (electric waves followed by rhythmic waves of fluid) that the mechanism exists in some form in all individuals. I agree it does make for a clear follow up question: "could this mechanism be altered in some ways in people who experience sleep problems?"

while technology is very advanced it still has a lot of limits. Watching what is happening in someone's brain without damaging them is quite difficult. From the article "Currently, people who volunteer for such experiments have to be able to fall asleep while wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap inside of a noisy MRI machine—no easy feat." So it would seem that studying internal brain activity during healthy sleep is indeed a challenge.

the poster mentioned it was for greeting cards, I remember their used to be a lot of greeting cards that would play a recording when you opened them. I bet they loaded low-quality samples into the ROM for that.

so glad to see that place mentioned! it was my morning coffee stop when i lived in new york. the owner/operator is great to chat to, lots of interesting stories about the neighborhood.

yeah when I saw that quote the first thing I thought is that this is probably one of those non-replicable studies that was cherry picked out of a small sample size.

cars cost "tens of thousands" yet personal automobile ownership has been feasible and has a huge positive impact on the economy. If that 10-90K ballpark cost estimate is accurate then accessing the information superhighway could be a similar situation.

re-reading your comment "This is talking about the cost-benefit from a societal perspective, not from the accounting perspective of the hospital." I think perhaps you do not understand what residents do. Residents handle a portion of the patient workload. They provide direct economic benefit to the hospital by handling patient workload at a lower salary than more senior doctors. There is a hierarchical system by which work is reviewed by more senior doctors but this is used in all hospitals regardless of whether there are residents. The economic benefit to the hospital is that residents do the work for lower salary than doctors. Putting that into dollar terms is what this article has failed to do, likely because the data to do so is not there.

I agree with this logic about "if residency programs predictably broke even" but I don't see any concrete support for that in the article. They don't have an accounting of revenue per doctor or at least the article has not shown one.

Saying the benefit is social benefit doesn't help here, obviously it is it's a hospital, there needs to be revenue numbers in the mix to talk about breaking even.

bkovacev out of curiosity what country do you live in? Because i have friends who have had much better experiences in Estonia.

I dealt with an RSI issue and had a similar experience where traditional hospitals and MDs did not help. I needed to go outside that system to get help. The hospital system is simply not setup to deal with those things; it is setup to deal with people who are possibly going to die. Imagine this is your job: the city you live in collects all the people who are so seriously sick or injured that their families/friends are worried they might die and brings them to you. You have to deal with all of them. Any of the people you can't assist don't get treatment and their illness takes its natural course. Now imagine how much of your training is focused on RSI.

If you think of a modern hospital as a direct organizational descendant of a war triage hospital, albeit one that is dealing with the health issues that kill the American public (generally cancer, heart disease and other manifestations of our unhealthy lifestyles), then you will have a better idea of when to go there. i.e. your problem must be acute.

I was confused by that part too because the article goes on to say teaching colleges "have an incentive to offer residencies in specialties from which they can get the most revenue per resident."

My guess is the 150K number ignores the revenue contribution of the residents (which must be significant because they carry out a significant amount of the work that requires a doctor at a hospital)

I did a google search and found one article that seems to confirm this: "Whether the programs are ultimately costs or moneymakers for hospitals is mostly unknown. Expenses tied directly to the programs are tracked, but overall cost-benefit accounting that would take into account such things as savings or lower medical bills for patients from the use of lower-paid residents instead of practicing physicians isn't done." http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20150719/news/307199...

The argument that federal funding is the only way to create more educational "seats" for doctors seems strange since the article claims they are paid much more than other fields, and is not really laid out well in the article.

To contrast your single positive account with a single negative account, my brother has been unable to update his Estonian e-Resident card because the system only works reliably on Windows. He has to wait to re-activate until the next time he goes to Estonia.

He has used the system from the outset and describes it as dated. It was built for a pre-mobile era and does not have a full-featured ecosystem for mobile devices.

This is a great point. Clothing styles go in and out of fashion on a cyclical basis that is multiple years long.

my company shared an office with the Jewelbots team and I was very impressed at the user testing they did. The bracelet is a great user-programmable product for 8-14 year olds, which is really a difficult age group to design for.

this is a great resource, a lot more stuff in here than a typical blog post

fortunately, this change should help diversify the number of certificate authorities for people to use. In the explanation of the wilcard support they link to another post that explains it is enabled by their rollout of ACME v2.

Wildcard support is one advantage of ACME v2, but another advantage they list is "ACME v2 was designed with additional input from other CAs besides Let’s Encrypt, so it should be easier for other CAs to use" - https://letsencrypt.org/2017/06/14/acme-v2-api.html

So, in addition to this functional improvement to Lets Encrypt, the change should enable more automated CA options in the future.

they said enterprise devs are failing more interviews because of cultural filtering by the hiring company, not that they are failing the technical assessments more than other devs.

The idea that design is primarily done inside tech companies is wrong. Netflix has a series called "Abstract" that profiles notable designers and none of them work for web/tech companies.

the philosophical questions raised by multiple, visually similar species being considered as one have come up before. Zebras were discovered to be 3 separate species. See "What, if anything, is a Zebra?" from 1983 http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/gleazer/462_readings/gould.pdf

> All of the information of our world is contained in text.

This statement is false. There is a well known thought experiment called Mary’s Room the gist of which is that knowing all conceivable scientific knowledge about how humans perceive color is still not a substitute for being a human and perceiving the color red: https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Did_Mary_Know

The experience of seeing red is an example of what is called “qualia”.

In Google AI systems that identify cats, birds, etc it is reasonable to imagine AI technology evolving towards systems that can discuss those objects at the level of a typical person. However with an AI based on text only there is no possibility of that. It would be like discussing color with a blind person or sound with a deaf person.

This is the correct path forward to move society into a digital era. It follows the well established principle that the state uses force in legally proscribed ways to maintain security. Known as the “monopoly of the legitimate use of force”, this is a core concept of modern law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence). This concept carries over cleanly from the past into the digital era. In this case govt security forces are committing digital violence in the same way that criminals do. Same thing as when the SWAT team breaks down a door, just a digital version.

The alternative is that the government co-opts manufacturers so that government agencies can carry out security tasks without using digital violence. That’s what the FBI is seeking in the Apple case and it is a much worse direction for society because it challenges the existence of strong security in our increasingly digital society.

Note that the legitimate use of force is done according to law. As stated in the article, “In order to use the malware, government officials will have to get a court order, allowing authorities to hack into a citizen's system.”. If your objection to this is “they say that it’s done according to law but we know there will also be instances of them using it inappropriately” then you are also arguing that strong encryption (and pretty much any interesting technology) should not be allowed for public use because we know there will also be instances of it being used to achieve bad ends.

I understand that the reality of police, military, etc are not as nice as the theory but I have not seen people here explicitly rejecting the use of force by the state. If you oppose the German government employing spyware, you should consider whether you also oppose it arresting people in general. I suspect most people here have no alternative to suggest in place of the centuries of legal tradition that western societies are built on.

Saying you have absolutely no oversight in the UK is not true. I recently read David Omand's "Securing the State" which is the most informative book I have found on how to integrate secret intelligence into a democratic society. Most of the analysis in the book focuses on the UK system as he is a longtime member of the UK intelligence community. There is a detailed discussion of how to meet the challenges of keeping a secret intelligence system accountable while maintaining its secrecy. Specifically see your JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) and its history of post-portem analysis after notable incidents such as the Iraq WMD misread. That was about political influence into the workings of intelligence, scope overreach is of course the issue of the day but presumably they could take a crack at it.

In fact I have come to believe that your system is more well-managed than ours here in the US partially because it is a smaller country and hence easier to keep track of. See the Washington Post's article (before Snowden's revelations) on the mushrooming growth of myriad, largely redundant secret intelligence groups dispersed throughout various US agencies: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...

this was great, thank you for taking the time to pull your thoughts together.

This is great. I love the idea that people can take the effort they would put into casual gaming and learn coding skills. Also an interesting point that doing some of these courses can get your resume viewed more even when applying for non-coding jobs. It seems like Codecademy has found a niche helping people who are not full-time computer science types get benefits out of coding.

Yes, I think the key word in that sentence is "legally". The following article describes the situation re: warrantless monitoring of u.s. citizens by the NSA: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...

The thing is that they can not bring the result of this warrantless wiretapping into court. But they probably don't want to.

From what I've seen the FBI is a lot more vocal in complaining about the impact of encryption because their mandate involves bringing cases to court so they want a formalized, legitimate way of breaking encryption when they have warrants. They would also love to have the dragnet that the NSA has to know who to watch, and I don't know to what extent they do, but the bigger difference that I see is that the NSA is not interested in launching court battles (any more) whereas that is the primary endgame for the FBI.

The problem of course is that an encryption system which can be broken in a formalized way is open to the possibility of being broken by the wrong people. You can't have your cake and eat it too by having strong encryption that can be broken by the "right" people because there is no way to theoretically describe who the "right" people are. The encryption has to work the same for everyone.

Like all big issues in society there are competing rights; the need for law enforcement bumps up against the freedom of the individual. I believe that we are comfortable enough pushing this balance more heavily towards the freedom of the individual in America that a policy of embracing strong encryption is in the best interests of everyone, but I am aware that I don't have as much knowledge about this issue as some others.

living on a street with 8 contemporary art galleries I can say that 90% of contemporary art sucks. It's just like startups, 90% of them fail. But people who love startups or art keep making more regardless.

I think a lot of the irritating attitude is the support of people who all do the same thing. Same way when your friend makes a new web app you're not going to say it sucks even if it does because (a) they're your friend and (b) you are going to want moral support for your next web app at some point.

Mayor Bloomberg was a hacker actually. He started out working in a financial company, saw a need for a better way of getting information and quit to build the Bloomberg terminals which turned into the Bloomberg company.