mikecsh

Surely they could generate the hash on your own device..?

Aha, thank you.

MLA?

If only I could convince my company of that!!

Security concerns with this particular project aside, my dev machine does indeed have 8 GB of RAM, which Slack alone readily consumes 1/8th of whilst also using 15% of my total CPU power at rest, doing nothing at all.

There is no excuse for this - it is shoddy engineering. Sending text messages is a simple task. Ruining my battery life and performance for the sake of making it easier for the billion dollar company to ship a cross platform app which feels wrong on every platform is something I despise and I for one am extremely happy that people are trying to counter this ridiculous trend.

Sounds like a neat study - would you be willing to share your write-up?

Thanks for this - I'll try it out, I hadn't realised you could have one app on multiple virtual desktops!

I've often pondered this myself.

Windows has traditionally been a Window/document-centric OS where the primary object of interaction is a window (e.g. alt-tab would swap between individual Windows).

macOS has traditionally been an application-centric OS, one tabs between Applications.

What I would love to see is a project-centric system, where I can tab between projects and have all the relevant applications and documents appear and disappear with it.

In the UK, under the NHS, summary data regarding a surgeons performance is published [1].

There is an interesting debate about whether this is a good thing or not. One argument is that it improves transparency and allows patients to make a better, more informed choice of who operates on them.

The counterargument is that most patients don't understand that there is an element of probability distribution involved. Perhaps more importantly, if the thought process of a surgeon changes from "performing surgeries to the best of my abilities and knowing I will lose my job if I am dangerous" to "all my results are published for public scrutiny so I need to have a survival rate as close to 100% as possible as that is all the public comprehend" may lead to surgeons only being willing to take on cases which are very likely to be successful, as taking a difficult or last-chance case will have a high probability of mortality and therefore will affect their numbers. This would be a loss for many people. I don't know if any research has been done to determine whether that has borne out or not though.

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/service-search/Consultants/performanceind...

Additionally, trying to elicit the information you need to make a diagnosis is much harder than non-clinicians realise. Present a series of yes no questions doesn't really capture all of the information that is required; I suspect this is partly why previous expert systems have failed thus far.

From the moment the patient walks into the room you are assessing their clothing, their colour, their gait, their physique, how they're breathing, their emotional state, their physical abilities.

When you are discussing their problem you are varying not only the content of the questions you ask but also the style and the wording to match the patient's level of education, understanding, local culture and terminology etc.

For certain conditions patient's will lead you completely astray if you take what they are saying as canon. There is an art to human conversation and the best doctors I know excel at this as well as having the depth and range of knowledge to synthesise a diagnosis.

After a history you will typically examine the patient. Listen to their heart and lungs, palpate their abdomen, look at their retina or their eardrum, etc.

The diagnosis is made by gathering all of this information together and then running a "pattern matching routine".

I have no doubt that machine learning software is coming for us, but the job that doctors too is often oversimplified by techies. Myself included. As a programmer and electronic engineer before starting medicine I thought that it would be trivial to replicate much of the work in software. It isn't. It will happen but after another couple of orders of magnitude improvement.

In the meantime, using machine learning for diagnostic aids is hugely valuable. The sort of things we are seeing at the moment are very much the "low hanging fruit" of medicine - that is, tasks for which the input, analysis and output is well defined and easy to feed into a computer algorithm. Examples include analysing histology specimens for cancer, analysing head CT scans for stroke, analysing cardiac monitoring for patients at high risk of heart attack, and so on. The "difficult" part is the data gathering.

As an aside, I do think the role of doctors has changed over time. Medicine has advanced enormously as a field over the last hundred years. Much of what used to be the role of the doctor is now the role of nurses, nurse specialists, nurse practitioners or even physician assistants. Yet still (in the UK at least) doctors have a never ending amount of work to do!

I'm very excited to be at the crossroads of medicine and technology and upbeat about what the future will bring for patient care.

I wasn't complaining, but thanks for this!

As an electronic engineering student, our exams were negatively marked. If you got an answer wrong you incurred (-0.25 * $availablePoints). If you didn't answer the question you scored 0. We despised this at the time..

Now a medical student, we don't have negative marking. I feel it's actually very important in this discipline to know your limitations and not pass-off as though you know more than you do. I have however encountered resistance to this, having professors question my very reasons for doing medicine due to leaving questions unanswered..!

Cappuccino [1] is a port of Objective-C to Objective-J (plus transpiler to JS) combined with a port of the Cocoa Frameworks for building client side "desktop class" web apps. You can use interface builder in XCode to layout your UI graphically.

[1] http://cappuccino-project.org

Humans have a "tumour suppressor gene" called p53 which helps reduce the occurrence of cancers. Elephants (not quite whale size, but still pretty big!) have been shown to simultaneously express 20 variants of p53 which is thought to (at least partially) account for the lack of an expected increase in incidences of tumours given their sheer number of cells.

Further reading: http://www.nature.com/news/how-elephants-avoid-cancer-1.1853...

I quit my job as a software developer to study medicine. Although I still work as a developer for a medical education startup to pay the bills... perhaps there is no escape ;)

Oh how interesting! Thanks for the link!

I don't think this can be the whole story. Normally when a kidney is transplanted into a patient, the defective kidneys are not removed (adds unnecessary risk). There is plenty of space to add a kidney without removing the spleen so there must be more to this!

I still have this on my shelf! :D

Oops, also read your message as being from Slack!

This reasoning is essentially "it's easier for us". I have to use slack for work and it is extraordinarily frustrating to have to use such a ridiculously slow and resource intensive application for sending text messages in 2016. Coupled with the non-native UI (can I right click on that message? Oh no - it's a web page, let's find the cog to click on). Saying that it allows the UI to be the same on every platform to me means that it is not good on any platform. I would take IRC over slack any day at this point.

Because one issue does not negate an enormous treasure trove of content

To a degree. Sometimes it's OK for the user to have to put a modicum of effort in, especially for something which is not a product or service.

And before that from Motorola 68k

Somewhat off-topic but can anyone point me to any resources that explain the hardware architecture differences between x86 CPUS and the old LISP-machines? Was there hardware level support for s-expression evaluation?

Depends where she was studying as well. I'm in the UK and my elec engineering masters was £4k. They've since hiked the fees for higher education and my medical degree is ~£36k. Still, that's 9 years of education for 1 years of dev salary, plus I work for a startup whilst studying. It's definitely doable!

Swift

Oh that's really interesting! I went to school in the UK and they just divided it into numbered sets e.g Set 1 (top set) to Set 6 (bottom set). The US naming is an interesting affirmation of the child's difference from their peers - I've not heard of that sort of thing over here.

Do they actually call it a "gifted" track?!

I'm more interested in the content of the linked article than whether it offends someone's sensitivities. Bloomberg articles linked here tend to be interesting and of good quality.

You may very much enjoy the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. He was the founder of Palm computer with a strong computer science background and then went on to found his own neuroscience institute.

He has been working on AI in a system which he terms Hierarchical Temporal Memory which he describes in his book. The interesting point is that his algorithms and data structures are based on existing neuroscience research and "reverse engineering the neocortex". It sounds very buzzwordy but I found the book an excellent cross-disciplinary read.