napoleoncomplex

Tangential, Openpediatrics seems like a great initiative, are there any other such resources for other medical fields?

There is the FOAM movement (Free and open acces meducation - https://lifeinthefastlane.com/foam/) but I bet there's many more out there.

It feels like there is some foundation for medicine to evolve like software evolved, where there is more and more open source knowledge to build upon, democratizing and lowering the cost of access to that knowledge.

This has been in testing for a while, so I'm guessing they already know how to prevent businesses from having automated replies to each customer message to avoid paying the charge. Anyone have an idea how they do it?

Yeah, skip the reviewer, they cite the rules endlessly, even if the rule they are citing has no connection to the actual problem (in your case it does, but still). App Review Board, send in your plea, that's that.

Did you have a conversation with your reviewer, or are you just citing what the App Store rejection was?

You can both appeal the reviewer's decision and have a conversation with the reviewer, and if that doesn't work, you appeal to apple's app review board.

In the few times we've experienced rejection, the review board was the most useful option, and always approved us in the end.

Few points to expect:

- it was not uncommon to get cited completely different "violations" as you go through various appeals

- "other apps do it" doesn't get you far

- process can take a while but perhaps we made a mistake of not going directly to the Apple app review board and stating our case there. We got approved in a few days after that.

No citations, just thinly-veiled attacks, and the source seems to be somebody with quite an interesting angle on several topics:

- Why the ‘e’ in e-car actually stands for evil

- Singing the praises of coal — the virtuous stone that liberated humanity

- How Tesla’s Elon Musk became the master of fake business

A solid skip of a read.

Any insight from HN insiders on how seriously companies big and small are taking this?

In my experience, the buzz around this is much more serious compared to previous efforts, "the cookie law" for example, though I have no idea on the actual impact.

In our company, we've decided to implement the necessary changes, because a lot of them just make sense (be clear with the user on tracking, don't store personal data you don't need...). It could turn out to be a competitive advantage, but only if the rules really are enforced.

Otherwise it will be the same as the cookie law, the companies following it had a shittier user experience, and the ones that didn't were never penalized (the cookie law was absurdly bad legislation in my opinion to be clear).

So any insight from the HN crowd would be much appreciated!

A few things that I haven't seen discussed much.

1. Battery degradation should happen to all phones, regardless of OS/manufacturer. How do other phones handle this (flagship Android phones etc.)?

2. If other phones don't experience these shutdowns on such a wide scale or don't throttle the performance so harshly (to literally half or one third of original performance) to avoid shutdowns, what about the iPhone is different to force them into this decision?

Geekbench which posted the larger group of data confirming this, they could probably run the same analysis on S8 phones from Samsung.

Now, if the same does not happen on other phones, the entire debate being framed as it currently is, is a pretty amazing PR spin.

It's much easier to justify the decision between phones shutting down or throttling the device, than it would be to justify a engineering decision that makes the above two choices the only choices, despite other vendors being able to seemingly pull off this magic trick of keeping devices working for more than a year.

With all of Apple's resources and engineering know-how, it seems a stretch that they would be the only ones incapable of solving this issue.

I don't actually know if other vendors solve it differently, but I do know that they have the same battery life, the same phone thinness and powerful specs.

Does anyone have a clue about this? Seems like the more interesting story.

Might be an absurd proposition, but according to their website, the publisher is a non-profit called NautilusThink, meaning it's eligible for the Pineapple Fund (https://pineapplefund.org/).

Now I don't know what the odds are, but considering there's about $79m left, I'd say they aren't too far from the odds of the potential acquisition talks coming through.

It won't solve the underlying issue, but it will make possible to at least think about better ways of solving it.

Apologies for side-tracking the OP discussion, but how's the performance on this thing? Have been looking for a tiny phone for a while.

The original title on the website does not do much to reveal the content, but in short, the book is about a new "theory of the brain" (new as in the past 10 years), based on predictive processing.

The post itself, and the follow-up posts about predictive processing on the above blog are probably the easiest way to get into the subject, and it's an insanely interesting subject.

The core of the idea is written a bit into the blogpost: "The key insight: the brain is a multi-layer prediction machine. All neural processing consists of two streams: a bottom-up stream of sense data, and a top-down stream of predictions. These streams interface at each level of processing, comparing themselves to each other and adjusting themselves as necessary."

Deeper into the post, there's a breakdown of how this theory fits into various areas of research in novel ways (autism and schizophrenia among them), and I strongly suggest reading through at least that.

My impression is that it has accelerated if anything. Random teams are raising 5-10m$ daily, and people who missed out on the first wave a few months ago are now gearing up to be a part of the second wave.

A good overview of the amount of these things is here: https://www.icoalert.com/

Not all of them will raise successfully, but the percentage is way higher than you would expect. Not to mention some of the longer ongoing sales, such as EOS, with 200m+$ raises. Either way, it's still quite insane out there.

Games and apps like Snapchat can go that route, making the user learn a completely different UI. But for practically every other app type, going with a new UI and discarding the platform defaults for navigation, buttons, etc. is only going to hurt you in the long run, both from a user perspective (no one has the patience to learn a new UI with every app), and from a effort standpoiont (it takes way longer to develop your own UI than it does sticking with platform defaults).

That has been my experience at least, every time we changed something from "our" way to a more default platform way, we've seen better metrics and retention across the board. We even try to avoid platform specific things like swipe to delete etc., because the general user does not use those features, even if you "teach" them in the onboarding.

This doesn't mean that you shouldn't style your app etc to give it an identity, and there's actually a lot of room you have even when sticking to default elements.

I guess it's time to try Firefox again. Always missed the superior URL bar experience over Chrome, and it seems my other excuses have been dealt with :).

It might be paranoid from the aspect of history, but this is something that I definitely noticed with the URL bar when moving from Firefox to Chrome.

Chrome will often offer the first result as a search query, instead of a website I visited before. Feels very clear that it's a big part of their business model. Firefox is much more aggressive in serving history URLs. If I type "videos" in Firefox, it will give me "reddit.com/r/videos" as the first result, since I've been there plenty of times, but Chrome insists on offering the first result as a generic Google query for "videos".

Related sidenote, Firefox was also way superior in remembering which letters I type to go to which site in a more broad way. Chrome does it on a very basic level, prioritizing the sites that have the same string on the top level domain. Example, if I type "news" Chrome is always going to offer me sites that begin with "news" such as "news.ycombinator.com", even if I more often end up going to "randomsite.com/news" or "randomsite.com" whose page title is "News!" when typing that. Firefox remembers my preference, which means that after a few days of Firefox use, I'll have a bunch of 2 letter combos that take me to the exact site I want ("ne" to Hacker News, "vi" to reddit videos, "ap" to an apartment listing website which has "ap somewhere deep in their URL, or just in the title of the website, etc.), while Chrome will only give me top level URLs, and feels as useless on week 10 as it did on week 1. For sites where I don't remember the URL, I'll usually end up googling the page title in Chrome, while Firefox would serve me exactly what I need from history.

Part of all of that is just shit UX on Chrome's part, but it's a safe bet that shit UX drives significant revenue for Google.

Also from Europe, and we have a similar approach, discussion with the candidate about previous work, interesting problems, any public code they've written, etc. Just to figure out what kind of challenges excite them, and get to know them better.

We also do a coding challenge after that, basically the candidate behind a computer, with all the resources they want accessible to them, implementing a simple example directly relevant to the type of work they'll be doing, while the interviewers are in the room and debate with them if needed.

To me, the most important quality in a candidate, once we determine that the basic skill level is good enough, is their ability to learn, quickly find the resources needed, and rely on the team when they need help. Whiteboard interviews don't seem to select for any of those qualities.

The comments below explain a bit of the reasoning, but I agree. In cases where there is no alternative meaning to the word, this makes for a confusing read, especially since ö is a letter with a completely different sound in several European languages (German, and I think Norwegian and Danish, and my local dialect of Slovenian :P), pronounced as "oe"

If you want to imagine how I read a word like that, this video is a helpful guide to pronounciation of ö: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr-mCMtISfA

I might be wrong, since Italy might be different, but in my experience, incorporating in another EU (or elsewhere) country isn't a big issue at all. A lot of people incorporate in the UK, other European countries, or the US, Delaware especially. Of course if you pay salary to yourself from that company, and you live in Italy, you'll still be taxed at the tax rate of your residence. But in general, there is no law against opening up a company elsewhere, if you properly report about your business, and don't use it to avoid taxes. Yes, you have to deal with some bureaucracy, but nothing major. If you're one guy/girl with a laptop, meaning no outside people involved, do you have a product yet? Do you have something people use? Do they have to pay to use it? If yes to all of that, then you need a company. Earlier than that you shouldn't worry too much about it.

The fact that it was made by a single person still blows my mind. $24m is a crazy number, great success story in a genre largely ignored and stigmatized by previous "farming simulator" success stories such as Farmville with its abusive mechanics. It was the best gaming experience I had in years, after completely losing interest in games for a while. It sounds cliche, but the game feels like it was crafted with care. So many lovely details and surprises, and a very calming experience overall. It made me realise how few games these days make me feel more relaxed after playing them. Hopefully this serves as inspiration for other devs to explore abandoned genres.

What I got from the e-mail was that this is after the Obamacare website rework was already done, and they wanted the same guy to work on a "secret" Eric Schmidt project, since he proved to be a good leader.

Since the guy questioned "how legit it is", the insinuation I get from Wikileaks that this project was some kind of shady government spying project.

Edit: to be clear, based on the e-mail it could literally be anything. But I guess the main point is to show how tightly SV is integrated into the inner workings of government.

Just wanted to chime in and say Indie Shuffle is one of the best resources I've found for new music out there (for my taste).

While I have no need for SubmitHub's main purpose, the Popular tab looks like it can serve as another source of fresh stuff.

All in all, massive respect for your work promoting new music. As a sidenote, I'd happily donate some money through Patreon/whatever to support an ad-free version of the site (I know, I know, one in a million :).

As others have mentioned, there are a few factors in play. The interview mentions the letter he recently wrote to his dying ex-love, where he said himself "I am not far behind". Connected to that, his single from the new album is more or less an invitation for death to come for him. Those things likely triggered the sense of urgency in some reporters :).

The first of the numbers (rate of mothers dying) would not be affected at all by what you mention, and the second (rate of children under age of 5 dying), while affected by infant mortality (number of deaths of infants under 1 year old), is a much wider metric, so the effect is also relatively small.

Either way, I'd be interested in seeing some sources for those claims, as it's the first I've heard of it happening, at least in the developed world. And I mean it sincerely, since it's a topic of interest to me.

Here's a figure from the article posted by Eric Topol on twitter: https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/729688822053670912

Combined with the stat you mentioned, it's a strange one. Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but there's barely any physicians receiving above $50k in payments, so the biggest impact pharma payments have made is around a 5 % difference in prescribing. Looking at the variation at around $0-$10k, 5 % seems like a tiny change, since you have docs prescribing anywhere from 0 % and 80 %. Something else is driving it, my guess would be good personal relationships with sales reps? In that case, focusing on limiting that would have a much better impact on fixing the issue.

The big variation could also be something completely innocent like trust in a specific brand due to experience in the clinic, etc. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

Both of these projects are from Ben Goldacre (not singularly, but he has a big part in both).

COMPare is a continuation as far as I understand it, because now that all trials are registered and should follow those standards, abuse is still happening in the way COMPare points out.

The standard that COMPare is aiming to achieve, as far as I understand it, is the following:

1. Outcomes that will be measured for clinical trials need to be registered and public ahead of the trial (this is already achieved with recent regulation, as mentioned in the article)

2. If planned outcomes change, the change needs to be reported and explained, with new outcomes being again clearly stated.

I really struggle to see how enforcing this will prevent productive research. This is basic scientific hygiene, not fantasy. No one is arguing that studies shouldn't be adjusted, just that the adjustments should be clearly stated.

Completely changing the goals of a study after failing on your initial goals, and then claiming success without mentioning any of the failures along the way is poor science, because you're masking a lot of potentially significant findings along the way that others can benefit from as well.

Not to mention that these standards have been agreed to by all the largest journals decades ago, with big PR claims of how this is needed etc., yet are never followed in practice. The responses of some journals (NEJM, JAMA that I recall) have been shameful, and contradictory to standards they claim to follow.

For the card type which has your name, in the early days, probably 6, 7 years ago, the national "information commisioner" (office which oversees personal information use in companies/government) carried out an audit of the system. Turns out noone thought of anonymizing the trips, and they were forced to update the system soon after, to strip all personal info out of trip data.

As the previous commenter mentioned, there's also a card type which requires no personal info, and you can load it up with cash.

Completely agree, I was blown away at the level of transparency this brings to the world of pharma prescriptions. Inefficient care, overprescribing, otherwise suspect prescriptions, all of this laid out very clearly.

Ben Goldacre is moving mountains, stone by stone.

This is fantastic. Addresses the completely broken aspects of doing research in academia, gives researchers access to top developers through the YC network, gives you a much better environment stress and pay-wise than if you're a researcher, and focuses on meaningful innovation. And the research will be free to use. Nailed it in so many aspects.

@sama - since you mention that startups aren't good at solving certain types of problems, is this something you've always believed, or is it a realisation through your work at YC?

Also was it inspired by the Shuttleworh Fundation in any way?

There's no need to make up dark motives on Marco's side, his blogpost on blocking The Deck (http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads) pretty clearly showed where the cracks were. A lot of people and business will get hurt in this, plenty of them not at fault or at least with no better way to monetize.

Now to be clear, I use ad blockers on the web myself, and intend to install the Android ones once I root my phone. But it's getting tiring reading people standing on some moral high ground to justify their use of ad blockers. There is no scenario where this leads to better-behaving ad networks, or to better monetization models for the web. The final winner of this ad blocker war is a no-frills ad blocker that blocks as much ads as possible, regardless of the quality of the ad network and its ads. The majority won't go and fiddle with the settings to approve ads on sites they like, or from ad networks that are cool. Give people a chance to block all ads and they will, even if some "innocent bystanders" get hurt. And I think Marco saw that scenario unfolding in real life with Peace's success.

One example, Daring Fireball is proud of how his monetization strategy is working out for him, and justly so, he hand picks his promotions and packages them into little promotional posts. But that's basically a native ad. So let's say the next big idea from everyone hurt by blocking is that native ads are the big thing now (not that it isn't already being used heavily), and everyone should hide them among the real content, undetectable to current ad blockers. So ad blockers will evolve, and people will build filters that hide the content of these native ads in smart ways. And they might build a filter that hides posts on Daring Fireball that contain the words "my thanks" or "sponsoring this week". Will Gruber still be so supportive of content blockers then? And where's the line? Who decides what the right types of ads are?

It's not that I have any smart answers about this, but I think it's disingenuous to pretend this "culling" of the shitty ads will lead into a brave new world with fair ad networks where everyone decides to turn off ad blocking on The Verge, because gosh, they've really improved, or into some kind of fairytale where people pay for The Verge's content through subscriptions. But they will keep visiting The Verge en masse, and expecting fresh content served in miliseconds. Who will pay for it and who will write it, I sincerely don't know.

Agreed, they're sticking to their core strength, and I feel are executing their vision quite well. It's depressing to see snide comments about both the company and the amount of money they're making.

Some people have a completely unrealistic view of how much money is needed to run a company outside of SV/how much money is needed to live more or less worry free. Considering the revenue, and living outside of bubbly salary areas (John O'Nolan lives in Egypt for example), they're all living a comfortable life on their current paychecks, and as the revenue continues to grow, it's only going to get better. They aren't beholden to anyone, run a successful open source business and are growing nicely every month. If that's not a great story, I don't know what is.

As a reality check for SV folk, according to their report on how they spent their Kickstarter money (http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/), their gross starting salaries were 4500 $ per person (18k for 4 people). Warm word of advice, spend time in other cultures :).