olieidel

Good luck!

Yes, I do. I had lenses with cylinders (for correcting it) in the past and didn't like them. They're larger and asymmetric - the lower side must be heavier so that they always align correctly on your eye.

With not-so-bad astigmatism, you can get away with not correcting it in your contact lenses. That's what I currently do. It works okay and brings you to a good level of vision (1.0 here in Germany, probably 20/20 in the US).

Yes, that's a real problem - and I think those "arbitrary values" even vary by manufacturer. The best strategy I can come up with right now is ordering a pair of contact lenses based on a "best guess", possibly by an optician, based on your values for glasses.

Then, check whether they are over- or under-correcting and order another pair with slightly different values under the assumption that your initial "best guess" was off. Then, compare and repeat..

Totally agree. It's a cool idea that going very deep in a certain field yields benefits which were unimaginable in the beginning (or to others).

fwiw, I talked to someone who'd done some research in that area. While using an autorefractor provides you with objective values, predicting the actual values people were most satisfied with was very difficult. Possibly because there's a lot of "post-processing" of visual signals in our brain and that may vary a lot individually.

I totally agree that having an objective way to measure this would be awesome.

> For all the skepticism at others (eye professionals at that), did he checked his enthusiasm for placebo effect?

Yes. I have two pairs of glasses here: The optician-made ones and my self-prescribed ones. I have controlled for the frame - both have the same one.

I see much better with my self-prescribed ones. If you don't believe me, feel free to drop by and we'll do a blinded (heh) test. :)

It's a pretty generic kit sold on ebay from various chinese resellers. It's not too hard to find if you search for "optician kit" or so, price is around 180€ in Germany :)

Interesting! For what it's worth, I also learnt that there are quite a few lens manufacturers out there and they all differ slightly regarding lens thickness and refraction properties. That may be another explanation.

And, if your optician is close by and shares your belief that your values vary over time, getting your values checked in different "states" (morning / evening / tired / etc.) can be helpful for deciding on what the "right" values for your glasses may be.

Some good thoughts. Totally agree with all your points.

Yes, I am a doctor. As far as I remember, I studied medicine and graduated.

As other comments point out, medicine is a very specialized field nowadays and I didn't specialize in any field (I got into coding healthcare software instead) - in Germany you study all disciplines at University (min. 6 years) and then specialize during something comparable to US residency in a hospital.

I understand the process of accommodation. This poses the risk of e.g. over-correcting short-sightedness if you're not aware of it because, with each lens of increasing strength, you accommodate and think "geez, everything just got sharper.. again!". I was aware of this and, as you can find in my article, actually ended up using very similar values for dioptries (the spheres) as the opticians. So either all of us totally forgot about accommodation or all of us were aware of it :)

My values mainly differed regarding to astigmatism, and accommodation doesn't play a significant role there.

I am also aware of the bone behind my ears, thanks for reminding me :)

While you do learn a lot of stuff in med school, learning how to bend those things of glasses which go behind your ears is not part of that. I suppose that's not a skill which can be taught well, anyway - it's more like craftsmanship, getting it right by having done it lots of times.

Whoa, this is unexpected. I'm the author. Thanks for reading and for all your comments! Will reply to as many as possible.

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Software, Frontend, Clojure} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | https://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhDs and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

Our Automotive Team is solving the data challenge for self-driving cars, by automatically filtering, categorizing and evaluating raw sensor data. Currently hiring Data Engineers and Product Managers.

  * Work at the unique intersection of robotics, machine learning and big data    processing


  * Immerse yourself in our mission of making self-driving cars a reality


  * Collaborate closely with experienced Machine Learning researchers

In Healthcare, we’re making breast cancer screening more efficient and safe with Machine Learning. Currently hiring Clojure, QA and Data engineers.

  * Develop an impactful and technically challenging medical application in ClojureScript and Clojure

  * Join a team of experienced Clojurists who are happy to mentor you

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (we have two)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Furthermore, we are always looking for Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Software, Frontend, Clojure} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | https://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhDs and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We’re currently working on these problems:

Our Automotive Team is building safety and validation systems for self-driving cars. Currently hiring {Software, Frontend} Engineers, Technical Program Managers.

  * Design and implement a large-scale testing engine for full stack autonomous vehicle (AV) software, that implements both log-based as well as simulated test scenarios

  * Develop applications and tools for data integration, experimentation, quality & modelling

  * Conceptualize and build visualization environments to develop modular scenarios for AV testing, which is able to scale to millions of test cases

In Healthcare, we’re making breast cancer screening more efficient and safe with Machine Learning. Currently hiring Clojure Engineers.

  * Develop an impactful and technically challenging medical application in ClojureScript and Clojure

  * Join a team of experienced Clojurists who are happy to mentor you (@volrath, @countgizmo, @olieidel)

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (we have two)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Furthermore, we are always looking for Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Software, Clojure} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | https://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhDs and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We are looking for Machine Intelligence and Software Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Further, we're also hiring Clojure developers for our medical project team which is making healthcare more efficient through machine learning. There, you will:

  * Develop an impactful and technically challenging medical application in ClojureScript and Clojure

  * Join a team of experienced Clojurists who are happy to mentor you (@volrath, @countgizmo, @olieidel)

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (we have two)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Software, Clojure} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | https://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhDs and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We are looking for Machine Intelligence and Software Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Further, we're also hiring Clojure developers for our medical project team which is making healthcare more efficient through machine learning. There, you will:

  * Develop an impactful and technically challenging medical application in ClojureScript and Clojure

  * Join a team of experienced Clojurists who are happy to mentor you (@volrath, @daveliepmann, @countgizmo, @olieidel)

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (we have two)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

The almost exact same could be said for Ruby and frankly, any other programming language which has stacktraces and a standard library.

For web projects, the benefits provided by Clojure on the backend side may not be very large; there are already good languages with extensive libraries available (Django, Rails, etc.). It arguably may seem hard to choose Clojure with its minimalistic libraries when these frameworks provide an "easy" [1] way to get running with a full-blown admin interface. Furthermore, backend code by itself tends to be dependency-heavy in the way that you need dependencies which you'll definitely not write yourself: You need a library to interface with your database, you need something for cryptography / passwords, etc.

Looking at the frontend (React) side however, things are different. The JavaScript ecosystem is a mess. From a viewpoint of a React developer, there are lots of libraries which vary widely in quality. react-router is an interesting example here, it had 4 (?) breaking changes so far by replacing the entire api. There's a ton of mental overhead for the normal React developer trying to write a "simple" app.

Ironically, developers start rolling their own stuff. Instead of using a form library which tightly couples your components to your redux state (redux-form), you start writing your own. Instead of coupling your entire views to graphql via apollo, you start doing it differently, your way.

This is where ClojureScript is a game changer. If your app differs just slightly from a (very) vanilla CRUD app and whipping some libraries together doesn't do the trick, you start writing custom stuff. When writing custom stuff, you want a programming language which is a) well thought through (great standard library, immutability, sane concurrency) b) predictable and c) productive. ClojureScript has all three while JS has none.

We (Merantix) are currently developing a medical image viewer in ClojureScript and had prototyped two separate versions: One in JS with React, another one in ClojureScript with reagent and re-frame. Even though it is dependency-heavy (webgl stuff), ClojureScript turned out to be the superior choice: Immutable data structure at its core which ironically perform better than Immutable.js and way higher developer productivity due to less random bugs and a more interactive development (REPL).

Using Clojure on the backend now seemed like an obvious choice: We can reuse and share code from the frontend and more importantly, all our developers are "full-stack" in the sense that everyone can at least understand what's going on "on the other side" (backend / frontend) of the stack as it's literally the same codebase.

The learning curve is significant but the advantages are tremendous. I wholeheartedly recommend learning Clojure even if you're not allowed to use it at your job. It sounds cliché, but it will make you a better programmer for sure.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 (to understand the meaning of "easy" above)

Depends how you define "works for":

    Disclosure: I am an advisor to Virta Health and I have invested
    in the company, because I believe their approach is the best one
    to solve this problem—not the other way around.

The article is incredibly light on details except advertising the startup he's working for.

The only link with some facts was this paper: https://asset.jmir.pub/assets/a2c0047f60bd77156d22029b8bdd5c...

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Data, Frontend, Backend} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | http://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhD’s and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We are looking for Data and Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Further, we're also hiring Frontend and Backend engineers for our medical project team which is making healthcare more efficient through machine learning. There, you will:

  * Work on a very challenging browser-based medical application in ClojureScript / Django

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (two of which work here full-time)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Data, Frontend, Backend} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | http://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhD’s and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We are looking for Data and Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Further, we're also hiring Frontend and Backend engineers for our medical project team which is making healthcare more efficient through machine learning.

There, you will:

  * Work on a very challenging browser-based medical application in ClojureScript / Django

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (two of which work here full-time)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Data, Frontend, Backend} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | http://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhD’s and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We are looking for Data and Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Further, we're also hiring Frontend and Backend engineers for our medical project team which is making healthcare more efficient through machine learning.

There, you will:

  * Work on a very challenging browser-based medical application in ClojureScript

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (two of which work here full-time)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Machine Intelligence, Data, Frontend, Backend} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | http://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhD’s and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

We are looking for Data and Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Further, we're also hiring Frontend and Backend engineers for our medical project team which is making healthcare more efficient through machine learning.

There, you will:

  * Work on a very challenging browser-based medical application in ClojureScript

  * Have a tight and efficient feedback-loop with physicians (two of which work here full-time)

  * Interface with our Machine Learning models.

Have a look at our job openings here: https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

Merantix | {Frontend, Machine Intelligence} Engineer | Berlin | Full-Time, Internship, Onsite, Visa assistance | http://www.merantix.com

Merantix conceptualizes, builds and scales AI ventures. We acquire enterprise datasets that enable promising products, we incubate those products in joint ventures, and we spin off companies to support their growth. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians and engineers from premier universities in Europe and North America. Many of us have PhD’s and work experience at top tech companies. We’re based in Europe’s startup capital, Berlin, and are growing quickly!

I'm on the medical project and we're looking for a second Frontend Engineer to join me. In my opinion, we've got the Holy Trinity of software development covered: A superb language (ClojureScript), a great field with real impact potential (improving healthcare) and a great team (us). So if you're passionate about functional programming and Clojure in particular, you should definitely apply!

We are also looking for Machine Intelligence Engineers to join our core team to help us develop impactful applications of machine learning across a range of fields. We deploy to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Tensorflow, Apache Beam, Google Cloud ML, and Docker.

You will:

  * Research and prototype state-of-the-art deep learning models

  * Design terabyte-scale data pipelines

  * Iterate on building and analyzing products to uncover scalable businesses

Have a look at our job openings here:

https://merantix.bamboohr.co.uk/jobs/

You might want to add that all those book links have an Amazon referral link attached which (presumably?) points to you.

Wired has quite a long piece on Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht [1], definitely a good read.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-untold-story/

As no one else has mentioned him yet: Mike Thompson, creator of re-frame (ClojureScript).

There are not many ways to follow him (mostly GH [1]), he hardly uses his Twitter [2]. Maybe that's why he's so productive?

The constantly evolving re-frame docs [3] are all you need to follow..

[1] https://github.com/mike-thompson-day8

[2] https://twitter.com/wazound

[3] https://github.com/Day8/re-frame

Apart from learning Clojure, Daniel's humor made it a really fun read for me.

If you enjoyed the style of the book, it's also worth checking out his talk on parallel programming [1], I caught myself laughing out loud and actually learning something at the same time.

Thanks, Daniel!

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=eRq5UBx6cbA

Location: Heidelberg, Germany

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes (American Citizen)

Technologies: JS, Elixir, Python, Clojure; being a doctor (see below)

Email: oli@eidel.net

GH: https://github.com/olieidel

I am a fully qualified doctor (physician) and love coding. Looking to combine both.

yes, CSS Diner: https://flukeout.github.io