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sdbrown

50 karma · joined March 7, 2016

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sdbrown··on Don't rent the cloud, own instead
On a related-different axis, I've consistently seen on-prem GPUs running identical workloads ~35% faster than the same workloads on the same cloud hardware, regardless of intermediate infra stack layering/versioning choices. Weird but I'm not complaining!
sdbrown··on A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour
Wasn't this part of the base thesis of "We Have Never Been Modern"?
sdbrown··on A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour
Are you referring to Bruno Latour or the author of the post? If you're referring to Latour, I would strongly urge you to read "Laboratory Life", which is [as] clear and easy to read today as it was when I first encountered it nearly 20 years ago.
sdbrown··on Amazon receives FDA warning letter for supplements with undeclared ingredients
I don't see dilution anywhere on that page, and increasing volume of administration at a lower concentration to achieve the same effective dose does not alter the dose itself. You are not interpreting TI correctly.

Edit: further, to your comment about "prescription strength" nomenclature, look at section 14 of the Cialis/tadalafil prescribing information, IIRC, table of clinical studies, where they have the second two outcomes of the clinical studies broken down by dose. Efficacy increases pretty directly with increasing dose, and these are where the observed side effects show up. It seems like patients may well self-escalate. Maybe the OTC countries have public data on this?

sdbrown··on Amazon receives FDA warning letter for supplements with undeclared ingredients
That doesn't change the difference between effective and toxic doses, it changes the potential scale of off-by-one user error. If 20 milligrams is delivered in 1 tablet, then 3 tablets is the toxic dose. If 20 milligrams is delivered in 5 tablets, then 15 is the toxic dose. A single daily tablet is far superior to multiple daily tablets in terms of patient adherence and hence disease management.

Can you name specific examples where the number of pills/capsules/tablets has been increased to improve drug safety? Increased pill counts historically reduces patient adherence, which worses disease management. This is just the first example I found which measured it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31298592/ This review explicitly states it in the abstract even: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30561486/

sdbrown··on Amazon receives FDA warning letter for supplements with undeclared ingredients
Tadalafil (Cialis) is available as a generic in the United States. If you think "big pharma" is served by drugs going off-patent, you may want to re-evaluate your perspective.

If you want to get more reasonably unhappy with market exclusivity, look at Celgene's grip on thalidomide/lenalidomide/pomalidomide for the treatment of multiple myeloma.

sdbrown··on Amazon receives FDA warning letter for supplements with undeclared ingredients
How, in your view, does dilution change the therapeutic index of a chemical? If a drug is effective at 20 milligrams, but at 60 milligrams has a steep rise in the incidence of hypotension, how does taking that same 60 milligrams in a larger volume of filler (e.g. water, or spread across more physical pills) change the fact that you've just taken 60 milligrams?
sdbrown··on Rekt.network
To me it sounds dialed-in even on immediate landing. Different strokes!
sdbrown··on Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Bertozzi, Meldal, and Sharpless
Apologies -- tetrazine reacts principally with trans-cyclooctenes. So azide/DBCO would be the orthogonal group. To the best of my knowledge, those two pairs do not cross-react.
sdbrown··on Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Bertozzi, Meldal, and Sharpless
Tetrazine/DBCO is also pretty popular IIRC.
sdbrown··on Librarian's Letter to Google Security
Huh! https://biomedical-engineering-online.biomedcentral.com/arti...
sdbrown··on Librarian's Letter to Google Security
I feel like fingerprint/iris/retinal scanners would be a reasonable stop-gap here if only there was some way to deploy them cheaply. Does anyone know if such add-ons exist that might be made compatible with a 2FA system?
sdbrown··on AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
This is a fabulous convenience! The reach of this ready-to-go data will be much larger (in some directions) than the model and CASP results themselves.
sdbrown··on Unlocking efficient light-energy conversion with stable coordination nanosheets
See figure 3: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202100564

Doesn't the measurement of current in the presence of light mean photo-voltaic?

sdbrown··on Ask HN: How did an adult ADHD diagnosis help you?
I appreciate your comment; medication saved me from tanking what has been a relatively successful career.

However, they bring up a reasonable question, which is that of conflicts-of-interest. I do not now, nor have a I ever, received any compensation from a current or historical manufacturer of medications targeting ADHD. I do not anticipate receiving any such compensation in the future. However, I am married to a physician. (Side note: she also has ADHD. One of the smartest people I've ever met, but nearly failed her first USMLE because she couldn't execute on review/studying prior to the test. Went on meds and passed the rest of her exams with scores right in the middle of the distribution. The meds don't make us super-human, they just let us be normal.)

sdbrown··on Ask HN: How did an adult ADHD diagnosis help you?
Literally LOL! My meds have been generic for so long that the most regular non-appointment-reminder phone calls I get are the pharmacy telling me that the manufacturer and appearance of the pills has changed.
sdbrown··on Ask HN: How did an adult ADHD diagnosis help you?
This was the biggest benefit for me.
sdbrown··on Ask HN: How did an adult ADHD diagnosis help you?
It's been about 9 years and I'm still on the original dose of the first medication my psychiatrist prescribed. I'm really glad I managed my pride enough to make that first appointment.

- Slept better. No more tossing and turning for an hour or two before I fell asleep.

- Ate more regularly. My stomach starts to hurt if I wait too long between meals.

- Remembered people's names when meeting them, at least to the point where I could say it again after they introduced themselves and started talking.

- More realistic outlook. Things aren't perfect and they aren't the worst, they just either kind of suck for now or this is a good moment.

- No longer have to make a giant mental effort to get something done on the weekend. If I want to read a book, I read it. If I want to play video games, I play them. If I want to clean the house, I clean the house.

- No longer a giant mental effort to get something done at work. Need to send an email? Send it. Need to annotate some data? Annotate it. Need to schedule a meeting? Schedule it.

sdbrown··on Coinbase S-1
I hadn't thought about that before! Very slick incentive structure there...like, build the tech to go to space and mine it and become enormously wealthy on Earth (ignoring the amount of wealth required to accomplish this).
sdbrown··on 14,000x Speedup (2015)
A k-D tree?
sdbrown··on How I operated as a staff engineer at Heroku
My partner is a physician, and this is _exactly_ how they manage disagreements about treatment plans, almost by instinct. It is amazing how well this works at clearing things up.
sdbrown··on GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners
Or, can it (like humans?) adapt its responses to suit the style of the question? Like if you start asking it lots of antagonizing questions, will it become more or less antagonistic itself?
sdbrown··on [dead]
OK, slow down. What FDA actually said was "do not use ivermectin intended for animals on humans": https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/product-safety-informa...

Physicians can and do use drugs off-label at their discretion all the time; the FDA is not charged with regulating that. (They do, however, regulate the advertising of a drug with claims which are unsupported by clinical trials.)

sdbrown··on Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya
I think this appeared on HN a few days ago:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-un...

sdbrown··on Backdoor in event-stream library dependency
> People ITT blaming the OP don't understand this attack always works on a long enough timescale.

I'm a little dismayed by the great number of comments I had to read before someone pointed this out...

sdbrown··on Finding UX in the Trash
Trash sorting is the absolute worst UX. A newspaper goes in paper recycling, fine. Does a glossy magazine also go in paper recycling? Cardboard goes in paper recycling. Does paper cardboard with a plastic overcoat go in paper recycling? Can TetraPaks or whatever the heck Zico/juice boxes/etc. uses be recycled as "paper"? What about steel cans (which most coconut water in southern California is packed in), do they go in "cans" recycling, since there is no "Aluminum"-specific stream in my workplace?

Trash UX is really awful. In my office it's even worse - the custodial staff just dump the at-desks blue recycling bins into the same large trash can as the black waste bins. Why the heck do we even have recycling bins if it's just going to be commingled anyway?

sdbrown··on Leaked document: EU Presidency calls for massive internet filtering
So I admit that I've only skimmed the PDF on statewatch.org that the site points to, but I didn't see the "massive filtering" bit. This reads like the DMCA seems to be practiced; can someone point out to me the specific page number of the PDF, or better the text within the document, which refers to the content filtering?

I'm not saying the DMCA is a good thing or a bad thing; I'm just trying to get calibrated to what is being proposed in the directive. Thanks for the help!

sdbrown··on Parallel Python
A little hacky, yes, but extremely effective. I wrote an image processing application for somewhat large time-series datasets (> 1TB) on Linux which took liberal advantage of these details to run very nicely on v2 Xeon processors. It also worked quite well for GUIs which interacted with the datasets.