seanahrens

Agreed

Would wifi 6 require new silicon?

What real-world wifi upload/download speed in mbps should we expect from this board?

I am a part of the inaugural cohort, which is wrapping up now in San Francisco. Feel free to ask me questions.

Actually, I remember in my business classes we were taught to project confidence independent of if we had the knowledge/experience to back it up. As if confidence were an attribute in itself (unrelated to actually having the skills and experience to do a job).

I think this teaching bred that pride of which you speak.

I was in classes with these kids. Many of them were smug AF and wanted to start tech companies, but didn't know a thing about software engineering. I just felt they wanted to manage/direct the people and make the money.

Since I had been coding since a young age, building web apps in my spare time, when I was in classes with these people I started to actually realize I had this superpower they valued.

But truth was I didn't want to work with any of them. I didn't see the value in someone whose studies were about learning how to harness my value.

I graduated with a major in Business at Haas and a minor in Computer Science from the College of Engineering. And I tacked on an extra semester to get it done.

Yeah you're right to think doing double major w/ EECS would have been quite a tall order. Probably logistically impossible.

Yeah he definitely was a bad professor. Sad that he was the finance professor (for this required, main track course) every undergrad my year had. Which meant, I think, 300-400 students received his indoctrination that semester. I use him as an example because that moment was so, well, exemplary. Other courses weren't as extreme, but they generally echoed the core tenet: your goal is "maximize profit" with sometimes an explicitly added "above all else". It generally gave me the impression that the corporate social responsibility club was the window dressing to this tenet--and the place in the business school for liberals to get out of the way and still fit in.

But to zoom out a second, in America, it's not just a "tenet", it's a legal responsibility of the CEO of a corporation to maximize shareholder value. The professor, and school, are preachers of something much larger than themselves, and so I don't want to point my finger so strongly at just this professor, and just this school.

My finance professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley preached that maximizing profit was our ultimate service to the world---so much so--that he taught that if we were running a company and had an option to maximize profits by producing a product that would seriously harm the health of people (eg. give them a medical condition), we should undoubtedly DO IT. Because we would have maximized profit for shareholders, made something great for our customers, and (if we needed) we could take the extra profits and make medical payments to the people harmed to make it whole.

He made this argument in front of 150+ person lecture class. I was so dumbfounded and shell-shocked at the argument that I couldn't believe what I just heard. I looked around at the undergrad business finance students around me, and it looked as if they were absorbing it in.

That was the day I knew I chose the wrong major.

I really did think about raising my hand in that class to respond to the hellish ethics he just espoused. But this professor frequently shouted down students or used ridicule to make people regret raising their hands, and I didn't have the worldview I now have to be able to tell him precisely and irrefutably why what he was teaching us was so so wrong.

The real trouble, however, is that this professor was just a preacher for the doctrine of modern day American capitalism. I just expected to hear the doctrine in a much more sugar-coated and digestible form. He literally read the doctrine to us right out of the book.

UC Berkeley allows undergrads to study at their Haas School of Business and earn a BS (bachelor of SCIENCE) in Business Administration. This is what I was studying. Luckily I had enough time left in undergrad after this lecture to switch to studying computer science at the College of Engineering--where I then felt like I was learning real skills.

It's an iterative and building process for us to get where we want to go with Crohnology. The start is less scientific, but as we build better software, with larger N, and bring on the involvement (and attract the attention of) more researchers and doctors, things will build their rigor.

If you believe in the vision, of gathering patients together to collect and learn from more real-world data points, in concert with oversight by researchers, then the current implementation is, well, just the current implementation to get us to that end goal, of a more engaged, globally-distributed means of learning from patients as they live and treat their disease.

Medical science is fundamentally the study of how inputs to a body relate to outputs of the body (in the scope of treating disease). If we can collect a continuity of these data points in the real-world, among a global populous, you have the potential to understand the disease in ways never before possible.

cool, i wonder if clicking a link to the beeminder site (or simply log in) would do the auto-resume, or if there is a specific engagement required to make it auto-resume. noble and awesome!

ah yes, sorry about this. we'll get some user permissions up soon for non-patients. most of the stuff we've programmed is patient focused right now. luckily, as soon as we do get something up for you (or just for you to see if you'd like), i'd love to email you.

You know, that is the number one comparison people make. I should probably work on incorporating into these blog posts a little sentence or two to address the question more when it comes up. PatientsLikeMe has done a great job at building comprehensive tools for symptom and lab value tracking. Where they fall short however is providing a real palatable and compelling reason why people should do this.

And that compelling reason--it is our hypothesis--comes from community, and knowing that what you do on the site can very directly help others. And PLM is a quantitative system, not a community place. It is our belief that instead of feeling like a hospital's electronic health record system, successful software would feel more like a Facebook -- where it is the real relationships, your real ability to help others, that compel you to share your knowledge and what treatments have worked for you.

And yes, while Crohn's & Colitis are our first network, you are on the right track knowing that our heads are churning on ways to make software that helps people with one or more of many other chronic conditions.

I hope that is helpful!

Yup, working with limited resources initially to test the concept and get where we want to as a team, but you've got the right idea!

Tuxguy, thanks a bunch for the comment. Yeah CureTogether and PatientsLikeMe exist, but they didn't seem to fill the specific vision for a complete product I had -- which was THE location for people with a specific chronic condition to go. In order to do that, you kind of have to make a place more than a product. And my hypothesis is that making a place for this purpose requires the perfect balance of social elements, health tracking, and knowledge sharing (q&a). I can dig into it more, but the basic essence that as hard as some of the other players have tried, they still have yet to capture any Facebook-esque stickiness to their services. I believe that there is room for health software that does have this property. That patients really identify with, and will come back and use.

jiggity, this is an awesome idea. i think i'm going to do this and put it in a pitch deck. =)

love it. keep up the great work, cole. let me know when it can automatically prompt me to mail for my friend/family's birthdays.

Maybe. I tracked my symptoms for a year, starting when taking the worms. My symptoms got really rough after taking the worms, but I don't have a lot of baseline data for how rough my symptoms were prior to taking them. I gave a presentation on this experiment at the Quantified Self Conference 2011 in Mountain View. A blog post is certainly due.

I really appreciate that. It wasn't easy choosing this path for sure, for exactly the reasons you mention.

hm, working from San Francisco. I'll keep my eye on it though. Thanks for letting me know.

Malbs, as you allude to, it can be a hard leap to start openly telling people you have Crohn's or Colitis. It's not easy to lash your personal identity to the disease. Believe it or not, I've gone through a personal struggle with this myself. For Crohnology to work, it was required for me to wear the badge really clearly, so to speak. What I think is that telling people unabashedly that you have the condition is probably almost like coming out (just a guess). It's incredibly empowering and allows you to leave lots of personal shame and suffering behind, and join a whole new community of like people. It's really uplifting.

Thank you so much. I think there are two sides of the spectrum: patients that are in dire need of help and information, and patients that are 'veteran' and have a lot more information to give. I think these two sides of the spectrum actually work really well in concert. Experienced patients helping new and sick ones. I think both of these groups get a lot out of that interaction. It's really empowering to help others, especially when they really need it.

herbivore, I don't consume any liquid dairy (as a part of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet). And it certainly helps. I could possibly imagine that my health could improve even more if I avoided all dairy, but there are so many things out of my diet as is. The main things I have eliminated from my diet are grains and refined sugars. I eat none of those. These two restrictions eliminate about 80% of most grocery stores, on their own. But this diet really helps. It's similar to the Paleo Diet, if you've heard of that.

Zerohp is right. They don't. It is estimated there are 1.4 million people with Crohn's & Colitis in the United States. But because most people who have it don't talk about it, people go on suffering in silence.

One reason people don't talk about it is because it's not "dinner table conversation".

Thank you so much. I'm sorry to hear about how pervasively this disease has affected your family. But I'm glad to be working to produce something that may help. Email me at beta@crohnology.com, and I'd love to have them a part.

Many thanks! I'm happy to have, help, and learn from her. Which link are you referring to?

Super fascinating. Definitely would never have guessed it was anywhere even close to 12%. Wow.

I think this is a pretty good point to bring up the comparison. I can definitely see github ousting many software dev tracking tools in the years to come. Very interesting...

Jonathan, thanks for the great post. I agree with you (unlike a handful of HN commenters) on feeling uneasy about the materialism, doing a startup for the money, etc. I saw (and experienced) a lot of that first hand and never really understood it. Doing a startup to get rich off a startup in my opinion is like playing in a rock band for the fame and money, not for the music.

"Ricky and I met Mark at Startup School in October 2009 (I guess we have to begrudgingly thank Berkeley for at least that much)"

Hehe. As a bear I say Grrr... =D