Hacker News Reader

w1ntermuteon 'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

From the article linked by Techdirt: “executives have sought to almost entirely subordinate clinical case managers’ judgment to the computer’s calculations”

Sounds like the issue is the executives. What does this have to do with “AI”? Also, the company that built this tech (naviHealth) was started in 2012. Their product existed long before large language models were created.

w1ntermuteon Petrichor

”“A little-known piece of trivia,” Altman announced. “This smell, after it rains for the first time. You know what’s that called?”
“Is this going to freak me out?” Williams said.
“Petrichor,” Altman said. “It’s my favorite smell. You only get to smell this once or twice a year, because it has to not rain for a while, and then rain. It’s the smell of summers in St. Louis.”
“Petrichor?” Williams said, uncertainly.

“Petrichor,” Altman said.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sil...

w1ntermuteon [dead]

Someone hasn’t used TikTok…or paid attention to anyone in Gen Z on their phone.

w1ntermuteon Ontario Court Declares the Ontario Math Proficiency Test Unconstitutional

It's not that these aren't interesting subjects or potentially useful in adult life. They just shouldn't be the priority. Is it potentially useful in adult life to know how your car's IC engine works? Sure, but nowhere near as useful as knowing how to get a good rate on your car loan.

w1ntermuteon Across Kazakhstan by rail

Reminds me of this great travel blog from 2008: http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/

The writer traveled from Vienna to Pyongyang by train, giving him 36 unsupervised hours in North Korea.

w1ntermuteon More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru

It’s just another example of the “participation culture” that modern parenting and social media have made commonplace. Who needs to do anything real when you can just upvote or retweet? You get the same sort of participation trophy that you’ve been taught to aim for since childhood.

w1ntermuteon We Hacked Apple for 3 Months

If they actually did get paid so little, why did they do it? This seems like a terrible use of their time.

w1ntermuteon Don't Get Stuck

There are really three categories of management:

* Line management: are you willing to be the man and promulgate the party line? You can be mostly apolitical in this role.

* Middle management: are you willing to be the pawn of a specific member or two of senior management and do their bidding (which probably isn’t fully aligned with the party line)?

* Senior management: do you know how to intelligently break the rules in order to stand out from the crowd of middle managers? This could be by developing a broad following within the lower levels of the company through self-promotion, through cultivating specific relationships with the CEO and/or board, or by (in rare cases) delivering on highly visible and truly remarkable results for the company.

w1ntermuteon D.E. Shaw and how computer geeks and English majors transformed Wall St. (2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed

w1ntermuteon The FDA's perpetual process machine

With respect to point #2, the real reason why revamping any regulatory regime "top to bottom" is difficult is because so much organizational, legislative, and administrative cruft has built up over the years in the federal government that means no one individual has the authority to drive reform. See FDA's discussion paper from Jan 2017 on revamping the LDT regulatory regime (https://www.fda.gov/media/102367/download) for more on the inane complexity created by the federal bureaucracy: "For example, a test made by a conventional IVD manufacturer would be regulated by FDA initially. If a laboratory made a significant modification to that test, it would then be regulated by CMS. If the original manufacturer then made another significant modification, the modification would be regulated by FDA."

Also: "In 2015, FDA established an Interagency Task Force on LDT Quality Requirements with CMS, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health"

Any manager worth his/her salt can tell you that a task force involving four different agencies is unlikely to ever result in any meaningful change. A cornerstone of effective management is to designate one person who is responsible for execution and hold them accountable. This is exactly how the executive branch, from the president on down, is supposed to function (with oversight from the judicial and legislative branches, of course), but few parts of it are like that after centuries of bolting on overlapping agencies and departments.

w1ntermuteon How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

As someone who has used a variety of VTC products (Zoom, Webex, BlueJeans, Teams, Skype, etc.) for several years on a daily basis (lots of external VTCs with different companies who use different VTC systems), Zoom is by far the best. The audio and video quality is head and shoulders above the rest (both on PC and mobile) and the interface is dead simple for even the least tech-savvy users.

My company uses Zoom, and there have been many instances where, during a VTC call set up by someone at another company (that doesn’t use Zoom), we have switched mid-meeting to Zoom because there’s something wrong with the other VTC system (someone can’t join, can’t hear, can’t speak, can’t share their screen, etc.). And the other options haven’t gotten noticeably better over the years either.

w1ntermuteon The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

The death curve is also deceptive - there were likely many patients who were recorded as dying of the flu, or of influenza-like illness, that actually died of COVID-19, due to a lack of testing. The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to make a conclusive statement based on the data collected prior to widespread testing.

As for that Medium article, it’s written by a tech exec with zero education or professional experience in anything related to medicine or the life sciences, so I would treat it with a heavy dose of skepticism. Many of the deluge of preprint articles from academic institutions written by epidemiologists or public health experts would likely be a far better source of info.

w1ntermuteon Hidden Champions: Successful but little-known businesses

See the wiki page for a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

w1ntermuteon Microfunds as a way to gain early insight into promising startups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carried_interest

w1ntermuteon Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?

Re: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, this critique of the book is worth a read: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

w1ntermuteon Financial Time Series Forecasting with Deep Learning: A Literature Review

The most important factor for financial time series forecasting is undoubtedly access to clean data. This is what sets Renaissance apart. There’s no need for particularly sophisticated math - they’ve been doing it for 3 decades.

w1ntermuteon Today’s Top Tech Skills

My phone's contacts list. Make friends with as many people at your current company as possible, and when they leave, make sure to keep in regular touch with them. I enforce self-discipline on this by putting regular touchpoints in my GTD app. I try to get coffee with or talk on the phone to former coworkers once every 4-6 months, depending on how well I know them.

w1ntermuteon Why I don't love Light Rail Transit

Great—let me know when you've changed the zoning laws, fixed urban planning more generally, and how the whole society is organized around massive subsidies for driving and inefficient sprawl housing with long-term unsupportable infrastructure. In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

w1ntermuteon Why I don't love Light Rail Transit

Wrong—the claim has nothing to do with what rich or poor people like to use.

The claim is that the only way to provide affordable public transit that's sustainably accessible to people who aren't rich (that is, even when gentrification occurs in the city core) is to provide surface transit (buses), which can serve a much larger area than light rail.

> Maybe if we had more human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere, there would be enough of them to meet the high demand and more such neighborhoods could support mixed-income residents.

Sure—let me know when you find the funding required to build all those "human-scale, walkable, transit-accessible neighborhoods everywhere." In the meantime, let's provide affordable transit that's accessible regardless of which neighborhood you live in: high-frequency, reliable buses.

w1ntermuteon Why I don't love Light Rail Transit

> He claims only the rich use light rail. But what is it about a light rail that causes a poor person to look at it and walk away deciding it's not for them? It simply doesn't make sense. Build LRT to a poor area, people will use it.

Are you sure you read the article…?

> The area around the LRT lines definitely attract investment, but if you look at who actually uses the line a few years in, it’s mostly rich people. Why? Because they’re the only people who can afford to take it – not because the fares are too high, but because real estate in the immediate walking area around stations becomes too expensive…Unless you have bus routes or other last-mile ways of getting to the LRT, then it’s going to be a public transit option that’s only available to people who can afford to live nearby. And the nicer you make the line, the higher an income threshold that’s going to require. (Unless you do the hard work of actually integrating the LRT line via last-mile bus routes into all of the other neighbourhoods that aren’t gentrifying.) LRT investment on its own doesn’t expand public transit; it gentrifies it.

w1ntermuteon Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speech-to-text feature

That approach (circumventing the specifics of the law through technical workarounds while still violating it in spirit) seems unlikely to succeed for the same reasons as Aereo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....

w1ntermuteon Using the Golden Research Engine to Query the Y Combinator S19 Batch

Also, it’s gotten substantially easier for a team of 1-2 to build a polished product on a shoestring budget than it was when YC originally started.

The claims of big customers are likely mostly exaggerated—product-market fit is as difficult to achieve as ever.

w1ntermuteon Mountain View approves 10,000 homes by Google's North Bayshore project (2017)

10k is a drop in the bucket. We need blocks of high rises going up around all the Caltrain stops, and a corresponding increase in Caltrain capacity.

w1ntermuteon What people actually do at WeWork

If you get a private office at WeWork, you’ll get that peace, quiet, and isolation. Or you can just put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones.

w1ntermuteon If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

Yes, this is exactly what I meant.

w1ntermuteon If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

This is a good idea in theory, but the problem in practice is that for every Emily or Anthony, there are a hundred students at 2nd and 3rd tier universities who, partly through their own failures and partly due to the unfortunate circumstances they’re in, are completely incompetent. I often find that those who are so keen on “hiring broadly” have never worked in a company that hires primarily from Podunk State - your expectations of your employees have to be so much lower.

The key is not to focus on the schools (rather than to focus extra on state schools). Instead, develop methods for identifying talent based on its own merits, regardless of where it is or what university it went to.

w1ntermuteon Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

Just as people who didn’t immigrate from a poor country might not completely understand your circumstances, I don’t think you fully grasp the circumstances of those who have failed to succeed despite being in the US for generations. If it were so simple for those people to just delay having children and invest more in education, they would have already done it.

w1ntermuteon Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

In this context, wealth doesn’t necessarily have to start out as financial wealth. You came from an educated family, so even if your parents were materially poor, they created an environment that ensured you would be on an upward trajectory compared to them. This is a common story among educated immigrants from poor countries.

But then there are those who are both materially and educationally impoverished - those whose families struggled despite having been in the US for generations. Not sure it makes sense to conflate them with people like you.

w1ntermuteon Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related health startup

Reminds me of these lines from a Hemingway novel:

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways, gradually and then suddenly.”

There have been a lot of startups without a real product that have been propped up by the bubble of easy money over the last 5 years. But sooner or later, the debtors will come calling.

If you work at a startup, you owe it to yourself to think carefully about where your company stands - you can be sure that the executives, drunk on their own Kool-aid, won't see any problems until it's too late.

w1ntermuteon UBeam's Meredith Perry shows her wireless charging technology really works

Analysis of the article by former uBeam VP of Engineering Paul Reynolds:

> In all this time, have reporters still not learned to press on the key questions? "How much power is being received?", "How much is being sent?", "What's the efficiency?", "How much does it cost?", "Have you proved it safe?", and "If this is what you have now, what were all those 'prototypes' you were talking about 2 years ago?". But those are actual questions that matter, and basically we know the same today as we did yesterday (which indicates it was an awesome PR piece, lots of coverage with no actual info).

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-in-pictur...

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/someone-was-pay...

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-ta...