webjprgm

Tell this to my IT department that gave me a Macmini with SSD and not only insists on antivirus but also on File Vault. It takes a long time to boot and Xcode compiles are horribly slow. (Eventually I'll convince them, it just hasn't been worth it to push too hard yet since 99% of my time is spent in VS on the Windows box sitting next to it.)

(FWIW, I prefer VS to Xcode, despite preferring Mac to Windows. IntelliSense and editor tabs seem nicer to use than Xcode's UI, and Xcode with a Swift project only a little bigger than a toy demo hits periodic freezes. On my home iMac which does have an SSD.)

I only heard of Bowie because of The Labyrinth. :-)

My work laptop has one, yes, but it is closed and docked so I can use the two larger monitors on the desk. Ergo it is equivalent to not having a camera at all.

This was my first thought when I read the article. There ought to be some test track qualification before allowing a new system to be tested on the public road.

Another part of my problem is that I have too many projects I want to do. Learning about AI is one example, but I've instead done a series of web and mobile apps which are much closer to success. It would take a lot of time to read all the AI research and become good enough to tackle a problem like self-driving cars, and I've only got my spare time at home, with which I must also make sure my wife remains happy (ignoring her seems to make her unhappy for some reason) and keep my sanity (read fiction or play a video game some times) and take care of my house (the lawn just won't stay mowed).

I do remember being about 19 and thinking I was the best programmer in the world. By about 22 I had rewritten as much of my old code as I possibly could because it was so horrible. Somewhere between there and now I've gotten a cynical bit of humility to tamper my ego. I think the cynical part is that my ambition has not lessened, just my belief that I can succeed.

One Steve Jobs philosophy is focus and say no. I'm guessing I could do better if I said no to all but a single project.

Does it really? Students in high school could easily take the lazy approach of believing that education doesn't matter because they will always have the basic income anyway. Noble people will better themselves under either system. Does a basic income system increase or decrease the number of people who aspire to better themselves?

Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me.

To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.

Cool. This might have come in handy about 6 years ago for a C++ OpenGL cross-platform project. (I haven't done a C/C++ project in a long time though ...)

It starts before the ballot box, winning over voters. And that takes money.

El Camino is annoying enough to drive on that it really would be quite frustrating. Depending on the time of day.

Out of curiosity, what kind of data do you propose searching? Do you mean searching a patient chart? Searching for lab results? Searching doctor notes? Or do you mean more like analytics to see trends? Or for finding patients, in the vein of an national patient ID service?

I ask because there is some amount of chart searching and organization analytics in the big EHR products so I'm curious which part you think is specifically lacking?

I would argue that it isn't about how old the technology is but how good the developer tools and support are. Newer technologies (not brand new, ones that have a few years of maturity) often have better support in common developer platforms, more tutorials and answers on StackOverflow, etc. They are also easier to find employees to hire who know how to use them (or who WANT to use them).

If an older technology is so great then my preference would be to build modern tools for that old technology and then it would be like new. If you can evangelize this old-made-new platform a bit then you could find more people willing to use and learn it, which would fix the online presence and employee hiring problems too.

Note that MUMPS is one of those old technologies used in healthcare. It is basically a NoSQL database from before NoSQL was popular. Intersystems' website suggests that they've made a bunch of additions to it, but Intersystems charges a lot of money. GT.M is the open source one but as far as I know it sticks more to the ANSI M standard. That standard language is pretty old so it can get confusing to read/write it. I'm not sure if GT.M provides dev tools either. Intersystems does, but AFAIK they are not as good as tools like Visual Studio, XCode, or other newer platforms.

It may not be deliberate attempt to lock customers in, but just the first part of what you said: there is no incentive to make this any easier. It basically works, so hospitals/clinics that need to make a few simple customizations can do so with REST API calls but it isn't easy enough for third-parties to quickly and easily build large applications. There's so much going on in healthcare that it is hard for big vendors to justify cleaning up their web services over doing other things. Especially when the "interoperability" buzz fits in better with supporting FHIR, CommonWell, Healtheway, HL7, etc.

The latest buzzword is precision medicine. Also if that's from 2008 then it is missing all the advancements in mobile (iPhone is 2007) and digital health monitoring like FitBit. So one of those three things could easily make an improvement over what that paper says. (Did not read the paper.)

BTW, while I would love to improve the healthcare industry and I wish you the best of luck, I don't think software is the primary problem. Sure, it is very expensive and always 10 years out of date. But the real problem is government and the payer model.

I'm excited to see where retail clinic initiatives like CVS's go, since that's actually a real change to how I, the patient, get care. Instead of consulting my insurer's website to find out what clinics they accept then calling up to make an appointment in a busy doctor's schedule, if I could instead just walk into the store and get what I need like I could any other product that would increase the convenience by enough that I might use it to keep healthy rather than to fix myself when I'm very sick.

We need ways for companies to compete in giving the most convenient service at the best prices. We need full price transparency. We need the prices to be things people could actually pay. (Insurance was originally for catastrophic care where the cost for a major illness or surgery would get too high.) Having prices so high that only insurers can pay them means only insurers DO pay them and since hospitals and clinics know this they can charge whatever they want.

(I once went to a dentist who advertised cheap wisdom tooth removal. I found out the way he did it was send a huge bill to the insurance and whatever the insurer declined to pay he would just forgive. Basically he is kinda willing to work for free but take as much as he can possibly get from the entity that has the deep pockets.)

No discussion about APIs in health care EMRs would be complete without mentioning HL7's new FHIR protocols: REST-ful web service endpoints for HL7 health data. It makes developing applications with these standards much easier.

But that's only one piece. You need business relationships to even connect to the EMR in the first place. I think the problem with breaking into this industry is: (1) Huge incumbents with tons of cash who have shown they will spend a lot of money to smear each other, buy out smaller companies, or just implement the new feature in their own system. (2) Excessive government regulation which makes it hard to play in this area legally and makes everyone afraid to work with you.

I had a couple friends pitch me a medical-related startup idea a few years ago and I declined. They didn't last long before some bigger player came and implemented their idea thus stealing their customers.

Also, the article mentions reinventing the wheel of integration libraries. Having open APIs will not magically solve all problems. It mentions Kareo and says they are building out their own EHR. THAT is reinventing the wheel. An EHR is mega-huge. It has tons of modules and for the main vendors takes 18 months to 2 years or so to configure it to the satisfaction of all parties. It sounds like the advocated world is to have lots of small "open platform" companies re-invent the wheel by making a new EHR module-by-module but with different startups inter-operating instead of locking each other out. You realize that all the major vendors today started like that? They were all first one module and gradually added more. Why do you think hospitals tend to buy the integrated software to replace myriads of independent legacy systems? If you can't fully understand that and articulate why your "open platform" would be better then you're going to fail.

I used to read Yahoo! News too, but the quality became too low and the bias too annoying. I still use Yahoo! email as my secondary account.

My Dad used to spend time on Yahoo!'s portal too, mostly for stocks and movie information. I never thought it was worth going directly to Yahoo, but if a Google search sent me there for a stock then I'd read it.

The original "synergy" idea was more about being a portal. But those don't exist anymore because search completely superceded it. It seems too late for Yahoo! to revive its search business. It isn't a good aggregator or content discovery platform because there are stronger competitors like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook.

If everyone likes Star Wars then you can make Star Wars references and jokes in company meetings and announcements and expect positive reception. Any effective presentation requires a knowledge of one's audience. But it does seem kinda backwards to pick the audience based on their fit for the presentation rather than adjust the presentation to the audience.

At my present company the upper management is constantly trying to make jokes that the 20-somethings will get. That includes movie references and things which you know some of them don't really get (especially when they say "I'm told you all will find this hilarious"). It shows a willingness of those older, experienced people to adjust their presentation to the "culture" of the current employees. The overall culture of the company is still to have a lot of fun, just the jokes change a little as time goes on.

There's at least some level of tenured and management defending their privileges at any company. I was momentarily shocked when in a conversation with some managers at Apple who responded in a rather hostile manner about being too young to merit a window office. Yeah, I know they are limited, but it was the instant smack-down way of saying it that told me he was trying to make sure everyone knew not to even ask.

At my current company a lot of things are based on tenure. Not the same as age, but at least slightly correlated. Sure, you gotta base it on something, but I would prefer it include more merit-based advances. (The reason for it, I think, is that this company hires swarms of recent graduates which tend to leave after a year or two, so basing things on tenure encourages people to stay longer. I'm not fresh out of college so sometimes I feel insulted by this. But they also don't have stock options which is the usual method for keeping people around.)

BTW, I'm 30 and definitely in the upper percent age-wise of people working at this company. And with nearly 3 years I also am in the upper 25% of tenure on my team.

The case that has bugged me is when I have some integer number of items and I need to compute some CGFloat for drawing something based on it. count * SpacingPixels gives an error, need CGFloat(count) * SpacingPixels even though there is no possibility of losing precision by the up-cast from Int to CGFloat.

It is also slightly annoying to have Double and CGFloat not be the same, but I solved that by just always using CGFloat pretty much everywhere even when not referring to pixels or points.

I don't think I would overload + and *, though, due to possible complications with the error messages as the article suggests. But I might play with more terse Ruby-like ".to_f" as an extension or something ...

Yes, but the video is just as horrible. You sit there slowly watching someone write the narration, which you can't really read anyway so you read the subtitles. There is nothing that shows how the UI works to do anything other than write a single page of text (or doodles).

How embedded are you thinking? C# has LINQ for example. Is that not embedded enough? What about in-memory SQL databases for JavaScript? I don't know anything about FoxPro, so I'm trying to understand what you mean by "embedded into the language" in this case. (You didn't mention what language, just the VS IDE.)

It sounds like you need a physical device between both ends. So you couldn't have untraceable radio-like communication. You would just follow the path of spheres like a wire.

But yeah, if you could teleport a magnetic field across long distances with nothing in between you would get both communication and, probably more interestingly, power transfer (induction charging). Depending on the properties of whatever hypothetical device accomplishes this.

To be honest, I only want to be ruled my a meritocracy if I can define myself as the most intelligent person in the world. (Or, in the upper 10% or something). A true meritocracy scares me. And this from a guy who was in the upper 10% of my high school (upper 4%). But I've seen much more brilliant people out there.

So who honestly wants a meritocracy either?

Another option would be that whoever works hard is taken care of. That sounds like the 1950s corporate job with a pension. It may be less exciting and sounds like it would produce less motive for innovation, but it is also less scary and a bit more fair than rewards to the affluent risk takers.

I have no idea how to get the best of all systems. So I make do in this one. I'm just pointing out that no system (known to man) is perfect.

There was one time (2006 at a company of less than 50 people) where I absolutely refused to build the new pricing features in a billing system (which would have been a big hack on a long series of smaller hacks) unless they let me refactor it (meaning rebuild it from scratch). After waiting for a few months without their new pricing features they finally gave in. That's at a young, nimble company where the co-CEO had a programming background. I can only imagine how hard a fight that would be at a larger, slower company.

Yeah. They said for doing simple things rather than building complex systems the current tools are not very convenient.

I find it really useful to use Ruby's built-in CSV library to process data for spreadsheets then visualize it with a graph in Numbers. I pull data from copy-paste tables, extract from Sqlite databases embedded in applications, etc. But for something like scanning Facebook friends as they suggested I'd have to first figure out the API or how to scrape the data. Once I figured that out it probably wouldn't be too hard to write a script for it. I could probably even put it in a crontab (LaunchAgent plist on a Mac).

Anyway, I think there's a huge opportunity to empower more people who are inquisitive and maybe somewhat technical but are not programmers. Make it easy for these people to solve problems rather than trying to teach them to "program". The end goal in my mind is the StarTrek programming model where you discuss with the computer what you want to do to solve a problem. Those crew members are scientists and engineers but only a few of them are "programmers". (StarTrek is a useful yardstick because we seem to like copying technology out of it. E.g. StarTrek communicator which is the late 90s cell phone and StarTrek PADD which is the SmartPhone/tablet.)

I really enjoyed building data applications in MS Access before it was sunset. In fact, I finally started understanding SQL joins by using Access's graphical query builder so that it made me much better at my PHP web programming job. (That was in 2003-2005 time frame. I was also still in college.)

I agree completely.

I'm using "Cha-Ching 2 beta" which was abandoned some 6 years ago when Intuit bought out the company working on it but the beta still works (I owned a copy of Cha-Ching 1 from some software bundle I picked up). The downside is (1) manual entry of every transaction, and (2) no analytics at all. The plus side is I wrote my own scripts to extract data from its Sqlite database so I can do analytics in a spreadsheet.

I definitely don't trust any one company. I don't want my bank or my credit card company to have 100% of my financial data.

I prefer using my own credit card and getting reimbursed since then I get points on my card. (Which I then use to buy things on Amazon that I want without considering my budget.)

Obviously this is part of credit card companies charging fees that hurt small businesses. But as long as the system is that way I'll use it. Retailers don't charge me different fees based on which credit card I use, so I might as well use the one that gives the best rewards.

Since all my comments so far have sounded like I oppose giving out contraceptives (since I am very much a proponent of moral living), let me clarify. I think it is great to help lift people out of poverty. Since there is a trend among poor teenagers to have more unplanned pregnancies it makes sense to address that problem, and this is one possible step.

I do not think it should replace teaching abstinence. But I also don't think that teaching abstinence using scare tactics in school is all that effective. Religious and moral teachings are much more so. So it still comes down to the responsibility of parents to teach their children correct life principles.

Let the government give free contraceptives to at-risk populations. But also encourage parents to teach good morals.