luddaite

Testing should be reserved for situations where the outcome of the test will change management. One such situation is whether or not the patient should be quarantined. Another situation is whether or not medical management will be affected (send home vs admit vs ICU). If someone is going to self quarantine regardless, maybe testing isn't appropriate.

Will ER rooms need to be re-designed to accommodate bedside MRI? The ER at the hospital I work at already has special rooms for Gyn and Ophtho complaints so it wouldn't be that far fetched for there to be a room designed for Stroke code patients.

I think the recommendation from USPSTF is every 3 years. If a provider is forcing yearly examinations on you without a good reason (i.e. suspicious findings on the path report) then I would consider talking to your provider or finding a new one.

edit: Here is a link to the recommendation https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/...

Isn't this approach that merchants such as Massdrop are taking? They have a small number of product categories that are heavily curated by the staff and the users.

I would be all over any search engine subscription that guaranteed that none of my information would ever be stored in any way. Just give me the option to pay!

I remember reading that SpaceX employees work crazy long hours and that the burnout rate is high. Is the same true for the people who work the venues or go on the road with bands?

I ordered new electric toothbrush heads from Amazon about a year ago and ended up receiving a very obvious knockoff product. It might be my fault for not reading the listing carefully but this definitely would not have happened in a brick and mortar where I can pick up the product and see that it isn't some off-brand mimic.

Aren't tech leaders such as Musk and Jobs different from rock stars though? Both groups might exhibit poor personal behavior but only tech leaders have the ability to make thousands of employees work in miserable conditions. I agree that the article kind of misses the point when it discusses the private lives of these figures but there is definitely something to the idea that people who treat their employees like shit shouldn't be worshipped.

I've recently started doing the opposite. I'll search Amazon to see what products are recommended and see if I can find those (or something similar) in local stores. This is particularly true when I am buying something that I don't know much about. I basically use Amazon as initial research to discover what properties I should be looking for in an item.

On the flipside, I really appreciate a short but sweet single player campaign. Titanfall 2 had some truly awesome levels (time travel!) and ended when it had said what it wanted to say. I really dislike games that feel drawn out like too little butter on too much toast (some JRPGs come to mind..).

If we assume that the premise here is correct (there is some amount of exodus of technical talent from SV), isn't it still a good thing? My impression is that the result of having all the major tech companies located in one region is the development of a tech cultural bubble. The current tech industry has a hard time understanding and relating to the rest of the country/world. Wouldn't we all be better off if they spread out a bit such that they could better represent the entirety of the world?

I am just entering the job market and I would like to try and make this my career as well. I'd like to go from early stage company to early stage company and help the founders build something cool. Any tips or advice?

Certainly the lack of jobs is partially due to all the businesses that Amazon puts out of business by leveraging all of their AWS money to out compete companies in unrelated markets?

The company I work at manufactures these instruments. There are a bunch of videos on Youtube explaining how these systems work if you search for "flow sorting". I can also answer questions if you have them.

Aren't FPGA's used mostly to test/design a circuit that you would then go on to actually fabricate/build?

We use FPGAs in cell sorting because we need to make decisions off of high dimensional data with low latency. The cells moving through our system have velocities higher than 1 m/s. They flow past a set of lasers and wind up in a droplet less than a millisecond later so we need to make a decision whether or not to sort a droplet within that time frame. We don't use ASICs because we don't move enough volume to justify the startup cost.

We don't know the full story and likely never will. What if the doctors were correct in their assessment that the patient was unfit to make medical decisions and that she was being coerced by parents to act against her own best interest? I would be interested in looking at her medical record to try and understand what was really going on but that is unlikely to ever happen. There is really bad information asymmetry here because the hospital is legally prohibited from releasing any medical information but the patient can choose to reveal as much or as little as they wish.

I agree that the monetary incentives are definitely incorrectly aligned in the current healthcare system as is. That said, I don't think that monetary incentives are the only incentives present here. Most physicians don't go into medicine only to make money. There are easier ways to make more money. From my experience, most healthcare providers genuinely care about the patients' well being. That is why I bristle whenever people rush to attribute a physician's actions to greed. I totally agree with you that a better incentive structure would improve the system.

Ethics councils are often hybrid in nature, including members of the local community that do not stand to benefit financially from patient care. I agree that informing patients about the presence of these governing bodies is a difficult problem. However, many bad situations would be avoided if the information was disseminated as standard procedure at the earliest possible convenience (before disagreement has a chance to arise).

I have definitely seen anecdotal stories of this occurring. Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that this type of behavior is widespread?

It's easy to attribute this whole situation to greed and/or malice but I think that fails Hanlon's razor. I can easily see this whole situation occurring because of poor communication and the culture of paternalism in medicine. It is not hard to imagine a team of healthcare providers that know or think they know what is good for their patient and do a poor job explaining why they are making the decisions that they are making whether that is because of poor communication skills or because they are simply too busy. I think the article proposes a good solution in calling up the hospital's ethics council. This should be standard operating procedure when a patient disagrees with medical staff and the presence of this resource should be communicated to the patient early on and by a employee who isn't directly involved with the patient's care.

It seems pretty unfair to malign the entire field of medicine due to a single bad actor. I went to medical school prior to becoming an engineer and my impression was that most if not all of my classmates were genuine in their desire to help improve the lives of others. I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with your previous PCP but they don't represent the profession as a whole.

Also, if ADD is not a mental illness then what is it? I think this point is a conflation between medical definitions and social stigma.

This is giving me flashbacks to the whole STAP cells fiasco of a few years ago where a research group in Japan published a "simple" way to generate pluripotent stem cells. Everyone and their mother tried to replicate the result and eventually the paper was shown to be fraudulent. On the bright side, the larger scientific community acted as a backstop to the journal/peer-review system. On the other hand, the amount of resources expended to nullify this claim was probably enormous and is hard to quantify. Putting out bad data not only poisons the well, it also chews up lots of productivity cycles of everyone in the field.

If we give Stripe's management the benefit of the doubt then I think you are correct. If they are acting rationally then they would seek out technologies that threaten their business model and try to incorporate them to mitigate that risk. Dropping bitcoin would indicate that their internal metrics indicate that the technology is not currently a sufficient threat to their business.

Over the last few months, I decided to try and reduce my Amazon.com shopping as much as possible. As a result, I have been doing my item finding on Amazon and then going out and buying the item at a brick and mortar. I find it to be an interesting reversal. It has also been pretty shocking to see how much money I save when I don't have a Prime account. It turns out that most things I want are things that I don't actually need.

How about we all agree that people shouldn't have to work in inhumane conditions?

If the fingerprint frequencies are in the audible range, wouldn't you hear a brief humming when the fingerprint signal is being broadcast?

I wonder if you could solder a low pass filter into the electronics that drive the speakers in a TV in order to disable this sort of tracking. It might be even easier if you have an external receiver.

I don't think replacing politicians with scientists and engineers is really the solution here. We will always need the interpersonal skills that politicians bring to the table. However, these politicians should really employ more scientists and engineers as advisers. Most of the nitty gritty policy is currently handled by aides. These aides should have more training in evidence-based policy.

With regard to firing grad students:

I think it is quite rare to see grad students fired. Typically there are two strategies to get rid of a graduate student:

1) Just graduate them (either with a masters or with a undeserved PhD)

2) Make their lives miserable so they quit.

I don't think switching the source of funding for graduate to the department really prevents either of these from happening.

I did my graduate school in engineering and saw many of the same problems. Projects were often done simply because the matched the "brand" of the lab, meaning that they used some technology that had been developed in the lab. The experiments were almost always done haphazardly with only good results being published. Additionally, any barriers that were encountered were overcome by de-scoping the paper (removing claims that require breaking through the barrier). At the end of the day, at least basic science contributes some amount of information (however small) to the body of knowledge. Engineering research can just produce waste because it doesn't even bother to search for a fundamental truth.

Edit: I think there is still a role for engineering academics. The most successful ones that I have seen are those that are motivated by chasing down specific scientific questions and developing technology that will enable them to find answers.