HN user

niels_olson

6,462 karma

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/nielsolson; my proof: https://keybase.io/nielsolson/sigs/By0s36TtGr0q4mq9khivHQz9EMRqdpJYyqS3A9GwL4A ]

email is user dot name @gmail.com

topcolor: f6f6f6

Navy pathology resident in San Diego.

If you're in town and looking for someone to go surfing, trail running, cycling, or open ocean swimming, please hit me up!

Posts222
Comments1,979
View on HN
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: What's your favorite router these days?

niels_olson
1pts3
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Show HN: Two HN tabs I found together, that concern me

niels_olson
5pts1
challenge.nejm.org 9y ago

New England Journal of Medicine SPRINT Data Challenge

niels_olson
1pts0
jamanetwork.com 9y ago

Deep Learning Algorithm for Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy

niels_olson
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: What sort of data do distributed systems handle well?

niels_olson
2pts0
iase.disa.mil 9y ago

DoD PKI interoperability chart

niels_olson
2pts0
en.wikipedia.org 10y ago

Nodding disease

niels_olson
1pts0
www.medscape.com 10y ago

FDA approves cold compress for insomnia

niels_olson
1pts0
superuser.com 10y ago

Shell vs. Console vs. Terminal

niels_olson
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

HN meetup at NVidia confrence? Wednesday at 5?

niels_olson
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

What Is CompSci Equivalent to Federation of American Scientists

niels_olson
2pts1
la.curbed.com 10y ago

Will the California Coast Be for the People or Big Developers?

niels_olson
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Tutorial for python (esp PIL) for bio image analysis?

niels_olson
2pts0
alexwheeler.io 10y ago

Hacking for Good Waves

niels_olson
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 11y ago

Apple Waits as App Developers Study Who’s Buying Its Watch

niels_olson
29pts57
www.cvedetails.com 11y ago

CVE distribution by vendor

niels_olson
2pts0
stackoverflow.com 11y ago

Ukkonen's suffix tree algorithm

niels_olson
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Tips to build an OpenBSD Thinkpad for airgap use?

niels_olson
7pts4
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: How do you decide when to use a library?

niels_olson
3pts3
web.cecs.pdx.edu 11y ago

Computer-Intensive Methods in Statistics (1983) [pdf]

niels_olson
14pts0
dodcio.defense.gov 11y ago

DoD Open Source FAQ

niels_olson
1pts1
www.google.com 11y ago

Why can Google find gas+stations but not local+pgp+key+signers?

niels_olson
2pts1
www.consumer.ftc.gov 11y ago

Two relatives burned by tech support scams, pls share with parents

niels_olson
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Is there a GitHub-like service that can host scientific data sets?

niels_olson
3pts6
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

How to cost account HPC compute hours?

niels_olson
4pts1
www.nytimes.com 11y ago

The Problem With 'Pay for Performance' in Medicine

niels_olson
1pts0
plus.google.com 12y ago

Lego Robotics Team 2600 needs help

niels_olson
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: What has a better ROI? Comp Sci BS or JD?

niels_olson
1pts2
code.google.com 12y ago

Did Google just add Wacom support to chromeOS?

niels_olson
3pts1
discussions.apple.com 12y ago

Would someone please ask the Apple Numbers team to fix slanted headers?

niels_olson
2pts1

I interviewed at Sikorsky back in the day. Sort of wish I had pursued it, because the factory floor was amazing, but the manager reminded me of a guy from The Sopranos, and then I got into medical school. But that floor, man. Swashplates. Have you ever seen a swashplate, naked and alone on a pallet? Thin wall machining. I mean, goddamn, that was some sexy machine work. But they wanted me to run business analytics for government cost-accounting programs. Fuck. That. Also, medical school.

Naval Architecture 5 years ago

My first job out of college was as a junior engineering officer on a ship. I had taken naval architecture and the daily draft report was part of my job. The fuel king had a spreadsheet where the engineering watch input all the tank levels overnight. I added a sheet that took that data and solved all the tank problems, bouncy, incline, etc, and printed the report. So instead of two hours of number crunching, or one of my enlisted guys doing what he did (which was basically copy forward and subtract an inch a day), the report was completely automated, with fore, aft, and center draft. With zero human effort.

Apparently the guy who took my job when I left had a nervous breakdown. I feel a little bad about that, but not really. He should have paid attention in class.

Unfortunately, some people are going to read this wrong. For example: I know some folks who have "second dinner" after 8 pm. Their children are definitively obese, and I can see them citing this study as a reason to keep eating "a meal called dinner" after 8 pm.

How do you propose to infect cells deep inside solid tumors?How do you target cells that have lost cell surface markers? Your example, p16, is used in many cells intermittently, or only in certain microenvironments . How do you deliver? IV, topical, tumor injection (if so, what about needle tract seeding)?

There are regions with sparse coverage due to higher concentrations of C-G bases. This can make alignment results less reliable. Plasmids may interfere with alignment or need to be isolated out before or during library prep. And you want to detect and discard any members of the population with any evidence of cancer, genetic disease, etc.

And you need good population coverage. What's a normal variant? Newer methods propose a graph alignment instead of just trying to build a single sequence reference genome.

Personal opinion based on anecdotal evidence: population mobility has increased career opportunity at the expense of the opportunities afforded to young families through staying close to home. From newborn to age N, local gandparents can be a godsend. In any family's case, which grandparents are nearby may be crucial, but if you came from a nuturing home, moving to a different timezone has definitely negative, high stress consequences in the young home.

I'd go beyond "general problem-solving skills". Physics gives you high quality math training (albeit somewhat truncated with respect to number theory), coupled with demanding experimental methods, and a deep, principled understanding of the foundations of the universe. Nothing is beyond your reach. Any other quantitative or logical discipline is just laying there, waiting for you.

My sense is that the major issue is not the algorithms. The algorithms are plenty fine today. The major issue is data. Not "more" data. Just data. There are vast swaths of the economy where people simply haven't figured out how to digitize the data yet. They have no idea the gold mines they are sitting on.

Imagine everyone who never took multi-dimensional calculus in college (most of humanity). Where are they today? Those folks have data they're not using.

also ordering services such as use of the clinic, assistants, supplies, and so forth

For things like moles, a big chunk is the pathologist's professional fee, as well as the technical fees for whatever additional studies may be needed. "It's just a mole" can become "I'm very sorry, but you have melanoma, we'll be excising most of your cheek on Tuesday."

Can't vote on those, and it's five hysterical pacifist comments who conveniently forget that the DoD also owns the "homeless missions" by default, and complained when Obama didn't send more troops to Allepo.

Look, this video is aimed at mid-level to senior officers: leaders tasked to keep their people alive and executing the mission (humanitarian aid, asset extraction, etc.). This is a think piece for people who will go into harm's way.

Ah, cholesterol plaques in arteries are in fact the ghost of inflammation past, and specifically macrophage-mediated inflammation. In medicine this is far from a departure from the prevailing hypothesis -- it is a consolidation of multiple lines of evidence.

Karpathy's explanation in CS231n is great: for any computational unit that is a function, you can calculate a derivative. So propagating the derivative backward through the function, just aplly the chain rule. This is much with simpler functions, so understand your algorithm down to the smallest computable units in the graph.

Every atom of every element heavier than iron is stardust (1). Uranium is no more fossil than gold is.

(1) Most of the lighter stuff is stardust too, but there's some small number of heavy nuclei that decayed down to more stable, lighter isotopes, which ultimately leads to iron, the most stable of all.