njl

Kyra Health | Senior & Staff Product Engineers | Remote (USA)

We’re building a national ICHRA platform at the intersection of healthcare, fintech, compliance, and AI.

Implementation is getting cheaper. Engineering judgment is not.

We’re looking for engineers who enjoy:

* Turning ambiguous problems into production systems. * Owning outcomes, not tickets. * Working across product, architecture, and implementation. * Reviewing and improving AI-generated code. * Shipping quickly without creating a maintenance disaster.

Requirements:

* Strong Python, TypeScript, or equivalent experience. * Strong engineering judgment. * Strong communication skills. * US residency.

Apply: https://engineering.kyra.health

Questions: n@kyra.health

Kyra Health | Senior & Staff Product Engineers | Remote (USA)

We’re building a national ICHRA platform at the intersection of healthcare, fintech, compliance, and AI.

Implementation is getting cheaper. Engineering judgment is not.

If you enjoy turning ambiguous business problems into production systems, owning outcomes, and shipping quickly without creating a maintenance disaster, we’d like to talk.

Python, TypeScript, healthcare, fintech, AI.

Apply: https://engineers.kyra.health Questions: n@kyra.health

Kyra Health | Python/Typescript | Remote (USA) | Full Time

We believe there is a significant opportunity to improve healthcare quality and cost for employers, employees, and insurance companies; regulatory changes and LLMs mean it is time to build. We think we can provide a better experience for less money, and have multiple positive impacts on society. We have the idea, the funding, and the skills and knowledge to make it happen. We're looking for a few more strong engineers to help us build it.

Responsibilities

- Research, plan, scope, and design solutions to difficult problems while navigating laws, regulations, and standards in money movement and healthcare.

- Produce elegant and simple code that is architected and written for the long haul.

- Speed up overall development efforts.

- Help build a development environment and operational tooling that will be the envy of companies many times our size.

Must Haves

- Strong Python or TypeScript skills, or a strong background in another dynamic language.

- A burning desire to get things out the door and in the hands of users.

- Strong communication skills.

Reach out to me at n@kyra.health, or kick the process off at https://enghiring.kyra.health

Kyra Health | Python/Typescript | Remote (USA) | Full Time

We believe there is a significant opportunity to improve healthcare quality and cost for employers, employees, and insurance companies; regulatory changes and LLMs mean it is time to build. We think we can provide a better experience for less money, and have multiple positive impacts on society. We have the idea, the funding, and the skills and knowledge to make it happen. We're looking for a few more strong engineers to help us build it.

Responsibilities

- Research, plan, scope, and design solutions to difficult problems while navigating laws, regulations, and standards in money movement and healthcare.

- Produce elegant and simple code that is architected and written for the long haul.

- Speed up overall development efforts.

- Help build a development environment and operational tooling that will be the envy of companies many times our size.

Must Haves

- Strong Python or TypeScript skills, or a strong background in another dynamic language.

- A burning desire to get things out the door and in the hands of users.

- Strong communication skills.

Reach out to me at n@kyra.health, or kick the process off at https://enghiring.kyra.health

Kyra Health | Python/Typescript | Remote (USA) | Full Time

We believe there is a significant opportunity to improve healthcare quality and cost for employers, employees, and insurance companies; regulatory changes and LLMs mean it is time to build. We think we can provide a better experience for less money, and have multiple positive impacts on society. We have the idea, the funding, and the skills and knowledge to make it happen. We're looking for a few more strong engineers to help us build it.

Responsibilities

- Research, plan, scope, and design solutions to difficult problems while navigating laws, regulations, and standards in money movement and healthcare.

- Produce elegant and simple code that is architected and written for the long haul.

- Speed up overall development efforts.

- Help build a development environment and operational tooling that will be the envy of companies many times our size.

Must Have

- Strong Python or TypeScript skills, or a strong background in another dynamic language.

- A burning desire to get things out the door and in the hands of users.

- Strong communication skills.

Reach out to me at n@kyra.health.

Unlaunched Healthcare Startup | Python/Typescript | Remote (USA) | Full Time

We believe there is a significant opportunity to improve healthcare quality and cost for employers, employees, and insurance companies; regulatory changes and LLMs mean it is time to build. We think we can provide a better experience for less money, and have multiple positive impacts on society. We have the idea, the funding, and the skills and knowledge to make it happen. We're looking for a few more strong engineers to help us build it.

Responsibilities

- Research, plan, scope, and design solutions to difficult problems while navigating laws, regulations, and standards in money movement and healthcare.

- Produce elegant and simple code that is architected and written for the long haul.

- Speed up overall development efforts.

- Help build a development environment and operational tooling that will be the envy of companies many times our size.

Must Have

- Strong Python or TypeScript skills, or a strong background in another dynamic language.

- A burning desire to get things out the door and in the hands of users.

- Strong communication skills.

Apply at https://www.unlaunchedhealthcarestartup.com/, or reach out to me at njl@njl.us.

Spotify actually has (at least) a few hundred pools of money; one of the pools might be "Free listeners in the US", one might be "Moldovan listeners who have Spotify as a bundle with this particular cell phone provider". A fixed percentage of that money is set aside for the rights holders for the performance (master rights) and the rights holders for the music (publishing rights).

The allocated money is then passed to the rights holders, based on the percentage of listens they received within users in that pool. Individual rights holders can negotiate additional bumps, and Spotify has some exceptions for what needs to be counted.

I know that the idea that money should go from a listener directly to the bands that user listens to, instead of splitting up the pool, feels like a pretty interesting one. Unfortunately, folks who listen to a lot of music tend to listen to smaller and more interesting bands as well. This change wouldn't necessarily result in more money in the pockets of smaller artists; it's not inconceivable at all that the rich would get richer.

It's also worth mentioning that the average person who spent money on music at all, prior to the invention of streaming, spent far less annually than they spend on streaming now.

I think artists are reacting to a lot of issues. The entire music industry is built around signing absolutely disgusting contracts with deeply talented and fundamentally naive 18 year olds who are effectively replaceable by the next new thing. This is compounded by the fact that most artists don't have a relationship with Spotify; they have a relationship with their record label who has a relationship with Spotify, and the label isn't really interested in giving an artist a full accounting of what they've brought in from Spotify.

Finally, and most importantly, there is a real disconnect between the social impact of music and the actual size of the industry. There's a lot of money there, sure, but the music industry is like a professional sports league in terms of total revenue. A few superstars are going to suck up a lot of the money and not leave much for the bench players, let alone the folks three leagues down from the "show".

There are a multitude of different processes and procedures to deal with different kinds of fertility issues. It isn't uncommon to do a "fresh" transfer after a handful of days. Genetic testing is generally only going to be offered if you do a frozen transfer. Not all embryos are of high enough quality to survive being frozen, and a live transfer might be the only option.

Spotify has internal fingerprinting stuff that can handle this easily enough. The shutdown is entirely due to pressure from the record labels. It's a shame; this was a surprisingly difficult product to get off the ground, and a lot of folks put in heroic efforts to make it work.

Restrict processing – in your admin panel where there’s a list of users, there should be a button “restrict processing”. The user settings page should also have that button. When clicked (after reading the appropriate information), it should mark the profile as restricted. That means it should no longer be visible to the backoffice staff, or publicly. You can implement that with a simple “restricted” flag in the users table and a few if-clasues here and there.

The simple hubris in this statement is jaw-dropping. “Just a flag and a few if clauses! Easy peasy!”

The user can request I delete all of the data related to them without “undue delay”. Are you ready to purge all references to certain IP addresses in your logs? Don’t forget backups.

GDPR blows up a lot of assumptions we make about writing software and managing servers.

https://www.privacy-regulation.eu/en/article-17-right-to-era...

If only it was that easy. A reasonable reading of GDPR makes standard web server logs (which contain IP addresses) a punishable offense, even if you don’t have a nexus in Europe.

GDPR is a wonderful idea that will be insanely expensive to comply with, act as a continuous drag on developing new technologies, and end up offering only nominal protection to end users. This is just going to be another way for EU regulators to smack around Google and Facebook. They probably deserve it, but the potential fallout for the rest of us is really going to hurt.

Don’t get me wrong, treating user data with respect is the right thing to do. But we’re all going to be paying for this overly broad and under specified legislation for years to come.

Dave Cutler was a lead for VMS, then left DEC for Microsoft and led the development of Windows NT.

I've never heard it stated quite so plainly, but that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if the billion dollars in funding demands more.

There are two competing interests here. First, Disney wants to keep control of Mickey Mouse cartoons, and it doesn't feel unreasonable at all that they should. Second, the rest of the stuff that is of little commercial value but of potential cultural value should be freed from uncertain or uninterested ownership.

The answer feels trivial to me, which means I'm probably missing something. Fixed term for a few decades from the creation of the work, maybe 30 years or 40 years. After that, you need to give a copy of the work to the Library of Congress, pay a nominal fee, and you get a 5 year extension. Take as many of those as you want.

This greatly simplifies everything. If you find a work that is older than the base term, you look it up in the copyright extension database. If it's in there, you can find out who owns the rights to it, and try to license rights. If it isn't in there, it's public domain. If somebody doesn't stay on the ball enough to renew their rights every five years, it probably isn't all that commercially valuable, and moves into the public domain.

I'm very comfortable with this in the general case; I feel guilty eating bacon because pigs seem pretty smart. Still, rights always come paired up with responsibilities. Do we then try dolphins for rape or murder?

Rather than saying certain categories of animals should have the same rights as humans, maybe we'd be better off saying certain categories of animals deserve a higher level of ethical and legal consideration.

Just because you can play Mad-Libs with his sentence to make it seem silly, doesn't mean you are adding anything to the conversation. Social networking is a fun and interesting development, but putting it in the same category as the printing press makes me think you are either greatly undervaluing the printing press, greatly overvaluing social networking, or more likely, both.

There are a number of alternative period table layouts[1] that highlight different aspects of the relationships between elements. I taught chemistry for a bit, and I coveted this swooping three-dimensional spiral model that gorgeously showed how the electrons were filling out the different orbitals...

Doob is the man, and I was disappointed when I hit the spiral button and it was a demo of putting the things in a spiral, not the half-remembered spiral-esque model in my mind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_periodic_tables

I suspect this would be better as a membership with an annual fee and a free app.

They're all protected by patents. All of them. I can pretty much guarantee you that any of IBM, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intellectual Ventures, and many others have sufficient patent coverage to be able to sue you for anything you could possibly build that involves software in any way.

[edited to scope it to software]

We're not going to shut them down by invalidating them one at a time. You're not plugging a few leaks in a dike; you're trying to splash the ocean back with teacups.

If you violate a patent unknowingly, you are liable for damages. If you violate a patent you know exists, you are liable for treble damages.

The only rational thing for someone who actually makes stuff to do is to not read any patents, ever, as a matter of general policy.

This might not be the socially responsible answer; we should all be fighting the patent madness in our industry. It is, however, the most logical course of action. It puts the lie to the whole "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" thing, but that's where we are.

I hate one declaration per line. I wrap at 80ish columns. I can then see all of the CSS for a single page at once on my screen, without paging up and down through some ridiculously long file. It bothers me that idiomatic CSS is so wasteful of vertical space.

The successor to Perl is Ruby. System administration used to mean Perl, now it means Ruby. Fast web development used to mean Perl, now it means Ruby or Python. The successor to Perl is Ruby.

For those missing the irony, CNET is also a CBS property.

I haven't heard the Java licensing angle yet. That would make the Motorola acquisition an even bigger legal play than originally thought.

SEEKING WORK -- Boston, MA or remote

Full stack web developer, browser Javascript all the way down through the stack to DevOps stuff. I'm most effective in Python, Javascript, Java, and Go, in about that order. I've used most of the NoSQL DBs, Flask, Django, Celery, Node, jQuery, Amazon APIs, etc, etc. My increasingly outdated resume is at http://www.njl.us/resume/

Doing the IP lookup yourself isn't very hard. The nginx HttpGeoIPModule[1] will do a lookup on the MaxMind databases for you. I used it in my weekend hack, http://spotwoo.com. Doesn't take very long to set up, very easy to use.

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpGeoIPModule

I haven't played with it much, but the dateutil[1] package seems to do some nice stuff.

[1] http://labix.org/python-dateutil

Momentum, I suspect.

At some point, increasing demands from local government are destined to provide a competitive advantage to businesses in other locales. The interesting question is how much of an advantage being located in Silicon Valley is, as compared to the cost. By their nature, bureaucracies tend to ratchet themselves larger and larger. At some point, the balance has to tip.