thaddeusmt

My spouse is a physician, and "patient messages" (aka "non-face-to-face" encounters) usually aren't reimbursed by insurance. Having a friendly online conversation with a patient doesn't generate the "RVUs" they need (contractually!), so time spent messaging is time taken out of their personal day on top of their regular workload.

Responding to messages can also just be very difficult and time consuming. Maybe you ask concise, clear, pertinent messages to your doctor (or think you do!), but most do not. It's similar to problems HN readers might be more familiar with: user-created support tickets, and comment moderation. Medical office staff help with this triage and moderation, but it has become a big problem to manage with how easy it now is for bored/sick/scared patients to send messages.

Glad to see this mentioned (twice even!). Ambrosia Software! This was the first game I was really exposed to "mods" and user created content with, too. Takes me back!

Figured this was related to hybrid RAV4s or EVs but no - the regular old "car battery" is the issue!

A few tech and Python specific podcasts I've been listening to while I do dishes:

The Real Python Podcast Talk Python To Me Software Engineering Radio Maintainable

Yes, but maybe a company or organization is, in fact, looking at political climate change solutions, but needs tech hires for their operations, etc.

As the target audience for a job board like this, the question I am starting with isn't "how can tech solve climate change?", it's "how can I apply my tech skills to a problem like climate change?".

In Utah, my understanding is that the primary purpose of state owned lands is to generate revenue for the state. Utah uses them to make money, not to protect them. This includes mineral leasing for oil, gas, coal, etc, and grazing, but in some cases, like the "SITLA" School Trust lands, the state will literally auction off land into private hands. This is ostensibly to raise money for public schools. I strongly support public education, but this way of removing beautiful tracts of Utah desert from the public is very final. You can hike around an oil well, and eventually sort of clean them up, but outright selling off limited resources like lands is frustrating. Compared to normal revenue sources, like taxes, these land auctions raise such a small amount for money for the school system it's even more tragic.

The outdoor recreation industry in Utah is growing rapidly, largely part due to the National Parks, Monuments, and other amazing public lands we have to recreate on. Our 5 national parks (Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce and Capitol Reef) are some of the most visited in the country. This isn't hunting recreation, like the Field & Stream article is about. Most of this is mountain biking, climbing, hiking, rafting, etc. (Think family vacations and young web developers in Vanagons, not gun toting hunters in big trucks.) On top of the burgeoning hospitality industry supporting this tourism, outdoor companies like Backcountry.com, Petzl, Goal Zero, Black Diamond, Altra, Kuhl, Scott, etc have large presences in Utah now. By some counts, outdoor recreation is one of the largest economic drivers in Utah. And between the aspirational outdoor photos people in the city like on Instagram and generally affordable travel, this visitation trend will only continue upward.

In response to Utah's politicians passing resolutions and endlessly promoting "taking back" Federal land into State hands, the outdoor industry that relies on public land access has started to fight back. To make a stand against these anti-federal politics Patagonia, Black Diamond and some other large retailers threatened to boycott the "Outdoor Retailer" trade show, held in Utah. In response, there was a call with the Governor and he basically gave the outdoor industry the finger. They are moving the trade show to another state now - more symbolic than actually hurtful to Utah's economy, but an interesting development nonetheless. After the ceaseless "jobs" and "pro-business" rhetoric from red states like Utah this antagonism towards one of it's largest and fastest growing industries is frustrating and puzzling. I can't tell if my politicians really see using public lands for finite oil and gas extraction as a better plan than protecting them for generations of future vacationers - or if they just get better campaign contributions from those extraction industries. Either way, as someone who likes mountain biking and who has high hopes for solar energy and electric cars, there is nothing positive to me about these state attempts to control my Federal lands. (I do vote, but I will probably not be able to affect Utah's red state politics for a long time.)

Fascinating. If not a hoax - perhaps an early example of schizophrenia? A rare case where an educated schizophrenic had access to bound calf skin, creating a book with their own invented language and theories?

"Yoshi brings the gas station to your gift recipient, refueling their car regularly wherever it's parked. Any commuters on your list will thank you for removing the hassle of the gas station from their lives forever."

I get it, filling up your car is a chore, if your time is super valuable... whatever. It's hard to fill the YC portfolio every year with only companies working on "big problems", I'm sure. But it really does feel like "Valley bullshit". I hope it was pitched as "disrupting the archaic gasoline distribution system - we're going to do to fossil fuels what Amazon did for books & movies".

(I will have a good laugh if this dismissive comment is pulled up years from now as an example of "another negative Hacker News post about a now-hugely successful company")

Billings is actually one of the more diverse towns in Montana (which isn't saying much) due to how close the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations are. 4.4% Native American according to Wikipedia. But I guess that's not part of the image this marketing team wanted to project...

After living in Montana for almost 10 years, this video is kind of funny. It's like an ad for all of the things that _other_ Montana towns like Bozeman and Missoula are famous for!

Granted Billings is obviously changing (for better or worse), but it's known for it's industrial plants, not it's bike trails. I will say the "rimrock" above town is lovely and unique (and it's home to one of the most challenging disc golf courses in the country!) but in terms of trails and other recreational development Bozeman and Missoula are years ahead in development.

Billings actually does have some diversity due to it's close proximity to the Crow Reservation (4.4% Native American), but that fact is just as absent as the 3 oil refineries in this cheery white-washing promo video.

As a side note: it's incredible how many breweries and distilleries are springing up across the country - even in Billings! I love beer, but it's kind of overwhelming.

I'm sure it doesn't compare to SF, but the "homeless issue" is hardly solved in SLC, Utah, from my anecdotal experiences living here. If the homeless population has been reduced "91%" as this article maintains, then I cannot imagine what it was like before.

On the topic of Lenny, "who" is great, if you want to just listen to one recorded Lenny call to get a sense for how it plays out (and have a laugh too), in this particular one a car crashes into the building where the telemarketer is working, adding to the strangeness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lL870ixdsY

It's like watching magic. Granted the effect is enhanced by the accelerated speed of the videos, but, wow. I wonder how long it takes to learn Illustrator/Sketch/etc well enough to be able to create art like this (e.g. watching the tire tread get put on the taxi - what voodoo was that?).

Interesting to hear they were so dissatisfied with Celery/RabbitMQ that chose to write their own queuing system. I'm looking in to implementing a queue for background tasks right now, and was down to choosing between Celery/RabbitMQ and beanstalkd. Perhaps I'll check out their new "Taskworker" ("Kale"?) app that they have open sourced. (https://github.com/Nextdoor/ndkale)

A Planet Money recently talked about which items are recyclable, which are not, and how global economic trends effect them. Like how China buys our recycled plastic, unless oil prices dip low enough it's cheaper to make new plastic.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episo...

Also, this article is from 1996? I'd like to know what has changed (and what hasn't) in the last 20 years.

Salt Lake City (and apparently all of Utah?) is lucky enough to have some serious open data advocates actually employed in the government. Props to Open Salt Lake and everyone involved for working on the portal and supporting open and transparent government. We "pay" for this government data, after all, so it's great when it's made easily accessible.

I attended a civic data hackathon once, and was pleasantly surprised at the resulting products. My favorite was a "slumlord" app, which mashed up property ownership vs building code violations (or something like that). It was a fun change of pace from a typical hackathon and the requisite dating/shopping/photo sharing apps.

I love reading about "big data" projects that aren't about marketing and advertising. This is particularly interesting to me with my latent environmental and overpopulation concerns. Fantastic article, good find.

Link is down for me - is this the same article?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...

Long term I see the "sharing economy" being driven by resource scarcity (i.e. it's not practical for every human on earth to have a car), but I totally agree that right now it's often driven by job scarcity.

In my limited experiences with AirBnB people on the supply side either approach "sharing" as a fun hobby (e.g. "stay in our cute guest house!"), or they are truly trying to make ends meet.

True story: I AirBnB'd once and the guy rented out his own bed to us, and slept on the couch (and his girlfriend stayed over! on the couch!). Another roommate was AirBnB'ing a room in the same house, too. I think they were both trying to pay their rent share via AirBnB. Nice guys - we felt welcome and had a good time - but money was not "secondary" to them.

This is a common pattern for embedding scripts, so the browser will use the same protocol as the parent page loading the element (http or https), avoiding issues with embedding insecure content in a secure page. I thought it worked for iframe elements too - but I guess it's not consistently supported? It works for me in Chrome on Win7.

Edit - more info about "Protocol Relative URLs": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/550038/is-it-valid-to-rep...

Hyperbole. Words like "awesome" and "incredible" have also lost their original meaning and power. Things can't just be "good" or "moderately enthusiastic" anymore - it sounds too weak, and doesn't cut through the noise these days.

I remember catching monarch butterfly caterpillars, as a child in New York, and keeping them with milkweed stems until they formed their chrysalis and eventually "hatched" as butterflies. Amazing.

We moved West eventually, and I've rarely seen monarchs since. I figured it was just because of the different habitat (no milkweed), but apparently it's not just that.

All insects are amazing in their own ways, but monarchs just have that extra curbside appeal to humans. Sad to hear they are in decline.

Regardless of the link-bait/fear-mongering at play in any environmental journalism these days... I have genuine concern about growing the impact of humans on the earth. It's hard to remain optimistic sometimes, even as a technology-positive person.

I'm working through this course (and took the earlier sister course Computation for Data Analysis with R). It's quite good so far. They stay away from the "big" part and focus on the core of data analysis: how to find data, clean it up, explore it, find relationships and present your findings. We are using R, which is suitable for most data sizes. It's offered by Johns Hopkins, and has more of an academic bent than an industry one. Great general purpose knowledge that I think you would want before you start messing around with Hadoop.

We have a CMS application that supports creating custom web forms, which each have a different set of fields which hold different types of data. Email addresses, multi-select radio buttons, text areas, etc. Some forms only gets submitted once or twice, others are submitted many thousands of times. To store this in a normal relational database you either need many tables, or you need to normalize your data (probably Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) style). We didn't want hundreds of tables, and designing a good EAV system can be tough (Magento anyone?), so we looked at other options.

We've settled currently on using MongoDb, with one collection to hold the (versioned) definition of each form's fields (data type, order, validation rules, etc), and another collection to hold all of the submissions (this is a laaarge collection). There _is_ a "relation" between the form definition and the submissions, but because you always query for submissions based on the form (by form_id), you don't really need to do "JOINs" (you just query out the form definition once, before the submissions). Also, because the forms are versioned, and each submission is associated with a particular version of a form, there is no need to retroactively update the de-normalized schema of past submissions (although this does limit your ability to query the submissions if a form is updated frequently - or drastically). It's not perfect, but this use case for MongoDb has been working well for us so far.

My answer to this prompt was starting to get long, so I actually wrote it up in more detail on my blog (the first update in months!). Included are some other drawbacks and tradoffs there. Check it out here if you are interested:

http://chilipepperdesign.com/2013/11/11/versioned-data-model...

I would love to hear how other folks have solved similar issues like this? Or if anyone sees a way to improve on our current solution? Feel free to respond here or on the blog post. Cheers

So, this isn't so much about the "end" of using cookies to track users as it is about the "rise" of enhanced methods enabled by the fact we are constantly logged in to services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.

The thing is, even Google services (Search, Analytics, etc) and Facebook (the Like Button, etc) use cookies to track users. It's still fundamentally the same thing. The difference is that by logging in to the same service (Google, Facebook, etc) on difference devices and browsers, they can "link" the cookie data together for a more complete picture of your online activity.

Adding to this cross-cookie data, these services can include data from their actual services (Google Search, the Facebook Social Graph, etc), and are starting to include data about the Apps you use (in their respective ecosystems). It's a nice bundle of data they can sell to advertisers (indirectly, via ad targeting).

The scarier question is: will the tracking be enabled at the client/device level? Will your Google or Microsoft web browser (or OS) directly collect and track information about your browsing? Or will it still be limited to "web tracking" (with enhanced ability to connect cookie data across multiple devices)?

$1 million (a year) in funding might not register on TechCrunch, but I would think it's more than enough money to start (or help keep afloat) many different kinds businesses, including tech startups.

The first time I tried to work remotely I was in college, living in a dorm. Work was not my priority, a dorm is not a good environment, and online collaboration tools weren't as good then (2003). I missed a big code deadline, and that was the end of that experiment.

I've been working remotely again for the past 3 years, with good success. It's been a boon to me since I've had to move twice, but was able to keep the same job.

I love working remotely for all the reasons 37signals hit on the their video, but there are some downsides:

1. loneliness - This may still be preferable to some office situations, but it can wear on you. Web chat, coffee shops, and coworking spaces combat this, but still.

2. distractions - You can also waste a whole day at work if you are in an office (and offices have their own distractions), but I still think greater self discipline is needed to stay on task working from home.

3. poor work/life division - Contradicting #2, it can be hard to STOP working. I find myself working while I eat dinner, on weekends, and late in to the night.

4. "out of the loop" - Especially if the whole company isn't remote, you can quickly become "out of the loop". Even if the company makes a big effort to have frequent virtual meetings and CC you on discussions, you will miss out on random office discussions/overheard phone conversations/etc.

Alcohol is a very polarizing subject, even outside of the workplace. And rightly so - it can be a destructive force, and does require more personal responsibility than many people have to use it "appropriately".

And beer especially is loaded with gender baggage as the drink for choice for men. In light of all the recent discussion about gender equality in tech (not to mention "rape culture") having a keggerator in the office can easily be construed as throwing your company's hat in the male-privilege ring. Beer enjoys a better reputation than liquor, at least, but would the conversation change if the office stocked wine? Or drink with the opposite gender stereotypes, like maybe strawberry margaritas on tap?

I like beer (and homebrewing) and have no problem with it in the office. But I'm a young, white, male, developer; so no surprise there. It would appear I am who these companies (think they) want to attract and retain.

But assuming my demographic is not the only one who should feel comfortable in the office, I could see erring on the side of sensitivity and "professionalism", and not having beer on tap in the office.

I have enjoyed all of the Google/Arcade Fire collaboration videos, especially this one from a while ago, where (spoiler) you are shown your childhood house on Google Maps at the end: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire/

It's always interesting to see experiments with art and technology like this (especially with music I enjoy!).

That's good someone is still interested in low-level tinkering! There will always be problems than cannot be solved within the limitations of a framework or SDK. And the more entrenched in this new "high level" "wire-together" paradigm people like myself are, the more daunting low-level system exploration is. IMO, this means fewer developers will be willing to try it, ensuring demand will continue for the work you are interested in.