skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My biggest concern with Theranos, which I haven't really seen acknowledged in any of these articles, is that multiparametric panels on asymptomatic individuals will lead to a proliferation of false positives. Running hundreds of tests whenever a patient decides to do so doesn't make sense unless that ultimately enables better clinical outcomes for patients. And this is true regardless of whether the underlying measurement technology that Theranos has developed actually works or not.

It's discussed in a journal article from earlier this year by a pathologist:

> panel profiling, which was introduced in the 1970s as a way of identifying early biochemical changes of disease in asymptomatic individuals, had been abandoned in the 1980s, not so much for the cost. It has long been realized that with multiparametric testing, approximately 5% of results will be false positives, i.e., test results outside the reference intervals, in otherwise normal subjects. This is due to the definition of reference intervals, as being values between the 2.5 and 97.5 percentile of a reference (normal) population. The high cost of investigating seemingly abnormal results in normal people, and the added anxiety of patients, has led to the complete replacement of such biochemical profiling with what is now known as “discrete testing”. In the latter, tests are performed by the testing laboratory, only if requested specifically by the physician.

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/cclm.2015.53.issue-7/cclm-20...
An accusation this serious should be accompanied by evidence, or dismissed.
> I wonder how popular this viewpoint will be here on HN - the home of lifehacking and microanalysis of bodyfunction (often without the corresponding knowledge to go with it, but prefaced with a view that 'more data will always be better').

This would be what I see as the fundamental flaw behind Theranos, even if their technology worked (works?) as promised: the idea that more data will always be better is sophomoric (and I select that word judiciously, considering the founder). Evidence-based medicine clearly shows that more data does not, in itself, lead to a better outcome.
I'm honored to work at the Internet Archive and hope you will consider chipping in to help us continue to champion the import of, and make progress towards, our mission: universal access to all knowledge. If you can't part with a little $$ now, how about uploading some digital media you think are important? The Archive will endeavor to make them available to everyone, forever, for free.
You'd have to correct the 47m GBP for nominal GPD/capita growth to get a clearer sense.

Using the data from http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2009/nov/25/gdp-uk-... and picking 1975 nominal GPD (28,742 mGBP) vs 2013 nominal GDP (399,834 mGDP), the 47 mGBP in 1975 become 654 mGBP in 2013.
Because prototyping requires you to build and then get feedback, because almost no company knows how to actually plan a project in isolation rather than have to go through multiple iterations. Then rework (where you're redoing things based on user feedback and changing requirements) causes forward progress to not be the sustained motion that management always expects. That's why.
This is sort of what's wrong with HN lately. There seems to be a sweeping majority of Singularity believers that just take "AGI in 30-50 years" as just an obvious inevitability. So therefore we just go straight into SciFi mode and make all kinds of speculation with that premise. Then, this couples with this sort of, I don't know how to explain it, maybe its like an uncritically overly anti-establishment or "naively disruptive" current that just collectively nods like "Oh yeah, the traditional law firm is dead meat."

It's surprising to m,e as I believe the community is largely made up of technologists, that I never see much questioning the fundamental claims here.

For that wet dream of that Internet Bayes Theorem Religion, that I will not name, to come true, it needs to first be possible and second, there must br credible, serious people to actually be working on it. Granted, artificial intelligence is a very hot area of research. However, for anyone that is either a researcher in this field, a graduate student in the field, or just someone actually very current on the latest papers and the current research programs, knows this is AGI of the SciFi sort is not really what is being worked on.

Not to go into all of the field but sure there are many interesting things happening in pattern recognition, NLP, machine learning and data mining and much work done with things like convolusional neural networks ..... but I'm sorry to say that these an AGI Overlord do not make. They are fancy techniques that yield very powerful and interesting results but in consideration of an AGI they are rather boring and banal.

Largely, the techniques have been discontinuous incremental improvements on reasonably simple ideas from the 1950s and 1960 but now utilizing massive parallelism. Unfortunately, I think, for AGI a non-trivial number of techniques are rooted in statistical and probabilistic methods, which I think anyone would agree is probably a a wrong track toward intuitive and creative problem solving.

It's not that those of us critical of AGI proclamations think that it is impossible, that would be rather bold, or that we think humans are magical or something. We probably just think that our brains, or even abstractly "true intelligence", are things that are unlikely able to be simulated by something like a Turing Machine. Any skeptic knows that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I gotta tell ya, the way facial recognition works or even Watson, ain't it.

Also, I will say, just because something in the world is a certain way or if it is not exactly like Uber, does not mean it is necessarily a bad thing .... I'm just sayin' ....

An AGI Overlord would probably not be like the wild-eyed disruptor but more contemplative and understanding of the world as being very complex.
How a 5 year old can brighten your day in a wink of an eye
It should be socially acceptable for Internet Archive to ignore robots.txt.

They have to respect it because we, collectively, say so. Obeying robots.txt is the minimum acceptable behavior for any robot, short of the Asmiov laws.

But archiving is different. I've been running into "Site was not archived due to robots.txt" more and more frequently. Often these are articles from ~2011 and earlier which the author no doubt would have wanted to be archived.

Trouble is, robots.txt is also the only thing that people really bother to set up. Maybe there's a way right now to indicate "Sure, archive my site please, and ignore my robots.txt." But if there is, it's not really common knowledge, and it's kind of unreasonable to expect every single website on the internet to opt-in to that.

On the flipside, it seems entirely reasonable that if someone really wants to opt out of archiving, that they explicitly go and tell Internet Archive. Circa 2016, Internet Archive is the only archive site that seems likely to persist to 2116. It's a shared time capsule, a ship that we all get a free ticket to board. If someone wants off, they can say so.

But right now, large swaths of the internet simply aren't being archived due to rules that don't entirely seem to make sense. There are excellent reasons for robot.txt, but opting out of "Make this content available to my children's children's children's children" seems perhaps beyond the scope of the original spec.

Would you feel ok with the Archive ignoring your robots.txt, or would you feel annoyed? If annoyed, then this is a bad idea and should be rejected.

But if nobody really cares, then here's a proposal: Internet Archive stops checking /robots.txt, and checks for /archive.txt instead. If archive.txt exists, then it's parsed and obeyed as if it were a robots.txt file.

That way, every site can easily opt-out. But everyone opts-in by default. Sites can also exercise control over which portions they want archived, and how often.
My mom is terminally ill and recently started experiencing orthostatic hypotension, so I just picked up an Omrom armband blood pressure monitor that is trivially easy to use and stores the last 100 measurements for two people.

http://amzn.com/B00KPQB2SS

It's still not what you want, but it looks like things are moving in the direction you suggest. That said, I'm wondering if it is even possible to do what you suggest without being inconvenient to the user. Having an armband inflate and tighten around my arm every few seconds with become infuriatingly annoying. Are there alternatively ways to measure blood pressure that are imperceptible?

What I'm looking forward to seeing is conductive textiles making their way into compression clothing so we can measure heart rate all the time. i.e. a wearable EKG shirt. The use case would be older people at risk for a heart attack and heart fail so we can detect problematic heart abnormalities that are predictive of failure.
GPL works well to protect the freedom of its users. Now I understand this can me it unpopular with closed-source shops but it wasn't designed to make corporations happy.

I would've expected someone who volunteered at FSF understood this basic fact (or trade-off, if you like) long ago. After reading your story, I'm not sure what actually motivated you to volunteer there in the first place. I somehow can't believe it's because you really shared their philosophy.

To me, it seems you are the one who's twisting things motivated by a personal anecdote.
Hillary Clinton Says She Wants a Manhattan Project for Encryption. The Fuck?
Atlassian's User Onboarding Magic
Now that would be a cool product. Lots of datapoints.
I'm skeptical about the claim - yes, it's important, but there are so many variables that feed into it, and I need to be convinced that constant, 24 hr monitoring of BP would enable better management than spot tests, home BP management and the occasional 24 hr ambulatory monitoring.

It's a very consumer-targeted technology, although it would certainly find a place in emergency departments and ICUs.
I am at a loss to think of ways as to how we would actually capture the data, although better minds than mine I hope come up with ways.

The problem is that to get a good read on arterial pressure you either need to do it the old fashioned way (occlude the artery and record that pressure, then slowly drop it until it's constantly flowing again - see [0]) - or you need to stick a cannula into an artery, as we do in ICUs, and measure pressure using a transducer.

Even technologies that stress their 'passivity' (see [1]) and try to capture this market use the old fashioned way. I don't see that changing anytime soon - you could try and somehow monitor the stretch of a small artery maybe using some variation of current o2 saturation sensors, coupled with advanced computer models of flow rate and variation in small arterioles, but that is a world away and would seem to me to be highly subject to variation/sensitivity.

My prediction is that this won't be possible until we are commonly implanting biometrics in people, but I guess we will wait and see!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korotkoff_sounds
[1] http://www.visimobile.com/
He wrote about it in his book -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Frist#Medical_school_expe...

http://web.archive.org/web/20021101052043/http://www.boston....
This is a really valid criticism. I often send patients home from the emergency department with values outside of the normal, usually without discussing that finding with them (ie, it is not useful for a patient with some level of kidney failure to know that their sodium is 130, and has been on every presentation they have had for years). Trying to have a conversation with every second patient about why this value is slightly outside of reference and how the reference ranges are actually calculated is not productive and will likely only lead to confusion and obsfucation of the actual reason they presented
iOS 9.2 causing lag in Logitech Create keyboard for iPad Pro
The skills of a high level lawyer is in sales and negotiations and trials, not in the document analysis that junior lawyers do.
It's interesting that the only test cleared is one for herpes. Conceptually, a finger prick sample would very clearly work for binary, "you've got it or you don't" tests, like STD tests (e.g. you've been able to buy home HIV tests for years that just require a few drops of blood from a finger).

Most blood tests, though, are about detecting whether levels of a substance are in a particular range - milligrams of cholesterol per deciliter of blood, mg glucose per deciliter, etc. Taking a much smaller sample is pretty much guaranteed to make the plus/minus error range larger, and capillary blood from a finger prick will have a greater percentage of contamination from intracellular fluid.

Even glucose meters you can use at home are much less accurate than glucose readings taken with a venous draw in a lab. In that case, the benefit to a diabetic of being able to do frequent home testing outweighs the loss of accuracy. If you're going to get work done by a lab, though, you are going to want it to be as accurate as possible, and in that scenario I don't see how a finger prick will be able to compare to a venous draw.
Rocketlawyer, legalzoom, nolo , etc, are uber for lawyers.
Do not worry. You have years of problems solving experience. Physics is one of the most challenging majors you can do. The fact that you completed a degree in it and have taken algorithms, assembly, C, and machine learning puts you in a fantastic place. Apply anywhere you are interested in for a new grad position and don’t think twice. In fact, you would probably be a perfect fit for the more challenging to get machine learning and data science jobs. Many programmers haven’t taken calculus. Don’t underestimate yourself. I would probably hire you over most new grads with a CS degree, unless they had a solid portfolio, which in my opinion is the most important thing. Nothing says ‘ability to build software’ like building software.
You know, I didn't expect this to be on his Wikipedia page. My apologies for not doing the most basic of searches. (The topic was uncomfortable enough to want to avoid it, but I still should've checked.)

Thanks!
> GPL uses the term "Free" in a twisted, marxist way.

You appear to be using the term "Marxist" as a snarl term.

This is strong evidence you're trolling.

Please leave. We don't especially want trolls here.
It's a fabulous place to live but if you don't work for higher education you work in the service industry for people in higher ed. Or you work remote. I work for cornell and it's great but if I didn't work there idk how I'd find employment in town.
> It would also be a huge win for premature babies, some of which only have 2oz of blood in their entire system.

Take a look at Baebies, which is doing exactly this (neonatal screening): http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article28910089.ht...

The cofounders previously founded Advanced Liquid Logic, a diagnostics company using microfluidics technology developed in a Duke research lab that was subsequently sold to Illumina for $96M in 2013. Baebies is now licensing that technology from Illumina.

Unlike Theranos, their work has been published in peer-reviewed journals. For example, here's a publication from 2004: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2004/lc/b40334...
A longer interview at http://wn.com/james_simons_(full_length_interview)_-_numberp...
Same. I still have the book in my parents bedroom.
Technically not much changed but the way we work and live is totally different because of the advances in tech. In 2000 internet was not everywhere; I was on holiday in LA in 2004 and the internet quality in hotels that advertised with internet was miserable and mostly unusable. Mobile devices sucked and we were still in the AI winter. Search engines in 2000 did deliver total drivel for programming related questions (and probably others).

Now my subscription allows me to use my 4g in most of the EU and the US, it works very well, wifi is everywhere so basically you do not have to remember any facts. Google AI recognises pictures and auto makes panoramas and videos from pictures. When I search anything programming the first hit is the answer. Children have smartphones and tablets and use them all the time. So do my parents and my 80+ old neighbours. There are millions of coders online instead of the tiny amount in 2000; starting a software services company in 2000 was a breeze (I did) to grow and get fortune 1000 clients as there simply was very little and most was crap; try that now. Startups are everywhere and a huge % of students see that as an option now. We can 3d print implants. Did you check games lately? I can go on and on.

Although tech only got faster and bigger the world is completely different. And that is because those 'marginal' enhancements in tech and science.
It seemed promising to do some experiments with sewing a BP sleeve into a shirt, then setting up an Arduino to trigger it to inflate/deflate. It should be possible to record the result digitally. It'd be slightly uncomfortable, but even if it's only once per hour, it's still better than zero per hour. The noise would be annoying, but I have some ideas for how to make it quiet. But would anyone actually want such a thing?

Thanks for batting around the idea with me, and for the valuable references. I didn't know there was any other way to measure BP than the old-fashioned way.
That does not make them "free." Somebody's paying, even if you aren't.
Show HN: Yet Another News Video Android App
How does this reinforce gender stereotypes? Amazon even dressed the kid in purple instead of the traditional color for a boy.

EDIT: Okay, when I refresh the page I see two images.

9 out of 10 times, the page shows a white boy in purple.

1 out of 10 times, it's a black boy in grey.
There's two techniques that I find work very well for SMD ICs for hand assembled boards:

- hot air rework wand. I got mine from China for $100. It works awesome both for removing parts and for melting paste.

- flood & wick. You start by tacking down two corners of the chip, and then drag the tip with some solder along the full edge. You'll probably get some bridging between pins. Sometimes, when the moon is aligned just right, you just get a perfect solder. For the times when you don't, the next step is to take a bit of fresh wick and clean it up.

Between these two tools (cheap Chinese reflow wand $100, and a nice Hakko iron $100), I've probably hand-assembled 75-100 prototypes and I don't recall ever destroying one. My next trick is going to be trying to do some BGA parts... new experiences!
Don't worry, the AI isn't going the replace the "Perry Mason" kind of lawyers, they are irreplaceable! AI is designed to replace the "Junior Grunt Joe" kind of lawyer/associate who is mostly involved in documentation and assistance.
Are the full slides available somewhere?
A pause to refresh the Web?
>>When I was doing more project work I outright refused to give estimates... Instead I offered broad time ranges that would narrow down to more accurate ones as work progressed.

Broad time ranges can also be risky, because people will hear what they want to hear, which is usually the lower end of the range.

Which is why I only discuss effort (in hours) rather than timeframes. All of our projects are fixed bid, so the conversation usually goes, "this project will take 150 hours of effort. We don't know how long those 150 hours will take to expend." And in rare cases where we absolutely have to mention a timeframe, we make sure it is not in writing anywhere.
Well, against the standard of ML, Scala does come up short.

Almost all of that is due to the intentional choice of running on the JVM with high interop compatibility. Choose ML-family or Haskell, and you don't have Java baggage.

But I'd take types with class-vs-trait design choices, less-than-ideal match exhaustiveness checks, and type inference incompleteness any day over a language lacking all static typing features.
Well, look at YC's stats on success rate vs. founder went to an elite school.
I know, it's almost as if saving the world will require hard work and there may be some bumps and hiccups along the way.

We should just not do that.
Does Juniper not have source control? Don't they know who inserted this code?
I wouldn't go that far.

The problem outlined was in dealing with data model changes. So the problem as I see is in managing the alignment of parameter types used in code with database field types. For that I've written a schema-template abstraction that manages that relationship. This template engine is about 100 lines of code and for every point the code intersect to/from the data it goes through the engine, looks up the a template and uses that for access/processing (a hook if you will). This allows automation for finding all the code entry spots.

Bottom line is I don't hit these issues because I identified the problem and wrote an abstraction layer to handle it and for the rest of my code I can happily rely on type inference.
`===` is triple stroked in these fonts, but that is probably not enough for you. Just saying though! :)
ModularGrid
What are those stats? Just curious.
Interesting! What kind of legal processes do you already automate using software in your day to day life as a lawyer?
I totally agree but I think your defense is even too generous to the other side. For me, it is a little laughably naive, the lack of recognition of how complex "lawyering" actually is. Fancy NLP does not even get within several orders of magnitude of that.

Lawyers are meant to achieve positive results for clients even in litigious circumstances. For instance, in an auto accident case, a lawyer must carefully consider how best to present medical evidence to get the best possible offer in a settlement negotiation.

Lawyers must consider creative solutions to legal problems that are not as others suggested "just finding precedent snippets."

How do I even explain my complex case to the AI lawyer, assuming it is not some kind AGI Overlord? It's sort of stupid, I'm sorry to say, to me to see it suggested that lawyers can be replaced by LegalZoom+NLP. Maybe these people have never needed a lawyer for anything other than what they consider to be perfunctory paper pushing or they think we should not have an adversarial legal system.

If I have a serious legal problem I will take a serious firm of experienced lawyers over an NLP system. I guess if your outcome doesn't matter to you, you can pick what you like. It reminds me of the saying about the lawyer defending himself having a fool for a client.
I have several people in my family who demonstrate various levels of hypochondriasis. Imagine the nonsense over gluten-free and every other fad diet of the last 30 years, non-specific symptoms, alternative "medicine" and that's two or three people in my immediate family. Now let them start ordering their own blood tests and it'll make the anti-vaxing movement look like a cultural blip.

Most people simply aren't smart or informed enough to understand things like "false positives".
But you can do that as a human too. The problem is that all ends with 'but you cannot prove that He does not exist ans the bible says people will try to discredit Him'. Religious people are not all to rational usually so why even have the conversation? In the EU I see religion dying rapidly; I live in a tiny (40odd people with a bigger 100 people village in the valley next to it) village in the south of Spain where I moved down to from Amsterdam. In Amsterdam I was used to people being atheist. Even my maroccan friends who do go to the mosques only go because it is social thing not because they believe. Same for my Jewish friends. In Spain I thought the old men and women at least would believe and I was surprised to find that they actually almost all do not. 'Don't be silly, I go to church because after that we drink a lot' says my neigbour.

Not sure why the US is so religious but the education and lifestyle will kill it. No AI needed.