jihoon796

Outside the vacuum of technology (can it be done?), it seems to me that the role that policy plays when it comes to the actual rollout of self-driving cars (should it be done and how?) is vastly underrated. This seems to be the real bottleneck in mass adoption - improvements in technology will have diminishing returns after a certain point.

For example, things like getting companies to agree to a unified standard at a government/industry level & determining frameworks for liability all seem to be as important (and perhaps difficult) as eking out another 0.00001% increase in safety.

Like qudat said, the level of rules and regulations required to enter the market are indeed pretty high, but I don't think they are insurmountable. And industry connections certainly do help in getting contracts, but people will generally listen if you have good ideas.

The people making the purchasing decisions are almost always pretty removed from day-to-day usage of clinical software (and the bigger the company, the more true this is).

But how will you present to them that your new product is "better" than that of the incumbent's? You can say, "our product can do X feature 10x better than another product", but if they reply with "unless your product has dark mode for a select number of physicians who live in WA and NY state, it's going to be a no-go. We already have another quote from someone else who will do this for us", what are you going to do? You may resist at first, but in order to win the business, you too will likely repeat this process ad-nauseum, until your "MVP" becomes just a "VP".

These decision-makers are also cautious about "new" technology (and rightly so, for the most part). Since if something does go wrong with patient data, it is considered catastrophic - and who will be to blame then?

Dendi | Software Engineer | Raleigh-Durham, NC | Full-time | Onsite

Dendi is a healthcare software company that is working on developing the next-generation clinical laboratory information systems (LIS).

We are a small and technical team. We are looking for startup-oriented Python developers to help us execute on our vision and take our product to the next level.

We are also looking for people who are comfortable with uncertainty and open-ended questions, as the position comes with a significant equity stake (cofounder level).

Preferred Qualifications: - Native level of English proficiency, both verbal and written - Bachelor’s degree in computing or a related field - Advanced expertise with Python - Experience with Django - Experience in designing REST APIs - Experience with SQL databases (PostgreSQL) and relational database design - Experience with Linux - Experience with healthcare or laboratory settings is a big bonus

Interested? Email me at [email protected].

The biggest issue is resentment, although I've personally gotten over it for the most part.

The key phrase of the article being "secret" - it took me until junior year of college to realize that the reason a lot of my classmates could eat out wherever they wanted and buy whatever clothes they wanted was due to their parents funding their lifestyle. In comparison, I struggled a lot in college financially (even on a full ride scholarship), as well as fitting in with my peers both academically and culturally.

When I had asked my friends how they were able to afford everything, they always told me that they had "money saved up", which I legitimately believed and never really questioned.

It really wasn't until I started working and my friends would reminisce about college that I realized that the "money saved up" was really their parents money. Then some of my friends started buying homes: they had "money saved up" and "invested wisely", they claimed, but this time I was wiser because we were working the same job at the same company, and I knew that they spent more money than me.

When I started my own company, some of my friends in the tech community said something along the lines of, "how much money are your parents gonna invest?" - which is the same kind of assumed privilege that left me feeling so bitter before. I've definitely grown out it since then and have taken steps to stop comparing myself to others as much, but it's human nature to do so and I think my story will ring true with a lot of people with similar backgrounds.

Ultimately, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but I did spend a lot of time saying no to a lot of things (as a result of not having time and/or money) and feeling inadequate as a result. And before anyone says I should "make better friends" - I think our own personal narratives are always biased to sound more self-sufficient than we actually are, so no, I don't blame anyone either.

Who I am to judge what innovations are useful or useless to society? In a sense, one could very well argue that the market cap or valuation of a company is at least a decent proxy for "usefulness".

With that said, however, my personal opinion is different. Although I think innovation of any kind is great for society, what I'm frustrated by is the relative mindshare of where we focus our attention on.

I like to use the term "farsighted" - many people in SV are able to see very far distances into the future, but ignore some of the immediate problems that are right under our noses. That's what I'm frustrated by.

I don't think we have to think of it as a binary opinion. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) realizes that the supply of doctors is an issue - but anyone can already start a medical school (California Northstate, for example).

And to address your point about "awful doctors", people are also starting to realize the shortcomings of the previous system - filtering too heavily on test scores/grades, for example, meant that many medical schools churned out graduates with great test scores but relatively poor interpersonal skills (which is a travesty since you're dealing with people all day) for a while. Nothing is changing overnight, of course, so the jury is still out in how things will be in the next few decades.

Both the prices and costs of a hospital/clinic are very much politics-driven.

And the most infuriating part to all of this is that whether a system does well financially has little to do with patient outcomes or any other metric related to human health. Yes, I understand Goodhart's law ("when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") since it's a common counterpoint used against my argument, but surely there are better metrics to optimize for other than profit?

For example, I work closely with a medium-sized reference laboratory, and it's clear to me that they have to take literally every shortcut possible in order to survive. The only reason that they're able compete in the market at all against a LabCorp or a Quest is due to the fact that they have deep political connections (lobbyists, governors, lawyers, etc) - certainly not because they have a better product or have better testing methods (although if you asked them, that's what they'd tell you).

The lack of transparency is due to perverse incentives in the healthcare system stemming from overly complex legislation.

As a country, the US hasn't decided whether healthcare is a fundamental right or privilege. As a result, we constantly make political decisions that straddle the line without ever really going one way.

The biggest culprit is the "fee-for-service" model of reimbursement, where healthcare providers (physicians) are reimbursed based on the quantity of care rather than patient outcomes. Each procedure has a code (CPT) that is used to bill insurance. Billing for each of these codes is completely arbitrary and up to provider/payer negotiations. The fee-for-service model is a clear example of a perverse incentive.

Who reimburses the fee-for-service model? Either the government (Medicare/Medicaid isn't even entirely government-run, as many states rely on a for-profit Medicare Administrative Contractor) or private health insurance companies. The perverse incentives can now be seen from both the provider's side and the payer's side: hospitals and physicians negotiate to get the best reimbursement rates that they can. And of course, because these insurance companies want to make money, they make it "difficult" for providers to get paid for each procedure and will find any reasonable way to deny the claim from going through. Because of this, providers artificially raise the amount charged to the payers as high as they think they can get away with in the hopes that insurance will pay up.

Meanwhile, patients suffer greatly as there's no transparency.

That's awesome. Improving the copy + paste interactions would definitely make it a lot easier to use.

I actually just started using Webflow a few weeks ago, so I didn't even know that CSS grid was a relatively new feature.

Overall, I really like Webflow so far as it's made the design process so much more iterative for me. I actually export the code (code export was a game-changer) into my own Django project, which gives me more configurability. Kudos to you guys for making a great product!

The CSS grid was much-needed in Webflow, but I found the implementation to be pretty unintuitive.

There's a few examples I've run across. One is copy + pasting text, links, or images into the grid - maybe it's just the way I'm using it, but it doesn't let me paste an object into the exact grid box I want intuitively.

There's a few reasons why: many businesses are in geographic locations where there's not as much software presence, they don't know how to hire correctly, and they don't want to swallow the bitter pill of "software developers cost significantly more than minimum-wage employees".

I've worked with a company where developers were hired to "glue these two off-the-shelf systems we bought a year ago together", but the implementation was laughably poor. From talking to this specific company's executives, I found that they were confused as to why things were always behind or why they were running into so many bugs. They told me that they were having difficulty accessing software engineers and that there was a market shortage.

What they didn't tell me was that their current "software developers" were ex-military operations folks with no actual dev experience, and that they posted on Indeed/LinkedIn but wanted local talent (in NC, not the Bay Area) and only offered $50k/yr salary with no real benefits.

Wanting only local talent (instead of remote) already reduced their available developer pool by 99%, and the terrible salary put the nail in the coffin. But to company executives, all of this only proved that they lacked access to software developers.

If what the article says is true, it's great that executives are starting to understand the opportunity cost of technical debt.

Too many companies see software development as a menial "cost center" while hypocritically relying on it on a fundamental level for operations.

While I see where they're coming from - the ROI from software developers can be rather opaque for many industries - these companies are often hellbent on hiring as cheaply as possible (in-house junior developers with no experience) and cutting as many corners as they can get away with, all the while accruing massive amounts of technical debt.

Sounds like your company is doing something similar to what my company was doing before I left. You're right - we weren't technically wrong, but it did feel disingenuous. I was never really sure if our customers actually derived value from our product in the way we wanted them to, or if it was simply a wildly speculative investment made by middle managers feeling FOMO after reading the Wall Street Journal.

If you must do whiteboard interviews, here's a technique I've used with great effect:

Have someone else pick a coding problem (that you as the interviewer don't know beforehand), and work on it from scratch together with the candidate.

Being upfront with the candidate that you don't know the answer yourself puts the candidate at ease, and you'll be able to better judge the candidate's soft skills (communication, critical thinking, empathy in case I don't understand the problem).

Depends on what you're looking for. Charlotte is 90% finance-related jobs (I used to work there myself). I live in the Raleigh/Durham area, and it has a decent amount of engineering opportunities, especially in biotech.

It's not the Bay Area, but it's pretty comfortable.

It's not only money that drives these people, but also ego/prestige. I did my undergrad in finance - during that time, most of my peers looked down on my interest in technology. At one point, one of my friends (who is an investment banker now) even told me to stop having a "poor person's mentality".

Of course, many of these same people jumped into the tech industry (if such a thing exists) as soon as it became "prestigious". Although they have only a very shallow interest in actual tech, they've brought that same superiority complex with them.

I've legitimately overheard someone say in a SF cafe: "I couldn't be a doctor...it doesn't change the world enough and you don't actually earn that much." facepalm

Yes, this is also true.

Firstly, why would a hospital relinquish control of payment to the patient? The hospital is the one getting paid, after all, and they want to maximize their profits (aka get paid as much as they can).

Secondly, if a provider doesn't negotiate with an insurance company, the insurance company would naturally reimburse a lot less. In the U.S., the lion's share of provider revenue comes from insurance companies instead of patient self-pay, so they have less leverage to negotiate here. Of course, a large hospital system could just say "screw you, we won't join your network" (in which case they have the upper hand, since people are more likely to pay insurance premiums for plans that include their current doctor/hospital).

I've worked in medical finance as a consultant, and a huge problem that I've seen is that although private insurance was originally intended to encourage competition, it has made prices much more complicated and opaque for the end consumer (patient).

Generally speaking, each hospital/practice/clinical lab has to negotiate with individual insurance companies to get reimbursed at a given rate minus "contractual adjustments" - this negotiation process is highly inefficient, given that each payer may do things differently (a contract with BCBS of NC may be different than one with Florida Blue), and smaller providers simply don't have the bandwidth or resources to have any leverage in this process.

The complexity of this ecosystem only hurts consumers and providers (and helps the payers, of course), and although many insurance entities call themselves "non-profit", I seriously question their motives.

It's almost reminiscent of the era leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, where complex derivatives, mortgage-backed securities, and other overly sophisticated financial instruments made those that worked in the industry fantastically wealthy, while the common people were left holding the bag when the stock market finally plummeted.

I hope we can find ways to simplify this system - the single payer system, for all of its flaws, seems like a step forward in the right direction.

Agreed. In addition:

"As discussed in the introduction, public information may be profitable if sophisticated investors like hedge funds are skilled information processors. Alternatively, private information may be more valuable when used in conjunction with public information." (pg. 19)

The paper goes on to show evidence suggesting that the predominant channel is the latter complementary private information mechanism.

It does seem counterintuitive that publicly-available information does indeed generate alpha, but the real valuable insight here is that hedge funds are able to generate alpha from using public data synergistically with private data.

Yet another social media platform on Ethereum...how many of these do we need?

Read your blog, but I fail to see how you'd be able to attract enough of a following to make this worth the effort for users.

I think the limiting factor for most people is motivation, not intelligence.

Reading books and doing tutorials will certainly help you, but you might get burned out quickly. Working on projects seems like a much better use of your time.

Eventually, you'll have to pick up some books and learn theory, but the main challenge is getting to that point where you'll find the theory useful.

Love the idea behind ZeroDB - kudos to you guys, and cheers from a fellow Tar Heel!

What's your expansion strategy for Oracle/DB2/MySQL?

Quantopian provides data, a community, and capital. All of these are expensive costs for any individual trader.

In addition, a lot of strategies don't really work that well unless you have a 'critical mass' of capital with which to capture any meaningful profit.

Execution is also important. It's one thing to have an algorithm that works in theory and is back-tested. Execution is a different ball-game because you have to deal with factors like trading costs/brokerage fees, accounting, etc.

Agreed with Quandl being a good source for financial data. Their APIs are also quite well-maintained. Within Quandl, I've found Zack's to be a good resource.

I work with both Quandl and Zack's pretty frequently, let me know if you're interested in buying large amounts of data from Zack's, and I can perhaps get you a discount from the listed prices on the Quandl website.