Viewing profile — shariqm

if you can't view the video in the link from your location, it's on youtube too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHKopqVI_cw

We're building hearing aids that work in noisy places (AudioFocus[1], YC S19). We use novel machine learning and microphone array design to help patients hear better in loud restau…

Those are pretty cool screen reader add-ons. Do you use JAWS, NVDA, or something else?

AudioFocus | Oakland, CA | Hardware Design Co-Founder | Full-time AudioFocus (YC S19) makes hearing aids that work in noisy places like bars. We use a combination of an in-house bu…

Thought this paragraph was particularly interesting: “The notion that any risk assessment instrument can account for bias ignores the racial disparities in current and past policin…

I agree it's still not going to win the cost-benefit tradeoff in most markets. OTOH - I imagine making your software support more OSs is much more expensive than designing your web…

Ah yeah it does say that here: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/ada-primer-small-business Good to know

I see some people are feeling conflicted trying to balance 1) Making the web more accessible with 2) Increasing business/startup costs. It's important to remember making websites m…

Yeah, this isn't the first time: https://dralegal.org/case/national-federation-of-the-blind-o...

Uber settled a case similar to this in 2016 [1,2] and agreed to "Require that drivers provide equal service to people with disabilities who travel with service animals." Seems like…

Very cool! I like the idea of a longer period (1-year) to develop your idea, good science takes time.

A big hurdle for doing this is latency, every time you hop from one device to another you're adding at least ~10ms of latency if it's over anything like bluetooth. There might a cl…

In this demo there is only one microphone on the phone. But we're working on stereo (2) microphones now. That will help make it more reliable, lower latency, and give you spatial a…

I agree! We're working on this at AudioFocus (YC S19). You can see an old demo here: https://www.audiofocus.io/demo There are a lot of challenges with putting this in a hearing aid…

I would definitely call that low power. Our entire brains only use 20 watts of power, compare that to the 85,000 Watts IBM's Watson uses.

As someone with a PhD in neuroscience I like the sentiment of this post but it’s off the mark in some key ways. From a high level @foone is right, our eyes and visual system are no…

As someone who was often distracted from grad school research to work on grant applications this is great news. I would caution against making the NSF more like DARPA though. DARPA…

Yeah, the OTC (over-the-counter) hearing aid act passed in 2017 [1]. It says the FDA has to release reduced regulations for the sale of hearing aids OTC by August 2020. There will …

The most common type of hearing loss is age related hearing loss. This type of hearing loss makes it difficult to hear high frequencies. The main thing a hearing aid does is compen…

There's plenty of hearing aid apps on iOS and Android. They haven't really taken off because of the delay introduced by the mobile OS and the wireless transmission (> 10ms) causing…

Sorry, I'm not following. If you have 2 rows storing how much money you have in 1 account then your data isn't normalized and serializability isn't going to solve your problem, if …

"MVCC can't stop two competing transactions debiting the same account pair (i.e., I have two linked accounts A & B with $100 in each and I launch two simultaneous transactions to t…

Clustrix says it provides repeatable-read because it complies with the ANSI spec. In truth we actually provide something closer to snapshot-isolation by default. Snapshot isolation…