5 letters as the answer: money.
Why the Fuck?
401–410 of 528 posts
Re: Why the Fuck?
#402My father spent most of a decade running a company developing a non-invasive blood sugar meter: http://www.diabetesnet.com/diabetes-technology/meters-monito...
After many years of struggle, the company folded from a lack of investment: medicine investors were scared off by the tech component, and tech investors didn't understand that in medicine, you have to prove, with studies, that your treatment or device actually works. This takes time, and frequent trips back to the drawing board.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses. As someone in the biotech space, this is by far the biggest factor. When you are dealing with humans, crashes and bugs mean deaths. Deaths mean increased regulation, often under the mistaken assumption that more rules would prevent engineers from making bugs. Modern testing and build systems might, but regulators aren't keen to change their testing systems, many of wh…
This is why I think that this revolution will be led by hacker/patients and not business men / politicians. I am not trying to be dramatic but I will literally die for this cause because I spent my entire life sick, in bed, shitting blood and trying what everyone else wanted me to. 3 months of doing it my way and I never knew life could be this good, so while I agree that the regulatory climate makes this difficult;…
what does "doing it my way" in this context mean? What did you try and how did you research it?
Have looked into this kind of thing myself before and am interested in how you went about your project and if there's a community around that kind of thing.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#404Essentially he's asking why person-hours are expended on things that make the most money rather than things that are important, for some definition of important. There are several answers to that. 1. The most obvious is that people need to make a living. People can and do work at some discount in order to work on things they think are important, but it rarely stretches as much as 10x. I expect most workers either don…
4. Our economic system does not allocate resources as efficiently as we as a society would like to. In particular it is susceptible to favoring the short term over the long term, and tends to develop self-reinforcing trends and bubbles.
Trends and bubbles seem to be exaggerated by the fact that in our globalized world the media reporting tends to synchronize over large parts of the globe when it comes to those trends (e.g. Facebook being hyped almost universally prior to its IPO).
Re: Why the Fuck?
#405My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some footba…
1. The barrier for entry (education, &c) is higher in medicine and bioinformatics.
2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses.
I'm not sure these really apply to Bioinformatics. Particularly if you're looking at the research market, you don't need FDA approval to write research tools. And a lot of the current problems are not really research problems but "how to I make these tools easy for non-computer people to use". If you look at things like Galaxy and Pipeline pilot, you may get some idea of what I mean.
3. The problems are harder to solve than it may seem to the man in the saloon.
So is building twitter, making an iPhone app or anything else. They all may look easier than they might be. But honestly I'd say building and scaling twitter is no easier than building a usable tool for launching Bioinformatics applications (for example).
Anyway, if you're actually interested in any of this stuff with respect to Bioinformatics, ping me (new at sgenomics dot org).
Re: Why the Fuck?
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically, you're correct that our prognosis is poor. Then again, we cannot compare numbers with the generation before us because they were, more than likely, cruising around with sugars consistently in the 200-400mg/dL range. I realize that what works for me won't necessarily work for others, but I have a really hard time complaining in light of the fact that I regularly achieve A1Cs of less than 6.3 with nothing…
True, it can always be worse. Having a 6.3 A1c with MDI and no CGM or pump is very fortunate. Perhaps you've still got working beta cells. Congrats on those results!
Hm. I always assumed my efforts would yield similar results for anyone. Maybe I am luckier than I deserve and should pay closer attention to what other diabetics have to endure.
In the meantime, here's to fighting the good fight.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#407Love the sentiment of this post. But why does water run downhill instead of up? Up would certainly be useful.
As in physics, there seems to be a gravity that pulls people towards the greatest rewards for the least effort.
Becoming wealthy by building a diabetes management tool is, I suspect, much harder than drinking some of Facebook's cream for working on their ad network. There are certainly people who relish and lean into such challenges, but it's not the majority and never will be IMHO.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#408My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some footba…
2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses. As someone in the biotech space, this is by far the biggest factor. When you are dealing with humans, crashes and bugs mean deaths. Deaths mean increased regulation, often under the mistaken assumption that more rules would prevent engineers from making bugs. Modern testing and build systems might, but regulators aren't keen to change their testing systems, many of wh…
> > 2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses.
> As someone in the biotech space, this is by far the biggest factor. When you are dealing with humans, crashes and bugs mean deaths. Deaths mean increased regulation, often under the mistaken assumption that more rules would prevent engineers from making bugs. Modern testing and build systems might, but regulators aren't keen to change their testing systems, many of which were encoded by legislation decades ago. For example, adaptive clinical trials have been known to be theoretically superior to the Phase I/II/III design for 15 years, yet are still in limbo[1] at the FDA; their proponents are still banned from trying them out. Facebook does not need a Federal Software Assocation to sign off on its new unit testing framework.
There is plenty of basic biomedical research left to be done on animals, and this is far less regulated. In the U.S., rats and mice are effectively exempt from animal welfare laws. NIH imposes some fairly regulations for funding recipients (i.e., universities), but in my experience, it's not very difficult to get a project with legitimate scientific value approved. If you can cure diabetes, it's not unreasonable to ask you to prove it in an animal model first.
My understanding is that approved treatments in humans often lag 10 years or so behind what's known to work in animal models, but until we can cure most major illnesses in rats and mice, we can't blame the slow progress in treatments on the difficulty of translating therapies from the lab to the clinic.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#409My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some footba…
> It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in > physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could > work on "big problems." Seconded, though I could never find the words to express this before. How the fuck is anything that I'm doing right now helping to make the world a better place? How could I even begin to make a difference with my life? Making software is the only thing that I'm marginally…
Big problems are solved in small steps and your software could make those steps significantly more efficient.
The folks working on TCP/IP back in the 80s could have shared your worries but now it's the backbone for a technology making all forms of business and science more efficient.
Even if you're working on, say, a dating or pornography site, it's hard to work out what value is or isn't being provided somewhere down the line in the calculus that is human achievement. Even a comment you make here on HN could be the inspiration that leads something into a path to greater things.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#410Elon Musk chose to do PayPal (a rather disliked company on HN) which enabled him to work on Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX (which HN rather likes). Isn't it possible that some of these people toiling away in the corporate womb are acquiring capabilities and capital so they can be reborn to do important, but potentially unprofitable 'change the world' projects?
And, further, his work on PayPal has enabled millions of others to have opportunities they couldn't have had otherwise (including me). It is hard to calculate the effects every action we have has on the world.