411–420 of 528 posts
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Generally their bank accounts.
By your definition, those realtors of 2006-2008 were the greatest minds of that period, so were the financial analysts, and the personal wealth managers who had nothing other than a 1 week seminar to certify them as such.
My 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…
"I'm not smart enough" - this is not an excuse. I have no education, no college etc... and I created software that generates meal plans according to my Crohn's symptoms (made it from my hospital bed at SF General) and now I am off all my meds. Made an app for a friend that helped her identify that she had a Gluten allergy (later verified by doctor) And right now I am working on a way to help match patients and doctor…
Raganwald needs to forget the font-size attribute.
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There is a perception difference, for sure, but an argument's validity is not reduced by the person saying it. Granted, here it's much more opinion than fact, so...
It isn't the argument's validity, but the source's trustworthiness. These are related but not the same; the source's trustworthiness is a contributing factor to whether or not I want to spend (waste?) the time verifying the validity.
Nothing of the sort. He's expressing an opinion about things that nobody disputes. Calling him a hypocrite means you don't like his opinion and think that calling him names is a good way to weaken his argument. Of course it's meaningless and defending such silliness on the grounds that this is all about the credibility of an information source is beyond silly.
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What? I don't agree at all. I wrote something in my personal blog on the Internet. That's the bar. If you want to tweet, or write something in on your blog, that's also the bar. But this is a kind of club where I didn't post those writings. And when I have discussed them, I've been civil as is our rule here. We have two ways of saying "This is noise, not signal." One is to downvote. The other, flagging, is reserved f…
The core problem is that 100 more people on Hacker News think that your top comment is valuable, and further that you take this as justification that your viewpoint is supported by the community. As there is no way for folks to only participate in the HN that disagrees with your rants, folks are being negative. That's the only tool they have. When you sell books on how CoffeeScript is great and then rant that people…
"Vulgarity is no substitute for wit"
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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…
approved treatments in humans often lag 10 years or so
behind what's known to work in animal models
http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/disco...
Early in 1921, Banting took his idea to Professor John
Macleod at the University of Toronto, who was a leading
figure in the study of diabetes in Canada.
Banting and Best began their experiments by removing the
pancreas from a dog. ... By giving the diabetic dog a few
injections a day, Banting and Best could keep it healthy
and free of symptoms.
The team was eager to start testing on humans. But on whom
should they test? Banting and Best began by injecting
themselves with the extract. They felt weak and dizzy, but
they were not harmed.
In January 1922 in Toronto, Canada, a 14-year-old boy,
Leonard Thompson, was chosen as the first person with
diabetes to receive insulin. The test was a success.
Leonard, who before the insulin shots was near death,
rapidly regained his strength and appetite. The team now
expanded their testing to other volunteer diabetics, who
reacted just as positively as Leonard to the insulin
extract.
The news of the successful treatment of diabetes with
insulin rapidly spread outside of Toronto, and in 1923 the
Nobel Committee decided to award Banting and Macleod the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
What if we tried that today?
You mean, just rely on the judgment of the experts involved and the verbal consent of the patients?
You mean, just allow the doctors to come up with whatever dose they felt warranted and patients to take whatever dose they feel comfortable with?
You mean, resist having some kind of ostensibly judicious central authority approve all such decisions, and rely on the distributed judgments of all consenting participants involved?
Yes. The typical response is that this is a recipe for anarchy. But history shows that it is a recipe for Nobel Prizes, and it is not like 1920s America was much like Somalia.
Would there be risk? Sure. Some people will not be helped and others might even harmed by new and unproven treatments. That's the price if we're serious about rapid progress, or really any progress. There must always be a first human trial; why not as soon as possible if people really are dying?
Needless to say, this kind of boldness won't fly in the modern US. Outside of the internet, the country has become just too risk averse, too wealthy to pay the price of progress. Our task as hackers then is to create at least one spot on this earth where patients can take whatever treatments they want, where entrepreneurs/technologists can invent whatever drugs/devices they want, and where no regulator has the power to intercede between these two consenting parties. And where we can go from idea to human trials as fast as the patient pleases.
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No one was arguing that point. The FDA does good things. The FDA does bad things. The question is whether the FDA is more helpful than harmful. I for one am happy that the FDA inspects my food and medicine and holds them to a standard of safety. On the other hand they do make some medical devices and advances overly expensive to make and create a barrier to entry into the market.
I think you would be rather surprised what those standard really are. Far lower than you would expect.
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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.
My Way = Macrobiotics, Stress Control, Acupuncture etc...
Yes, there are many communities; I mostly used trial and error but the difference is how I measured what worked. I kept a food diary that allowed me use actual nutrient stats etc... to find patterns in my trigger foods.