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brandonb

9,339karma·1,335submissions·January 17, 2011
about
Data for good.

Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.

Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)

  CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)

  Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology

  HealthCare.gov rescue team

  Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)
twitter.com/bballinger

brandonb.cc

recent activity (1,335 total)
0 pts
NaNy ago
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(I worked on healthcare.gov) Some of my colleagues are doing just this. Stay tuned.
11y ago·view thread
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I'll bet the "Wizard of Oz" strategy would work well for this idea. Start off by NOT building any of the fancy infrastructure—the crawler, crunchbase joiner, LDA algorithm to cluster in…
11y ago·view thread
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NaNy ago
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Is anybody here working on an Apple Watch app? Feedback on the (v1) APIs?
11y ago·view thread
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I wonder if somebody could build a bayesian filter for Epic alerts. If we can filter out the Nigerian prince scams from your email, why not apply that to save lives?
11y ago·view thread
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"Improvements are not consciously forbidden, and making things better is not discouraged. But like an enormous traffic jam, no single person has room to do much of anything. Coordinating a number…
11y ago·view thread
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That seems rather cynical, doesn't it? Why don't you ask the people who work at USDS if they're having trouble getting interest from the agencies? That would be a way to test your hypot…
11y ago·view thread
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Short answer: no real security issues. AWS itself runs everything from credit card processors to hospital software, they have great documentation on how to design your system so that you comply with t…
11y ago·view thread
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I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I am sure it was not their intention to bait and switch; I've forwarded your comment to somebody at USDS so that they can make sure things like this don&#…
11y ago·view thread
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"There is no political will to do so." That was true a couple of years ago, but healthcare.gov was a wakeup call, and everybody from the president on down takes reforming government IT serio…
11y ago·view thread
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And on the flip side, computers can suggest beautiful theorems to mathematicians by making it easy to run virtual experiments. There's now a burgeoning field of pure math called "Experimenta…
11y ago·view thread
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This is cool! I couldn't quite tell from the article, but do you see this as an alternative to Prime and, if so, how is it different? EDIT: One more question: the article says you've reached…
11y ago·view thread
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NaNy ago
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NaNy ago
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For those who don't know Jason, he's the author of Selenium, founder of Sauce Labs, and was part of the "tech surge" to fix healthcare.gov.
11y ago·view thread
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Depends on what you're doing. For most consumer products, it's less about domain expertise and more about capturing "lighting in a bottle." The founders of YouTube weren't nec…
11y ago·view thread
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Super cool idea! I love the fact that the interface is so simple and intuitive; I think that makes machine learning accessible to a much longer tail of problems that people would not have previously c…
11y ago·view thread
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What an excellent post! I don't agree with every point, but this is thoughtful, clearly articulated, and the thought process reminds me of PG's best writing.
11y ago·view thread
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There are many truths here, but I keep seeing HN articles with variants on the following piece of advice: "As a founder your sole aim is growth. If you don’t have growth now, you are failing.&quo…
11y ago·view thread
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NaNy ago
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Thank you! That's helpful. If you'd ever like to talk further feel free to email me (email on my profile).
11y ago·view thread
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I'm not tashfeens, but given that you have a CS degree and an MD, I'd be curious as to what makes you skeptical about healthcare startups. Or, conversely, what should a healthcare startup do…
11y ago·view thread