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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/bballingerbrandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
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(I worked on healthcare.gov) Some of my colleagues are doing just this. Stay tuned.
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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…
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Is anybody here working on an Apple Watch app? Feedback on the (v1) APIs?
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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?
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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).
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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…