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brandonb
9,334karma·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)
brandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
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I don't know about GMail specifically, but I suspect your approach of using neural networks is the best one given the state-of-the-art in machine learning today. You can think of naive bayes and …
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This is pretty cool! A small feature request: I uploaded data with a combination of continuous features and discrete features (which happened to be coded as numbers—2 or 1—with negative numbers used t…
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Note the Harvard study is from 2010. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) passed in 2010, started going into effect in 2014, and bans lifetime caps on health insurance payouts. The intent was to addres…
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It's just slightly more complicated than that. :) The main thing healthcare.gov does, which esurance and others don't, is to tell the user which government programs they're eligible for…
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Hard to know for sure, but most of the problems would have been exposed at even moderate amounts of load--there was no load testing or performance monitoring in place initially.
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To be fair, three Canadians were part of the tech surge to fix healthcare.gov:
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/06/21/the-president-n... I don't think the …
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I worked with Mikey and I'm damn sure he's not in it for the money, the prestige, or anything else.
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I understand your cynicism, and it's not entirely misplaced, but this team is both formidable and comes with strong support from the administration—in particular, from US CTO Todd Park. For whate…
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Feel free to send me a resume, and I'll make sure Mikey and friends get it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com (I worked on healthcare.gov with Mikey, Todd, Ryan, and the other people starting this effo…
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Feel free to send me a resume, and I'll make sure Mikey and co get it: brandon.ballinger@gmail.com.
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The law caps federal salaries at $155,500. Congress could change it, but given that they seem to have trouble passing a budget, that doesn't seem likely very soon. :) That said, I think there are…
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I worked with Mikey on healthcare.gov and he's the real deal--wicked smart, but also humble, patient, respectful, grounded, and keenly insightful into how organizations work and how to fix broken…
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I was part of the "tech surge" brought in to help patch up healthcare.gov in December. The GAO report gives a decent idea of what went wrong in 2010-2013 from a high-level contracting and po…
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Any ideas on how technology could help?
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Congratulations to Spenser and Curtis!
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I think the key numbers to compare in a study like this are the number of positive labels (in this case, homicide offenders) vs. the number of variables in the model. With n positive labels and n vari…
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I love this type of research, but this particular study requires a two-ton grain of salt. First, these results are based on only 20 total homicide offenders. So when they claim they can classify 75% o…
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Congratulations Ryan!
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If you're interested in helping with this or any other government project, feel free to email jobs@hcgov.us or attend the talk mentioned elsewhere in the thread! There are lots of ways to get inv…
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These are fair points. Let me check with the other speakers and see what they're comfortable with. It's not my decision alone. (As one of the other comments alluded to, we're engineers,…
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Yes — we're trying to find a larger venue. For now, sign up for the waitlist and you'll get an email once we've found something larger!
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Good idea. If you're interested in this type of thing, check out 18F, which is a brand-new engineering office run from within the government in San Francisco and DC: https://18f.gsa.go…
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Unfortunately we're not doing any recordings -- it's hard to be candid and recorded for all history at the same time. :(
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A bunch of the folks in this article are Y Combinator or Google alumni, and we're giving a talk on Saving HealthCare.gov next Thursday in SF for anyone who's interested: http://ww…