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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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Congrats all! A stellar batch of folks.
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Nice! Excited to try it. I suspect software tools can help teams both make better decisions, spend less time, and have more fun than a conventional meeting.
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Super cool concept! Wishing you folks luck with it.
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How incredibly cool!
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Right now, we're looking for folks who can move to the Baltimore/DC area for at least 1-3 months -- it's just hard to get stuff done in this environment without being here in-person!
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Right now, we've all been pitching in on 1-3 month rotations to the DC/Baltimore area. (If you'd be interested in helping but can't necessarily move to Maryland... stay tuned :) .)
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Unfortunately, each of the 14 states that made their own exchange used a separate team with a separate codebase. To be clear, it's not like QSSI or anybody else is ripping us off. We're all …
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No particular knowledge is required, but all of our new code uses technologies like Backbone, Node, Capistrano, and MySQL. We also make API calls into the existing system, which is written in Java, so…
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Update -- wow, a lot of you out there want to help with healthcare.gov, or the government more generally! That's awesome. I'm trying to reply to each person, but it may take a couple of days…
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Complexity. We have 10x more code, 10x more components, and 10x more layers than we need. If the initial architecture had been dirt-simple, I don't think the site would have had so much trouble s…
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The biggest general problem is that people thought of shipping the site the same way they thought of shipping an aircraft carrier -- you write the code, hand it over, and you're done. It wasn…
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So far, it's been on a rotation -- folks go on leave from their jobs for 1-3 months, move out to DC/Baltimore area, and work as hard as possible while they're here. :) It's such a …
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Unfortunately not. :( I'm a California resident -- although living temporarily in Maryland for the project -- and have gotten the same reports of technical problems. To give some background, 36 s…
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The portion that was open-sourced was actually only the static portion of the site (the 'Learn' side). That was taken down before I got here, so I'm not sure on the complete backstory, …
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You certainly don't have to be anointed™ or have worked at any particular companies. I'd say the two most urgent roles we're looking for now are:
* Site reliability engineers
* Soft…
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Yes, I meant to say 1 in 1000 uninsured people die each year in ways that could be prevented by insurance coverage. Here's an article that references a few of the reports:
http://www.r…
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Yep, in spite of the progress made since October (when the site was entirely down for days at a time), there are absolutely still problems. I also see you're a YC alum! If you're interested …
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An estimated 26,000 people die each year due to lack of insurance coverage. That's part of the reason the Affordable Care Act was passed. For more information, see this Reuters article from 2012:…
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I've been working on healthcare.gov for the last few months alongside a bunch of other Google, Facebook, and Y Combinator alums. I'll always remember what Mikey told us in December, after th…
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Congrats Spenser, Curtis, and the rest of the team!
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Very cool! It's remarkable that you can get a good score with effectively only two features: vertical distance from the lower pipe and horizontal distance from the next pair of pipes. I suspect y…
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Congrats Chris!
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What a great application of machine learning. Amnesty International now has decades of Urgent Actions, as well as data on what happened after. Maybe humanity can finally start to learn from the past w…
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Kalvin, Randy, and Jason are some of the nicest and most capable founders around. Wishing them luck on their next journey!
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Sorry for the delay -- it took me a while to dig up a version. I posted it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hiLQjlCIfBQobLwj2lecohUq... These are raw, rough notes -…