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ihodes

4,397 karma · joined March 19, 2010

Building foundation models, helping to advance science

isaachodes@gmail.com

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ihodes··on I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M
Regarding information sharing, not quite. Covered entities (term of art in HIPAA), which include providers (and also payers!) including both the lab and your doctor, do not need your permission to share information between them for the purposes of treatment, payment, or operations (commonly, "TPO"). A BAA between a covered entity and a vendor (like an EHR or PACS [viewer for your imaging]) also does not require any patient consent.

There are sometimes things you might not like hidden in the releases you're signing, beyond the run of the mill acceptance of financial responsibility / assignment of benefits, notice of privacy policy acknowledgment, consent to treat.

ihodes··on Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
That's good—you guys should come out to visit sometime!
ihodes··on Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated
I agree that programming language can be a better (denser, more precise) encapsulator of intent than natural language. But the converse is more often true; natural language is a denser and more precise encapsulator of intent than programming language.

I think there's some irony in using Russell's quote being used this way. My intent will often be less clear to a reader once encoded in a language bound inextricably to a machine's execution context.

Good abstraction meaningfully whittles away at this mismatch, and DSLs in powerful languages (like ML-family and lisp-family languages) have often mirrored natural(ish) language. Observe that programming languages themselves have natural language specifications that are meaningfully more dense than their implementations, and often govern multiple implementations.

Code isn't just code. Some code encapsulates intent in a meaningfully information and meaning-dense way: that code is indeed poetry, and perhaps the best representation of intent available. Some code, like nearly every line of the code that backs your server vs client time example, is an implementation detail. The Electric Clojure version is a far better encapsulation of intent (https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...). A natural language version, executed in the context of a program with an existing client server architecture, is likely best: "show a live updated version of the servers' unix epoch timestamp and the client's, and below that show the skew between them."

Given that we started with Russell, we could end with Wittgenstein's "Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need?"

ihodes··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Very cool app. Is there a way to periodically import from a Google Sheets spreadsheet? I track a bunch of things there on a daily basis and would love to have those pulled into this application.
ihodes··on Researchers develop ‘transparent paper’ as alternative to plastics
"(…) They can be used to make containers because they are thicker than conventional cellulose-based materials. The new material is expected to replace plastics for this purpose, as plastics are a source of ocean pollution."
ihodes··on Clojure MCP
Very cool—It seems to allow access to the page itself, not to the network or console tabs, correct?
ihodes··on Clojure MCP
If there were an MCP to connect to, say, a running Chrome tab with your frontend running on it, that would allow an agent to both visually inspect and interact with the webpage as well as look at the network and console tabs, etc. That would be hugely helpful. Is there something like that today?
ihodes··on Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet
1. Fracking tech allows us to drill horizontally, and enhanced geothermal systems rely on this to get that surface area exposure at 7+ km below the surface 2. The steam's extremely (225C+) hot, so there are losses but doesn't make it infeasible.

Below a certain depth, the earth gets 1º hotter per 40m of depth.

ihodes··on The fastest math typesetting library for the web
Greg's blog is a great example of Katex in the wild: http://gregorygundersen.com/
ihodes··on Show HN: Readwise Reader, an all-in-one reading app
My take (as a paying subscriber to both, largely because I want to support this world and think both teams are insanely talented and great) is that they're solving similar problems, with some different features.

I wish I could use both with a sync between them until I figure out which one I'd want to stick with. Or stick with both.

ihodes··on Ask HN: Has the quality of Google search declined for anyone else, or just me?
It's absolutely declined, no question. Further, the advanced search tools have been all but eviscerated, so it's even more difficult to find what you want even if you know what you're looking for.
ihodes··on How I switched to Flutter and lost 10 kilos
This is great, and love that making apps like this is getting progressively easily.

Curious for your take on the recently-released https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

ihodes··on Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year
I think this is a great summary of some of the main challenges nurses are facing.

I'd add to #1 that travel (temp) nurses are making 4x+ more than staff nurses, I've heard as high as $13-17k per week in high-demand areas. This exacerbates the problem, as staff nurses hear this, and if they can, they leave. Travel nurses can be great, but they won't know the facility and workflows and people as well as staff nurses: staff nurses now pick up more slack, all while getting paid 1/10th what their new colleagues are. This is more than most doctors.

For #3, this problem is made worse by additional compliance burden. Nurses need to document more and more, click more and more, read more and more… with less and less time. And on systems that are unpleasant to use. Among other issues, this leads to problems like these[0], which drive more and more nurses away.

I'm working with a badass team on solving some parts of these problems, particularly relating to technology and workflows. If you're interested (across basically any role, but product designers, engineers, product managers are top of mind right now), let me know (email in bio)!

[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/radonda-vaught-nurse-guilty-dea...

ihodes··on Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (April '22 edition)?
Same, I have a free account from having signed up when it was something like $8 for life, the core features actually seem to work pretty well (though I have had some documented search issues where tags weren't being searched; I think that was resolved and one-off).

I pay for the archiving service partially to support Pinboard because I want it to stay solvent, partially because it soothes me to know I can refer back to websites (at least the page I archives) that I found valuable in the past.

ihodes··on Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (April '22 edition)?
I absolutely love Pinboard, seems like hiring one person to attend the support queue would solve >80% of the problem.
ihodes··on Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (April '22 edition)?
That's awesome, I can give him a ton of recommendations over email when he responds :)
ihodes··on Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?
This book is next on my reading list. One question that's come to mind before having read the book is if Singapore is an example of a highly-legible planned state's success?
ihodes··on What doctors wish patients knew about long Covid
In case you're curious about Long Covid vs Long Flu https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
ihodes··on We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
How does the Substack App fit into the picture with apps like Matter and Instapaper (and their integrations with programs like Readwise?) Is this for the more casual / sane reader, and is meant to coexist alongside the more power-user apps like Matter?
ihodes··on What to Learn
I think I agree with your argument, directionally, but in the case of the C++ hacker, might it be the case that he needed to find a different role, job, and/or manager to really leverage the power of a 98%tile C++ programmer?
ihodes··on Study: Vitamin D won’t limit risk, severity of Covid-19
The title should probably be "Genetically predicted serum vitamin D and COVID-19", from the paper title.
ihodes··on Launch HN: Bristle (YC W21) – At-home microbiome test to improve oral health
I love where we're going as an industry in using the tools we have in genetics (and other assays) to better target care and understand the causes of medical issues.

For the range of bacteria you can identify, what are some common treatments / behavioral that finding them might indicate? Or is it more information at this point?

ihodes··on Why books don't work (2019)
Do you have an alternative book (or list of) which you'd recommend instead?
ihodes··on How companies became addicted to debt
There's a fair amount of thought behind what the ideal debt ratio should be for a company, but basically the goal is to minimize the cost of capital while maximizing market value.^[1]

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/optimal-capital-structu...

ihodes··on Weird Keyboards, Programmable Keyboards
The QMK firmware offers a (very) simple onboard macro editor, JFYI
ihodes··on Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
Yep, I did use inline images in my days with org-mode, but I found it to be rather hacky. It's possible, I just found it unpleasant.
ihodes··on Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
I love this, and used Deft and org-mode for a long while, but formatting and inline images aren't something that's non-hackily possible to do in Emacs. Would love to be wrong about this.
ihodes··on Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL
This is very cool, as is your git-like tool for PG! Thanks for sharing.
ihodes··on Hasura raises $9.9M to simplify GraphQL
I'm curious if anyone here has compared Postgraphile to Hasura? My personal difficulty in implementing these is that there aren't good source control and code organization tools for SQL and managing rollbacks and rollforwards in a sane way.

(And a way that doesn't require writing rollbacks, which sometimes aren't even possible anyway).

ihodes··on No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
As an anecdote, the major consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), all provide constructive interview feedback after interviews. They do this regardless of if the candidate is moving on to the next level of not.

It's strange that other industries haven't followed suit.

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