milksteak42

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[1]

These coding challenges used to be a very good measure of ability, but now applicants are just memorizing the most common problems for each company. We're not at the point where these tests are useless but we will get there in the near future. The problem is that I haven't seen any good alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

That's nothing. One of the largest banks in North America (BMO), limited passwords to 6 characters. Worse, for compatibility with telephone banking the characters were mapped to digits. That means there were only 1,000,000 possible unique passwords! They have 12,000,000 customers!

They only just changed to complex passwords this year.

Well, Apple has Braeburn Capital but they're probably much more risk-averse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital

Yes, most have a low-temperature cycle and the rest can often be configured to include the option.

I don't buy it. A crisis that causes the world's countries to isolate themselves from each other does not stimulate cooperation. In fact I'd argue the opposite - it highlights the downsides of a cooperative world with open borders and open markets. I'm not making a value judgement here, just that this will probably result in the opposite of what the article implies.

This article is a bit - or maybe a lot - callous, but it makes some good points. Shutting down the economy is not free of human costs. People will lose their livelihoods and some will lose their lives to the coming recession.

Where I disagree is the premise that we're "eating the young to save the unhealthy old". The implication here is that letting the virus run wild is an appropriate trade to make for saving the economy from a recession. That's pretty unconscionable in my opinion.

We should be angry, but it should not framed as a generational dispute. We should focus on the fact that countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are able to deal with this with much less disruption. We should be angry that we do not have enough masks for everyone. We should be angry that testing was not available until this became a crisis. We should be angry that the healthcare system cannot coordinate a coherent response.

It's worth nothing that this machine is very low throughput - the larger one only takes 4 samples and you have to use their proprietary disposable cartridges.

edit: as pointed out below - the largest of the machines has 80 slots and could probably do 2000/day taking around 45min-1hr/test all in

Contrast that with a modern real-time PCR machine which typically has capacity for 96 samples, with some machines able to test 384 or even 1536 at a time. The tradeoff is that those machines take 2-3 hours and the lab needs to do nucleic acid extraction separately.

The main advantage of this machine is that it does the nucleic acid extraction and PCR in one cartridge and in ~20 minutes. It's great for clinics and field hospitals but for an established laboratory running hundreds or thousands of tests per day, I'd wager that the standard methods are much cheaper and a bit faster overall.

It's mostly a commercial decision. Reagents have very high margins and recurring revenue is more attractive than large one-time purchases. Illumina does this with genetic sequencing as well.

edit: There are some informal standards like 96- and 384- well plates that make it possible to have third-party consumables with some machines, but there is no incentive for a for-profit company to design open platform.