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mmohebbi

60 karma · joined September 10, 2009

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mmohebbi··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2017)
GoodRx | Software Engineers and Analytics Engineers | SF, LA (Santa Monica) | ONSITE

https://boards.greenhouse.io/goodrx

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions: matt at goodrx dot com

---

GoodRx is America’s leading prescription price transparency platform. More than 7 million people use GoodRx’s website and popular mobile apps each month. GoodRx helps consumers save up to 80% on their medications by delivering prices and available discounts at nearly every pharmacy in the U.S. More than a hundred thousand physicians use GoodRx, and its services have been positively reviewed by Good Morning America, the American Heart Association, The New York Times, ABC News, AARP, Forbes and many others.

mmohebbi··on How to Keep Messages Secure
I agree! The Atlantic ran a story late last year on the changes there.

"In May, 29-year-old Elaine Welteroth took over as editor from Amy Astley, who helped found the magazine in 2003. Welteroth, the digital editorial director Phillip Picardi, and the creative director Marie Suter have moved the magazine more aggressively into covering politics, feminism, identity, and activism."

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/te...

mmohebbi··on Node v6.9.0 (LTS)
It's in a PR here: https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/pull/2265
mmohebbi··on America’s Dazzling Tech Boom Has a Downside: Not Enough Jobs
What isn't explicitly mentioned in the article but worth calling out here is AWS and other cloud computing environments. That is a major part of what enabled:

"Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012"

and

"WhatsApp had more than 450 million users world-wide when Facebook bought the messaging service for $19 billion in 2014, turning founder Jan Koum into a billionaire several times over. At the time of the acquisition, WhatsApp had 55 employees."

With prior tech booms, even if the computers that powered them were manufactured outside the US, they had to be installed and maintained in the US by employees of the company. Now all of that outsourced to Amazon and Google, who in turn have datacenters that employ few people.

Don't get me wrong- I love these services but a massive question still remains: Who is now responsible for job creation in the United States? It previously came naturally as a result of economic growth but that no longer holds.

mmohebbi··on FTC Issues Warning Letters to App Developers Using ‘Silverpush’ Code
I'm getting a redirect loop on that for some reason. Archive.org version does work for me:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160320170615/https://public.ad...

mmohebbi··on My first ten-day Vipassana retreat
Yes- nice to see I'm not the only one who felt this way! It's an amazing experience but some of the cultish aspects bothered me as well. I understand that they want you to focus on the Vipassana way of meditating during the retreat but pushing it as the "one true way" felt contradictory.
mmohebbi··on Show HN: Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt
You should take a look at lobsters. They solve a lot of the transparency issues that some have with HN and ProductHunt.

"Some other link aggregation sites are operated by corporate entities which may have significant financial incentive to censor or artificially promote the links and discussion that relate to those entities, their investments, or their competitors. Some of these sites have had moderators of popular sub-forums banned after it became known that they were being paid by 3rd party companies seeking special treatment of their submitted stories.

All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about which moderator it was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions.

All user voting and story ranking on this site uses a universal algorithm and does not artificially penalize or prioritize users or domains. Per-tag hotness modifiers do affect all stories with those tags, but these modifiers are made public and usually used to shorten the life of meta-discussions. If certain domains have to be banned from being submitted due to spam, the list will be made publicly available.

If users are disruptive enough to warrant banning, they will be banned absolutely, given notice of their banning, and their disabled user profile will indicate which moderator banned them and why. There will be no hidden or childish "shadow banning" or "hellbanning" of users popular on some other sites.

The source code to this site is made available under a 3-clause BSD license for viewing, auditing, forking, or contributing to. This code is always up to date with what is running in production on this website.

Public stats are available for site requests, comments submitted, stories submitted, and users created."

https://lobste.rs/about

https://lobste.rs/moderations

mmohebbi··on Ask HN: What database do you use for your iPhone app?
Watchville uses Yap: https://medium.com/the-way-north/ditching-core-data-865c1bb5...
mmohebbi··on Ask HN: What database do you use for your iPhone app?
Quip uses LevelDB/Protocol buffers with a custom C++ syncer which syncs to a Python/MySQL webserver:

https://medium.com/@btaylor/react-with-c-building-the-quip-m...

mmohebbi··on The San Francisco Rent Explosion Part III
That's due to a combination of crime, local businesses (e.g. fancy coffee shops and bars), and access to commuter shuttles. You can see some of these in heat map form here:

http://www.trulia.com/local/san-francisco-ca/

mmohebbi··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2015)
Iodine | San Francisco | Onsite

We're looking for a strong frontend or mobile developer to help us build our React Native app (the MVP is almost complete!).

We're a team of Ex-Googlers working on tools to help people understand if they are taking the right drug. We have an excellent group of investors and work closely with FDA on their open data system. Details:

http://www.iodine.com http://angel.co/iodine

If interested, please email matt@iodine.com

Thanks!

mmohebbi··on Customer.io Extended Outage
Of course. Just sent them to you.
mmohebbi··on Customer.io Extended Outage
We used customer.io for the past few months but due to bugs with the system, we switched to sendwithus with sendgrid as our ESP. We've been really happy with the results.
mmohebbi··on Ask HN: Tool to post new referrers from Google Analytics to Slack?
Thanks for the response. totally agree that it's quite possible and with AppEngine it would be pretty easy. The reason I was asking here was to see if someone had already built it.
mmohebbi··on The Cold-Medicine Racket
This is amazing- we hadn't noticed this! It feels like they are A/B testing different boxes. I particularly like the MLB logo in the corner of one of those boxes.
mmohebbi··on The Cold-Medicine Racket
Well, we are trying to counter all the pharma ads!

But really, we hear from users all the time that they get confused in the cold and flu section of the pharmacy. We hope to help address this problem.

mmohebbi··on The Cold-Medicine Racket
While the FDA does a fantastic job of reminding the population of the process it uses to ensure generics deliver the same experience, there is still a ton of waste in the system due to brand-name drugs being chosen over generics. Part of the problem is the massive marketing efforts by pharma trying to convince patients and doctors that their brand-name drug is better. For details see:

http://www.iodine.com/blog/do-people-prefer-under-patent-dru...

mmohebbi··on The Cold-Medicine Racket
"The idea is to help everyone find exactly the right cold medication."

http://www.iodine.com/cold-and-flu

I work at Iodine (our Cold and Flu tool is featured in this article) and we're watching this thread. Feel free to ask medication related questions of our clinical team or technical questions of our engineering team.

mmohebbi··on Do people prefer under-patent drugs to generics?
[I'm a member of the Iodine team]

This is based on a massive (125,000 person) Google Consumer Survey we ran on America's experience with medications. Happy to answer any questions people may have!

mmohebbi··on To Gather Drug Information, a Health Startup Turns to Consumers
The early feedback we've been getting from doctors and pharmacists has been very positive. We believe (and many of them agree) that a users subjective experience of a medication is an important part of the overall equation, especially with non-compliance being as high as it is.

With respect to brand vs generic, keep an eye on our blog for a post on this soon but here is a preview:

https://twitter.com/zimmeee/status/514807668163088384

mmohebbi··on To Gather Drug Information, a Health Startup Turns to Consumers
Great questions! For background, I was part of the Flu Trends and Consumer Surveys teams before I left Google to start Iodine.

Google Consumer Surveys attempts to create a representative sample of the internet population according to the breakdown from the Current Population Survey (CPS) published by the Census. This is done at survey delivery time. Additionally, after the survey is performed, the stats are reweighted by this distribution since the targeting system isn't always able to deliver a fully representative sample due to other constraints (publisher volume, survey volume, etc).

Of course, this only helps with ensuring that the stats represent Internet users. However, there are many reasons to believe that this sample is a reasonable proxy for many types of questions. For examples, see:

http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/static/consum...

http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/11-7-12%20Googl...

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-po...

Additionally, there can be a bias in many traditional survey platforms (RDD telephone surveys being the current gold standard) due to the adoption of mobile phones among other things.

With respect to recall-reporting problem, for a subset of users, we asked not only about the medication but what they were taking the medication for. We do this in the form of an open ended question and it helps increase our confidence in what the user reports. Details of our exact methodology are forthcoming!

mmohebbi··on To Gather Drug Information, a Health Startup Turns to Consumers
We launched today at http://www.iodine.com

The team is monitoring this thread. Happy to answer questions!

mmohebbi··on Make pull requests easier
Gitcritic does some of this right now as a webapp, including side-by-side diffs:

http://gitcritic.com

https://github.com/danvk/better-pull-requests

mmohebbi··on CloudFlare enabling free SSL by mid-October
Agree with others that it depends on what you are trying to protect against. It's also worth reading through the options that Cloudflare supports for origin server communication:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-strict-ssl-protecting...

mmohebbi··on Arthritis drug spurs hair growth in man with alopecia universalis
It does look like it has some serious side effects, including an FDA blackbox warning. You can find a more readable version of this FDA product label here: http://www.iodine.com/label/xeljanz (shameless plug)
mmohebbi··on FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
Thanks!

We support gzip on the api json response for clients that support it. Given that, I'd expect the size improvements would be minimal for whitespace stripping but let us know if you have evidence to the contrary!

mmohebbi··on FDA launches openFDA to provide easy access to valuable FDA public data
We're Iodine (http://www.iodine.com), a consumer health startup based in SF. Our backgrounds are varied but many of us came from Google, including three of us from the search team. We're big believers in both open source and open data and we're excited to be part of openFDA!