stevepotter

VR training hasn't really stuck in ortho training. It's legit and people do it, but it's a distant second to doing it live. I haven't seen that much of it, but from what I have seen, the fidelity is quite low. It would be cool to see what a good game studio could produce.

Doctors, like most people, don't like stuff on their head. Plus in ortho there is a lot of feel to it. It's often referred to as "carpentry". The docs I know, especially those with experience, would prefer a video and a cadaver lab. Even that's a lot to ask because they are so swamped. In every surgery there is a rep from the implant company, and those reps are really the ones doing the training.

So there is certainly potential but it's just not to the point where people are excited about it.

I'm working on a system that helps surgeons make precise bone cuts during knee replacement surgery. Believe it or not, manual cuts are still the standard in that type of procedure. Robotic systems exist but they are very costly, big, and actually add time to the surgery (bad news when you are under anesthesia and your leg is in a tourniquet).

It uses 4k stereoscopic capture and bunch of ML models to match bone position with sub-millimeter precision. The surgeon screws a metal base piece into the bone, and we detect where that is in space. Then, a Stewart Platform adjusts another part that is placed onto the base. The robotic adjustment allows the base to be placed in a ballpark area, with the robotically-adjusted piece oriented in the exact spot where the surgeon needs to cut.

The net result is a robotic system that is many times cheaper than the least expensive incumbent, decreases surgery time significantly, reduces error, and basically "just works" as opposed to requiring a ton of training. We are debuting at a tradeshow in October.

I understand your point and if I were the author I would want either a disclaimer or a fix. File an issue or make a pr. Filing an issue is quicker and more fruitful than dealing with folks here

Great, take care

You're being too aggressive for my taste and I don't think there's any dialog to be had here. I was wrong though, this particular visa was O-1 and not H-1B and they are quite different. I was discussing a single person who was uniquely qualified. And passed the rigorous O-1 application process only to be prohibited from crossing the border because he was born in a particular place.

I'm a startup with modest angel funding. We can't compete with larger companies salary-wise and so far I haven't been able to find competent people who are willing the play the startup game when they can get half a mil straight out of school. We have only a handful of software engineers. But I don't have to tell you because like you said, you know exactly what my situation is.

This clearly isn't a productive conversation so let's just drop it. Enjoy your weekend!

No, I don't want to underpay imported people. I'm not talking about teams of low-skilled people. You don't know my situation, so I'll explain. I work in a startup that requires a specific ML computer vision skillset. And we are in the surgery space. I found a brilliant person who is a master at computer vision, loves the medical field, and is willing to take a +6 figure salary and equity. I tried to find someone like that stateside and couldn't. He wants to live here and would be a great addition to the country. He's in Canada now, has been for years. Unfortunately he's still there now because of the recent travel ban for those born in certain countries.

Thing is, I would pay $100k extra to have him in office. In my case it's moot because of the travel ban. My point was, this whole thing simply benefits the companies that can afford it - google, meta, amazon etc, who happen to be big contributors to the administration. $100k will not stop them from hiring foreign talent, but it may stop companies like mine. Flagship companies might be psyched about this.

As a startup, I cannot afford this. The big companies can. Guess who wins?

Agree, although this is often an undeveloped skill in newer folks. There are many other things I like to discuss in an interview: past mistakes, things they are especially proud of, times they trimmed scope to meet a deadline, working with difficult people, etc.

My goal for interviewing is to either hire the person, or not hire the person but have them walk away feeling like they got something out of our time together. Often I can quickly tell that the person isn't right for the role, in which case I will politely explain that to them and offer whatever advice I can.

Great question. I'm okay with someone who doesn't have public code, although they will have to work a little harder to verify their skills match their story.

You have some public repos. That's plenty. Even some gists will work

I tell people all the time, if you want to make it easier to get hired, put some work online. This is especially helpful for those without great credentials or history. Take advantage of this, as it's not possible in many other professions.

When I interview a candidate, I focus primarily on what they've done. Ideally they'd have a body of work online that I can view beforehand. Then I go through a high level system design and have a collaborative conversation. Last, I give a pretty straightforward coding question, whose purpose is only to make sure they aren't full of shit, which often they are.

The mistake I see interviewers make is that they are looking for the candidate to solve some kind of puzzle, and the focus is kept on whether they had that "ah-ha" moment vs a clean implementation. Maybe this would be a good approach for a job that required defusing a bomb, but this is relaxed desk work haha.

I once had someone bomb the coding, then email me a few hours after with a clean answer. One of the best hires I ever had.

This comment should be at the top

Someone else pointed out the reason for the datatype. A more subtle problem is the use of double negatives. Boolean APIs like "disable" will throw off users of your API.

Try this: https://github.com/luca-medeiros/lang-segment-anything

I do a variety of things, including iOS and web. Like you mentioned, LLM results between the two are very different. I can't trust LLM output to even compile, much less work. Just last night, it told me to use an API called `CMVideoFormatDescriptionGetCameraIntrinsicMatrix`. That API is very interesting because it doesn't exist. It also did a great job of digging some deep holes when dealing with some tricky Swift 6 concurrency stuff. Meanwhile it generated an entire nextjs app that worked great on the first shot. It's all about that training data baby

I love ClickOnce and am amazed that it never got that popular. Installs and updates are seamless.

I wrote an inventory management program for my father's hazardous waste company. Used .net mvc as the backend, WPF as the frontend. WPF sucks in many ways, but I got it working and have had zero complaints.

I built that program almost 20 years ago. Until last year I spend maybe 5-6 hours total in maintenance, mostly ssl cert updates. Let that sink in.

redefinesurgery.com - I'm steve @, would be happy to talk to your brother

I'm working on a system that uses affordable hardware (iPhones) to make orthopedic surgery easier and more precise. Among other things, we have to track the position in space of surgical tools like drills. Models like this can play a pivotal role in that.

As someone mentioned, this is great for gaussian splatting, which we also do.

Wow I just got done integrating NextAuth. I will totally switch to this if you can support my mobile API. My nextjs app has some API routes used by my native iOS app. It was a bit of a hassle with NextAuth and I was surprised at the lack of support and demand for it (am I crazy for using next for a mobile API? I don't think so). If you support that use case (I didn't see anything in the docs), that would be great. I'm already done with the iOS portion, which basically stores the

I'm working on a device that records surgery and uses AI models to analyze the procedure for things like surgical technique, efficiency, instrument usage, blood loss, etc. We're starting with using it for medical education because that doesn't need FDA approval, but eventually it'll be deployed in operating rooms. The goal is to enable every surgeon to perform like the greats (most aren't), improve patient outcomes and ultimately save lives. We just got into Techstars. Aside from that, dad life in suburbia

Named parameters and nothing new and I like them. To this day I don’t understand why swift/objc have two names. I get that one is external, one internal so changing external breaks APIs. So is the only advantage that you can rename the parameter name for function implementation? So what? You can do that by a variable at the top of the function. Those two names make function signatures hard to read (which one is which etc)

I did obj-c on a popular consumer app about 10 years ago. Recently had to make an app. I used async/await and SwiftUI heavily. Used observableobject and actors as well. It’s very nice, much like a React/typescript app. UIs used to be torture

I did have to build some things that I felt should have come standard. For example, I had to build a class that provides a thread-safe way to enqueue objects and process them in a background task, which used DispatchQueue internally.

By and large, it’s a world of difference from what it was and my experience has been joyful. Xcode cloud just worked so that’s cool. Profiling is wonderful (signposts etc). Could there be improvements? Sure. Are there other languages with better features? I think so. But I haven’t found myself longing much for something provided by other languages and platforms

Point is, I no longer dread iOS development. In fact, it’s quite fun.

Long time software engineer, just coming off 4 years of Kotlin into Go. Love-hate describes it for me. It's just not as much fun and feels sterile. I get the whole "just write the damn code" argument, but unfortunately for me I get fulfillment out of writing code, and Go isn't doing it for me. I've been around for a long time and experienced all the various language philosophies. The Go dogma is especially frustrating. Everything I say is met some automatic recycled response. No thanks

I was in your situation a few years ago and took a job. I've saved more in the past couple years than all my other time combined. I will be financially independent by the time I'm 50, at which time I can do pretty much whatever I want. I tried multiple times to make it on my own but it was extremely stressful, especially once I had kids. You can always go back to it later.

they give you a signing bonus, paid out over time, to make up for the difference in total comp in the first two years

I work at AWS now and can second that. Nobody is happy when things break, but COEs are looked a positively and are circulated constantly to prevent repeats.

Where I live, we have a deer problem but houses are too close to hunt. I drive to my folk's place about an hour away to do it. Some towns hire professionals to take some out, but it's expensive. The meat does go to feeding the homeless though. I'd happily pay for the ability to hunt right in my town. It can be done safely.

I bow hunt deer in New Jersey. Hunting is sacred to me and I do it for the meat. It's great to see this shared here. CWD can be contained. Most hunters are aware of it and are doing their part to fight CWD. If you don't hunt, a simple way to help is to call the police on the off chance you see a deer acting strangely.

Can I have more information on the "high profile lumps this past year"? Thanks!

I've used screen recording systems in both web and mobile and found them to be very valuable tools. And I've only ever used them to troubleshoot and improve the product. Never shared the data. That said, I've always been disturbed that it was considered fine to do. I think Apple's move is great. I hope other apps stores do the same. I think it should be done for text-based analytics like GA as well, as they get so detailed that it's pretty much the same as screen recording.

Same thing for web - https://www.fullstory.com