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wcedmistenon Show HN: Openpanel – An open-source alternative to Mixpanel

And if you did want something closer, Hetzner offers USA based vCPU options that are still quite affordable compared to DO.

There's a 4GB option for 9 Euros.

I recently migrated my personal projects from DO to Hetzner for this reason

wcedmistenon Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

I think you may have misinterpreted the parent comment. "Complement" as in a complementary good in economics terms. Not "complimentary", as in free. There's a good article on this by Joel Spolsky

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

wcedmistenon FDA recalls defective iOS app that injured over 200 insulin pump users

For this particular device, there were 40 devices in the ancestry tree. While certainly feasible to traverse a graph of 40 PDFs and keep track of these relationships, it would probably take more than 5 minutes.

Additionally, not having the data in a structured format prevents seeing overall trends in the data.

wcedmistenon FDA recalls defective iOS app that injured over 200 insulin pump users

I recently did a writeup [1] on the 510(k) FDA clearance process (which cleared this device for market).

Basically this device was cleared through a DAG of other devices that were "substantially equivalent". I made a website to visualize these relationships, and any recalls that occurred in the parent devices. If anyone is curious about this particular device, see here [2]

[1] https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/medical-device-analysis/

[2] https://www.510k.fyi/devices/?id=K232380 (click on "Predicate ancestry graph")

wcedmistenon AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff

This is why I can't really trust LLMs for data tasks like this. I can't really be certain that it won't be hallucinating results

wcedmistenon The current state of map design in OpenStreetMap

There are kind of branches already (other layers have different styles [1]), but this debate is over the default layer style, which appears on first page load of openstreetmap.org

[1]: Transport Map Layer https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/42.3594/-71.1051&layer...

wcedmistenon The current state of map design in OpenStreetMap

> But it is also visible, that despite Americana being a relatively young and not yet feature complete project by its own goals, it already struggles significantly with the technical limitations of the map rendering framework used and the commercially developed data schema it is built on.

I wonder what goals of Americana the author feels are fallen short? [1]

> The purpose of the Americana project is to:

* Promote collaboration and shared purpose in the American mapping community

* Express the American experience through cartography, taking inspiration from the familiar features of North American paper maps

* Close technology gaps that impede the use of American cartographic principles. Where the technology to build our map doesn't exist, we will build it.

[1]: https://github.com/osm-americana

wcedmistenon Research into why some people have a better sense of direction

Totally agree on the device dependence. Sometimes I'll navigate a route a few times with GPS and then try to find my way there without it, just to learn the route.

I was thinking it would be cool to make an app that helps you learn navigation. Maybe like a game to find your way to a given place, and you get hints if you're off track.

wcedmistenon Organizing OpenStreetMap mapping parties

I'm mostly an "armchair mapper", but I actually find adding details from satellite imagery to be really fun. It's kind of like a nerdy version of paint-by-number.

wcedmistenon Show HN: Hospital Territory Map of Virginia

That's a good idea, I'd certainty like to incorporate population into this, since it would help contextualize the population density.

wcedmistenon Show HN: Hospital Territory Map of Virginia

Hey everyone! I recently saw an article [1] about a hospital merger (Ballad Health) in southwest Virginia and how it increased ER wait times.

I thought an interesting visualization would be to see who owns the hospital "territory" in Virginia. I pulled all the hospitals from OpenStreetMap and calculated a voronoi diagram from the data to get regions that are closest to any given hospital. Then I color-coded these regions by the hospital network operator, to see how much competition a given area has.

[1]: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/ballad-health-er-wait...

wcedmistenon I'm Too Old

Kurt Vonnegut, in a letter response to a high schooler asking for advice:

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK? Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them... You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

wcedmistenon After Appalachian hospitals merged, their ERs became much slower

I was thinking it might be interesting to show a map of regions to the closest hospital, and color code it by the operator, like ballad health = red, banner health = green, etc. I'll see if OpenStreetMap has this data available

wcedmistenon How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

> Who read article like this on mobile?

The irony of this on an article about how developers ignore users on low-performance mobile devices

wcedmistenon Write for others but mostly for yourself (2022)

Totally agree! When I started my blog my motivation was to write about my projects so that I would actually finish them, but I've found that an added benefit is that I write "defensively" in a way that makes me fact check myself. I also add a lot more citations

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

I do use this resource for 510k.fyi to populate the device and recall data, but unfortunately it does not contain the 510(k) summaries, or even links to them. The web scraping was still required to get those documents so that I could run OCR on them.

Since the website is open source, there's even a github issue confirming this: https://github.com/FDA/openfda/issues/200

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Author here! I was legitimately considering building an iPhone OCR farm for this based on this article about running OCR on memes [1]. Haven't tried it in practice, but the article claims it has better performance than tesseract.

[1]: https://findthatmeme.com/blog/2023/01/08/image-stacks-and-ip...

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Author here, thank you!

My understanding is that with pharmaceuticals, new drugs must always go through clinical trials to prove safety and effectiveness before the FDA approves them for public use, so there's not really an equivalent to the 510(k) process for drugs.

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

That's a good idea! There's actually a paper [1] that does something very similar with the "device description" and "indications for use" sections. They use Word2Vec on these sections and compare similarity.

Fig 2 [2] shows a graph of similarity of all devices to their predicate for each year.

However the discussion sections mentions difficulty with using Word2Vec because of the jargon used to describe these devices, so I'm not totally sure how to interpret the graph.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8496833/

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8496833/figure/...

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Hi, author here! I think my main concern with this process is that the predicate itself might never have gone through clinical trials.

So even if the new device works as well as the predicate, that predicate might be equivalent to a whole chain of devices that have never gone through clinical trials.

This might be fine if the device is low risk, but the 510(k) process has a history of clearing devices that have resulted in patient deaths.

Of course it's a balance between too much red tape and having unsafe devices, I was just personally surprised at where the FDA draws the line today.

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

I'd love to take a look, do you have a link? I couldn't find any bulk downloads for this, but that would definitely be useful!

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

I'm not super familiar with the regulatory landscape in Europe, but I did find this article [1] while I was researching for this project.

I believe the EU has a similar pathway (in the EU Medical Device Regulation) for new devices relying on equivalence to a predicate, but the requirements for demonstrating equivalence are a higher bar. Joint prostheses (like the one causing cobalt poisoning in the US) are not allowed through this process in the EU.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002013832...

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Hi, author here! I totally agree there's a cost-benefit tradeoff to be made. I think the 510k process seems appropriate for low-risk devices like latex gloves and bandages.

My concern is mostly around the class II devices cleared through this process, such as the recently recalled Philips CPAP machines, which resulted in 561 deaths. [1]

Philips also knew about complaints without informing the FDA. [2]

[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-sleep-apnea-philips-recall-...

[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/philips-kept-warnings-abo...

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Hi, author here! Completely agree, I would love to see the FDA publish an official dataset of predicate device relationships. I'm not sure if they have this data available internally, but if not, they could validate my dataset and republish it, which might be easier than starting from scratch.

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Hi, author here!

That's a good point, I should probably add a disclaimer about what recalls mean in this context. Unfortunately I couldn't find a good way to determine whether the recall might be a systemic design issue that would affect other similar devices or something that can be remediated for an individual product, like a labeling issue.

I was also thinking of changing the color code based on the recall severity (class I, II, or III)

wcedmistenon A copy of a copy of a copy: FDA medical device clearances

Hey everyone! Author here, happy to answer any questions about this project!

wcedmistenon I turned my open-source project into a full-time business

Why not release it as AGPL?

wcedmistenon Adding keyboard shortcuts to a 24 year-old government website with userscripts

Author here! I didn't know about that Devices@FDA search, thanks for the tip!

My goal for this project is to create a free/open source website that enhances this 510k data based on the public data dumps. I'd be very interested in hearing about how you use the current website for work, and what improvements would be useful for you! My email is in my about page.

The major enhancement is to show predicate device information as a first-class property of each 510k, since right now the data is buried inside various PDFs.

wcedmistenon Adding keyboard shortcuts to a 24 year-old government website with userscripts

Author here!

That's true, and I actually used that dump[1] and OCR to automate about 80% of this project. The manual data entry was only required for the 20% that couldn't be found automatically.

Since this was just to fill in the gaps, I figured there would be diminishing returns on re-implementing fuzzy search on the data, but adding shortcuts to my manual workflow took less time for a reasonable speedup.

[1] I also used the JSON dump of this data that the FDA provides here: https://open.fda.gov/apis/device/510k/download/