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whafro

809 karma · joined January 27, 2009

@mjacksonw, health tech VC at F-Prime, formerly CTO @Beacon_Testing, SVP product/engineering @PathAI, CTO @Kinsights, UX @Posterous @LinkedIn.
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whafro··on Why are pianos traditionally tuned “out of tune” at the extremes?
A lot of keyboards are based on recorded samples of acoustic pianos – they might use a Steinway or something as the source of the samples, so the keyboard and piano would sound ostensibly similar and good together.
whafro··on Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit
I have a 2018 XC60 and it's been really great on the whole, but very clearly Not There Yet™:

+ During a dark and wet night a few weeks ago, I used Pilot Assist (lane/speed/steering control) and it genuinely saw the lane lines better than I was able to during major unexpected downpours. I was in control the whole time, but it was a great help along the way and made the drive a lot more comfortable.

- Some of these systems work together rather poorly. For instance, the Pilot Assist system seems to identify white lane lines better than yellow ones, and on US highways (where the left-most edge is often yellow) it will drift left. However, the lane keeping system seems to see the yellow line just fine, so it will vibrate the steering wheel to warn that I'm getting too close, while Pilot Assist continues to insist on moving left. The solution is to get out of the left lane.

But I'm very optimistic and supportive about Volvo's trajectory in this area, to all of your points above.

whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)
If you apply through the website, it won't be a black hole, for sure. There are some third party application sites that we're getting a handle on now. Hopefully we hear from folks like you!
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)
Hey! Sorry about that. I don't see an application in our system with what I gleaned to be your name. Feel free to shoot me a follow up – jackson dot wilkinson at mycompany
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)
I think right now we're a little more cautious about a remote manager (it'll be our first) than ICs of all seniority levels. Definitely happy to have a conversation about it, though, and I have a soft spot from my time in DC.
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2019)
PathAI | Boston, MA or Austin, TX | https://pathai.com | Onsite / Remote (US)

PathAI is looking for front- and back-end engineers and engineering managers to help detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We're working with a modern stack using Python/Django/Flask/DRF, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

We're making some major decisions around the direction of the platform, so we're especially excited to bring on tech leads, but early- and mid-career developers who have great software engineering chops can find a great home here as well.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in. We're well-funded with strong revenue, growth, and – most importantly – impact.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2018)
PathAI | Boston, MA | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for an Director of Engineering to help lead our work to detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine. We're also looking for individual contributors to our application engineering, platform engineering, and design engineering (front-end development) teams as well.

We're working with a modern stack using Python/Django/Flask/DRF, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

This role in particular will be helping build and lead our application engineering team, which works at the python/postgres layer to provide services for software-based medical devices, customers via the front-end, and internal teams. The team is five people today, and expected to grow through the short-to-mid term.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in. We're well-funded with strong revenue and growth.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on In the Works – AWS Region in Milan, Italy
Subtle variation:

Heaven is where the food is Italian and the engineering is German.

Hell is where the food is German and the engineering is Italian.

whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)
PathAI | Boston, MA | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for an Director of Engineering to help lead our work to detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine. We're also looking for individual contributors to our application engineering, platform engineering, and design engineering (front-end development) teams as well.

We're working with a modern stack using Python/Django/Flask/DRF, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

This role in particular will be helping build and lead our application engineering team, which works at the python/postgres layer to provide services for software-based medical devices, customers via the front-end, and internal teams. The team is five people today, and expected to grow through the short-to-mid term.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in. We're well-funded with strong revenue and growth.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on Triplebyte Now in Seattle and Los Angeles
I'd certainly be an employer-customer if/when Triplebyte launches in Boston.
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)
PathAI | Boston, MA | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for an Director/Manager of Engineering to help lead our work to detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We're working with a modern stack using Python/Django/Flask/DRF, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

This role in particular will be helping build and lead our application engineering team, which works at the python/postgres layer to provide services for software-based medical devices, customers via the front-end, and internal teams. The team is five people today, and expected to grow through the short-to-mid term.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in. We're well-funded with strong revenue and growth.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on iOS 12 released
As of a few days ago, the rumors were that Waze support was still in early beta and a ways (sorry) off, but that Google Maps would likely land in October.
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)
PathAI | Boston, MA | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for back-end engineers and engineering managers to help detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We're working with a modern stack using Python/Django/Flask/DRF, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

We're making some major decisions around the direction of the platform, so we're especially excited to bring on tech leads, but early- and mid-career developers who have great software engineering chops can find a great home here as well.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in. We're well-funded with strong revenue and growth.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on Amazon's electricity rate discounts have pushed up utility costs
I think the point was that Amazon pays salaries/wages, the recipients buy gas for their personal vehicles, and that gas is taxed to pay for the roads.

Presumably Amazon funds paid to delivery services are also used to pay for gas, which therefore indirectly pays for the roads.

whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2018)
PathAI | Front-End, Back-end Engineering | Boston, MA | Full-time | VISA, ONSITE | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for back-end, front-end, and platform engineers to help lead and expand a platform that is already helping detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We're working with a modern stack using Python/Django/Flask/DRF, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

We're making some major decisions around the direction of the platform, so we're especially excited to bring on tech leads, but early- and mid-career developers who have great software engineering chops can find a great home here as well.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on CeramicSpeed’s Driven Concept Might Become the Most Efficient Bicycle Drivetrain
I'll just leave it at this: this particular guy's eating habits, whether you're privy to the details of them or not (and I suspect you aren't), were totally not germane to the discussion. The first sentence was legit, and the second was entirely unnecessary.
whafro··on CeramicSpeed’s Driven Concept Might Become the Most Efficient Bicycle Drivetrain
No, it should not have been noted.
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2018)
PathAI | Front-End, Back-end Engineering | Boston, MA | Full-time | VISA, ONSITE | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for back-end, front-end, and platform engineers to help lead and expand a platform that is already helping detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We have a modern stack with a mix of Java and Python, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

We're making some major decisions around the direction of the platform, so we're especially excited to bring on tech leads, but early- and mid-career developers who have great software engineering chops can find a great home here as well.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces
I believe it's an effort to show a netsplit in the traditional form (server1, server2) without placing blame on a particular server.

Back when I IRCd regularly (and perhaps this is still the case today), certain servers would get a reputation for splitting more than others, and I think this network (and/or its ircd) decided to mask it without breaking the general format.

whafro··on GitLab 11 released
Thanks, edited!
whafro··on GitLab 11 released
We've been paying for GitLab for about a year now, and it's mostly been a good experience. There have been three things that seem to come up weekly for us:

1. Lack of traceability/auditability. We're in healthcare, and have a regulatory burden that requires versioning of basically everything. GitLab does this for code and wikis (thanks to git itself) but not for issues, merge requests, comments, etc. I've ended up building a service that just ingests the webhooks for these to store them away, which feels ridiculous. Since the webhooks for comments doesn't get triggered on update, I even have a TRIGGER shimmed into GitLab's postgres DB. Ech.

2. There's no concept of a bot user, so every integration we want to do is against a single account/identity, in part because...

3. The pricing of Ultimate feels ridiculous, and that's the only way to get something as fundamental as epics. $1000+ a year for every employee?

[edit] $1000/mo -> $1000/yr. (per month would have been even more way cray)

whafro··on Figma 3.0 is herebye Invision
There's so much progress in the design/front-end tools space after years of Photoshop/Fireworks stagnation.

Right now, in this space, Figma is up against Sketch and InVision, and they each bring something pretty great to the table. Super-constructive competition, and we're all benefitting.

whafro··on Using Deep Learning to Help Pathologists Find Tumors
I'm definitely an optimist about this, and I have an interest in it. So, grains of salt. But things worth noting:

The lack of labeled data is definitely a challenge, as you call out. But a sizable chunk of what we do is power a platform and network of pathologists to get this data within hours for training purposes. We think there will always be a very real need for human pathologists, but that the bread-and-butter work in pathology can be better handled by well-trained and thoroughly-validated algorithms.

And yeah, the non-technical issues are just as important as the technical ones:

* There's very limited use of digital imagery in clinical pathology at all. Fortunately, that's not the case in research pathology, and the success we've had in that field has been moving clinical labs toward an investment in digital pathology.

* Reimbursement (in the US) will be an issue. There are only a few options for billing payers for pathology reads, and they aren't necessarily in lock-step with the potential future of the industry.

* Like I mentioned, this opens up a class of analysis that just isn't feasible for humans to perform. It's up to us to show the value of this type of analysis.

* The regulatory environment is a real thing. We aren't hiding from this, and are creating processes that allow us to build and iterate software like we'd like to, while still faithfully meeting our regulatory burden.

So far, we've found our approach to be viable, and we've had some really strong early results with our customers (and solid revenue!). So I'm pretty optimistic, for sure.

whafro··on Using Deep Learning to Help Pathologists Find Tumors
I work in this field (not directly on the ML, for the company born out of the winner of Camelyon16) and the last two years of progress has been amazing to watch. Tumor detection has become incredibly accurate, across basically every tissue/tumor type, and we're now making real progress on the next major goal: determining the best therapy for a given patient.

It's a bit of a dirty secret in this space that pathologists have a pretty high error rate on a lot of these tasks — it's just tough work for human eyes to do literally hundreds of times every day. Applying computer vision techniques can not only improve accuracy and reproducibility over human assessment, but you can do types of analysis in seconds-to-minutes that would literally take years for a human. We're just scratching the surface.

There are lots of ML challenges here, but just as many general tech/engineering/design challenges. So if you're interested in working on bringing work like this to the masses, we'd love to talk at PathAI.

whafro··on The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc
Good old Harpy, what a guy.

I can speak from experience that using your middle name creates it's own set of super annoying issues.

whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2018)
PathAI | Engineering | Boston, MA | Full-time | VISA, ONSITE | https://pathai.com PathAI is looking for back-end, front-end, and platform engineers to help lead and expand a platform that is already helping detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We have a modern stack with a mix of Java and Python, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

We're making some major decisions around the direction of the platform, so we're especially excited to bring on tech leads, but early- and mid-career developers who have great software engineering chops can find a great home here as well.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/.

whafro··on FDA permits marketing of AI-based device to detect diabetes-related eye problems
This is definitely going to be an issue. Even in cases where you're measuring your tool against "expert consensus" (often 3-5 physicians), there's a reasonable likelihood that the consensus may be wrong in certain types of cases.

Though even in those cases, you might be looking to show that your tool agrees with physicians at least as often as physicians agree with each other. Malpractice is usually about failing to offer the standard of care, and if you can show a reasonable level of concurrence with the standard of care in research and trials, you may be able to move forward and reach those higher levels of accuracy.

whafro··on San Francisco’s Seismic Gamble
I knew someone who lived in the building, and while she didn't report cracks in the walls, she did say that things would reliably roll toward one corner of her apartment if they weren't secured.
whafro··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)
PathAI | Engineering | Boston, MA | Full-time | VISA, ONSITE | https://pathai.com

PathAI is looking for back-end, front-end, and platform engineers to help lead and expand a platform that is already helping detect cancer faster and more accurately while paving the way toward personalized medicine.

We have a modern stack with a mix of Java and Python, alongside a Vue-powered front-end. Services are containerized, and we do our best to have a great engineering environment alongside our regulatory and compliance efforts. We're a technology company working within healthcare, not a healthcare company trying to leverage technology.

We're making some major decisions around the direction of the platform, so we're especially excited to bring on tech leads, but early- and mid-career developers who have great software engineering chops can find a great home here as well.

Work alongside a diverse set of expert technologists, computational biologists, and computer vision scientists – if you're intellectually curious, it's an amazing environment to be in.

Check out our open positions at https://www.pathai.com/careers/. Or feel free to reach out to me directly – jackson (dot) wilkinson [at] pathai [dot] com.

whafro··on Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with Fraud
Theranos was a punch line in my office just this morning, and she'll forever be associated with that.

But Shkreli has brought on himself another order of magnitude of personal criticism because of his statements and actions beyond the price fixing. In my experience from the days after his sentencing, people who know nothing about tech or healthcare know his name and react to it with scorn, while quite few of them know the name of his funds or companies.

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