Can we stop hyping blog posts by tech people writing about epidemiology and medicine? I'm shocked how much baseless speculation and misinformation is being shared on HN.
He's not. He's hyping his biomedical startup which is trying to make a cheap plasmon covid test. Whether or not he's right, that's sort of right at the HN sweet spot for relevance.
Will it work? God I hope so, but it doesn't seem prudent to bet on it. We know several existing technologies for covid testing that will work. We know they can scale. We know how expensive they are. And while they aren't cheap, we know can afford it at the federal level.
That we still refuse to actually pull the trigger on mass testing and announce a program to fund and launch a universal covid testing regime is just infuriating.
I mean, I desperately hope that a magic bullet like this will pop up to save us. But we know how to beat this. We just won't.
HN is an internet watercooler. It exists for curious conversation. That inevitably includes speculation—that's what people do when they converse. The question is whether it's curious (thoughtful and fresh) or uncurious (reflexive and predictable).
People being wrong is also inevitable. We don't have a truth meter, and there's a ton of uncertainty on topics like this one anyhow. I don't think it would work to try to restrict discussion so that only authoritative opinions are allowed. This community would not tolerate that sort of restriction being put on it, and it would only convert to an argument-by-proxy about who should count as authoritative. The solution, if there is one, is to converse thoughtfully and respond to one another with accurate information where possible.
No, because they were right and the epidemiologists and medical people were wrong. Everyone kept telling us not to use masks except the tech people. There were all these lies:
* Doesn't work
* Too hard to train
* Shortages will happen
Literally all were wrong and they either knew it and misinformed everyone or didn't know it. So you can either drop the assumption of benevolence or competence.
The only guys who didn't listen to them, Taiwan, are doing fine despite every other risk factor being huge for them. It turns out some skills translate across domains. I'm not going to get a software engineer to perform a total knee replacement on me, but I think I'll listen to them on the crisis management: turns out they're better at it than the crisis managers.
I tend to agree. Maybe medical people should start having opinions on software architecture after reading a few articles. They may have some fresh ideas. Or not?
I've worked in both fields. Few people who are experts in one of those fields can be useful in the opposite field, but there are some exceptionally productive individuals who are. Reading through Bucheit's article, he seems to fall into the 'wow, biology is really easy, you just have to do <X> and the problem is fixed' camp. In my experience, that does not correlate with a good understanding of how to produce a successful medical diagnostic.
I have told a lot of people who said this "Just do it yourself. I don't know how to just do it". It's so disrespectful. "Just convert everything to micro services written in Go and all your problems will go away".
Will it work? God I hope so, but it doesn't seem prudent to bet on it. We know several existing technologies for covid testing that will work. We know they can scale. We know how expensive they are. And while they aren't cheap, we know can afford it at the federal level.
That we still refuse to actually pull the trigger on mass testing and announce a program to fund and launch a universal covid testing regime is just infuriating.
I mean, I desperately hope that a magic bullet like this will pop up to save us. But we know how to beat this. We just won't.