Opt Health | Mid Full-Stack Engineer | Remote | Full-Time | US
We are a small startup focused on creating optimized health outcomes by connecting patients to doctors and supported by regular lab testing. I'm hiring to build out our core engineering team, which I lead.
* I care deeply about creating a healthy work environment that supports and enables all team members to meet their own goals
* Opportunities for mentorship from a small but very experienced and skilled team
* We greatly value diversity and seek to build and understand from all perspectives
* We value high-quality, sustainable work
* JavaScript, NodeJS, React, Postgres
* You have at least a few years of experience engineering web applications at small companies
* You would enjoy the challenge of helping to improve a difficult codebase :)
* You would be ok working under HIPAA compliance and dealing with health-related integrations
* Salary $130K+
Interested or questions? contact: thomas.hintz at getopt dot com
Looking through the docs it seems a very nice lisp. Clean, simple, yet covers all the basics without a lot of legacy warts. let with less parens and limitless if branches are very nice. Definitely one of the nicer looking JS lisps I've seen.
This is abuse and wrong. Just as it is abuse and wrong for every website or app that does something similar. And this couldn't exist if we as software creators didn't make it. We as the creators of software need to look at everything we create for its potential to be used against people and if it could potentially be used to abuse someone, like say exposing interfaces that can be used for biometrics, we need to refuse to make it. People have survived for ages without your software and they might be better off if it stays that way. Don't be a part of this.
But how would that work? If I work on a word processing application, that application can be used to write horrible lies and propaganda that many people would believe. Are you saying I shouldn't work on such a product because of that?
If you look at the story of how browser cookies came about[0], it wasn't for advertising and tracking people. It was just intended to be a simple way to allow users to keep state between web pages to provide services the people wanted. It was later hijacked by ad companies to do surveillance and then the government hopped on board.
I think you make a great point. We _should_ question whether it's a good idea to make the word processor. I'm not saying it shouldn't necessarily be made but we should think about how it can be used and if the potential for harm is too high or if it can be mitigated. My point is these things should always be kept in mind and we need to not be afraid of not making the technology.
SEEKING WORK | San Francisco Bay Area | REMOTE-only
I'm a Frontend Javascript web consultant specializing in React.js. Whether you're just getting started with a new React app, or transitioning from a different architecture, or in the middle of React development, I can help. Unlike many others I also have product management and founder experience. This helps ensure that the technical side is addressed while also meeting your business goals.
I've worked on Frontend heavy web applications with millions of monthly uniques as well as prototypes for startups. See some of my work here https://thomashintz.org/my-work
* Note that I typically work on a flat project rate with a minimum of $5,000, and most projects in the range of $10K-$70K. If the scope is undefined or the project is openended, I’m open to a weekly rate as well.
I do all my browsing with uMatrix with everything blocked by default but first party CSS. It really makes the internet a more enjoyable place to be. Pages load much, much faster and it's often easier to find and read the content. On mobile it saves a boatload in bandwidth costs. For example, loading a NYTimes article takes 90KB and DOMContentLoaded is in 69ms. Truly much of the other stuff loaded is bullshit because a significant amount of the web is more usable without all the crap.
This seems like a good time to question if we really should have cars at all. Autonomous cars might be better in some ways but they are still tons of metal flying at high rates of speed. Accidents will happen and people and other animals will die on a regular basis. Cars also require tons of infrastructure that walking and biking don't. You also have the environmental destruction of GHG emissions and from the mining of rare metals needed for batteries, you have roads and parking lots destroying habitat and using up valuable space, air pollution and smog from tailpipes or energy generation, noise pollution, and more harmful effects. Autonomous cars might mitigate some of those things but most of it will still be there (or we'll just use cars even more and so we'll have just as many deaths total along with the rest of it?). What about doing research and testing a world without any cars? It will probably be a better one.
Do programmers love numbers and algorithms so much they want to be reduced to them? Programmers are people and should be treated as such.
Also, shouldn't we be concerned that giving one company's algorithms control over who gets hired will be too much power in too few hands? And algorithms are not neutral. The people that make the algorithms have biases and discriminations just like regular people do but at least if your company does its own hiring you can work on figuring out what those are and how to address them. How can you do that if you depend on some proprietary algorithm?
And what about disabilities? How does your algorithm handle those? Racial bias? So many unanswerable questions.
I have many issues with the way most companies interview but giving up that process to a proprietary algorithm seems like the worst solution. This is not news to be celebrated.
Why are we still making appeals to corrupt politicians? We might not control the cables but we do control the content. Why don't we shut it down until we get what is right? Why not another SOPA blackout and this time it doesn't stop until net neutrality is safe?
Swartz is dead. Nobody to rally behind now, no real leaders. Online communities are older and more mainstream and are getting ossified. Much more brutal competition in the web space now, can't afford to voluntarily bleed + content is no longer special if someone doesn't get their fix in 5 minutes now they go somewhere else; ethics and values cost money and lots of people in this field have neither now. Lots of people running around in tech that don't share our views ever since 'tech' went mainstream around 2012/2013. What would a black out accomplish? The people in power don't give a fuck as far as I can tell regardless of how much public outage can be generated. Maybe we will finally get mesh networking out of this.
America has a capitalism problem. What the article fails to address is that the root cause is really capitalism. Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates, which in the case of businesses, that eventually means bad monopolies. Under a representative democracy that also means politics will always be corrupted because those with money and power will always be benefited by controlling politics, and they have the money and power to do so (who owns the news media? who can afford to buy off politicians, whether they start corrupt or not?). While the power of monopolies ebbs and flows as those without capital get angrier, the monopolies will always come back because that's what capitalism does.
Monopolies are not inherently bad. It's entirely possible to have a monopoly and have a great thing that everyone likes and is happy with and which keeps innovating. But under capitalism the primary incentive is the accumulation of capital which rarely lines up with creating something great long term.
Yes, it fluctuates depending on numerous factors, including how unhappy those without capital get about the unequal distribution of capital. You see this when monopolies start getting broken up and some wealth gets passed back down. But inevitably the capital gets concentrated again because that's how capitalism works. And even when some of the wealth gets passed back down the people in power generally stay in power.
I can think of at least one way to diminish companies power over legislatures. Pay representatives enough that they’re indifferent to corrupt forces. It’s not like there an expectation for representives to be broke.
I don't think this solution really works. For some folks, nothing is ever enough. Then you also need to consider that it is less about money for some and more about friends and power. Maybe I don't do what corporations ask because they are going to pay my campaign. Maybe I do it because it makes me feel like a big man being the person they all come to for favors. Maybe I do it to gain acceptance into an aristocracy. I don't know how you can compete against that on a government salary, no matter how big.
Donald Trump is supposedly worth $3.5 billion. Do you think paying him more money would change the way he governs? I only use him as an example because he is the richest US politician, but there aren't too many poor ones at the federal level.
I guess I just don't see how you could ever pay a politician enough to be "indifferent to corrupt forces".
I’m dismissing Trump as an example as he’s a clear outlier.
How much do you figure you would have to pay Bill Gates to babysit? Unless you’re in his immediate circle that’s going to cost quite a lot of money. People react to incentives in relation to their current wealth. A chartered flight or sweatheart real estate deal will mean a lot less to someone making plenty for their job of representing the people. They’ll also be much more sensitive to scandals.
At that point it seems you would have just promoted politicians in to the capital class without the middle-person, but again they now represent the capital class and all their non-politician capital class buddies at the cocktail parties, instead of representing those without much capital.
They’re already there. And in order to obtain and maintain that status they chose special interests over constituent needs. Lobbyists pay better than the people.
We are a small startup focused on creating optimized health outcomes by connecting patients to doctors and supported by regular lab testing. I'm hiring to build out our core engineering team, which I lead.
* I care deeply about creating a healthy work environment that supports and enables all team members to meet their own goals
* Opportunities for mentorship from a small but very experienced and skilled team
* We greatly value diversity and seek to build and understand from all perspectives
* We value high-quality, sustainable work
* JavaScript, NodeJS, React, Postgres
* You have at least a few years of experience engineering web applications at small companies
* You would enjoy the challenge of helping to improve a difficult codebase :)
* You would be ok working under HIPAA compliance and dealing with health-related integrations
* Salary $130K+
Interested or questions? contact: thomas.hintz at getopt dot com