Hacker News: n8henrie

New comment by n8henrie in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

n8henrie — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:25:26 +0000

This was using equipment in the emergency department of our state's only L1 trauma center and comprehensive stroke center; I presume it was decent as far as medical monitoring equipment goes.

New comment by n8henrie in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

n8henrie — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:23:27 +0000

Interesting. As I noted above (though typo O2 -> CO2), I used the same technique you describe, which I learned in free diving, and was not able to get below 98%, at altitude.

New comment by n8henrie in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

n8henrie — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:15:46 +0000

In many people a momentary drop to the 80s or even below is not an emergency or anything close to it. Not saying that it is good. Someone that is awake, sitting up, and struggling to breathe should be considered an emergency regardless of oxygen levels (and in this situation 80% would be very concerning).

EDIT: your comment is otherwise entirely correct, particularly at sea level.

New comment by n8henrie in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

n8henrie — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:12:28 +0000

One a friend and I hooked ourselves up to continuous pulse oximetry and had a contest to get the lowest recorded oxygen level. We tried everything we could think of, from just holding our breath to end-expiratory breath holding to hyperventilating to clear O2 (I used to do some recreational free-diving) beforehand to exercising (jumping jacks)...

Neither of us could get it below 98%, and this was at a mile of elevation (UNMH in Albuquerque).

New comment by n8henrie in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

n8henrie — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:58:03 +0000

Almost certainly plays a role. Also increased activity levels due to better less fatigue.

Certainly is not defeating thermodynamics, assuming calorie absorption is not disrupted somehow it's likely the above.

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:16:39 +0000

Similar data?!

We have wildly heterogeneous data just within the US!

And again, how exactly is this interface going to work? How does the AI determine how hard to press on an abdomen, and where, and how does it press there once it has that information?

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:13:57 +0000

Several of those are more procedures than labs. Of course you can't get someone to do a procedure on you for free. Arterial sticks and biopsies may have nontrivial risks (and commensurate liability risk for the performing provider).

PSA and troponin seem trivial to get. Did you look?

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:15:32 +0000

I would love to hear of any specific example, I will happily either show you how to order it or learn something myself.

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:23:55 +0000

How is training on bad data going to give you better results than the current system?

What kind of embedding helps the AI learn to do a physical exam?

Not to mention patient privacy, I can't even take a still photo of a patient in my current system (even with a hospital-owned camera).

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:21:38 +0000

> you can't order many of your own labs

Really? Which ones?

> insurance won't pay for them

Non sequitur, replacing doctors with AI will not help you pay for the preposterous US healthcare system. Vote!

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:15:44 +0000

Human language that is.

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:14:09 +0000

> Even now, I'll take a surgeon that's a complete jerk over a nice surgeon any day, because if they've got that job even as a jerk they've got to be good at their jobs.

This seems like an incredibly poor line of reasoning.

Hospitals are often desperate for surgeons. The poorly mannered ones are often deeply unsatisfied, angry at the grueling lives they've opted into, and the hospitals can't replace them. The market is not exactly at work here.

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 02:10:09 +0000

So why not order your own labs? I'm sure you can think of ways to get your own medications if you are sufficiently convinced that this is the best course of action for your health.

New comment by n8henrie in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

n8henrie — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:53:01 +0000

Unfortunately the training data is absolute garbage.

Diagnostic standards in (at least emergency, but I think other specialties) medicine are largely a joke -- ultimately it's often either autopsy or "expert consensus."

We get to bill more for more serious diagnoses. The amount of patients I see with a "stroke" or "heart attack" diagnosis that clearly had no such thing is truly wild.

We can be sued for tens of millions of dollars for missing a serious diagnosis, even if we know an alternative explanation is more likely.

If AI is able to beat an average doctor, it will be due to alleviating perverse incentives. But I can't imagine where we could get training data that would let it be any less of a fountain of garbage than many doctors.

Without a large amount of good training data, how could AI possibly be good at doctoring IRL?

New comment by n8henrie in "Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model"

n8henrie — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:47:48 +0000

I'm still fairly new to local LLMs, spent some time setting up and testing a few Qwen3.6-35B-A3B models yesterday (mlx 4b and 8b, gguf Q4_K_M and Q4_K_XL I think).

Was impressed at how they ran on my 64G M4.

It looks like this new model is slightly "smarter" (based on the tables in TFA) but requires more VRAM. Is that it? The "dense" part being the big deal?

As 27B < 35B, should we expect some quantized models soon that will bring the VRAM requirement down?

New comment by n8henrie in "Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th"

n8henrie — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:50:57 +0000

I strongly disagree. If it's doing well enough for the owner then it's doing well enough. I don't understand how one can tell someone else that their computer is unacceptably slow for that other individual's personal use.

This is a really unfortunate move by Amazon. My next e-reader will be one that I own (instead of just rent).

Glad that I took the time to jailbreak and pause updates on my 2017 kindle paperwhite while I could.

Nixcache-oci: Use GHCR as a Nix binary cache

n8henrie — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:36:26 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/cmspam/nixcache-oci

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663214

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by n8henrie in "Shell Tricks That Make Life Easier (and Save Your Sanity)"

n8henrie — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:59:39 +0000

Did this many years ago (but with bash) -- life changing is an apt way of saying it.

New comment by n8henrie in "Atuin v18.13 – better search, a PTY proxy, and AI for your shell"

n8henrie — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:16:59 +0000

A ton more conflicting keybindings.

I switched away from tmux a year or so ago due to one crash I kept getting, but thinking of going back. Really miss the simplicity.

New comment by n8henrie in "Hammerspoon"

n8henrie — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:40:26 +0000

Lua in HS is what motivated me to finally learn a lisp (Fennel).