His staff was gruff, there was such limited information as we progressed through the system, there were so many patients there from all over the western part of the US. For many of them it was their first time with cancer, and sitting there in the waiting room with my (non-medical!!!) bio training my Dad would often offer my services to "explain" something. Which I did, and I think I helped, but it was all rough.

The main doctor was so gruff and obnoxious that I emailed my MD friends in Boston (was still in grad school) asking how I could file a complaint.

But at the end of the day that process helped my father (and many of those other people ) get state-of-the-art proton beam therapy, covered by insurance.

Sadly my dad's cancer came back a short time later and he passed away (miss you too Dad).

But now, 15 years later, having been through the healthcare system in so many ways, and having many friends who are academic specialist MDs, I recognize that the doctor in SF was operating with incredible constraints, finite resources, and probably tired. And my Dad got the best possible treatment technology as a result of the second opinion.

But at the time I wanted to strangle the doctor.

I'm writing this just to say that sometimes the second opinion is tough. Sometimes it's in a far-away place or the doctors are jerks. Maybe even borderline unprofessional. They're the bastard operator from hell in their own little world. But again, this is life-and-death.

GET THAT SECOND OPINION EVEN IF THE DOCTOR IS A DICK.

This is literally life-and-death. My recommendation is for full transparency, it was crucial for us.

My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer in 2006 in Idaho. I was a PhD student at MIT at the time and a friend in lab helped me get an appointment at Dana-Farber. I thought it was probably overkill (it was a common cancer) but we did it anyway. They said everything in Idaho was standard of care but suggested one extra test, which Idaho team then reluctantly did, which revealed distant metastasis (stage 4! ), dramatically changing her treatment trajectory. She lived another 15 years (I miss you Mom).

Asking for a second opinion sucks. A lot of us are preconditioned from birth to trust our clinicians. But you're going on a journey and your life (or the life of your loved one) is on the line. Insurance often covers it. Your doctor will NOT be offended.

Think of it this way : if you were deploying code to the mars rover, and your colleague asked to do a code review before you pushed go, would you be offended? This is even more important than that.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324357

Points: 25

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Points: 3

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774224

Points: 65

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https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Groups-Introduction-Graduate-Math...

and

https://bookstore.ams.org/text-13

My friends were all putnam nerds in college and I was not, and I assumed this math was all beyond me, but once you get the linear algebra down it's great!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45629850

Points: 3

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I know this wasn't the point of the post, but it was the most beautiful thing I've read all week, and really sums up how I feel about my own children. A small aside in a much longer post but incredibly humanizing and wonderful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29335676

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28526909

Points: 376

# Comments: 159

1. Versioning notebooks in a semantically-useful way is difficult: think of it more like versioning binary data than source code. I know we struggle with this a fair amount.

2. There are many debates, some here on HN, about "best practices" for collaborative versioning (do you squash? rebase? etc). These questions exist for notebook users too, and there's a lot of interest in developing tools that either make these decisions for you (are opinionated), integrate them more into the GUI nature of notebooks, or both.

Optics. Optics optics optics.

A tremendous amount of neural interfacing, especially in non-human primates and other organisms, is done via optics. ~All the advances in neural data acquisition over the past decade have been optical. Microscopy is the future for a tremendous amount of neuroscience and more and more people are considering it seriously for human-scale BMI.

I know optics isn't always thought of in an EE context, but it should be! Many people doing amazing computational imaging and optics work are in EE departments. Computational imaging is the new hotness and can let you combine your existing CS skills with signal processing and optics to do things like build a lensless camera! https://waller-lab.github.io/DiffuserCam/

If I were you I would ditch the RF part of your plan and study optics. Yeah, it's all EM, but the order-of-magnitude differences in the frequencies involved makes the underlying engineering quite different.