My spouse is a physician, and "patient messages" (aka "non-face-to-face" encounters) usually aren't reimbursed by insurance. Having a friendly online conversation with a patient doesn't generate the "RVUs" they need (contractually!), so time spent messaging is time taken out of their personal day on top of their regular workload.
Responding to messages can also just be very difficult and time consuming. Maybe you ask concise, clear, pertinent messages to your doctor (or think you do!), but most do not. It's similar to problems HN readers might be more familiar with: user-created support tickets, and comment moderation. Medical office staff help with this triage and moderation, but it has become a big problem to manage with how easy it now is for bored/sick/scared patients to send messages.
Glad to see this mentioned (twice even!). Ambrosia Software! This was the first game I was really exposed to "mods" and user created content with, too. Takes me back!
Yes, but maybe a company or organization is, in fact, looking at political climate change solutions, but needs tech hires for their operations, etc.
As the target audience for a job board like this, the question I am starting with isn't "how can tech solve climate change?", it's "how can I apply my tech skills to a problem like climate change?".
In Utah, my understanding is that the primary purpose of state owned lands is to generate revenue for the state. Utah uses them to make money, not to protect them. This includes mineral leasing for oil, gas, coal, etc, and grazing, but in some cases, like the "SITLA" School Trust lands, the state will literally auction off land into private hands. This is ostensibly to raise money for public schools. I strongly support public education, but this way of removing beautiful tracts of Utah desert from the public is very final. You can hike around an oil well, and eventually sort of clean them up, but outright selling off limited resources like lands is frustrating. Compared to normal revenue sources, like taxes, these land auctions raise such a small amount for money for the school system it's even more tragic.
The outdoor recreation industry in Utah is growing rapidly, largely part due to the National Parks, Monuments, and other amazing public lands we have to recreate on. Our 5 national parks (Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, Bryce and Capitol Reef) are some of the most visited in the country. This isn't hunting recreation, like the Field & Stream article is about. Most of this is mountain biking, climbing, hiking, rafting, etc. (Think family vacations and young web developers in Vanagons, not gun toting hunters in big trucks.) On top of the burgeoning hospitality industry supporting this tourism, outdoor companies like Backcountry.com, Petzl, Goal Zero, Black Diamond, Altra, Kuhl, Scott, etc have large presences in Utah now. By some counts, outdoor recreation is one of the largest economic drivers in Utah. And between the aspirational outdoor photos people in the city like on Instagram and generally affordable travel, this visitation trend will only continue upward.
In response to Utah's politicians passing resolutions and endlessly promoting "taking back" Federal land into State hands, the outdoor industry that relies on public land access has started to fight back. To make a stand against these anti-federal politics Patagonia, Black Diamond and some other large retailers threatened to boycott the "Outdoor Retailer" trade show, held in Utah. In response, there was a call with the Governor and he basically gave the outdoor industry the finger. They are moving the trade show to another state now - more symbolic than actually hurtful to Utah's economy, but an interesting development nonetheless. After the ceaseless "jobs" and "pro-business" rhetoric from red states like Utah this antagonism towards one of it's largest and fastest growing industries is frustrating and puzzling. I can't tell if my politicians really see using public lands for finite oil and gas extraction as a better plan than protecting them for generations of future vacationers - or if they just get better campaign contributions from those extraction industries. Either way, as someone who likes mountain biking and who has high hopes for solar energy and electric cars, there is nothing positive to me about these state attempts to control my Federal lands. (I do vote, but I will probably not be able to affect Utah's red state politics for a long time.)
Fascinating. If not a hoax - perhaps an early example of schizophrenia? A rare case where an educated schizophrenic had access to bound calf skin, creating a book with their own invented language and theories?
"Yoshi brings the gas station to your gift recipient, refueling their car regularly wherever it's parked. Any commuters on your list will thank you for removing the hassle of the gas station from their lives forever."
I get it, filling up your car is a chore, if your time is super valuable... whatever. It's hard to fill the YC portfolio every year with only companies working on "big problems", I'm sure. But it really does feel like "Valley bullshit". I hope it was pitched as "disrupting the archaic gasoline distribution system - we're going to do to fossil fuels what Amazon did for books & movies".
(I will have a good laugh if this dismissive comment is pulled up years from now as an example of "another negative Hacker News post about a now-hugely successful company")
Billings is actually one of the more diverse towns in Montana (which isn't saying much) due to how close the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations are. 4.4% Native American according to Wikipedia. But I guess that's not part of the image this marketing team wanted to project...
After living in Montana for almost 10 years, this video is kind of funny. It's like an ad for all of the things that _other_ Montana towns like Bozeman and Missoula are famous for!
Granted Billings is obviously changing (for better or worse), but it's known for it's industrial plants, not it's bike trails. I will say the "rimrock" above town is lovely and unique (and it's home to one of the most challenging disc golf courses in the country!) but in terms of trails and other recreational development Bozeman and Missoula are years ahead in development.
Billings actually does have some diversity due to it's close proximity to the Crow Reservation (4.4% Native American), but that fact is just as absent as the 3 oil refineries in this cheery white-washing promo video.
As a side note: it's incredible how many breweries and distilleries are springing up across the country - even in Billings! I love beer, but it's kind of overwhelming.
I'm sure it doesn't compare to SF, but the "homeless issue" is hardly solved in SLC, Utah, from my anecdotal experiences living here. If the homeless population has been reduced "91%" as this article maintains, then I cannot imagine what it was like before.
On the topic of Lenny, "who" is great, if you want to just listen to one recorded Lenny call to get a sense for how it plays out (and have a laugh too), in this particular one a car crashes into the building where the telemarketer is working, adding to the strangeness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lL870ixdsY
It's like watching magic. Granted the effect is enhanced by the accelerated speed of the videos, but, wow. I wonder how long it takes to learn Illustrator/Sketch/etc well enough to be able to create art like this (e.g. watching the tire tread get put on the taxi - what voodoo was that?).
Interesting to hear they were so dissatisfied with Celery/RabbitMQ that chose to write their own queuing system. I'm looking in to implementing a queue for background tasks right now, and was down to choosing between Celery/RabbitMQ and beanstalkd. Perhaps I'll check out their new "Taskworker" ("Kale"?) app that they have open sourced. (https://github.com/Nextdoor/ndkale)
A Planet Money recently talked about which items are recyclable, which are not, and how global economic trends effect them. Like how China buys our recycled plastic, unless oil prices dip low enough it's cheaper to make new plastic.
Salt Lake City (and apparently all of Utah?) is lucky enough to have some serious open data advocates actually employed in the government. Props to Open Salt Lake and everyone involved for working on the portal and supporting open and transparent government. We "pay" for this government data, after all, so it's great when it's made easily accessible.
I attended a civic data hackathon once, and was pleasantly surprised at the resulting products. My favorite was a "slumlord" app, which mashed up property ownership vs building code violations (or something like that). It was a fun change of pace from a typical hackathon and the requisite dating/shopping/photo sharing apps.
I love reading about "big data" projects that aren't about marketing and advertising. This is particularly interesting to me with my latent environmental and overpopulation concerns. Fantastic article, good find.
Long term I see the "sharing economy" being driven by resource scarcity (i.e. it's not practical for every human on earth to have a car), but I totally agree that right now it's often driven by job scarcity.
In my limited experiences with AirBnB people on the supply side either approach "sharing" as a fun hobby (e.g. "stay in our cute guest house!"), or they are truly trying to make ends meet.
True story: I AirBnB'd once and the guy rented out his own bed to us, and slept on the couch (and his girlfriend stayed over! on the couch!). Another roommate was AirBnB'ing a room in the same house, too. I think they were both trying to pay their rent share via AirBnB. Nice guys - we felt welcome and had a good time - but money was not "secondary" to them.
This is a common pattern for embedding scripts, so the browser will use the same protocol as the parent page loading the element (http or https), avoiding issues with embedding insecure content in a secure page. I thought it worked for iframe elements too - but I guess it's not consistently supported? It works for me in Chrome on Win7.
Responding to messages can also just be very difficult and time consuming. Maybe you ask concise, clear, pertinent messages to your doctor (or think you do!), but most do not. It's similar to problems HN readers might be more familiar with: user-created support tickets, and comment moderation. Medical office staff help with this triage and moderation, but it has become a big problem to manage with how easy it now is for bored/sick/scared patients to send messages.