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kendallpark's comments

kendallpark | 2 years ago | on: Sunset at the South Pole

The issue is not cold, but whether you can get a highly competitive position at the South Pole Station. In order to see the sun set, you have to be part of the skeleton crew which maintains the station during the winter-over. There are no flights going in and out during the winter. If you see the sun set over the South Pole... you'll also be stuck seeing the sun rise as well. In the months between you'll be working in perpetual night.

kendallpark | 3 years ago | on: What it’s like to dissect a cadaver

> I don’t personally see a reason to treat cadavers any differently than any other object in a lab

Even from a purely consequentialist point of view: if behavior around the cadavers gets out to the public, and the public deems it disrespectful, the public stops donating cadavers, which negatively impacts medical education. Even if you don't personally believe in treating human remains with respect, a huge part of society does, and you have to at least respect that.

kendallpark | 3 years ago | on: What it’s like to dissect a cadaver

> From another angle, I would argue that the eyes and face are part of what makes a human, as are the hands.

I also agree with this take, though in the moment at the lab I didn't interject with a critique of mind-body dualism. Either way, it seems the brain has some sort of primacy over other organs, in terms of contributing to personhood. Pretty much everything else could be lost or transplanted, yet we'd still consider someone the same person. The brain however seems essential in making you you.

kendallpark | 3 years ago | on: What it’s like to dissect a cadaver

Speaking from first-hand, I can't remember any disrespectful behavior. Acting disrespectful toward the donor (what we called the cadavers) would get you kicked out of anatomy lab. There is even a "gift of body" ceremony commemorating the donations every year that family members can attend. Med students will speak about how the donors impacted their medical education and how much they appreciate them.

I would hope that tales of inappropriate jokes of posing with body parts are relegated to a bygone era.

Fwiw I would have no issue donating my body to my institution for dissection. I certainly benefited from the donation. Some notable memories:

- The brittleness and crunchiness of an atherosclerotic artery compared to the pliable rubber hose of a healthy artery

- How incredibly soft lungs are -- like a tempur-pedic pillow. Unless the donor had been a smoker. Then the lungs were hard and black-spotted like a pumice stone.

- The muscular atrophy of old age. There were some donors whose abdominal muscles were as thin as paper.

- Holding a donors brain in one's hand (it's smaller than one would expect). In the words of a lab partner, "I can't believe we are holding everything that made this person a person, all their personality, everything."

kendallpark | 3 years ago | on: How to Walk (12 miles a day)

I had a conversation with a cyclist who grew up in one of those "high crime neighborhoods" in St. Louis. He said that he received strange looks and comments when he visited his old neighborhood with a road bike attached to his car. He belonged; the bike did not. I suspect that more-than-casual cycling is a cultural oddity in some areas. I'm not sure that walking would garner the same reaction.

kendallpark | 3 years ago | on: How to Walk (12 miles a day)

I've gained an appreciation for walking through very roundabout means.

For the longest time I found walking even short distances insufferably slow and boring. I ride my bike--a lot. The distances and durations I cover have grown each year to the point that centuries (metric or imperial) are a regular weekend event. Boredom is always an issue when you're out for 5+ hours, but you'd be surprised at how much your sense of time can change if you normalize riding long distances. Interestingly, my mind's time-condensation for cycling never translated to walking.

This year I branched out into winter ultra fat biking, which, as it turns out, can involve a significant amount of walking. In bad snow conditions one can end up pushing a heavy bike for hours at a time. The two races I did this winter had their respective all time worst course conditions. So, I did a lot of walking.

This spring I've found myself opting walk to the gym and office, leaving the bike at home. My mind doesn't count the minutes the way it used to. I actually have no sense of how long it takes me to get to these places. I suspect the exaggerated stimulus of pushing a bike for hours through snow drifts has adapted my perception of everyday walking. I would hypothesize that the author's 20-mile weekend walks makes their long daily walks more doable. If you want to enjoy short regular walks, perhaps it would help to go out for a very long and hard walk from time to time.

kendallpark | 4 years ago | on: Andrew Ng says AI has a proof-of-concept-to-production gap

Two cents as an MD-(CS)PhD student studying what I've heard referred to as "the last mile problem."

My stack trace of investigation:

- The model is good, we just need to get the doctors to trust the model.

- The model is good, we need to figure out how to build an informed trust in the model (so as to avoid automation bias).

- The model is good, we need informed trust, but we can't tackle the trust issue without first figuring out a realistic deployment scenario.

- The model is good, we need informed trust, we need a realistic deployment scenario, but there are some infrastructural issues that make deployment incredibly difficult.

After painstaking work with real-life EHR system, sanity-check model inference against realistic deployment scenario.

- Holy crap, the model is bad and not at all suitable for deployment. 0.95 AUC, subject of a previous publication, and fails on really obvious cases.

My summary so far of "why?": assumptions going into model training are wildly out of sync with the assumptions of deployment. It's "Hidden Tech Debt in ML" [1] on steroids.

[1] https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2015/file/86df7dcfd896fcaf2674f...

kendallpark | 5 years ago | on: Tell HN: Thank You Dang

HN discourages the sort of clever-yet-unsubstantial one-liner jokes that earn a lot of karma on Reddit. It reserves the space for thoughtful discussions. Getting rid of the memes simply doesn't fly in other online communities.

I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.

I know of other rich and healthy online communities, but they are fairly niche.

kendallpark | 5 years ago | on: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation

> I come from Minneapolis, and before that I lived in Seattle and Boston — three of the bluest, most left-leaning cities in the United States. I was an urban woman and couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than a city. My husband concurred. Then our 28-year-old son died in late 2016.

> Suddenly the traffic and noise and confusion became too much. John and I took off on a year’s driving tour of gentler parts — both of us working from the road, a computer security consultant and a writer. We grew nearly silent in grief.

> We considered Asheville, N.C., and Santa Fe, N.M. But on a chilly, silver January day, we drove into the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas. Though neither of us could put our finger on exactly why, this felt like our place. People back home were flummoxed: I heard them say a lot about white, rural Christians who reject outsiders and “cling to their guns.”

> But what city folk don’t know is how beautiful it is here, and by that I mean way more than you imagine. We’re surrounded by low mountains, bony shale bluffs, forest, shining lakes and mysterious twisting roads. The wide-open sky brings every bird formation and low-hanging planet into relief.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2018/09/14/i-was-yan...

kendallpark | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds.

It led to debugging situations like this:

"Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we do it on this other page it's only one clank. Hm."

Turns out, there are some bugs that are easier to detect this way. Looking at timestamps doesn't really give a "sense" of whether two events are in a tight causal link. With sound, you can immediately "hear" that two adverse events are occuring at identical intervals every time. What's great is that the sound information doesn't take up any additional attention. It just fades into the background if you don't need it. When there is a pattern, it stands out.

kendallpark | 6 years ago | on: Former CEO of RadioShack now an ER doctor on frontlines of Covid-19 fight

> 'I am just one of those people who was very fortunate, where things worked out, and where I could do not just do one thing I really enjoyed in life, but two'

I relate to all of the gratitude in the above quote. It seems almost gratuitous to be able to pursue more than one major career pathway. I feel lucky to have the opportunity and lucky to have realized that I didn't have to choose.

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