seanahrens

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
526
Submissions
43
Member since
Mar 12
Designer, Hacker, Getter of Things Done

http://seanahrens.org

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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
Agreed
Comment · 5 years ago
Would wifi 6 require new silicon?
Comment · 5 years ago
What real-world wifi upload/download speed in mbps should we expect from this board?
Comment · 7 years ago
I am a part of the inaugural cohort, which is wrapping up now in San Francisco. Feel free to ask me questions.
Comment · 8 years ago
Actually, I remember in my business classes we were taught to project confidence independent of if we had the knowledge/experience to back it up. As if confidence were an attribute in itself (unrelated to actually having the skills and experience to do a job).

I think this teaching bred that pride of which you speak.

Comment · 8 years ago
I was in classes with these kids. Many of them were smug AF and wanted to start tech companies, but didn't know a thing about software engineering. I just felt they wanted to manage/direct the people and make the money.

Since I had been coding since a young age, building web apps in my spare time, when I was in classes with these people I started to actually realize I had this superpower they valued.

But truth was I didn't want to work with any of them. I didn't see the value in someone whose studies were about learning how to harness my value.

Comment · 8 years ago
I graduated with a major in Business at Haas and a minor in Computer Science from the College of Engineering. And I tacked on an extra semester to get it done.

Yeah you're right to think doing double major w/ EECS would have been quite a tall order. Probably logistically impossible.

Comment · 8 years ago
Yeah he definitely was a bad professor. Sad that he was the finance professor (for this required, main track course) every undergrad my year had. Which meant, I think, 300-400 students received his indoctrination that semester. I use him as an example because that moment was so, well, exemplary. Other courses weren't as extreme, but they generally echoed the core tenet: your goal is "maximize profit" with sometimes an explicitly added "above all else". It generally gave me the impression that the corporate social responsibility club was the window dressing to this tenet--and the place in the business school for liberals to get out of the way and still fit in.

But to zoom out a second, in America, it's not just a "tenet", it's a legal responsibility of the CEO of a corporation to maximize shareholder value. The professor, and school, are preachers of something much larger than themselves, and so I don't want to point my finger so strongly at just this professor, and just this school.

Comment · 8 years ago
My finance professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley preached that maximizing profit was our ultimate service to the world---so much so--that he taught that if we were running a company and had an option to maximize profits by producing a product that would seriously harm the health of people (eg. give them a medical condition), we should undoubtedly DO IT. Because we would have maximized profit for shareholders, made something great for our customers, and (if we needed) we could take the extra profits and make medical payments to the people harmed to make it whole.

He made this argument in front of 150+ person lecture class. I was so dumbfounded and shell-shocked at the argument that I couldn't believe what I just heard. I looked around at the undergrad business finance students around me, and it looked as if they were absorbing it in.

That was the day I knew I chose the wrong major.

I really did think about raising my hand in that class to respond to the hellish ethics he just espoused. But this professor frequently shouted down students or used ridicule to make people regret raising their hands, and I didn't have the worldview I now have to be able to tell him precisely and irrefutably why what he was teaching us was so so wrong.

The real trouble, however, is that this professor was just a preacher for the doctrine of modern day American capitalism. I just expected to hear the doctrine in a much more sugar-coated and digestible form. He literally read the doctrine to us right out of the book.

UC Berkeley allows undergrads to study at their Haas School of Business and earn a BS (bachelor of SCIENCE) in Business Administration. This is what I was studying. Luckily I had enough time left in undergrad after this lecture to switch to studying computer science at the College of Engineering--where I then felt like I was learning real skills.

Comment · 13 years ago
It's an iterative and building process for us to get where we want to go with Crohnology. The start is less scientific, but as we build better software, with larger N, and bring on the involvement (and attract the attention of) more researchers and doctors, things will build their rigor.

If you believe in the vision, of gathering patients together to collect and learn from more real-world data points, in concert with oversight by researchers, then the current implementation is, well, just the current implementation to get us to that end goal, of a more engaged, globally-distributed means of learning from patients as they live and treat their disease.

Medical science is fundamentally the study of how inputs to a body relate to outputs of the body (in the scope of treating disease). If we can collect a continuity of these data points in the real-world, among a global populous, you have the potential to understand the disease in ways never before possible.

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