Lots of companies released blockchains and coins. It's called FOMO, or "Metoo-ism". Interpreting this (or IBM's blockchain) as signs of a significant market shift is a triumph of hope over realism.
My wife and I went through this a couple of years ago, with a 10 week NIPT calling a rare trisomy (chr 9), which is always fatal within a few weeks of birth.
It was absolute hell. The key problem here is the waiting and uncertainty. You have the NIPT at 10w, but you can’t have the amniocentesis until several weeks later. When that came back fine, there were questions about whether it was a “mosaic” meaning only a small proportion of cells are effected. We were only really in the clear after the 20 week ultrasound.
That’s a lot of weeks to be consumed by wondering about whether to terminate the pregnancy, or wait it out for more information. I have a masters in bioinformatics (in genomics!) and my knowledge of stats and the science was next to useless in the face of these decisions.
I know of couples who simply couldn’t deal with this uncertainty and chose to terminate on the basis of this test alone.
Fortunately for us our child was fine and is a perfectly healthy 18 month old now, but I wouldn’t do the rare trisomy test again.
Having gone through two twin pregnancies (where the odds of these tests being correct are especially low) we declined all of them. Anecdotally, I know of several parents who had a positive test for genetic disorder, went ahead with the pregnancy anyway and children were perfectly healthy. Until these tests are close to 100% reliable I don’t see the point.
"The good news is that the invasive test proved the screener was incorrect. The bad news is that it looks like you've now lost your baby. It was fine though!".
The risks associated with this extended testing are just not worth it, perhaps aside from Down's (from a numbers point of view). Even then, there are many completely gorgeous children and people with Down's .. chances are you'll have a curveball in life one way or another at any rate.
I have two children, one diagnosed with ADHD/ASD, the other likely not too different but too early to tell. Apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. Wouldn't change a thing, other than to avoid the ABA services companies like plague - they prey on your insecurities and you might face financial ruin for possibly no real benefit to the child if you go along with their spiels.
So, to see medical companies exploiting vulnerable new parents who will do anything for their children? I am shocked. (/S...)
You are free not to take the test, but I think we would have taken the 0.3% risk to see if it is really Down's. While children with Down's can be gorgeous, I am not up to the task.
We did get the test for it for my two; can't recall if we did any extra ones. Believe we skipped them, at least on the 2nd.
I've come around to maybe change my mind since then, however I'd need to be in a very good position to be able to be up to the task.
I truly wouldn't have been, the ASD diagnosis was hard enough - and made magnitudes harder due to the manipulations of the "autism industry". Do this, do that, or else - you only have one chance for an early intervention, so better throw your own life away or you'll be a bad, bad parent.
No. I think this is a cruel and ignorant thing to say.
Wanting to have a child who is not special needs is not an evil thing. Choosing to not bring a a child with special needs to term is not evil.
Having a special needs child can dominate your finances, your life, and the lives of your family members and already existing children. People have a right to choose what what they want out of life, especially in the context of before a child is born.
“ Wanting to have a child who is not special needs is not an evil thing. ”
No its not.
“Choosing to not bring a a child with special needs to term is not evil.”
A huge evil. Just consider your next paragraph explaining why its not evil; it centers around how having a disabled child affects you and others. I do apologize, but I find your last paragraph frighteningly narcissistic .
I can see from your comment history you are catholic. I don't see any point playing the "yes" "no" game with someone. I doubt you are going to convince me of your ethics, I doubt I will convince you of mine.
Why stop there? It can be a challenge to have a kid who is ADHD, or is susceptible to depression or mental illness, or a different sexual orientation, etc. It’s not wrong to abort those children either, right?
> Why stop there? It can be a challenge to have a kid who is ADHD, or is susceptible to depression or mental illness, or a different sexual orientation, etc. It’s not wrong to abort those children either, right?
But we don't stop there. The bar is considerably lower than "the kid might have problems".
The mother, exclusively, can decide whether or not she wants to proceed with the pregnancy through to birth, and she doesn't need a reason other than "I don't feel like it". All those reasons you gave are still better than "I don't fell like it", and you somehow think that those are the wrong reasons?
To be fair, the pregnant woman isn't a mother yet - unless she has other children. She's deciding whether or not she wants to (or can!) cope with pregnancy and the hardships involved. She's deciding whether or not to become a mother or bring another child into the world.
And yeah, it can look like "I don't feel like it" to a casual observer, but then again, it really isn't the casual observer's business. They won't know if it was planned or the result of failed birth control, if the father was/is abusive, and a myriad of other things.
And to be absolutely clear: People would try to tell me "I didn't feel like it" - nevermind that I've never wanted children. I'd have been sterilized years ago if it were readily available and cheap in the US.
> And yeah, it can look like "I don't feel like it" to a casual observer,
I think you misread my argument: if the bar is currently at "I don't feel like it" for abortions, then judging someone as morally or ethically "wrong" (or evil) for a higher bar is silly.
[EDIT: I'm not making any judgement on a pro-choice position, nor am I attempting to trivialise the complex and often traumatising decision-making involved in abortions. I'm simply saying that if we accept "I don't need to give any reasons" then we shouldn't judge the people who give medical reasons]
> The mother, exclusively, can decide whether or not she wants to proceed with the pregnancy through to birth, and she doesn't need a reason other than "I don't feel like it".
The morality of that is quite vigorously contested. And even in places that have elective abortion, it’s often only available in the first trimester, while many of these tests are performed after that.
But even if we accept the notion of elective abortions, it doesn’t follow that any reason is morally acceptable. What if the parents don’t want girls, like often is the case in India and China. It’s okay to abort them? What if we had an in vitro test for sexual orientation? Would it be okay to abort fetuses in that basis?
Moral and legal are two different classifications.
I think it should be LEGAL to have an abortion no matter your reasoning. The reason for this is we need to preserve the bodily autonomy of people who can become pregnant.
Weather or not it is MORAL is another question.
It is LEGAL to protest outside of a veteran's funeral. However, I would argue it is not a MORAL thing to do.
There are plenty of ways we don't protect people's bodily autonomy though. For instance it was illegal for anyone to take Paxlovid until FDA approval.
If we can ban someone from taking a potentially life saving drug it doesn't seem crazy to ban someone from taking what half the population believes is a life ending drug.
We’re talking about morality in the context of this article, since abortions based on this testing are legal in the United States and most other developed countries.
This is not true in every state. Abortion is in the process of being outlawed in United States. Texas outlawed it. Supreme court is hostile to it for religious reasons.
Roe continues to be controversial because it prohibits states from adopting abortion laws that reflect the consensus view. Roe mandates elective abortions until viability, which is toward the end of the second trimester. Roe is thus opposed by many people who don’t believe that life begins at conception for religious reasons. Those people oppose Roe for whatever moral reasons that drive highly secular countries like France to prohibit abortions in the second trimester.
It is being outlawed in some states of the Union, not in the United States as a whole. Even if it repeals Roe/Casey, I don’t think that Supreme Court is at all likely to hold that abortion is in fact unconstitutional. As a result, some states will restrict abortion, but others will not.
For one, we don't have a good enough understanding of those things to be able to test adults definitively, so it's a moot point.
That being said, if there was a test for ADHD and I knew what the odds were that my child would have ADHD, as someone with ADHD I would seriously consider whether or not I wanted to have kids or subject another human to that.
So, I don't think it's necessarily wrong, in some universe, but there's a line between adversities for which you can still overcome and thrive (the ones you listed) versus the sorts of things prenatal tests check for where, if they do have these conditions they are either dead on arrival, dead soon after, will wish they were dead for most of their lives, or at the very least will never be a contributing member of society.
As someone with ASD/ADHD (professionally diagnosed), and with two children (one diagnosed the same so far), let me just say I'm somewhat taken aback by this.
I hear you say you have ADHD yourself - each case is different and such, but you're posting on HN and I'd say that puts you far above the rest of society. Sure there are challenges but it can also be a kick-arse superpower; learn to embrace it, and most of all be grateful for the things you have achieved.
If anything it has opened my mind about the beauty of a diverse society. There is more to life than a strict adherence to some notion of what it means to be successful.
I've done pretty well for myself even though I've also had some rather hard times - no diagnosis or help existed in the 70s/80s. Then again, people will face hardships in the most unexpected ways so if anything it's made me more resilient.
With the extremely low confidence factor in some of the conditions, this genetic testing is dangerous and unethical on so many levels.
I don’t think we understand these subtle mental disorders well enough for this kind of absolute decision-making. What is ADHD, really?
“Your child has an extra chromosome and will probably never live independently” feels deeply different than “your child has a gene variant that subtly affects their brain in ways that make it harder to focus in certain circumstances, and also probably in dozens of other ways that we don’t understand, and also many very successful people have this variant and it’s possible it even contributed to their success”. A society that routinely aborts children in the second case is starting to tilt into wild dystopia.
Not that we’ve identified such a gene, as far as I know.
Wait, are you objecting to the abortion specifically? Or does it just bother you that people could have a conscious influence on the kind of children they do/don't get?
If this is just a coded abortion debate... Count me out
But if it's the latter... Parents have been "selecting" children of the "right" race, eye color, height, etc for millenia... It's called "being attracted to certain physical characteristics over others" and it's really quite pedestrian.
ADHD, depression, and schizophrenia all appear to have a strong genetic component. I think most people would definitely weigh the knowledge of their partner's family's mental health history when they decide who to have children with.
I mean, don't you think people should have the moral right to select their own mates, free from coercion? I think most people would consider that to be an absolute human right, and anything less would be morally condoning rape.
They haven't been consciously selecting for traits, have they? Not with the certainty of a 1% false positive test.
This is eugenism, with its adherents lacking the moral clarity of the of early 20th century eugenists - at leasts they honest about what they were doing!
Well, solely with respect to skin color, which is arguably THE single biggest physical characteristic of concern... Yeah, I'd say >95% of Americans consciously select their mates with skin color in mind. Google the rates of interracial marriage if you don't believe me.
And yes, the skin/eye/hair color of the parents is probably about 99% determinant in the perceived race of the children... There are always exceptions, but two random people who are "white passing" are overwhelmingly likely to have children who are also "white passing".
You can call this behavior "eugenism" or even just racism, and I'm not saying your terminology is wrong... But I dare you to start going around telling people that to their faces.
The alternative is to take the same energy you'd spend on that one unlucky human being and spend it raising 3 healthy children who will go on to live full lives.
Parenting is an enormous time investment and families that take on the burden of raising disabled children almost universally reduce their family size. This is not a decision without cost, to those who lose their chance at life.
It's fine for you to live in whatever fantasy world that allows you to never have to make any hard life choices, but you shouldn't go out of your way to try to make others feel guilty for having the unfortunate fate of having to live in the real world.
Many of these conditions would in the past have been fatal in infancy, and it is only through modern medicine that children can survive them at all. It's fair to expect medicine to provide the solution to the problem it has created. There's nothing natural about children having to live their lives in and out of a hospital.
Depending on what state/country you live in, care for a disabled citizen may be partly or wholly paid for by the state. The parents may also be able to become qualified caregivers, in which case they can be paid to take care of the child.
It's still a full time job that precludes you from doing a great many normal family activities for the child's entire lifetime. There is also the danger that your state may elect budget hawks who decide to cut funding for the programs halfway through your child's life, leaving you on the hook for ruinous medical expenses. It can also be very unfair to your other children who are going to basically lose out on activities because their disabled sibling requires too much care.
I agree completely about all of the challenges, hardships, lost opportunities, and unfairness. It is an awful situation to be in for everyone involved and no amount of money in the world could ever make up for that.
Our experience was kicked off by a troublesome ultrasound and then confirmed by amniocentesis.
The tragedy of receiving news like this is probably fathomable, but I think it may be hard to grasp the emotional and intellectual agony of deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy based on a set of probabilities.
It breaks my heart to think that parents face this decision with erroneous data.
Why was there doubt surrounding an entire chromosome trisomy? My understanding was that it is easy to have high confidence about that since allele frequencies in the sequence reads are skewed across the entire chromosome.
From my experience, the core driver behind the data mesh architecture is organisational, not technological. Organisations are requiring more of data, be it for rapid product development, or self-service analytics. Often this involves large numbers of sources (e.g. external sources), rather than just larger volumes of the same thing.
If marketing, finance and sales is dependent on a centralised data team for every new thing, the data team quickly becomes the bottleneck, stifling innovation and frustrating teams. Incorporating the principles of a Data Mesh enables those teams to manage their own data, according to well defined governance standards that enable interoperability.
The reality is that different teams are already managing their own data (via excel spreadsheets, web-apps, etc). If we can apply a bit more rigor to how these datasets are managed (e.g. so they can be shared, integrated, secured, etc), then the whole organisation benefits.
I think I’m experiencing this where I work. The Data Lake is quickly gaining traction and feature requests poor in: please incorporate FHIR genomics resources, please make a UI for this image type, place make import filters to extract meta data from these files… this team seems swamped now. The solution would be to give more power to the requesters? Allow them to access underlying technologies, implement their own data models? Seems logical. Am I understanding this correctly?
Yes, you are understanding it correctly. The idea is that you give the "requesters" access to the data, then enable them to do their thing with it (with training / support / shadowing) and publish their results as "data-products" so that others can leverage it too in their own "data products".
The "data mesh" is essentially the collection of these independent "data-products".
We already see management problems with self-service analytics like PowerBI, Tableau & Looker. Its too easy for people to create dashboards / reports that are subtly wrong and which cause confusion. There is a balance between empowering to build data products and centralised control. Too much empowerment of people who don't understand the right way to do something leads to a horrible mess of contradictory data. Not enough, and people can't effectively do their job. Governance and process is the key to finding the balance and enforcing it.
The issue with the data-mesh is that there isn't really any great tooling to support the management or development of data products, or a data-mesh generally. I am sure this will change over time as vendors start building hype around it.
a bit self serving but I would recommend reading about Airbnb's Minerva (which I created). we leverage this data mesh concept to allow teams to define data independently and then Minerva handles blending the data from different teams together with guaranteed consistency.
I help run the data mesh community and yup, 100%. There's a reason data mesh is catching on as fast as it is because, if done right, it really feels like it can solve a lot of the agility/scalability problems people feel re data/analytics now. It is NOT a silver bullet but it can potentially really help companies towards that (obnoxiously named and overused) goal of being data driven.
Agree. We see this a lot at clients whom we work with. While I agree with data mesh on a philosophical/ principles level, at the implementation level, it creates a division between data “haves” (those who have the engineering know-how to write parallel processing jobs) and data “have nots”.
End result - implementation of data mesh might deepen the divide between data "haves" and the data "have nots".
A better way could be to implement Trino, Starburst, or Tetmon EdgeSet (where I am co-founder of), to realise the vision of data mesh.
Cloud AI Platform Pipelines appear to use Kubeflow Pipelines on the backend, which is open source [1] and runs on Kubernetes. The Kubeflow team has invested a lot of time on making it simple to deploy across a variety of public clouds [2], [3].
If Google were to kill it, you could easily run it on any other hosted Kubernetes service.
I haven't used Cloud AI Platform Pipelines, but have spent a lot of time working with Kubeflow Pipelines and its pretty great!
Its great to see they are so open about their issues, but as a paying customer its a real shame how frequently they seem to suffer from outages and performance degradation.
I love the product, but hate that I can't rely on it.
I share the sentiment. They do have some lessons to learn.... One being "test how long fully restoring databases from catastrophic scenarios will take and consider if you can afford it to take that long; if not take corrective action". People constantly seem to forget just how slow restores or syncing a new database replica can get, or assume they'll never need to.
Well, you can't really solve high availability problem by testing how long replication and restoration take. It's a lot more nuanced than that and requires real expertise in distributed systems. Usually it means getting rid of PostgreSQL/MySQL completely in favor of distributed solutions, as it's cheaper and is a better investment into the infrastructure, than attempting to build high availability on top of it.
You can get high-enough availability just fine on Postgres. Very few applications require zero downtime. With pgbouncer or similar in front, you can generally flip to a slave with very minimal impact. The issue comes in situations like the one in this case where a mistake leads to being left without up to date slaves and your system can't handle the read load on a single server.
I agree with you in principle, but for most systems it's total overkill. It wouldn't be total overkill if distributed solutions were easy to set up and without tradeoffs, but we're nowhere near being there.
In most cases then, restoration time is the biggest barrier to getting "high-enough" availability without re-engineering everything for a totally different system. Often you can prevent that from becoming an issue by siloing functionality into separate databases, offloading logs and analytics for example. Or buying faster SSDs for your DB servers... There are many approaches depending on the size of your dataset, and most people never outgrow those options.
To put it this way: Gitlab.com's database is small enough that fitting it in RAM on a commodity server is easily doable. While they'd still need to have snapshots on disk, at that point beating the restore speeds they're reporting would be trivial.
Also of importance in this area is Kuhn's [0] the "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" [1], which not only first coined the term "paradigm shift", but is also probably the best account of how science really works.
Your comment does not make any sense to me. 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' does not just propose 'theories': it mainly shows how the Popperian and other accounts of 'how science works' are simply wrong, as a close consideration of historical evidence shows that science just does not work that way. It goes on to explain why it would also be impractical if science did work that way. Those parts are all pretty uncontroversial.
The account of how science does work is still being debated. Perhaps Kuhn disavowed his account later, but that doesn't matter with respect to the most important parts of the book.
I am really interested in this as it seems like a more accessible version of KDB - especially in its support for SQL.
I'd like to look into it further, but I can't find any information about licensing. Given that there is no source code in the repo, it appears that this isn't an open source project.
I would generally consider it a bug to not have any form of license in the repo, but from the top of the Readme (last modified 10 days ago):
"Contact Kevin (e.g., licensing, feature/documentation requests): k.concerns@gmail.com"
So if you're interested, I suggest you send Kevin an email.
Personally I think it would've been interesting if it was Free Software -- as this doesn't come with any license, it's essentially less useful than the 32bit kdb[1] -- and I can't imagine it's as feature complete, or has a similar level of documentation, support or real-world testing.
If the intention is to make the binaries deployable/usable, a license file/note in the Readme would be the absolute minimum requirement IMNHO.
Also find it strange to host just binary artefacts on github -- I can't see how that's useful for the author or the users. I suppose one could submit pull-requests against the python api, but then it would make more sense to split the repo in two -- one for the source-available (unknown license) python code -- and host the binary artefacts somewhere.
Am I right in guessing that a "Passive user" is a user whom you collect information on without them opting in? E.g. By scraping public profiles or collecting connections from registered users?
Is it possible to view / check / correct any information about myself if I am a "passive user" on your platform?
Many eu countries and Austalia have privacy laws around these basic rights.
We (msgooroo.com) use the .Net stack on Azure and have found it to be quite good. We have even been experimenting with the new vNext / OWIN stack which appears even better and will give us the flexibility to run on Linux.
Azure is a bit hit and miss. Its brilliant for getting something up an running quickly (using websites / SQL Server), but is a little flaky at scale.
Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server, connection issues with their hosted Redis service, pricing of SQL Server when using advanced features like geo-replication.
All in all though, its a pretty good development experience once you get your head around the fact that in the cloud services fail and there is nothing you can do about it except plan for it.
Oh and the Bizspark program they have gives you $100 worth of free hosting on Azure which is always nice.
> Key problems include connection issues with SQL Server,
What sort? If it's intermediate connection problems .NET 4.5.1 added Connection Resiliency to ADO.NET [1]. If you're using a recent enough version of Entity Framework it goes even further [2].
public class MyConfiguration : DbConfiguration
{
public MyConfiguration()
{
SetExecutionStrategy(
"System.Data.SqlClient",
() => new SqlAzureExecutionStrategy(1, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30)));
}
}
The above SqlAzureExecutionStrategy will retry instantly the first time a transient failure occurs, but will delay longer between each retry until either the max retry limit is exceeded or the total time hits the max delay. The execution strategies will only retry a limited number of exceptions that are usually tansient, you will still need to handle other errors as well as catching the RetryLimitExceeded exception for the case where an error is not transient or takes too long to resolve itself.
Yeah, we use .Net 4.5.3, without EF. Connections still fail all the time especially under high demand.
We have our own retry logic, which also logs the issue so we are aware of how frequently errors occur while a command / transaction is being executed.
This is using SQL Azure with the "Business" tier, so it will be interesting to see how the new (much more highly priced tiers) Standard and Premium tiers go.
https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/anz-the-fir...