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> It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better

by derf_ 6y ago

> It's not curing cancer. I do believe that creating software can be a deeply meaningful experience, and that software can change people's lives for the better in real ways. But... this is a VC-funded startup for a browser shell. I have worked on software for treating cancer, and I have worked for Mozilla. And boy, let me tell you, the latter sure felt like it had a much bigger impact on the world.

skavi 6y ago
Are you affirming munificent's claim of "SV hubris" or do you actually feel you made more of an impact at Mozilla? This is an honest question; I can't tell which way you are trying to go with your comment.
- derf_ 6y ago
  I don't know. It was a sincere statement. Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake. With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks. Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients. So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard. P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".
  - ch4s3 6y ago
    There are other problems in healthcare that are more tractable. I built some software a few years back that identified HIV+ patients at risk of developing certain complications, and alerted their clinic/case workers. We were able to show after a year that they were seeing real improvements across their patient population. This is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.
    - epmaybe 6y ago
      Could I message you about this? I have some questions about doing something similar but very formulaic
      - ch4s3 6y ago
        Sure thing, my email address is in my profile. I left that job like 2 years ago, but I’m still close with the CEO and have done some other health tech projects.
        ximeng 6y ago
        Your email is not in your profile by the way
        ch4s3 6y ago
        Ahh sorry! Chase[dot]gilliam[at]gmail
    - derf_ 6y ago
      That's great! Take the opportunities you have to do good for the world. Everyone's circumstances will present them with different ones.
      - ch4s3 6y ago
        For sure! I’m taking a break from healthcare but I’ll be back.
inopinatus 6y ago
I read this as an indictment of tech firm culture, not of the actual merits of saving lives vs saving bookmarks.
- derf_ 6y ago
  I mean, that's fair. He's not even wrong. I just found it funny that I have literally done both of the things he was trying to draw a contrast between. I mean, not precisely slapping note-taking onto a browser shell, but close enough.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  The #1 all time human tool has got to be a piece of software called "Microsoft Excel". Not to far down that list is probably Lotus Notes
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    VisiCalc should get the credit: Lotus 123 and Excel are both derivatives that would not exist without VisiCalc (though it’s a given that someone else would have come up with a similar concept ex nihilo around the same time, imo). Lotus Notes is awful. It’s Exchange, but worse. They wanted it to be an “open” platform for applications to be built on top of but failed to win over hearts and minds (and especially not hearts...).
AshWolfy 6y ago
Mozilla is a non profit that has had a substantial positive impact on the world, this is a vc funded startup to slightly improve fact retention
Eridrus 6y ago
This reminds me of what a coworker of mine said who moved from working on software for medicine to consumer tech, that the gains in medicine were so hard won and so niche he felt like he was having a much greater impact making our bit of consumer tech better, given how many users we had.
cambalache 6y ago
Give me a cure for cancer over 10000 Mozillas
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  Nobody is asking for 10000 Mozillas? Doing the work researching a cure for cancer is much more practical with 1 Mozilla.
addicted 6y ago
That’s only because a cute for cancer is a binary result. If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).
- 1123581321 6y ago
  No, I don’t think this is true! “Curing cancer” is short for making progress on many aspects of many diseases. There are so many people doing productive and rewarding work that tangibly improves and lengthens lives. And alongside those, there are ineffective and dysfunctional projects that in retrospect were worse allocations of funding and skill.
- padolsey 6y ago
  It's not binary. There are thousands of variants, thousands of paths to matestasis. Some cancers are already, for most intents and purposes, "cured" (prostate, thyroid, testicular etc.)
  - Tepix 6y ago
    It's only that way because we haven't fully cured cancer yet.

by derf_ 6y ago

skavi 6y ago

Are you affirming munificent's claim of "SV hubris" or do you actually feel you made more of an impact at Mozilla? This is an honest question; I can't tell which way you are trying to go with your comment.

derf_ 6y ago
I don't know. It was a sincere statement. Let me tell you a little bit about medical software. It is incredibly hard and expensive to get data. It usually involves finding enough people who are dying in a particular way (already hard), and managing to collect comparable data from each (i.e., with the same process: even harder). There is never enough of it to do the statistics you want. Once you have some, and you maybe come up with some way to do some step of the treatment process slightly better, there are a lot of hurdles and it takes a very long time before anything you did can actually be used on a patient. Rightfully so. People's lives are at stake. With cancer in particular, maybe after a decade in the field you might know if what you did had a positive impact on treatment outcomes. Maybe. That's the best-case scenario. For me, I don't even know if any line of code I ever wrote was actually used to treat a real patient. Oh, yeah, and those dying people whose data you used to come up with and test your idea? Yeah, you could not do anything for them. They got whatever treatments were the best available at the time, and good luck. If they were great treatments, you probably would not have been working on the problem. So that sucks. Meanwhile, at a browser company, I was able to write a patch and within a month or three it was deployed to over a hundred million people. Software projects I worked on are currently used to encode and decode a non-trivial fraction of the bits on the internet. They are deployed on every Android handset and every iPhone (not just in Firefox), so that's a few billion devices. Every time you make a Zoom call or use probably almost any other video conferencing service, you are using at least one, if not several, of those projects. I understand people are doing a lot of video conferencing these days. Maybe even some telemedicine calls between radiation oncologists and their patients. So, uh, yeah. I feel like that had more impact. Not to discourage anyone from trying to cure cancer. It's incredibly hard. P.S., "cancer" is actually a thousand different diseases with a thousand different causes and requires many different treatments. There will never be a "cure for cancer".
- ch4s3 6y ago
  There are other problems in healthcare that are more tractable. I built some software a few years back that identified HIV+ patients at risk of developing certain complications, and alerted their clinic/case workers. We were able to show after a year that they were seeing real improvements across their patient population. This is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.
  - epmaybe 6y ago
    Could I message you about this? I have some questions about doing something similar but very formulaic
    - ch4s3 6y ago
      Sure thing, my email address is in my profile. I left that job like 2 years ago, but I’m still close with the CEO and have done some other health tech projects.
      - ximeng 6y ago
        Your email is not in your profile by the way
        ch4s3 6y ago
        Ahh sorry! Chase[dot]gilliam[at]gmail
  - derf_ 6y ago
    That's great! Take the opportunities you have to do good for the world. Everyone's circumstances will present them with different ones.
    - ch4s3 6y ago
      For sure! I’m taking a break from healthcare but I’ll be back.

inopinatus 6y ago

I read this as an indictment of tech firm culture, not of the actual merits of saving lives vs saving bookmarks.

derf_ 6y ago
I mean, that's fair. He's not even wrong. I just found it funny that I have literally done both of the things he was trying to draw a contrast between. I mean, not precisely slapping note-taking onto a browser shell, but close enough.
calvinmorrison 6y ago
The #1 all time human tool has got to be a piece of software called "Microsoft Excel". Not to far down that list is probably Lotus Notes
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  VisiCalc should get the credit: Lotus 123 and Excel are both derivatives that would not exist without VisiCalc (though it’s a given that someone else would have come up with a similar concept ex nihilo around the same time, imo). Lotus Notes is awful. It’s Exchange, but worse. They wanted it to be an “open” platform for applications to be built on top of but failed to win over hearts and minds (and especially not hearts...).

AshWolfy 6y ago

Mozilla is a non profit that has had a substantial positive impact on the world, this is a vc funded startup to slightly improve fact retention

Eridrus 6y ago

This reminds me of what a coworker of mine said who moved from working on software for medicine to consumer tech, that the gains in medicine were so hard won and so niche he felt like he was having a much greater impact making our bit of consumer tech better, given how many users we had.

cambalache 6y ago

Give me a cure for cancer over 10000 Mozillas

throwaway2245 6y ago
Nobody is asking for 10000 Mozillas? Doing the work researching a cure for cancer is much more practical with 1 Mozilla.

addicted 6y ago

That’s only because a cute for cancer is a binary result. If tomorrow we found the cure for cancer, and your work contributed even the slightest amount to it, that’s what you would be telling people at parties, not that you also worked at Mozilla (assuming you’ve done equivalent work in both fields).

1123581321 6y ago
No, I don’t think this is true! “Curing cancer” is short for making progress on many aspects of many diseases. There are so many people doing productive and rewarding work that tangibly improves and lengthens lives. And alongside those, there are ineffective and dysfunctional projects that in retrospect were worse allocations of funding and skill.
padolsey 6y ago
It's not binary. There are thousands of variants, thousands of paths to matestasis. Some cancers are already, for most intents and purposes, "cured" (prostate, thyroid, testicular etc.)
- Tepix 6y ago
  It's only that way because we haven't fully cured cancer yet.