Healthcare IT is screwed up only because our healthcare SYSTEM is.
I recently left my job at UC Irvine, where I worked in telemedicine research and IT. I can only repeat what ahi and veb have already said, bureaucracy, specifically bureaucracy on all levels, departments, organizations, insurance companies, state and federal bodied, regulations, and fear, are the cause for stagnation. I've seen too many innovative solutions squashed because someone in management was convinced it wasn't "HIPAA-compliant".
If I had to choose one reason, however, it would be insurance companies. Why? Insurance companies choose what to reimburse, and they're not reimbursing for technology-based preventative and/or virtual care. My first response on HN was on this exact subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2256119
Scratch your own itch. Startups that solve your own problem are great ideas: you know the need exists and in turn you become passionate about a solution.
I may do the exact same thing! I've already started: my exit interview is this Thursday.
Statistically, the chances of PG accepting me into this latest YC class are slim to none, so I'll be spending quite a bit of time loading up on leisure and knowledge before making the final decision to bootstrap my startup: training in BJJ/MMA, surfing, and filling in some holes in my CS knowledge. I never received a formal functional programming education, so I'm powering through "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" on my nook, using Clojure instead of Scheme. I would like to learn more about message queues and NoSQL, maybe some Python like yourself, and clean up some projects I've recently open-sourced. And ruby-serialport, which I maintain, could use another release, perhaps a little website too. Heck, I could use a nicer website...
I have some travel plans as well. Staying with friends in the east coast, and visiting family in South America. Depending on what happens, I may travel more. As a Third Culture Kid, I miss the foreign and new very much. Coincidently, I'm exploring the wild idea of traveling and collaborating with other developers on OSS, a la Paul Erdos, except without the academic papers, or the amphetamines.
My only clearcut advice is not to forget about health insurance. The last thing we need is a broken arm to wipe out our savings.
Anecdotally, at what point this is true also seems to depend on the host OS. Windows 7's pmap was beneficial at a lower n than Mac OS X's for a simple O(n) function. I have always wondered why this is.
It's this "let's hack together" mentality that seems to be lacking in Southern California, where so many schools & companies still insist on cubicles. Time to take the train up to SF...
Sweet! I would be all over that. There's really only one good coworking space there: CoLoft. But it's marketed to all freelance/remote workers--not just hackers. Would be nice to get a dedicated hacker place.
Not sure if it meets your criteria, but there http://blog.crashspace.org in Culver City. I'm up in Portland, but have admired it from afar. Seems to have some great events, especially lots of hardware hacking.
I suspect it's because we in SoCal prefer actually getting work done instead of being trendy and being seen hanging out with other trendy people doing trendy things.
Although I do exclude certain portions of LA and Hollywood from this description.
If you knew you were phrasing it unproductively (if the way you phrase it causes a valid point to get downvoted, that's unproductive), why not change the phrasing? E.g. "That mentality may be trendy these days, but I've found that the open office space approach can make it hard to find time to really focus and get things done."
Still gets your point across, but presents it in a less antagonistic way, leading to productive discussion rather than downvotes.
1) Hacker News is not about getting people to think through shock value. And I think a lot of us would leave if it were.
2) Anger about grave moral atrocities causes people to think. Anger about someone antagonistically phrasing a denouncement of their working style causes people to write you off as a troll and move on with their lives.
Likewise. I was fortunate to live and travel through South America and Southeast Asia through my teenage years since my father took overseas engineering jobs. I cannot begin to express what traveling, and more importantly, immersion, will do to your vision and your priorities. It's a wonderful world out there.
I used Evernote extensively for a few months. Their mobile apps did not support rich text, which frustrated me, but I found myself using the desktop clients exclusively.
Evernote may be excellent for certain workflows, but it just didn't jive with me. The concepts of documents, books, and tagging became a sort of work in itself.
What I really needed was a giant flexible outline: WorkFlowy. I recommend this simple but powerful mind tool without reservation.
Same boat here. Evernote was great for moving between devices but the limitations of the plain text note format way a pain to a list maker like me. When WorkFlowy started supporting iPad an iPhone through the web, I switched and never looked back.
