HN is probably on a backswing. For a while a few years ago, it seemed like everyone would have expected to be able to create a better-than-flesh prosthetic in 18 months with a team of five coders and a little vc funding.
I guess some of us are just sick of the hype, and the frankly demented hubris that's so often on display along with it.
I'll be honest, all this biomod stuff looks like LARP to me. Just look at the article, this person literally got a magnet installed so they could play-act at being in a lesser Neil Stevenson novel, while, as noted in these comments, the actual science is nowhere near delivering the advancements that were promised. It turns out not all problems can be solved with a little Javascript.
Maybe that makes me a cynic, fair enough, but all this valley hype is exhausting.
I did enjoy the note about gatekeepers (insurance companies and the medical profession).
These scientifically conservative organizations are great for not letting terrible things happen to people, but not at all geared towards radical innovation. Viz the medical community just starting to realize that systemic outcome-tracking might be beneficial towards informing what procedures are more effective in the real world.
