skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doing some back of the envelope calculations I can't see any scale where they are profitable given their current fee structure.

Could you explain? I'm sure you have much more experience reading such numbers[1] than I do, but at a glance they look viable if they can grow to something around double their size.

Ignoring Starbucks and doubling the amounts for 1H 2015 to make it annual, they'll have about $1000M of revenue from transactions, and will pay about $600M of transaction costs. They'll have about $500M of operating costs for 2015 and $100M of various other costs.

If in 201X they were to be double this size, they'd have $2000M of revenue, and $1200M of transaction costs. If they can keep their operating and other costs below $800M, they'll be profitable. Of their expenses, "Transaction and advance losses" will probably scale linearly, but all the rest plausible to be significantly sublinear.

Is this simplistic scenario clearly impossible for some reason?

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1512673/000119312515...
Without seeing the full emails, I'm hesitant to judge. The excerpt sounds reasonable, but for all we know, the subject line could've read, "WHAT WE ARE DOING IS WRONG!"...I thought company lawyers generally frown upon speculation of legal matters via email. Not necessarily to stamp out internal and genuine complaints, but because they end up being a rich source of material to be taken out of context should litigation come up...that said, Mr. Balwani probably should've kept that in mind before writing something that appears quite dickish when excerpted in an investigative news report.

The other parts of Theranos's media strategy, according to the WSJ, doesn't seem particularly friendly:

- Threatening to sue a widow whose Theranos-employed husband expressed doubts to her before killing himself.

- Going around to people who had been interviewed by the WSJ and asking them to sign statements (before the story was even published) that the WSJ had misquoted them.

- Holmes ignoring WSJ for _five months_. Then standing them up last week. The CEO is famous for being an inspirational, thoughtful speaker but can't even make time in _five months_ to give a bland statement of defense or explanation to the Wall Street Journal, on a story that strongly hints at violations of federal health regulations? It's one thing to refuse comment when a news organization ambushes you the night of the deadline -- it's inexcusable to hide for five months..._especially_ if the company isn't actually doing anything wrong.
To be honest, I'm perhaps a bit 'special' but my linux workstation is i7 5930k (6 cores, 12 threads) overclocked to 4.5Ghz, with 64GB of ram, and 2 BenQ 32" 4K screen. I'm reasonably sure I can find something that big as a laptop!

Laptops are also massively more expensive than an equivalent desktop, while /most people/ never move their laptop anyway.. I never really understood that. In fact, that big system's entire hardware is very likely considerably cheaper than a 'developer laptop'.

Personally, I use a crummy laptop if needs be, and I remote into the big workstation from wherever I am (I use x2go a lot).
It's already super easy to go back. Just do an edge-swipe from the left, like you would in a normal navigation stack in most apps. And you can edge-swipe from the right to go forwards.
Your right to your property ends at your death. None of us are entitled to anything.
Help passionate programmers find their career at Fullstack Academy (YC S12)
I actually find myself wishing I could scale whole apps on mobile sometimes.
Reader mode FTFW.

Fuck fixed headers / footers. Fuck social. And fuck fixed social header/footer bars specifically.
So you believe property is a basic human right.
Be So Good They Can't Ignore You – Free Webinar with Cal Newport and Scott Young
That's not completely clear. It depends entirely on how often the human is expected to take over
It's also (to refer to the grand-parent) a stretch to make concrete claims about why any large group of people do any particular thing.

I know Jewish people who avoid eating pork (etc) because it's their cultural identity and they don't want to disrespect that part of their heritage even though they have no particular belief in God or reverence for the Torah.
6year old has his genitals and fingers cut off after he disturbed neighbour sleep
Wait, what? Don't you get, I dunno, full?

That's what stops me from eating all day. I feel satisfied with the amount I've eaten. You, know: this automatic thing.

If you don't feel that, there's something amiss. You've described it so strangely, by calling what you have a more moderate type of habit to anorexia.
Many cyclists do ride on public roads for fitness reasons. Beginners might ride in local parks or smth, but I'm pretty sure most of the cycling hours are spent on the roads. Since people who ride more put in significantly more hours and tend to ride roads more. There's offroad cycling, but in many cases it involves cycling on unpaved public roads or other public areas not reserved to bikes only.

I myself spend more hours on public roads on a bicycle than driving a car.
The problem is that some designer whips up a mobile theme, disables scaling, and then an content editor posts some unexpected content that breaks the design, and the readers can't do anything about it.

It gets even worse when designers sell those themes to non-technical people, who have no way to fix the mess the designer caused by disabling scaling/scrolling.
It's more a matter of how the tools are used, and provisions for client side overrides. Reader mode is a godsend, though the delay on showing the icon and lack of a default option are both capital flaws.
So it follows:

If you are betting on the outcome, then put your money on a smallish group, call it 10, of the ropeless competitors.

If you are competing, make sure you have a rope, because coming 20th or 30th is a much better personal outcome than possibly dying.
Do's and Don'ts of College Marketing
Maybe this could be a good thing? Maybe if the MPs feel that they're under surveillance like the rest of us they might not be so quick to support global spying.
Thermomix
Smaller companies doing this (and possibly some big ones) are essentially outsourcing "Ops" by using "cloud" providers.

The number of people that think somehow using AWS means you no longer need Ops staff is amazing. In a bad way. How often does "we can't afford our own Ops so we use AWS/Azure/etc" come up as a reason to accept the associated vendor lock in with a given provider?
Democracy is when the people can replace the government if they don't like the way it governs. What we're seeing in Europe and the US these days is that government is trying to replace the people because it doesn't like the way they vote. The unfettered-immigration and amnesty-for-illegals movements on both continents are direct attacks on democracy by governments that think they can get more money or power with a different set of voters. I don't know if anything quite like this has happened before... did the Greeks even have a word for it?
Square Discloses IPO Plans
That assumes the tech is crap though, doesn't it? I think there's a case to be made that once the tech has progressed enough, there will be fewer deaths/injuries overall even if some of the number has moved from the "human did something dumb" to "human couldn't take over from autopilot fast enough"
E-wallet, Gift Cards, Recurring Payments Are Main Ecommerce Trends 2015
> And there are crazy pedestrians, crazy drivers, maybe cattle crossing the street, an accident, ice, fog, ice and fog and cattle, unpaved roads, etc.

All of which people often don't do that well on themselves.

> All those cues and signs were not designed to be read and processed by robots

No, but they were designed to be clear and quickly identifiable by humans with vague glances. We're not asking for them to identify a subtly sarcastic remark, signs are more of the "BIG RED CIRCLE WITH STRAIGHT WHITE LINE" variety.

> I would think an airplane's environment when in the air seems more predictable and stable, than an environment for car on the streets

Possibly, but the risks are significantly higher. If something unexpected happens you can't just come to a halt and put your warning lights on 30,000 feet in the air.

> Same thing for underwater vehicles

I disagree on this one, the environment is going to be largely unknown and more importantly for exploration you aren't just saying "go here". When I drive somewhere, many of the roads will have been driven over thousands of times the same day.
His 40 years of experience obviously did not include the only recently available GPUs and ASIC deep neural networks which are at the heart of the current self-driving robotics research. There is a game changer, and any previous experience is irrelevant.
No that's not happening, it's just conspiracy nonsense.
Exactly. And I think we all can agree that a sharp pencil does not have the same worst case scenario potential as an automatic rifle or nuclear weapon. It is really hard to sabotage a coal plant with the same national impact as an INES L7 nuclear accident. I think among the "conventional" energy sources only some of the hydro sites come close.
26-hour whole genome sequencing using application specific processor
How to be an entrepreneur: survey
We were in the middle of shifting our entire architecture to Lambda when all hell broke loose.

I had delayed Lambda function calls. S3 triggers for Lambda were taking hours to actually start the process, but the logs were showing the actions happening immediately. They weren't happening immediately. It was easy to see that the S3 files were not being moved for hours, but the logs were reporting the wrong time.

Days later, AWS us-east-1 went offline. Much of the internet went with it.

After it came online, everything was working well for me. We enjoyed near instant response times. Lambda was great, for a few days.

Then it started again. Hours of delay before the S3 events actually started the Lambda functions, and the logs once again lying.

We moved away from S3 triggers because it was unreliable. I really hope they fix the issues, but I'm not interested in relying on something that doesn't work, with zero help in the forums, and requires an expensive service contract just to report broken services.
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They've been working on a special web edition, and recently finished volume 3, it took quite a while.
Because the Mexicans would be working and paying rent or buying your property from you, not squatting in your bedroom for free.
>Well done Theranos, keep at it!

Really? What if your family member died because of inaccuracy of Theranos' results? Would you still cheer for them?

This whole article is extremely damning. Some stuff just makes your head spin:

>Carmen Washington, a nurse who worked at a clinic owned by Walgreens in Phoenix, says she began to question Theranos’s accuracy after seeing abnormal results in potassium and thyroid tests.

>She says she raised her concerns with the drugstore operator and Theranos’s lab director, asking for data to show that the company’s finger-prick testing procedures produced results as accurate as blood drawn from a vein.

>“They were never able to produce them,” she says. Ms. King says the company did show detailed testing-accuracy data to the nurse.

Anyway, if you ever need any tests done, stay away from Theranos.
Bjarne Stroustrup on the 30th anniversary of Cfront (the first C++ compiler)
That's what you get when a secret spying-oriented Court has to rule on this. It's like asking the FISA Court rather than the Supreme Court whether the NSA can spy on American citizens and politicians.
Do we need to upgrade that software to use an eliptic-curve fuckload?
Yeah, setup one channel and then another inside that. Seems like hash functions could be used this way, too. For instance, are there any practical attacks in sight that'd work simultaneously on both MD5 and SHA1? 3DES does this with DES so it probably works in general?
It sounds rather a likely risk though... I speculate the kind of manager that brings his own team thinks long term. When one thinks long term, multitudes of possible outcomes must be thought through. The vision has to be defended against all kinds of visualised attacks. It's complex, and often hard to explain due to the level of detail and time that is put into it.

Then some dick who thought about it this morning over his coffee wants to suggest you change direction.

It's a bit like software development. There are a bazillion things not in the code you are looking at, that the developer deliberately didn't put in; an infinity of tiny decisions. Also there lots of things that are in that it is later clear should not be in. Decisions on whether to refactor are really, really hard.

Something something technical difficulties in the relationship between craftmanship and leadership.
Digital Cable TV Network in India
Monitoring your Docker containers using Ruxit
> We assume that the binary expansion of Pi is not selected maliciously. ;-)

Well, I suppose that we must assume that, as assuming otherwise is self-defeating: anyone running the simulation we're living in already has direct access to the plaintexts anyway.
Or maybe they don't even have a choice any longer.
Rpy2 is the python library you probably want: http://rpy2.readthedocs.org/
3 Common Reasons Why You Are Afraid to Start Freelancing
Tesla sold more Model S’s in Switzerland than Mercedes, BMW and Audi combined
Not the atom, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a specific quantum transition of the atom. (Cs 133 and 9192631770 Hz)
I made another one, in Ruby http://smartcropper.berk.es/. And just like those other two, in need of love.

But the difference is that these are all running on a backend, while the JS version will probably run in the frontend.

I'm not sure what the right place for this would be, but frontend has some advantages and quite some disadvantages:

* It's as slow as the devise running the JS. In mobile era that probably means a magnitute slower than even the cheapest DO server.

* You can't reply on it, so if you want to ensure you receive, say, square images, you'll need to validate and re-crop on backend again.

* It's very error-prone. On a backend you can ensure versions of imagemagic or some other processing is there, on frontends: you'll rely on the parsing in JS (very slow) or on the rendering of the client (unstable in the sense of: you don't know where it works in what way, and if that will stay so)

* It is distributed. My smartcropper for Ruby is heavy, memory-gobbling, and slow (partly the fault of the bad code, It is long due some refactoring). It is near impossible to run without some async-job system. Whereas, a cropper in the frontend scales nicely across users, because each user brings their own processing-power

Edit: bullet-point markup and realised a pro for doing this frontend.
It's probably possible to some extent. It's like having a anxious pillion rider on your bike. I remember when I first took my little sister along on my motorcycle, she'd lean the wrong way in the curves because she was scared the bike might fall over or something. Made controlling the bike harder, but not impossible.

(That experience taught me to always tell people to lean into the curve if they've never sat on a motorcycle before)
When available, it's a good idea to use the F16C/CVT16 instruction set [0] for converting between single (32 bit) and half (16 bit) precision. I think ARM NEON has a comparable instruction set. They operate on SIMD registers, so if you're using SIMD, there might be substantial benefits in using them.

The actual arithmetic is still done in 32 bit precision and the conversions are only done when loading from or storing to memory. Some GPUs actually have 16 bit arithmetic internally, but most use 32 bit ALUs and just convert on load/store.

Alternatively, if you don't care about NaNs and denorms, and whatnot (e.g. the use cases for 3d model data mentioned in the README don't really involve NaNs or denorms), some simple bitshifting can do the conversion.

Here's a snippet of Python code that I've used:

def float2half(float_val):
f = unpack('I', pack('f', float_val))[0]
if f == 0: return 0
if f == 0x80000000: return 0x8000
return ((f>>16)&0x8000) | ((((f&0x7f800000)-0x38000000)>>13)&0x7c00) | ((f>>13)&0x03ff)

def half2float(h):
if h == 0: return 0
if h == 0x8000: return 0x80000000
f = ((h&0x8000)<<16) | (((h&0x7c00)+0x1C000)<<13) | ((h&0x03FF)<<13)
return unpack('f', pack('I', f))[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F16C
Check your root certificates. If any of those has capabilities of "Man in the middle", they can see your SSL traffic. That's probably how they do it.
My Fractal Design define R3 case has contained 2 different motherboards so far, 2 power supplies, it has seen a lot of disks and has contained various amounts of RAM over time. It is a pleasure to open it up an play with it. I think this case will last for a long, long time and will contain ever increasingly modern hardware, to be upgraded in small steps. I can't see myself do that with a laptop.
curious, is this really a bot or someone just providing a service under the guise of a bot?

be pretty cool if it was the former. that would be some serious natural language processing. (not that i know anything about that subject)

i read the article, this post does seem like a pretty accurate summary.
A German startup (Tandemploy - http://www.tandemploy.com/) is trying to establish something similar by allowing two people to "team up" together and apply for a single full-time position at a company. This sounds weird at first but the benefits for both sides are clear:

* The two "job sharers" can freely organize how they want to split their working time between each other, giving them a lot of flexibility and increased work-life balance.

* The company will have filled one full-time position with a team of two people, thereby greatly reducing the risk of sickness and one person leaving the company with all his/her knowledge.

So, basically it's RAID0 for people :)
It's easy to dismiss it as a phishing scam but these days some of them can be very convincing and elaborate. It's not hard to obscure URLs, obtain good looking SSL certs, and have a good story behind it. Social engineering will always work.
Print more money.
The same movie also lets the protagonist heal from a incapacitating spinal injury in a dusty pit -

So I'm not sure if this is a pro- or anti-rope statement :)
But if I invite you onto my property, your freedom of movement includes your right to accept my invitation. Which you can't do if there's a noncooperative national border between you and my property.
Location: Moscow, Russia

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript, BackboneJS, NodeJS, Less/Stylus, Handlebars, Grunt/Gulp

Résumé/CV: http://goo.gl/bSVMMi

Email: g.polush.kin@gmail.com

Github: https://github.com/proll/
I, for one, think that would be a much more fascinating problem than implementing neural nets where the representation of the underlying data is heavily obscured.
Symbolic AI seems to me inherently a wrong concept.

> A more contrived relation to this in real life that I've been thinking about: if a child knocks over a vase, you might be angry at them, and they might have done the wrong thing. But why did they do it? If a child can explain to you that they knew you were afraid of insects, and swung at a fly going by, that can help you debug that social circumstance so you and the child can work together towards better behavior in the future.

Maybe. What if the real reason was a combination of a misconfigured bayesian network in child's head that mistakenly assigned high probability to seeing a fly when there was a dust speck combined with an overreactive heuristics that made it start waving hands around? Or something? There may not be a reason that can be specified in symbols relevant to anything else.

In general, a rational reasoner modelling a probability network would make a decision because all the items upstream added up to a particular distribution downstream. There are no symbols involved in such computation, and it would be strange to suddenly include them now.

Also, if you really sit do and do some serious introspecting, you'll realize that any symbols we assign to explain our thoughts are arbitrary and after-the-fact. Brains don't run on symbols, they generate them later for communications.
Well, it's not that different from writing blog posts in the hopes that they show up here. Humans are social and connections even asymetric ones are valueable.
Quick Insight into Smart and Sustainability Projects in Helsinki
True. Concern about legal issues is what leads one to consult counsel in the first place typically though. Counsel discourages speculation by people who aren't involved and aren't the right people to be discussing it - like they've read a news article. I haven't heard anyone discourage genuine inquiry into a specific issue they're concerned about, and that it's appropriate for them to raise. It sounds like the employee had specific knowledge about an aspect of the company's operations. The word speculation is used a lot in that context, but every piece of legal advice I've ever received (outside of impersonal training) started with me thinking: it seems like this might be a problem ... I wonder if it's really a problem or not ...

Counsel also gives training about when to ask for legal advice and how to handle privilege and confidential communication, which doesn't sound like were followed here (or maybe never provided). As you say, it could be a liability during litigation. However, the response to that could have been "I've added our legal team for input on the issue you've raised. Please don't discuss legal issues except in privileged communication with our legal team." I guess that's easier to say and do when you have inhouse counsel. -g-

I would also hope that a thread like that would be deemed to be protected by privilege if counsel were immediately added like that as part of a request for legal advice. Perhaps someone more familiar with the boundaries of privilege could comment. From what I understand though, opposing counsel are usually pretty hesitant to attempt to pierce privilege, especially if there's a tinge of legitimacy on it. E.g., random guy raises legal concern to superior, who immediately involves counsel. Opposing counsel has to actually attempt to make the case that it's not privileged communication, which they are reluctant to do in such cases (but doesn't mean it can't happen).
Thanks! I will do it!
Audiences of those articles (nutrition, "cheap" health advice, garbage fitness, and so on) simply want trivial, feel-good advice; the media just fulfill that wish.

It's the cultural substrate which is misguided - having an interest in feeling good about something, rather than actually accomplishing it - but this is personal choice.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If anyone has enough privileges for a malicious attacker to use their account/info to compromise your network then that is the measure of how well protected you are. In this case it was a grandmother, but it doesn't have to be. It could be a salesperson, an HR manager, a burnt out developer. When a business grows to a sufficient size that there are people working in it who are disinterested in "computers" or "processes" (in the case of a software startup that's probably over about 10 staff), then you suddenly introduce some huge weak points in your IT infrastructure. That should be scary.
A lot of science is like that these days. You can find enough evidence for anything because the fact is that you are dealing with people and people are individuals with individual chemistry, at least that's a part of it.
I would go even alone and have my coffee with my laptop :) I'll do the same when I come to SF. Maybe a simple site for these meetings would be cool.
That'll nicely neutralise the security threat that Labour caused when they elected Corbyn.