skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cost of a contract doesn't represent whether the result is reproducible or not, it predicts the probability that it's reproducible.

So what do they mean when they say it correctly predicted the outcome? Are they just saying the odds fell on the same side as the reproduction indicated?

If so, that seems arbitrary. If the cutoff for a p-value is 0.05, then shouldn't we say that any contract selling for less than $95 predicts a reproduction failure?
Where is the line between grossly exaggerating ones product and criminal fraud drawn?

Personally I view things where you give someone a false health diagnosis to be among the most egregious deceptions possible, a step beyond running a Ponzi scheme and in line with other things where users are severely hurt or killed.
What you posted was uncivil. "What are you talking about" adds no information and is a variant of name-calling. Asking whether someone is "trolling or ignorant" is also name-calling, just with a branch in it. And "name X or retract your claim" is a form of intellectual bullying, so also uncivil.

Any substantive point you have will become sharper once you edit such rudeness out, so it isn't a question of "blunting", but of being respectful. Even if you don't respect the person you're talking to, you need to respect the community by holding yourself to a higher standard.
Fair question - is D&D or Diablo III a game of skill or chance? Is it legal to bet on it?
The Impossible Music of Black MIDI (2013)
One of the most irritating things about Theranos's defenders is their argument about how Theranos should be given lesser scrutiny because of how important and noble its mission is...that's the exact opposite of how it should be, IMO.

Using Facebook as the archetypical unjustifiably-rich-startup (not my opinion, just well-repeated), in which the goal is to lower friction between friend-network-contacts...even if FB's news feed algorithm was corrupt, users have multiple ways of assessing the quality of their experience -- including out-of-band assessments (um, hanging out with friends IRL) and being able to defriend/filter lists...

The whole point of Theranos is to reduce the friction in personal health assessment...which is a great idea regardless of noble motives...but lowering friction essentially means being able to more frequently collect and analyze data about yourself. If the assessment process is bad, then using more of the product is fundamentally terrible for the person. But the bigger problem is that it isn't easy to compare health tests...if getting an old-fashioned blood draw test was trivial, then Theranos would have no purpose in the first place. So with Theranos, the easily imaginable bad-case scenario is literally that people die because of false positives and negatives, no matter the kind motives and ambitions of Holmes.

But I have to admit...at least Theranos believes in their own product? Because if it were just snake oil, they probably would've worked out a way to not use their flawed procedures for the Safeway executives, who have much interest and motive (and money) to do comparative quality testing. (unless of course the Safeway execs conducted their own blind tests...which is obviously what they should do but obviously, not all big money executives have been that skeptical of Theranos)
> If the requirements change, you must update your software. How does waterfall handle changing requirements? It doesnt.

How does agile handle change? By assuming everyone will update and has no issue with all third-party accessories constantly breaking.

If you can’t ever change your code after you’ve written it once, then Agile isn’t useful to you.
It looks like it's a general attack on email providers because they can't duck behind Cloudflare (or similar).
Postgres 9.6 feature highlight: operator and function pushdown with postgres_fdw
It certainly will be interesting how he justifies this in front of the shareholder plaintiff lawyers.
Perhaps an implementation of tensorflow.org that can learn from "normal" traffic? Can we build AI into a router?
I think auto makers, gov't agencies with fleets of vehicles, private companies with fleets of vehicles, public transit agencies, etc., should contribute to OpenStreetMaps, which would then let them all incorporate any features they wanted in their navigation systems without ever having to worry about what Google might or might not decide to do or stop doing from one year to the next.
Simpler =! better. Your 3 bananas are far too many carbs compared to a serving of my Soylet or Ketochow.
Andrei Alexandrescu, co-creator of D, compares D, Go and Rust
This has not been my experience at all. I've found that a phone call is much more efficient. If permitted, many lawyers I've dealt with, several of whom were clearly the best and most professional, would milk an email or text-based response for quite a lot more, even after being asked to keep it brief.
I will be very surprised if Elizabeth hasn’t crossed the line over to fraud at some point. She is pulling down some very well connected people - she had better like orange.
What options are there for founders to liquidate shares in the process of fundraising but before going public? Are founders typically able to liquidate some amount of shares in funding rounds in order to take home cash, or do investors disallow that entirely until a company is sold or goes public?

Theranos is 12 years old at this point, and raised $400 million at a $4.5 billion valuation. Would a founder of a company in those circumstances have been able to liquidate - let's say - 1% of their ownership along the way, or in the last fundraising round, for cash? Or is that out of the question and founders are expected to retain their ownership aside from investment dilution until sale?

I suppose the answer depends on the terms the company is able to work out with their investors. But perhaps someone can comment on what terms are common in such situations.
FWIW, I put this in console so I could click the banner at the end to start over:

$('#chess__board-message').click(function() { var m = new ChessDemo.Match(); m.$boardOverlay.hide(); m.startNextTurn(); });
> WebAssembly in a webview would make a pretty good platform for many types of apps that want to download code that currently can only use JS.

Nitro can handle asm.js pretty well, I don't see why Apple would cripple wasm.
No doubt that a blood sample from a finger prick is different than from a vein.

That said, diabetics just use finger pricks for their blood glucose tests. Is the result calibrated for a finger prick test or do we just assume it's close enough?
The banks do, but the people don’t.

No one wants to have to buy a new Smart Fridge every year because the manufacturer stopped updating the old one. Hell, people won’t even update at all.

We can’t even get updating software on Android correctly. And instead of releasing bugfixes for all releases, Google instantly abandons a version of Android. There are 0 maintenance branches of it.

Applying the Android "Agile" situation to the rest of Software and especially Hardware is the worst nightmare possible. If that is going mainstream, I’ll quit compsci and start teaching kids in a kindergarten instead.

Android is actually the perfect example: Always having the latest is more important than it being thought out well! Documentation is less important than it somehow working!

Android’s update situation is the exact outcome of applying Agile development not just internally, but also externally. And it’s a horrible nightmare.
If you feel your lawyer is overcharging you, tell them so, complain to the local bar and/or find another lawyer.
Federate!
Simple fix: turn off your mobile data.
I had a really relevant experience in my ex-company. It was a small company doing video analytics and monitoring. It did well in initial stage and the pantry was stocked with real bean coffee maker, beers, sodas, and pastries. Then its business went down hill, and the beer was removed (beers are expensive in Singapore), then cheap beans were used, then no bean coffee but 3-in-1 instant coffees. Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit. The company went bankrupt after 1.5 years.

The lesson here is not about how much 'gift' it was taken from employees, it is more on the changing wind in the air that employees need to watch out for. If a company is so desperate to cut snacks, usually it means it has much bigger shit at the backyard that employees may or may not be aware of.
Mr. Burd declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement. He retired in May 2013.
How does a parasite create zombie-like behavior?
My takeaway from that was a toilet seat makes for an OK headrest if nothing else is available :-)
ok, you got me there
Yep, thanks - we've already spoken to a few of them and got some things in place. Obviously don't want to spell out all our measures in public.
The AG has made a determination that DFS is not skill based. That means that offering it in New York constitutes illegal bookmaking. It is illegal to place bets with a bookie in New York, and it's illegal for a bookmaker to operate there. DK has no New York presence, so they are not affected other than having to block NY players. But FD is, according to this determination, running an illegal bookmaking operation and is headquartered in New York. That will have to change.
> But the bigger problem is that it isn't easy to compare health tests...

It ought to be relatively easy. I mean, not easy for the average Joe, but easy for anyone seriously interested in doing it.

Draw blood twice: once with the finger prick, and once with a regular vein draw, and then test the two samples using the different methodologies. Compare the results. Seems like a fairly trivial experiment to run and reproduce.
Emigrant City: NYPL Crowdsources Records of the Emigrant Savings Bank of NYC
You don’t need the accuracy that you need for the other tests plus glucose is in really high concentrations relatively to the other compounds they want to measure. If you are out by 20% on the glucose concentration in diabetes it does not matter too much, but it does for everything else. It is not like the current machines are 100% accurate anyway even though the ISO threshold is +-20% [1].

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3317395/
Benchmarking Atlassian's S-1 – How 7 Key SaaS Metrics Stack Up
+1 Insightful

That way of looking at it actually makes me feel so much better. Thanks for the quick reversal of perspective steve19!
Pluto is an interesting one. So destructive that the plan was to have it just fly back and forth across the Soviet Union after it ran out of bombs, killing and destroying with the radiation from its unshielded reactor and the shock wave from flying past at low altitude at Mach three.

One of the (many) reasons it was killed was the question of how you would test such a beast. If it went haywire, you'd have a weapon on the loose that killed just by flying around, and with an enormous endurance. Oh, and which was basically impossible to shoot down.
So, um, why does Netflix always seem to be up/performant?
My Mercedes-Benz has software firmware for my transmission that is updated annually, at the shop.

The software can be updated over the air in a Tesla every few weeks.

Mercedes is working with my company to adopt agile practices and server deployment to disposable cloud environments for their connected car IoT applications.

Industrial and Appliance manufacturers such as Philips, and GE (a 10% investor) are also adopting this same software and methodology for their IoT platforms and applications.

I don't know what else to tell you - there are certainly areas where you correctly point out you need to get it right the first time. But you keep making projections about the future of immutable software that are contradictory to all the evidence.

The world is a big place and even in Deutschland the big industrial manufacturers are adopting lean and agile. Cars at Toyota and Honda (and many others) are developed with Lean Product development principles - not a big up front design plan, but test-first, concurrent, iterative, incremental engineering.

One can buy hardware that lasts a decade - the software can and will evolve except in constrained environments. A washing machine is not a constrained environment.
The ice sheet is 1-3km deep. That is almost unfathomable.
The code they are benchmarking is written in C, then compiled to asm.js (presumably with Emscripten). In one version, they remove the "use asm" header, but the code appears identical.

That seems like a strange test. They aren't testing JS against ASM, or even compiled-to-vanilla-JS vs compiled-to-ASM. Both versions are compiled to ASM (complete with all strange annotations like num|0), only one has the asm optimizations disabled. I don't know enough about asm to know if their annotations are slower than vanilla JS in unoptimized engines, but I suspect they might be.

I was also surprised that asm still won in Chrome - I thought Chrome optimized for asm-like code without checking for the "use asm" flag.
Complaining over this kind of issue to local bar will get you absolutely nowhere. I did switch attorneys, two or three times, but they all do this and all assert that all others do it. To boot, in some situations such as family court, switching attorneys can be and often is taken by the judge as a sign that you don't have your shit together well enough to hold down an attorney. Even if you switched for a completely legitimate reason, they can hold it against you and play favorites with the other counsel. This was especially true for a family member of mine going through such a circumstance in a small, rural community where all possible attorneys to hire in the area had close dealings with all of the judicial staff.
Biggest example is Snapchat, they got and keep asking for millions of dollars money when fundraising.

Last year's big drama was Secret app's founder taking $6MM when they raised $25MM then proceeded to buy fancy cars. The product growth stalled and the company shut down in less than a year.

Happened with Buffer.
Not having been in that situation directly, I believe that it is fairly common for founder(s) to take some cash in exchange for their shares at the later stages, if only so that they don't feel the immediate need to cash out. It sucks to be cash poor while being worth $X billion on paper, so I believe investors would rather the founder turn some stock into $10m and not worry about money than to have a fidgety CEO.
Well, Holmes _did_ reassure Burd. We cannot rule out the possibility that she is an exceptionally deft reassurer.

In seriousness, Safeway gets durable capital improvements to their stores for their $350mm, still useful without Project T-Rex.
I used to work for this guy, for a company called Yodel (owned by Fulfilnet). I know it's not Hacker News worthy, but he's a really awful human being and I remember him coming into the building and firing people blindly just so he could make enough money to keep his jetpack hobby alive. He's British, so he started businesses in Australia and left them running remotely so he couldn't be brought down by them.

Sorry for talking about the person and not the technology, I just can't stand by when I watched this guy really screw people over for his own personal gain.

Sources: http://www.ecommercereport.com.au/failed-businesses-yodel-bl... <-- This is the interesting one. After crashing his previous businesses he started up another and bought the assets and customers under a new name, then started fresh. New company is https://www.aiad.com.au/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yodel_Australia

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-16/customers-left-in-the-...
Or just click the web link stories have now under their title.
From some quick googling:

"California law generally requires a person to obtain consent from all parties to a call before recording the call. See Cal. Penal Code § 630 et seq. Consent can likely be obtained by providing a recording disclosure at the outset of the call."
No one is going to update their washing machine. No one.

Out of the people I know, most never updated their phone software or the firmware of their consoles. My mum was, until a week ago, running on her PC Windows Vista with the last update being downloaded in 2006, when we moved into this house and I had run Windows Update for her.

A washing machine is probably the most constrained environment in any home. No one’s going to update it. When you turn it on, you want it to just work. Same with the smart fridge.

These devices have a lifetime of decades, and no one’s going to update them.

Same with cars, most people don’t want them to be updated.

Remember, this is Deutschland, we still use Fax for business communication.
So much this.

I also liked the one period of time I used to type in my US zip code for Movie Showtimes and somehow be routed to theatres and showtimes in a town outside Naples, Italy. This was on a desktop, not a phone.

Not the biggest deal in the world but it seems every useful thing Google comes up with seems to degrade in quality over time and increase in complexity.
U.S. Congress Recognizing Asteroid Resource Property Rights
Linked to this instead of the bill itself (https://rules.house.gov/bill/114/hr-2262) because I think this link provides more context.

The full title is "Planetary Resources Applauds U.S. Congress in Recognizing Asteroid Resource Property Rights", but I dropped the first three words so that it would fit into the HN title.
Sam I think we can safely say at this stage that there is no favorable clinical data.
Oh wow I spent so many nights playing and making MODs and chatting with my other nerd friends on BBSes of the day trying to share knowledge. This is truly a much-appreciated work of art! On another note, I think the people commenting in this thread would be really great together in a room somewhere with beer and computers. It's a very specific cross-section of both a skillset and a point in time.
See Wikipedia:

"It is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice sheet is almost 2,400 kilometres (1,500 mi) long in a north-south direction, and its greatest width is 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern margin. The mean altitude of the ice is 2,135 metres (7,005 ft). The thickness is generally more than 2 km (1.2 mi) and over 3 km (1.9 mi) at its thickest point. It is not the only ice mass of Greenland – isolated glaciers and small ice caps cover between 76,000 and 100,000 square kilometres (29,000 and 39,000 sq mi) around the periphery. If the entire 2,850,000 cubic kilometres (684,000 cu mi) of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 m (24 ft)."
I think we can resolve this debate through a map. I think our problem is a disagreement on what is actually industrialized and predictable vs. What is more exploratory and uncertain.

Most software - but not all - deals with uncertain requirements. These are suited to agile methods.

Other software is in a well understood industrialized domain. Here, I would not recommend waterfall per se, but an approach like Six Sigma and Formal engineering methods certainly makes sense.

Simon Wardley has explained this well here: http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/06/why-agile-lean-and-six-s...

I think the disagreement is

A) is how industrialized IoT applications actually are.

It will be 2 decades or more I believe before they are. This will require to lots of disposability and change in the meantime. Hence appropriate for agile.

B) how much indistrialized software will there be in the future? Things like railway systems are well understood and industrialized. And don't need agile. But my point has been there isn't a lot of railway software out there to write anymore.

But at some point, will the newer IoT domains be eventually so industrialized that it requires formal engineering methods? To this I say - sure - but not for a long while. The applications are still too fluid.

C) how many people actually work on various ends of the spectrum of agile vs industrialized ? There has been an explosion of activity in using software in new domains, which is agile by definition. Industrial software even by your own definition only needs to be written once every 80 years. So it makes one surmise it will always be a minority of software development.
OK, you had a bad experience. I've had good experiences. Let's leave it at that.
But but but Rumsfeld and Kissinger told me it was a sure thing!
People sometimes do liquidate privately. There are even markets just for this. I don't like Quora, but these are some good explanations: https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-startup-founders-sell-some-of...
Do you really believe that it's about Exxon's investors? I imagine the proceeds from whatever settlement would go to those affected, according to your description, the shareholders who's future profit's will be hurt from withholding their studies?

You can sue for oil spills. You can put in a gas tax. But what's Schniderman is doing is a shake-down, led by populism. I get it, no one likes Exxon (me included) and my opinions may not be popular. But these lawsuits are a new form of hidden tax paid by shareholders, not some mythical corporate entity. He even went after an English bank (Barclays) for something to do with their dark pool. It doesn't go to those harmed by the actions. You can read about where the money goes. It goes to government agencies, and yes, iPads for the police. It's fine if politicians think there are worthy programs they want to fund, but this isn't rule of law.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/where-does-jpmorgans-...
Thank you. That makes sense. I suppose it happens with "hot" companies that have some negotiating leverage.

I'm curious because if Holmes has been able to convert even 0.1% - 1% of her shares' current value along the way, that's a life-changing amount of money ($4.5m - $45 million).

I'm very curious what the experience is like to be worth billions on paper via a private company. Can you get a mortgage? Can you borrow against stock in a private company? (Do banks recognize the valuation of a company as legitimate for that purpose?) It does make sense that investors would want founders to take something home so that they can live and buy a house, etc.
Predicting the Future with Google Maps APIs
Chrome should enable turbo fan with the "use asm"; set. Though the only confirmation of this is saying it's tested in beta. https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=2599#c77
And we see how well this updating works with the "agile" developed Android... Not.

A phone has a lifetime of over 5 years, but support is dropped before the legal minimum support of 2 years, even for Nexus.[1]

A device like a Thermostat shouldn’t even ever need updating. Everything it should do is record, transmit, and accept settings for temperature. Everything intelligent should be in a separate device.

It’s like we’re learning to separate the world into microchips and the interfacing processors all over again.

Also, I argued this before, if people can’t even update their game consoles or are still running Vista SP0 this month then they sure as hell won’t update their Smart Washing Machine.

You’re maybe living in Silicon Valley and all around these shiny new toys, but reality is that people are still using fax.

----------------

[1] By the way, this opens an interesting legal opportunity, I need to get updates for my Nexus device, as it’s less than 2 years old, and the vulnerability is a manufacturers defect.