skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. "A stable company might have a price/earnings ratio of 5x"

You're way off on PE's.

The Shiller PE is 26* right now. P/E moves inversely with interest rates. With rates around 1% (i.e. driving up P/E's) only distressed companies trade at 5x P/E ratios.

2. "AirBnB takes a 3% cut on transactions"

You overlooked 2/3 of their revenue.

"Airbnb generates revenue by taking a 3% cut of each booking along with a 6% to 12% service fee from guests"

3. "for them to have a $25 billion valuation, that's $5 billion in revenue or $167 billion in bookings"

The relevant data is in the article. Note they made $340 on $2.2B of bookings (about %15 of bookings).

"Airbnb generated $340 million of revenue in the third quarter, on bookings of $2.2 billion". You can just annualize that. Current run rate revenue is ~$1.4B. Current run rate bookings are ~$8.8B.

I don't have an opinion on the valuation but I can understand how they could be worth $25B. Airbnb's incremental cost for processing customers is probably close to zero. If they double bookings again, they'd double top line revenue ~$3B. I could easily see $1B of that flowing to the bottom line.

Also there are network effects/customer captivity at play that bode well for the long term. What do I mean? It would be hard to create a competitor to Airbnb because no one wants to establish their reputation on more that 1 platform (same under-appreciated advantage Ebay has).

*http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/
Show HN: Custom d3.js, dc.js, crossfilter dashboard
> ...self-control is a large component in addiction...

I don't know the literature on addiction. What's that opinion based on?

There's definite evidence to support the idea of physiological or external factors influencing obesity, e.g. gut bacterea influencing food choices, envionmental differences changing things like portion size.
That's not correct. The maximum acceleration of a Dragon mission has been 5G, so if you abort at that time you need 5G just to get your butt off the launch vehicle. You can't abort sideways.
Tell HN: Twitter count.json endpoint has been disabled; 3rd party buttons broken
API now returns 404.

If you roll your own Twitter button (as I do on my blog, hmrph), I recommend you fix it.
Show HN: Nap Slide (iOS nap alarm/timer)
I noticed a typo in one of the articles. Any thought to open-sourcing the Middleman repo so individuals can submit pull requests for fixes such as this?
I wanted a nap alarm that was really easy to set (I took naps at lunch, so the time would vary with traffic, etc). The app is universal and works for iPhone, iPad & iPod touch. I priced it at $0.99.

It's my first app and I'd appreciate any/all feedback. If you'd like to try it here are a few promo codes:

LP9LH4NXJRLK
YMW43EEYLXK7
KXEAPJLNLWLK

Thanks!
I never post or comment in political stories, only tech, saas and related stuff. Paris is my second home I guess I got carried out and ended up posting this story, oh well.
Surprise! (not)
Well I went to a paid university in Iran, the quality of education wasn't good either. Almost 1% of people get that "free" education you're talking about.
It's part of verification work in general. One must have a formal way of representing a program before proving key properties (eg safety, security) about it. Formal verification also often uses refinement to move from abstract to concrete with intermediate forms in between. See CompCert compiler's stages for how that might apply to LLVM (front ends especially). Also, static analysis tools like Astree Analyzer or SPARK Ada's Examiner have some internal model of the language to analyze to prove absence of bugs. Formal semantics helps with them, too.

So, it's kind of a foundation to build other work on that will let one rigorously verify the correct use, optimization, or compilation of LLVM programs. The link below has lots of examples of awesome work in security or verification that builds on LLVM. Some use Vellvm already with most able to benefit somehow if work is put in.

http://llvm.org/pubs/
I spent a couple of days working in the Rackspace "castle". It felt much the same as the average Silicon Valley office building (which are typically constructed with big open floors populated by cubes). Except it has a slide and a food court..
My work in statistical learning is always about multicollinearity, variable cardinality, and model selection. Understanding the topology of the data space is critical, and day-to-day concerns of data cleaning had made me lose sight of that. To that degree, this article was a fantastic reminder.
"That case concerned Percy Schmeiser, who discovered that canola growing on his farm in 1997 was Roundup resistant. He had initially discovered that some canola growing by a roadside along one of his fields was Roundup resistant when he was killing weeds along the road; this led him to spray a three- to four‑acre section of his adjacent field and 60% of the canola survived. Schmeiser harvested the seed from the surviving, Roundup resistant plants, and planted the seed in 1998. Monsanto sued Schmeiser for patent infringement for the 1998 planting. Schmeiser claimed that because the 1997 plants grew from seed that was pollinated with pollen blown into his field from neighboring fields, he owned the harvest and was entitled to do with it whatever he wished, including saving the seeds from the 1997 harvest and planting them in 1998."

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

edit:
TL;DR: Monsanto sues farmers, not seeds ;)
> “We literally bet the company and went through 12 months of runway in a couple of months because we thought that the time to own the market was right.”

This makes no sense. The switching costs for both consumers and businesses is basically zero, and there are aren't really any network effects like there are with Facebook, Twitter, etc. What did they expect to happen at the end of those 2 months? That consumers would ignore the hundreds of other deal players in the market and only buy from LivingSocial?
There is a Tesla owner down the road from me who keeps his outside all year. I live in Calgary, Alberta. It was -14F last night...
I've long had the idea of hosting a site for product reviews of enterprise software. There's so much shitty software produced by big vendors and IT managers keep buying them. I'd love to right this wrong, but the threat of libel scares me. The biggest vendors spend all their money on sales and lawyers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10604379

Work in progress for correctness that's being hit from many, different directions. I don't know of anyone doing the front-ends, though. Not for LLVM, anyway.
I've found that hot sauce on some crackers, or jalapeno peppers can do the trick -- it doesn't make me "happy", but moderates some of the "despair" feeling.
> There is, generally, almost no price pressure.

That's not actually true. There's tons of price pressure, but it all happens behind the scenes, and in a way that's invisible to patients.

The way payments are structured, downward price pressure on suppliers may even correspond to an increase in the (apparent) out-of-pocket cost to patients. That doesn't mean that the overall amount that the manufacturers are getting paid isn't decreasing, though.
Mixed feelings. I do think zero-rating violates net neutrality, however benignly. This zero-rating is plainly a threat to Netflix and crew, at least assuming you can random-access shows and not just catch sequential channel streams.

However, as annoying as it is to see Comcast find a new predatory business model, I don't see much difference between this and VOIP or even traditional cable, other than at the terminating end the bridge serves the information into your local network so that non-dedicated clients can get at it too.

If all this really does is move the functionality of the set-top box into an app, which is my current read, it's really hard to say this isn't OK.
doesn't work for my country
Mark Zuckerberg Will Take Two Months Off When His New Baby Arrives
IoT scares me for that very reason. I don't like the idea of people trying to infer things about me by how often I use my toaster, and I don't feel like I gain enough by my household appliances connecting to the internet to offset that privacy issue.
Most millennials I know are ill-informed on all matters of politics/civil liberties. As such, this does not surprise me one bit.
> Mine is far from the largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com and The Onion have done more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple servers and the like

Don't forget https://www.whitehouse.gov - it's a Drupal 7 site, and I imagine it gets a fair amount of traffic.
Western countries are not interested in investing in Middle Eastern countries to achieve long term goals.
The last line of the article seems to imply that it is shame keeping people from voting.

"If fewer people need the safety net to get by, the stigma will fade, and low-income citizens will be more likely to re-engage in their communities — not least by turning out to vote."

I don't see it as an issue of shame, it is more likely to be apathy. What their neighbors saw, the pollsters are also now seeing: the poorest are also the most disengaged. The nurse at the dialysis center looks on in bewilderment as otherwise able-bodied people go in on the government dime. The Democrat leaders look on in bewilderment as otherwise government-dependent areas continue to turn Republican.

What breeds this apathy? I think if you ask why people become dependent on government benefits in the first place, you get the answer: because there are very little opportunities. When the most they can aspire to is surviving day to day, they have little motivation to do anything, much less go vote.

Indeed, the article mentions economic opportunity in the last paragraph as a means to combat this apathy.

"The best way to reduce resentment, though, would be to bring about true economic growth in the areas where the use of government benefits is on the rise, the sort of improvement that is now belatedly being discussed for coal country, including on the presidential campaign trail."

For this, there seem to be two competing approaches. On the Democrats' side, the idea is to fund clean energy, transition the Kentucky and West Virginia economies to clean energy, and help former coal workers transition to working in clean energy. On the Republican side, it's reducing costly regulations on the coal industry, the goal being to make more money available to expand operations and hire more people back. On this issue, it seems voters in Kentucky and West Virginia prefer to stick with the devil they know.
Still though you could write it another way - 60% of millenials support the rights of free speech even when it is offensive to minorities.

It's not so dire. That's a solid majority.
I made an argument toward that point in the post itself that you may have gotten the expressions from it without even realizing it. You even quoted part of it. To be fair, I did it a bit old school which might have made the argument blend in further to the background and also because HN strips the applicable Unicode.
> Why would we possibly care about jailbreakme.com, or think that any security issue involving an intentionally-jailbroken phone would in any way reflect on Apple?

Except JBM was based on exploits in the official firmware, that the jailbreak would fix.

> Are you seriously bringing up stuff that was patched in iOS 1.1.2? Dude. It's 2015.

4.3.4.

> Also, it's really quite clear that the iPhone and iOS devices in general are, in fact, THE replacement for computers for hundreds of millions of users. So I don't think we really need to waste time debating that. Apple won. Apple succeeded in making a device which is useful for that purpose.

According to IDC[1] their market share is ~14%. I'd hardly call that winning.

1: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
Orwell wasn't poor. He went to Eton.

He's more like the Greek girl in Pulp's song 'Common People'

Whatever he did he could call time on it.

That's not to say I don't admire his work for its obvious compassion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Space_eXploration_Tea...
Their "go fast rocket" got to about half the altitude of Sputnik so if you got the cash you don't need to scale "go fast rocket" up by that much to put a cube-sat / micro-satellite up there.
Ah, none of that is an issue. The issue is in USA only, GM is not a required label.

That's it.
The market for computers seems obvious. The market for gene therapy is less obvious.
Because we are lazy, and everyone hopes it will help us become even lazier.
BPG Image Format Specification
The New Improved Selfie Stick
From a brief by Food & Water Watch, http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/sites/default/files/GE%20Sa...

"AquaBounty has radically altered Atlantic salmon by inserting genetic material from an eel-like fish and
a chinook salmon, designed to make the fish grow faster … an advisory panel of scientists … found major errors in AquaBounty's science and the FDA's data analysis. Scientists were especially critical of the small sample sizes used by AquaBounty — often only six or seven GE fish were used in comparisons.

… The FDA has chosen to regulate GE animals as a veterinary drug rather than a food, a decision that severely limits the scope of the agency's risk assessment. For example, the agency has not conducted a single feeding study to assess health risks associated with eating GE salmon … Before AquaBounty researchers physically examined GE salmon for health problems, they selectively killed off irregular fish, biasing the data set and severely compromising the integrity of the data.

… Acknowledging the threat of escape, AquaBounty has attempted to render GE salmon sterile, which would prevent sexual reproduction in the event that the fish are released into the wild. However, the company's regulatory submissions indicate that up to 5 percent of GE salmon will not be sterile … AquaBounty appears to be the biotech industry's sacrificial lamb — securing regulatory approval of a product that will likely be a market failure, but that will pave the way for other bioengineered food animals."
How to Be a Lawyer Without Going to Law School
Simulation of CMOS-Transistors by a semi-classical approach. A self-consistent deterministic solver for the Poisson equation, Schrodinger equation and Boltzmann equation including small signal analysis and noise characterization of the device.

Basically you want to gauge the crude models of circuit designers. But nanoscale transistors are hard to accurately understand. In particular, there's currently no good way to get predictive small signal parameters and noise characteristics of devices at such a scale.

So here I am, doing some of the first decent simulations for transistors at current technology nodes.

Definitely not something a startup is looking for :)
To me, that feeling is a fundamental warning that something is deeply wrong with the way we handle privacy in modern society.

It should be completely unacceptable that we have to worry about this.
FBI Rails Against Encryption – Redirects HTTP to HTTPS on Own Site
The FBI has been railing against encryption of most/all forms as-of late. However, it appears even their own website is using the dreaded encryption by forcing all HTTP connections to redirect into HTTPS:

http://www.fbi.gov --> https://www.fbi.gov
How the Amish are using the internet
Ask HN: How do you deal with your useless coworkers?
I'm sure you have all seen it... typically this sort of nice guy, even experienced, but who has a tendency to work little (but has countless interests which keep him browsing during work hours), who under-performs in every task, who shows zero initiative or interest in making anything better by himself (everything has to be asked from him explicitly and should be easy) and who, in short, adds little value to the project/company/team.

You can't let go this guy even if that would be the best. You're not the boss, you're just a colleague who wants to help him (and yourself), because he's there to stay.

How would you help transform this sort of coworker into an asset that helps the team?
Many users did flag it—understandably, since it's an unsubstantive hit piece. The flags killed the post, but we unkilled it so people can continue to post comments here if they want to.
Pulling on the seatbelt doesn't seem complicated enough to call it a "procedure". Now maybe if they'd said "And inspect the retaining plate while applying the force, if the retaining place moves less than 1.5mm, then you car is not affected", well that would count as a procedure. It's just a quick way to give customers some peace of mind while they wait for an appointment.
First, this is an extremely naive view as to what goes into training an astronaut to be sent into space. It's not like we just plucked four random people from the globe and are sending them to space. These are people who are very likely at the top of their fields, have gone through rigorous (and costly) training, and are going up to do very specific jobs. These people are not a "dime a billion", and claiming so is the same as saying that if Elon Musk were to disappear today, that any other person could simply take his place and keep moving his companies forward.

Second, just because there are negative aspects in the world that cause loss of life, doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing everything we can to ensure a safe flight. This is unrelated to the cost aspect mentioned in my first point, but the average person living in the U.S.A is only living as comfortable as they are because modern civilization, for the most part, values safety quite high. It's a poor argument to say "Well X people died yesterday, so we shouldn't care so much about the 4 that might die in a launch".
The abort system for the Dragon capsule provides 4.5G of acceleration (human dragon space flight will not reach 5G, don't mix in cargo launches, irrc SpaceX said that the nominal max acc. for human flight will be below 3G similar to an STS launch) and it does kinda abort side ways, as soon as it clears the main rocket it tilts and gets the heck out of the way because it's quit important to be as far away from the rocket as possible in case it explodes (also to prevent any chance of rocket derby catching with the capsule during decent) and out-running it upwards isn't a possible in the long run.
>I still don't believe what improvement it brings and if those outweigh possible privacy and security implications.

It's tragic that this is true, because the benefits of this sort of tech to individuals could be huge, game changing. For this to get cut off at the knees because we live in a world where our privacy is not respected is infuriating.
Exactly, the false ceiling is designed to absorb sound. If you remove that the space is nothing but a concrete echo chamber.
Of course we are. The tricky question is when. Here is an indicator with a decent historical track record which says not yet: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RECPROUSM156N
Glad it didn't get over 40%. I'd hate to be creatively analyzing all of my writing or speech trying to guess if someone might take offence in a million different ways. Burden should be on them to grow up and accept people will have opinions they don't like.

Very good illustration here:

http://jokes2go.com/poems/5205.html
The market for computers is obvious now because there is a market for computers.

The market for computers 40 years ago was far from obvious. Even 25 years ago, most people weren't really sure if this whole internet thing was going to amount to much. 15 years ago, people scoffed at the idea that the future of the internet was mobile phones.

Predictions are hard. Especially about the future.
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586661
Thought ethereum was basically the BTC protocol under the hood?
The difference between such a ballistic trajectory (1/5th of escape velocity) and LEO is huge.

>you don't need to scale "go fast rocket" up by that much

My napkin math says you need at least 2 orders of magnitude more fuel mass which classifies as "a lot"
Those numbers would be interesting to see.
The traffic estimation sites online peg whitehouse.gov at around 3m monthly visitors as well.
You are making the appeal to common practice fallacy. Even if human death (or sacrifice) is a common occurrence, it does not make it acceptable.
Worst case scenario:

People will be getting screened earlier and earlier. They will be told they have a horrible disease but there is nothing they can do about it because it is too expensive. The mortality rates from the major killers like heart disease and cancer will drop. This will not be a good sign though. The mortality rates from suicide and poisoning from attempts at self medication will rise. The deaths will just be moved from one to the other category, giving the false appearance of effective and safe treatments.
That's how I look at it. Those of us who cherish freedom are winning. :)

In a survey but not the country as a whole... (sighs)
Silicon Valley finally goes global – good for some but not others
As soon as you create non-linearities in DSP you have to oversample to avoid aliasing. In fact it's usual in DSP distortion circuits to oversample by a factor of at least 4 or 8. (I"ve seen some devs use 256X oversampling...)

I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't also be needed in an LTspice model. You can do distortion without it, but if you sample at 22k you're guaranteed to get that harsh halo around the midrange and high end that digital is famous for.

Analog circuits don't have the same problem, because anything out-of-band simply gets rolled off. Unlike a digital system analog doesn't have a Nyquist limit beyond which frequency components reflect back, so a physical circuit should always sound smoother.
I think the change in proportion of news devoted to startups is at least partially driven by changes to business journalism and business in general. Covering startups as startups is much more common in mainstream business journalism. Culturally, "startup" has become associated with a larger cluster of concepts than it was five years ago and it is not surprising when I see a new small business referred to as a startup. A few years ago, 10 Strategies for Marketing my Startup would be more likely to fall in the intersection of useful and actionable and interesting. These days the level of general knowledge about startups is higher (e.g. Altman's Stanford class and recent handbook). There was a time when "growth hacking" was an HN "trending topic". Today, we live in a time where it's been dissected and found to be a poor fit for a startup's core business strategy.

The third factor is that I think the standards of HN have become higher. Many of the VC blogs that used to make the front page look a bit flat compared to today's median...it used to be that the the 200-500 word daily thoughts and opinions of "important" people made the front page despite lacking supporting evidence. These days that seems less common.
You've been posting comments that break the Hacker News guidelines. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that.

Temper runs high and patience is thin when it comes to questions like this, so it's understandable when people boil over—but it also breaks the rules of this site, which are there for good reason. Please don't post comments unless they are civil and substantive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Just so we're absolutely clear, I can choose my own doctors. GP's, specialists, dentists, and even a Homeopath!; if I don't like 'em, I can find another, and all on the NHS. I think, in fact, I have more choice than Americans--don't you have to go to whomever your HMO tells you to use? Also, your Canadian neighbours to the north get to choose their doctors.
There was a great NOVA episode on this, although (to me) their website search makes it hard to find:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/why-did-homo-nal...
​We Made a Twitter Bot to Predict the Future
Questions for the Next Design Revolution