skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why should Airbnb be making losses at this point?

Are they refunding booking fees to customers while paying hosts?

Traditional hotels lose money because of huge amount of, costs (both fixed and variable) associated with running a hotel.

shouldn't Airbnb be making so much money at this point?

Edit: "...at this point?" not in reference to the current pandemic, rather at this point of how far Airbnb has come and how they've become a household name all over the world.
Who would underwrite that at this moment?
This is fair. A lot of hotel groups have seen their revenue drop 75 to 90 percent. Airbnb was never profitable (I think) and this round of trip cancellations put them deeply in the red.
MIT's grad schools jettisoned GRE consideration a while ago. As you say, the
GRE quant is trivial by MIT's standards, and the GRE verbal largely
irrelevant.

It's fairly easy to spot the "heavy-hitters" just from recommendations,
undergraduate publication record, thesis, and GPA. In short, MIT and its elite
cohort (CMU, Caltech, etc.) only accept undergrads who found their way into
their professor's research groups -- this feat in and of itself is a superior indicator.
Yep. SAT Math II is all but worthless at this point. The middle 50% for top universities ranges from 800-800 (aka the max score).
You can ask your users to download a third party app like PushBullet, but that's very lame and unprofessional.
Standardized testing is a natural monopoly -- if you have every college making their own, it's a crazy duplication of work, will produce a lot of substandard tests, and will put tons of strain on the students. Might as well ask everybody to lay their own fiber.

ETS isn't perfect (I think the amount they charge for GRE-related stuff is sickening) but it at least does a good job of making sure the best prep resources possible are cheap or free.
Sadly Andrey Kolmogorov is dead. Because I'd loooove to see his face.

Fantastic, solid thanks for that, I love it for what it is.

Edit: technical question for audiologists. The underlying pulsing heartbeat of this track, which is most clear right at the start, has a kind of 'furry' quality to it. How is this done? I guess it's a sample of a ~60Hz sine wave but I'm just guessing.
No it doesn't. 99.999% of Americans aren't going to respond with violence if the national guard enforces a quarantine.

This is the most ridiculous fantasy a subset of HN users love to bring up, but there is just absolutely no chance that this happens in any meaningful way.
I think the OP was asking, why is income negative on any revenue (they lost in Q3/Q4 of FY19), what are the expenses that can't be covered?
I think it’s pretty insane that a single company is a gatekeeper to elite institutions.

I’m honestly not sure of the solution, but the problem is pretty evident. College Prep could raise exam fees by 200% tomorrow and you have no law, no oversight from the government or anything preventing them from doing so. Absolute monopoly.

They’re no different than professors in bed with book publishers, mandating a particular book for the course. Students need to spend $350 on a textbook is insanity.
Rainbird talks to Microsoft on capturing and amplifying human knowledge [video]
Ah I got my information from someone in the NRW area and it was about half a week ago, I just synced up with them today and they said things are changing, but it does seem like a rather late response. Was mostly a counterpoint to the statement that Germany is handling this well.
Until there's a double blind placebo trial I will take this type of report with a truck load of salt. We want randomized control trials in medicine. We want highly vetted research in medicine. Lacking either is a bad idea.

I am also not holding my breath about a vaccine. We tried making a vaccine with SARS-CoV with a significant amount of the animal models dying from cytokine storm after viral exposure. Drug trials are hard, but necessary.
It is all funny fake made up money anyway ... there is enough resources for everybody.
Building up herd immunity without overwhelming the hospital system would take years. Instead we need to prevent spread as much as possible while testing is ramped up. Once we have free, fast, widespread testing, we can remove restrictions without risking new outbreaks, because new cases will be caught quickly.
You're not wrong but I think that's due to how much of university is based around timed tests. The artificial difficulty is maddening. I was fortunate that my school's disability office had fangs and that the maths program wasn't super competitive and wanted students to learn more than get marks.

My favorite professor was teaching number theory and always scheduled his classes for the end day and gave unlimited time for exams. Every time I would sit there for at least 5 hours (which wasn't super uncommon) and it was the nicest thing to not be freaking out and trying to force myself to focus.
This is the biggest government intervention in the UK economy since WW2, by far. These are interesting times.
NYSE owner defends stock sales by Senator Loeffler and her husband, the NYSE CEO
They should have been developing more than one test anyway. This reduces the risk of failure, and if you get multiple working tests, it allows some cross-checking to reduce false results. Failure to diversify is also mismanagement (though clearly more money can help you try more things).
This is a good recent summary for non-lawyers https://thedispatch.com/p/the-police-power-of-the-states-to
These type of "save lives" things tend to have bipartisan support so you can ram through any laws needs fairly fast. Very much doubt any politician will be caught on the wrong side of such a vote
Unfortunately this isn’t true. A massive amount of debt is going to be racked up in this time. The economic impacts are not immediate, but they will come.
A.4: I think you're a bit too literal here. A subscriber shouldn't affect the publisher other than by subscribing, and by the tiny bit of time it takes to be called.

Why those two exceptions? Because those two exceptions are mandatory in the publish/subscribe model. You can't escape them and do publish/subscribe. But the claim is, a subscriber shouldn't do anything beyond that, and that is actually a useful and important claim.

A subscriber shouldn't send data back to the publisher via the return value of a subscribed message, still less via reference parameters. A subscriber shouldn't affect the publisher's performance by taking too long to handle one of the messages. There may be other ways as well.

D.5: There's a difference between theory and practice. If the system is good in theory but bad in practice, then theory will not tell you so. Only practice can tell you.

You can, based on that practice, create an improved theory. That theory will tell you what a good system should look like... in theory. In practice, such a system may still be bad, just in a different way from the previous system. Again, you need practice to tell you this, not theory.
Great question. But, at a company in the past that I worked at, they just took a gamble and hoped they wouldn't have to pay it out. Morals aside, simpler times.
@Kye - After seeing the crap that comes on the History Channel, I don't know if I can trust anything anymore. National Geographic might just become National Geothermal Signatures of Alien Presence... But that's just my ignorance of NG speaking.
The world just got caught completely flat footed by a virus that's closely related to the seasonal flu. I shudder to think what will happen when something 1000 times more novel and deadly inevitably comes along.
Is there not an argument that given chloroquine's apparent efficacy, albeit statistically weakly or improperly demonstrated (so far), along with its long history of relative safety in anti-malarial prophylaxis (with known caveats), set against an exponential growth in dangerous pneumonia - it is therefore rational to want to at least offer it to all suspected cases and healthworkers in balance of the serious risks they face?
It is called quarantine, and yes they do, under certain circumstances.
More that thirty. I can never read online as well as I can with a paper book. Even just printing out a two-page article.
Very true. The entire EU also failed to co-operate during this crisis. And I fear that it will have a very adverse long-term effect on the EU as an institution. It was shown that in times of crisis, each country is alone. Sadly.
This makes more sense for me than sending $1000 checks to people who still have a job.
It's a slight improvement over 1900-1920.
There is a bizarre consequence that you have to remember all the phone numbers you want to dial or keep a paper contact book with you as well.

Relatedly, how many of you remember a bunch of phone numbers from your childhood. I can recite my best friend's home phone number, my home phone number from childhood, my dad's old office number, and my mom's cell number - despite all but 1 of those numbers having not been valid for 16 years.

Yet ask me to recite any phone number from when I got a cell phone onwards and I only know my own cell number and my wife's because I have to give them to other people or fill them into forms.

I wonder if these childhood phone numbers will continue to be retained / recitable when I'm much older.
i am still speculating that they manufactured the virus as a way to curb their elderly population. lots of people i come in contact with are saying the same thing. its a little too coincidental that this virus is dangerous to mostly the elderly.
I like Nate Silver's take on this:

"Like every single person here thinks coronavirus will change the world in ways that either (i) they personally like or (ii) reaffirm their longstanding critique about American culture and society."
Money distribution needs to be prioritized right now. People who live “paycheck to paycheck” are on two-week cycles. If the bills keep coming but the income stops, we will have problems.
I do wonder if it would be easier and cheaper to bite the bullet and move to a universal basic income. This situation cold be going on for years.
Why would they be making lots of money when their business is tanking? Their reservations have more than halved, so that's a huge drop in revenue without much if a drop in costs (unless they fire half their workforce and walk away from half of their office leases).
Cats just wants to be our friends (toxoplasma Gondii).
Please donate them to a hospital or senior living facility.
>People owning multiple houses to rent out to vacationers that people would like to actually live in doesn't upset me at all.

If people buying houses to rent on Airbnb artificially inflated the housing market

net-net : is n't both the same?
What you call a "smooth-talker" is what someone else would call an articulate, socially well-adjusted person who can communicate their values and opinions in an intelligent way and who is comfortable making connections with others. Perhaps if this was the standard college admissions used, public schools would have more incentive to educate students as functional humans rather than test-taking drones.
Computing Kevin Bacon Six Degrees of Separation
Colleges have lost their monopoly on education but still hold the monopoly on accreditation. If we can figure out how to reduce that latter monopoly colleges will lose a lot of their power
Is WeWork still worth something ... guess co-working is a bum idea right now.
There seems to be a really obvious explanation of why they rolled their own test instead of using the WHO's test: there was no WHO test when they did it, the two different tests were developed in parallel (and they're not the only country which developed their own test either, there are something like seven different ones used in various countries). The CDC had already been using its own test internally when the WHO announced the alternative German one they'd been using. Then when the CDC test didn't work when rolled out to labs, it's not like the WHO could have supplied them with testing kits instead. The CDC would have had to produced the WHO-designed test itself, verified it worked, arrange for it to be mass produced, and hope that the same problem didn't happen - all whilst their test rollout was massively delayed by essentially starting from scratch. Most of the media just doesn't seem to be interested in explaining this.
> Those studies were mostly funded and influenced by the college board, and they needed that to be true, so that’s what they found.

The SAT draws a huge amount of overtly hostile attention. So does SAT prep. But these highly motivated SAT-hostile researchers haven't been able to produce the results they need.
The bribery scandal especially depresses me, because a lot of the colleges impacted had official bribery systems in place -- you're supposed to donate to the "Development Office" to get on the "Dean's List", or some other set of euphemisms. What the colleges were actually outraged about is that these middling-rich people tried to cheap out by paying a smaller bribe to some other office.
They employ a lot of people and have office space. Any big company has a large amount of fixed costs that will drag you under when income dries up.
You'd probably have the same issue with a slow cooker, as the walls still get pretty hot, but an immersion circulator should do the trick.
The shareholders pay taxes. First quarterly due date is (was) April 15.
Please stop spreading FUD. That's not even close to a close pass. From the linked article:

> At its closest approach, which will happen at about 5:56 a.m. EDT (0956 GMT), asteroid 1998 OR2 will be 3.9 million miles (6.3 million km) from Earth. That's more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.
I used to use mm@disney.com (Mickey or Minnie Mouse)as a fake email.
I wonder if the global debt levels will start the next wars. At some point one of the bigger countries will not be able or willing to serve its debt and who knows what will happen then?
What you’re getting at is the government creates these types of monopolies due to massive regulations and licensing.

The issue is not with the college prep companies. It’s with government getting involved in education, making it way more expensive than it should be. The free market will drive prices down, especially in the education market.
Got UDP send down to 800nanoseconds blocking calls for small payloads on solarflare cards using efvi
Related:

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

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxHTM1FYxeC4F7xDsBVltGg

https://www.wimhofmethod.com/

Disclaimer: I'm not that saying Wim Hof isn't contraversial -- just submitting this because I find him and his method interesting, that's all...
Yeah... America is a big and weird place, and has large swatches of people who deeply distrust the police or the government for some reason or another. And literally everyone is already on edge.

My neighborhood might comply, but there's a real risk that police state tactics would lead to massive social unrest, rioting, and total economic collapse in pockets across the country. If anyone thinks this is impossible, may I refer you to the 1960's.

On the other hand, what the authoritarian minded commenters seem to miss is how powerful social pressure and distributed decision making can actually be.
How to Increase Productivity on Your Side Project
> It's kind of frightening to think of the broader economic impact it would have on the whole real estate market if Airbnb went belly up.

Oh I (living in Munich) hope for AirBnB going belly up. This will free a LOT of apartments back to normal rental markets. The rental markets won't be "hit" at all, the landlords will only lose the difference between "30 days of rent at AirBnB prices" and "30 days of rent at market value".

The winners will be those priced of their own home cities by hipsters and the neighbors of current AirBnBs who don't have to suffer from people running, essentially, illegal hotels in their houses - with people abusing apartments for sex orgies/porn sets, mass parties, or simply losing their keys and mashing on the doorbells.
This is another article seems to be written by someone who has deep knowledge about this topic.

https://emcrit.org/pulmcrit/split-ventilators/

Continuous mandatory ventilation (CMV) is required, however it is necessary to accept permissive hypercapnia.
I was a child of the 80s, and while I agree the Math "Level 2" was a cakewalk,
getting an 800 on Chem was definitely something to write home about. I get
that scaling may have changed in the past thirty years, but still!
Theoretically, it’s less than the cost of letting everything fall apart for 2 months of pausing business.
A good basic sanity check is to look at the log-graph of total cases in any given country, not the whole world.

Take Italy for example. You’ll see immediately the growth is not a constant exponent. Nor would even simple theoretical models expect it to be. It’s a logistics curve, or “S” curve, which means the exponent starts out at the highest value (once it takes off) and then is constantly decreasing over time.

What that looks like in the logarithmic charts is a line which starts at a high slope and flattens over time.

See, for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
Airbnb and VRBO have similar revenues (~2.6 billion). So im not sure the hosts will be out of options, but you aren't wrong that a ton of mortgages could be foreclosed due to the lack of revenue for hosts for the foreseeable future
You need a UBI on a level that allows people to live. That’s a lot of money. Better to extend unemployment benefits for a limited time.
You might be onto something. We've hit the trifecta of health crisis, faltering economies and bars closing their doors except now we've got smartphones and air conditioning.
Not quite. Toilet paper has been sold out for a week now.
I've been using pianobar which is a Pandora CLI and has an emacs package. It's pretty neat and I have Pandora, but this really looks cool and maybe better. I'd like to give it a shot.

https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar

https://github.com/agrif/pianobar.el
I see creation of a vaccine very differently to production of one of a range of existing ventilators.

There are many companies using things like 6D CNC machines with high accuracy that can essentially spit out a part for which there's a definition (and we can 3D scan parts to micrometer accuracy with laser scanners); many electronics companies can make "any" circuit to some extent (I'm guessing ventilators use generic components, some circuits might be generic - like valve controllers, whatever, certainly display controllers I'd expect to be generic). Parts like keys, cases, outside the gas flow/control path are probably injection moulds that factories could pop out a million of within a week (once the dies are duplicated).

A skilled grill worker takes a while to train, but any grill worker given McDo's recipe could make you a functioning BigMac in an hour. I'm not asking for a new product to be designed (one effort - opensourceventilator.ie - are doing exactly that, making a modified BVM system).

Still looks like production could produce output in weeks rather than months.
I don’t think that’s frightening at all. A bunch of rent seekers lose everything, and everyone else wins. This practice should be, and in some places is, illegal.
I can't even figure out the genre anymore - political drama shifted into a medical procedural, now we're going to end in a full on disaster movie? Pick a lane people.
That simply isn’t true, eg see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

The College Board can’t really have it both ways. And of course: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-...

Which is just one example of pulling out all the stops.
I use a mortar and pestle, if I can't grind the beans at my local supermarket.
Preparing for the Next Pandemic 2005 [pdf]
The possible side effects include permanent blindness.

Giving this drug to people while you simply don't know if it does any good is only justifiable if you do it within a properly designed clinical trial. Which is the thing you should do. If you feel lots of people should get this drug - do a large trial. Will give us better data.
Some virology experts already said mother nature is way better at this type of thing than we could ever be.
So, I think this is the most frustrating part of living in this political era. I did start this off with "funding", but it wasn't just funding, it was cutting qualified staff. It's that even the best qualified staff aren't moving fast enough or adapting and looking at cases beyond our own borders. Even in a reduced regulation environment, the FDA is likely hampering response time.

The US has regressed to an early 19th century model of government (loosely federated) at a time we're more tightly coupled than we ever have been due to moderinity.
> The core point here is that all summary statistics are misleading. You need to be clear on what you care about

I couldn't agree more. A few months ago I gave a talk that tried in part to emphasize this point (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG7Zhd6gLiw). mjb, I hadn't seen your post until just now but I wish I'd known about it earlier.

Another hard-earned lesson on many teams I've worked with is that humans just aren't very good at judging the variance that's intrinsic to many [summary] statistics. Even when your system is operating in what a human would consider a steady-state, summary statistics are naturally going to bounce around a bit over time. The variance is often higher for tail percentiles just because the density of the PDF is lower in that region. When faced with a question like "did the behavior of my system get worse?" in response to an external change (such as a config change, a code deploy, a traffic increase, etc.), it can be difficult to come up with a reliable answer just by eyeballing a squiggly time series line.
An Introduction to the Fourth Dimension
I think you're a bit too narrow in your definition. If an abstraction specifies properties, but I have to care about more than those properties to be able to use the abstraction, then the abstraction leaked.

Performance can be one of those things I have to care about.
Coronavirus: Putting an End to Received Ideas
It seems coronavirus denialism is widespread in the same demographics that espouse climate change denialism.
Why don't they borrow given we're at 0 percent rates?
unless you're an emerging market largely tied to financials through the US dollar. then you're looking at some serious trouble, especially if you're not food-independent.
>> Until there's a double blind placebo trial I will take this type of report with a truck load of salt.

You're welcome to. The remainder of the world should have the choice. Some people can't - or don't - want to wait for an RCT with a sample size in the thousands before taking a cheap and well-known drug with well-tolerated side effects.
Absolutely! I have a lot more faith in grad admissions than undergrad, because there's so much more good signal. Unfortunately nothing like this is available when people are in high school.
Coronavirus and Internet Outages: Telecom Services Having Issues
This just goes to show, "truth is stranger than fiction".

If someone had tried to make a movie that showed the true events of 2020, people would think it's ridiculously unrealistic.
Preventing Pandemics by Living on Toroidal Planets
Filthy lucre: Paper money shunned for fear of virus spread
Ars talks Civilization with the man himself: Sid Meier (2019)
Good, I was just saying Q1 2020 has been pretty boring so...
Yesterday's paper from the COVID-19 hospital in China mentioned chloroquine. They use it, but only in a few specific situations.