bugsbunnyak
Re:Recasting Silicon Valley’s role in society
on Monday July 25, 2016 @10:08AM (#12158747)
> Both of these served to discover the real market value of things
- Airbnb served to discover that someone always pays the cost of negative externalities.
- Uber served to discover the above, plus that in an environment with low interest rates and significant underemployment, a company can run losses indefinitely while paying peanuts. Calculate the net wage next time you take an Uber, accounting for their cut, depreciation, and a (generous) 75% utilization. That's only feasible at a loss while using funny money to pay desperate people. The Uber app is excellent, credit them for that. They were in the right place and time and executed very well on mobile+geolocation. But they've discovered nothing about market value.
(not interested in the "blah, blah, AI, logistics company" magical thinking. People who say that have short positions in Uber. Uber is Twitter: they could have been a profitable mid-size company making an excellent living selling all sorts of mobile service provisioning; in a capital crunch they cannot afford to pay drivers a market-clearing wage and pay back their over-inflated expectations)
Re:Why U.S. Infrastructure Costs So Much
on Tuesday May 17, 2016 @05:12PM (#11717477)
If a Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee presidency would change your opinion on federal control of education, perhaps you should reevaluate the underlying principles.
What ISIS Really Wants
Re:Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @01:12PM (#8887953)
This. 1000 times this. It's not even about automated diagnosis. The software used by most radiologists is more than two decades behind the state of the art, lacking even basic image registration and segmentation capabilities. (source: I've worked with radiologists who review brain images at several tier-one, top-10 hospitals).
If you are lucky, some eager, tech-savvy resident will use 3D Slicer or OsiriX on their personal laptop to coregister and segment images, and do longitudinal volumetric comparison. But those basic tools are not available on the platforms used to read most images.
Major vendors are trying to catch up, but from what I've seen, demand (and thus willingness to invest) is surprisingly limited.
Re:New Startup Raises $100M for Portable Ultrasound
on Monday November 03, 2014 @07:24AM (#8550435)
Because she may not be the one actually making that "choice", and even if she is directly, it is made under massive cultural duress?
Re:The Passing of the Indians Behind Glass
on Tuesday September 23, 2014 @09:58AM (#8355327)
Excellent policy: now non-indigenous sub/urbanites can learn about indigenous history from `Pocahontas` and `Dances with Wolves` instead.
Re:The Man Who Will Build Google’s Quantum Computer
on Friday September 05, 2014 @10:30AM (#8274032)
Don't be daft. It might be possible to take you seriously if anyone, ever, had made the same complaint about an article entitled "The Woman Who Will XYZ". In fact, such articles are celebrated as encouraging more STEM awareness and participation by women, providing positive role models, and other benefits -- which I fully support.
Re:Find salaries paid at companies using foreign worker data
on Wednesday September 03, 2014 @03:35PM (#8264857)
this web site ( http://visadoor.com/ ) has been blocked because it has been determined by Web Reputation Filters to be a security threat to your computer or the corporate network.
Indeed!
Re:MIT And Dropbox Alums Launch Inbox, a Next-Generation Email Platform
on Monday July 07, 2014 @03:35PM (#8000864)
AGPL with Contributor License Agreement, just to be crystal clear.
Re:Netflix responds to Verizon
on Tuesday June 10, 2014 @12:37PM (#7873595)
I am continually surprised that Netflix has failed to play any real hardball. Seed (ie: astroturf) a class-action lawsuit against Verizon for breach of contract. Make a big PAC donation to the attorney general in a consumer-friendly state like Washington or Massachusetts and let the dogs run. Get the city council of a largish and liberal locale like Seattle to consider a municipal internet service. Heck, cut off service to Verizon subscribers the day House of Cards comes out.
Re:OkCupid/IAC Employees Donated Thousands to Anti-Gay Marriage Politi...
on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @06:25PM (#7512186)
Sex-selective abortion is abhorrent, but it's not at all unbelievable. The others are mostly hypothetical - for now - but amniocentesis and genetic testing for specific diseases is a very real thing, and the steady march of GWAS means we will have the rest soon enough.
Re:OkCupid/IAC Employees Donated Thousands to Anti-Gay Marriage Politi...
on Tuesday April 01, 2014 @06:05PM (#7512065)
Abortion ban: government-imposed restrictions on the right to terminate genetically-undesirable fetuses. Which of these criteria should not be allowed: Gender? Height? Lack of physical strength? How about, say, statistically-probable homosexuality?
All is not as it seems when you change the optics (edited, restored).
Re:Silicon Valley Isn’t a Meritocracy
on Monday November 25, 2013 @02:42PM (#6796391)
> in our country's cabinet
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/20120730-cabin...
Re:Another Ortiz case
on Saturday January 19, 2013 @07:02PM (#5085360)
Since apparently I can't reply at that depth:
10th: there is no Federal interest here. Any assertion of justification by nexus would be laughable: these crimes are by users and end-sellers. If the US attorney had evidence of an ongoing interstate operation then they ought to bust that, not the hotel.
5th: I find it hard to describe "heads I win, tails you lose" as due process. If they had not gained outside support, fighting this suit would bankrupt them. I realize that there is no ideal solution to that quandary, but as a result we must prosecutorial discretion to a very high standard.
Re:Another Ortiz case
on Saturday January 19, 2013 @06:44PM (#5085286)
Re:'We thought we'd sell 1,000': The inside story of the Raspberry Pi
on Thursday January 17, 2013 @09:58PM (#5076801)
I've been looking for a way to get around this for some ADC chips I'd like to use in a one-off. Proto-vantage SMD-to-DIP boards look great for that, if slightly spendy; Radioshack even sells a few varieties.
Re:Wolfram Alpha Needs an Open Source Version
on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @06:03PM (#5063731)
Wasn't that NKS?
Seriously though, he did seem open to the idea of at least partially open-sourcing Mathematica during a recent AmA: http://sx.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/qisot/im_stephen_wolfra...
Re:Prosecutor as bully
on Saturday January 12, 2013 @05:08PM (#5049089)
How much would it cost to run a full-page ad near the front of The New York Times and Boston Globe, and some local tv ads in Boston? A targeted media campaign and the resulting echoes could easily put a stop to any political aspirations (I'm thinking 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper, and the like).
Re:Explaining Windows 8 PC Sales Over the Holidays
on Saturday January 05, 2013 @03:10PM (#5013863)
I am a little puzzled because the two Best Buy stores close to my house were seemingly sold out of almost every Win8 laptop after Christmas. Though I suppose this could be explained as Best Buy reading the tea leaves well and intentionally understocking.
Re:Sikuli: Write scripts using GUI buttons and screenshots
on Monday December 24, 2012 @11:30PM (#4965076)
+1. Sikuli was a dream find a few months ago when I had to upload 100s of images for a rater survey to a locked-down LimeSurvey instance (no ftp allowed). 20 minutes and I had a functioning script that pushed all of the upload buttons and paste the next filename in sequence.
Re:Ask HN: What languages and technologies/tools are you using right now?
on Sunday December 09, 2012 @01:06PM (#4895364)
> Dislin (Looking for a replacement, since it's a real pain to use)
Have you tried MayaVi?
Re:Apple - Think Twice
on Monday December 03, 2012 @01:52PM (#4867097)
I bought it specifically for the quadro 2000, for volume-rendering and cuda. Thanks for the heads-up, I didn't realize the W series was created post-IBM.
Re:Apple - Think Twice
on Monday December 03, 2012 @11:44AM (#4866254)
Sadly, Lenovo cannot be relied on as they once were (even for the first few years post-IBM). My W520 has been to warranty depot three times - still not fixed - for this problem that has been known for 1.5 years:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s...
I'm still using, and loving, my T61P. If only there was a way to get an i5 or i7 in that lovely reliable chassis :(
Re:Sputnik – Dell’s Ubuntu-based developer laptop is here
on Friday November 30, 2012 @12:17AM (#4851966)
"Productivity Software" page in the customization dialog. A large banner displays "MS Office - Get tools to express ideas and solve problems with full functionality". However (obviously) there is no possibility to actually select MS Office! Just odd/bemusing oversight.
Re:Sputnik – Dell’s Ubuntu-based developer laptop is here
on Thursday November 29, 2012 @09:33PM (#4851549)
Kind of odd that they have a Microsoft Office ad on the 2nd screen of the customization wizard... :/
Re:My open source cure for brain cancer
on Monday November 26, 2012 @12:30AM (#4830726)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICOM
Essentially all modern medical scanners export data in this format.
This fantastic site will let you view (after upload) DICOM images in a web browser:
There are a number of accessible (ie not clinical radiology priced) viewers available, the best of the lot for general use being Osirix [1] (OS X only), and ClearCanvas [2] (Windows only). Ginkgo CADx [3] and Mint viewer [4] are also good, and both cross-platform.
There are several well-regard open-source libraries for DICOM: gdcm [5] and DCMTK [6]. Widely used open-source medical image visualization SDKs with DICOM support include MITK [7] and 3D Slicer [8] (the afore-mentioned ClearCanvas is also an SDK in some sense).
[edit: formatting and add link]
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OsiriX
2. http://www.clearcanvas.ca/dnn/
4. http://www.mint-medical.de/
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDCM
Re:HP takes a $8.8 billion writeoff, alleging Autonomy accounting fraud
on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @08:41AM (#4808925)
I thought this sounded familiar - AlexMuir called it:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902749
and score one for Larry Ellison: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051730
Re:The Nuclear Scientist Who Skipped College
on Friday November 09, 2012 @09:24AM (#4762890)
His website:
http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Welcome.html
As speculated, he did indeed build a fusor: http://sciradioactive.com/Taylors_Nuke_Site/Neutron_Sources....
Re:The Retina MacBook Pro 13”
on Tuesday November 06, 2012 @08:58PM (#4751827)
No kidding:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s...
Already sent mine back once - mb and fan replaced, no change. Warranty service says they will replace the cpu next.
Avoid the W520.