Hacker News Reader

jerryhuang100on We Don’t Need More Blood Tests

the article and most comments here are more about EH's VISION of empowering regular people for cheap and on-demand blood tests. but the major problems the regulatory bodies, medical practioners and diagnostics experts have are mostly about theranos' underlining TECHNOLOGY, its basic SCIENCES and daily lab PRACTICES. to this date none of these three has been established at theranos (non-peer-reviewed, non-core patents, criticized by cms & fda w/ banning threats). in short, it just does not work (yet?)

it's like someone always talk about building beautiful resorts or gigatic mining operations on Mars, but fails to develop rocket propulsion systems or space travelling vehicles. if there would be other someone to bring us to Mars, it must be elon musk.

jerryhuang100on A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

in a way i'm not sure why there is still no parents or students complaining they're kind of being 'defrauded' for a chatbot while paying high tuition (cue discover card tv ad.) one thing for sure is that there are a lot of undergrad or grad students around looking for a part-time job and teaching experience. i know this is a great achievement in AI with huge potential in open course, and great for grant application, but on the very other end is someone paying with an expectation of a human interaction & care. for years i've seen a lot of complaints about foreign human TAs.

jerryhuang100on How Breakfast Became a Thing

this article kind of lags for a while (at least several months) as in march 2015 Bloomberg business wk just ran a cover story of the declining cereal sales across the board:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-02-26/for-kellog...

and the last several paragraphs about "breakfast-denying" seem biased as there are more studies to support the importance of breakfast.

jerryhuang100on The seeds of the next housing crisis have been planted

the article lacks the major fuel of the current housing bubble in US/CA: the Chinese buyers. there is an estimated $500B capital outflow from China in 2015. guess a large part of that is in SF/BC/NYC/London real estate.

jerryhuang100on Visualizing Large-Scale and High-Dimensional Data

https://sites.google.com/site/pkujiantang/big-data-visualiza...

jerryhuang100on Grail: Pan-cancer blood screening test for circulating tumor DNA

i am surprised that neither in their job opening, or exec board or advisory board there's someone with specialization in gov regulation or legal matters (except an opening for dir. of IP).

jerryhuang100on Inside Palantir

that $18M per annum price tag is kind of steep. at that price, if a consortium of five companies pool their money together, they could have a joint venture of a "closed" consortium without sharing data with outsiders. the valuation the new joint venture would even be another unicorn, depending on the multiples you choose.

jerryhuang100on Nine years of censorship

> "Climate change is a fact. The causes are just theories based on computer models."

That's not what you said in your now flagged statement. You specifically said "Climate change is a theory." Your statements are just not consistent. 97% climate scientists agree that climate warming in the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. Numerous conferences have similar conclusions of that. There is even a Wikipedia page for that.

> "To say that it's a fact and needs no further study is not only anti-intellectual, it’s criminal."

I never said no more further study. Do not put your words in me. I specifically said bring your own data, your own evidence, your experiments. Where is your data???

> "I worked in academia for over a decade."

So where is the data? Maybe you're just lazy with a crazy theory.

> "Thw entire system needs to be scrapped and started over."

Hahahahaha, good luck with that. Just like a 5 yo crying for the system not fair. It's just another inconsistent statement. First you said you're in academia, which is part the whole system, right? Then you said the entire system need to be scrapped, that includes you. You're still part of that system even you're a system-reject. You're simply anti-social.

jerryhuang100on Nine years of censorship

THERE WAS NO LIFE AT HADEAN TIME, DUH.

jerryhuang100on Nine years of censorship

climate change is a fact, not a theory. just like earth is round as irregularly shaped ellipsoid, not flat. if you want to have an irrational theory against a fact, at least you should work on your evidences and experiments about your crazy theory to proof it, otherwise you're just lazy and crazy.

jerryhuang100on The Impact of Index Investing: A Follow-Up

“Yes, you need to diversify... mix your more established growth names–e.g., your Microsofts, your Intels, your Ciscos, your Yahoos, basically, the reliable blue chip stuff–with higher-risk bets–something like an Astroturf.com, or an Iomega, or a JDS Uniphase, that will offer high-powered upside if things work out for those companies. That will give your portfolio balance, without sacrificing growth."

It's really a joke for this portfolio from some TV gurus from that time around '99, as every "blue chip" companies on the list mostly worth significant lower in '16 from their '99-00 heights: >-50%+ INTC, CSCO, YHOO (not to mentions it's on the selling block). Maybe MSFT is an exception. Those high-risk bets? more like busts: astroturf (?, never heard of it), IOM (from $100 to $3.56 when acq'd by EMC), JDSU (from ~$300 to $6 as VIAV and $25 as LITE). I really do not see what growth in such portfolio.

This just reminds me the moment that Jim Cramer and other pundits on TV urging investors to buy and hold Lehman Brothers stocks before its fall in '08 "because it's too big to fail".

jerryhuang100on The Secret Culprit in the Theranos Mess Is the Tech Press

it's ironic that a supposed evidence-based medtech company lawyer-ed up on evidence-based reporting, especially at wsj. their lawyers should know better it's nearly impossible to stop journalists once they smell sh*t. so one of the explanations is that they just want to find the sources and plug the leaks.

jerryhuang100on Experienced Programmers Use Google Frequently

new series from 'O RLY':

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/vqUQ5

jerryhuang100on Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

some papers on that top 10 list are even free on the original publisher sites or ncbi (eg. nejm). so why getting them on sci-hub rather than from the original? ppl don't read supplements any more?

jerryhuang100on Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

so i guess my super super slow free-shipping orders (non-prime) from amzn as a result of their curbing capex?

jerryhuang100on Apple’s loudest activist investor just dumped his stake

stock markets are mostly mind games. cue warren buffett's fear-greedy quote.

jerryhuang100on Singapore Is Taking the ‘Smart City’ to a New Level

it's 1984 in the disguise of "smart city". it's much easier for the gov of Singapore to collect fines by ticketing smoking violations (smoke detector) or littering (motion detector), with cross-referencing your mobile phone meta-data. This could even be done by a bot, without a policeman even presented. it's much easier for the Sg gov to monitor opposition parties for illegal assembly of more than five people under its penal code. if someone tried to argue that giving away partial freedom to feel safe at night, try solitary confinement.

jerryhuang100on The Epic Rise of John D. Rockefeller

"To crush his competitors, Rockefeller would create a shortage of the railroad tank cars that transported oil. He’d then buy up all the barrels on the market so his competitors would have no place to store or ship their oil. He bought up all the available chemicals that were necessary to refine oil."

i thought it's common strategy played in AOE....

this post makes a great companion with another recent post about Uber on Lyft.

jerryhuang100on Theranos’s Fate Rests with a Founder Who Answers Only to Herself

drug studies (or medtech) might not need to be peer-reviewed, but their underlining principles / entity / mechanism are peer-reviewed as scientific discovery. T is totally not the case. in fact its claim for using tiny amount of blood for medical diagnostics and its clinical results are disputed and questioned by comparing to its peers in peer-reviewed journals.

jerryhuang100on Theranos’s Fate Rests with a Founder Who Answers Only to Herself

in medical/scientific realm, claims are peer-reviewed to be valid.

jerryhuang100on Theranos’s Fate Rests with a Founder Who Answers Only to Herself

i would argue that even by removing EH from the CEO role of T would not save T as:

1) its core technology is basically non-existed, non-proven, non-peer-reviewed and was never fully covered by its 20 or 30 something non-core patents. it seems its core tech is all inside EH's head.

2) their company machinery is not healthy enough that "could be run by a monkey" (quoting warren buffett, no offense to any one). even some guy hired by EH for their biochem had to killed himself.

3) EH is the only hub node for the vast politicians on its board and its political network.

jerryhuang100on Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

would it be valid to say G put more than $1B (657+280+145) in its R&D? that would be way ahead than most fed agencies including darpa for just 1 Q.

jerryhuang100on A Marriage Gone Bad: Walgreens Struggles to Shake Off Theranos

W put $50,000,000.00 in EH's T without doing due diligence. Normal people would even take a second look at the bowl before flushing the toilet.

jerryhuang100on A Marriage Gone Bad: Walgreens Struggles to Shake Off Theranos

it's incredible that Walgreen, a public co., not doing DD for a non-proven, non-peer-reviewed medical diagnostic co, with a possibility of very bad PR. i would guess (simply speculation) there are some external factors, made Walgreen to skip that. that's probably the whole point for the politicians on Theranos' board, along with the DC connections (& Enron?) from EH's dad. and these 'external factors' also played same tricks for the other PE funding rounds. so here we go a criminal investigation is under going.

jerryhuang100on Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

GOOG/GOOGL's 'other bets' revenue is more than doubled yoy, though they spent 27% more yoy ($657MM just for Q1!!) for their 'other bets' operation.

jerryhuang100on Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

This author clearly twists the words from that 2010 Nature report[1], as

1) That quote "Life would continue as before — or even better." is not even the conclusion in the Nature report. It's in the fifth paragraph of the first part out of the three part report. I guess this author just stopped here and failed to read the rest parts of the report for his conclusion?

2) The other two parts of the reports talk about the mosquito biomass and its impact to arctic tundra ecosystem, food chains and even cacao pollination.

3) The original author Janet Fang actually concluded the report by quoting entomologist Joe Conlon "If we eradicated them tomorrow, the ecosystems where they are active will hiccup and then get on with life." And the more important part is the next sentence: "Something better or worse would take over."

The key is that there is a high probability something worse would take over when you tried to mess Nature's arrangement in the past 100 million years abruptly. As noted by other HN user, Chairman Mao also thought getting rid of sparrows was really a good idea.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html

jerryhuang100on The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [pdf]

Cuneiform Tables vs 2013/2014:

http://imgur.com/IaiqCXX

jerryhuang100on A Visionary Project Aims for Alpha Centauri, a Star 4.37 Light-Years Away

Skepticism could be constructive. Most of time people just want to improve some novel idea in question format. If someone really do not care about it they would not even bother to raise a question.

I do want to raise my hand about how the sails is going to avoid space objects (meteoroid, space dusts... visible, non-visible, or even dark matters) given its large surface.

jerryhuang100on Artificial Intelligence Sheds New Light on the Origins of the Bible

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/04/05/1522200113.abst...

jerryhuang100on A Revolutionary Discovery in China

further illustrated here in Chinese:

http://www.wikiwand.com/zh-mo/%E7%AE%97%E8%A1%A8_%28%E6%B8%8...