Hacker News Reader

umeshunnion Electricity That Costs Nothing–Or Even Less? It's Happening More and More

Meanwhile, in California, PG&E charges you 50¢/kWh

umeshunnion A flight search engine that combines flights from different airlines? (2014)

Yes, you can think of Google flights as a scaled front end on top of the ITA data.

umeshunnion Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

Sadly the politics of the Bay Area has led to a crime wave and most people feel differently.

umeshunnion Judge dismisses majority of GitHub Copilot copyright claims

At that point, they might as well copy your original code without going through an LLM to do it

umeshunnion NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9

Ah, that makes sense.

umeshunnion NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9

That's for Crew 9, not the Starliner crew

umeshunnion The Story of the Successful Life and Abrupt Death of Flip Video Cameras

Apple added video recording to the iPhone 3GS.

umeshunnion Burners eat big losses in desperate race to sell unwanted Burning Man tickets

It hasn't been free since 1993.

umeshunnion NASA investigation finds Boeing hindering Americans' return to moon

Lack of adequate STEM education in US schools --> more liberal arts majors --> more MBAs --> low value for engineering fundamentals and higher value for financialization --> Oh crap, MBAs can't send stuff to space?

umeshunnion Japan cracks down on use of rideable electric suitcases amid tourist boom

Isn't that what a moped is?

umeshunnion Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer Returns to Google

At this point that valuation is almost certainly a mirage.

umeshunnion CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage

There are random news sites out there that have reported the name incorrectly.

e.g. https://fortune.com/2024/07/19/cloudstrike-microsoft-massive... https://www.standard.net/news/business/2024/jul/23/lessons-l...

Looks like a minority, though it's concerning that Fortune reported it with an incorrect name.

umeshunnion Why Italy Fell Out of Love with Cilantro

Article on Indian food before modern European contact:

https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-colum...

umeshunnion Social media is a likely cause of confusion in modern mate selection

hundred? Even ten generations (300ish years).

umeshunnion Unemployed for over two years

Lesson 1: if you have a story to share, don't use a paywalled product with a 99% bounce rate to share it.

umeshunnion London–Calcutta Bus Service

This particular one was a single bus. Looks like there were 30+ operators running similar services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_b...

umeshunnion Is Target selling its excess inventory on eBay and Poshmark?

A rare exception here:

> A Target spokesperson confirmed to Modern Retail that the company that runs the Bullseye Deals account does buy salvage merchandise from Target and sells it.

> Target doesn’t control this Bullseye Deals inventory, but it is aware that its reverse logistics partner is doing this.

umeshunnion Woman found with £2B in Bitcoin jailed

Looks like it's from some investment fraud

https://www.ft.com/content/60dd70f3-04f7-48fe-94ba-a34969ad7...

umeshunnion Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943)

I'm still confused

umeshunnion Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

You live here - you know that that the NIMBYs would never allow that. It took 20 years to run a power line to electrify Caltrain.

umeshunnion Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI

Source?

umeshunnion Meta Is Shuttering Workplace, Its Enterprise Version of Facebook

The $28M is monthly revenue.

umeshunnion Meta Is Shuttering Workplace, Its Enterprise Version of Facebook

> Workplace will be phased out over the next two years and will remain operational until the end of August 2025 > Workplace had as many as 7 million total paying subscribers in May 2021.

This is a suprisingly short period of time to shutter a paid service used by a large number of enterprises (and have them migrate to some other system and potentially lose data in the process).

umeshunnion Melinda Gates Resigns from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

I was wondering and found this in the article:

> The organization’s name will change to the Gates Foundation, with Bill Gates, her ex-husband and Microsoft founder, becoming the sole chair.

umeshunnion Tech startup connects to two satellites in orbit from Earth via Bluetooth

So it doesn't work?

umeshunnion Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

My favorite quote about journalists goes something like "Never trust a journalist's math. If they could do math, they wouldn't have become journalists."

umeshunnion Ozempic will disrupt big tobacco, candy companies, and alcohol brands

The actual report (not linked to by CNBC of course) says

The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies, particularly in certain diseases where it is possible to cure a large proportion of the prevalent patient pool (or at least prevent an additional dose from being required for an extended period). While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow. GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients. We highlight several potential solutions for these genome medicine companies to sustain an attractive profile. Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually. We estimate that the hemophilia A market currently represents ~$6.5bn, while hemophilia B is ~$1.2bn. Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe. It is the leading genetic cause of death in infants. SMA affects ~1 in 11k babies, and 1 in 50 individuals in the US is a genetic carrier. Cancer is also a sustainable market given the patient population is almost entirely incident driven. Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness). Once a gene therapy is approved for a genetic eye disease, the validated platform could be used to quickly develop many more eye-based gene therapies. Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets.

umeshunnion Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

You're right: https://www.linkedin.com/in/girish1/

umeshunnion How the internet became shit

It's the perfect example of the phenomenon they're describing.

umeshunnion How Amazon built an EV charging network in two years

Yup, but goes to show that money isn't enough.