This is kind of interesting. It would be more interesting to know how that misperception has changed over time. I suspect that at any given time half of people wouldn't correctly guess whether the S&P was up or down.

2. Witness the explosion of enrollment in low-quality colleges and universities.

3. Notice the spillover effect of (2) into every corner of higher education, in the form of higher tuitions everywhere.

4. Watch as (2) leads to ludicrous debt burden on college grads.

5. Wring hands about out-of-control cost of college, leading to higher demand for loans.

Rinse and repeat year after year.

What would happen if federal student loans were phased out across the board?

The author never states the question. This makes it impossible to evaluate the answer, which presumably is stated in the title. The article would be much stronger with a clear statement of the perceived problem that microservices solve and why modules are a superior solution.

1. This doctor is widely-described as a pathologist. So it seems unlikely he would have developed any cancer treatments as a lead investigator.

2. It's much more likely he was part of a team that developed treatments, and that his was a supporting role.

3. A quick glance at Google Scholar indicates work on multiple approaches to melanoma treatment that Scolyer had some kind of role in. The article doesn't say which one was used.

4. There is no "cancer-free" in glioblastoma. Pieces of the tumor always remain after surgery, waiting to grow back. This is part of the reason there is no cure.

5. MRI cannot detect remnants as in (4).

6. Median survival is roughly 12-15 months, so being alive at this point is not in itself much of an indication of success. Three years would be more interesting. Even three years of "clean" MRIs would be more interesting.

This story keeps getting trotted out, and the journalists doing it fail to acknowledge these points. It's an extraordinarily complex disease that does not lend itself to feel-good stories. If it does get squashed into that box anyway, the result is misleading at best.

Strangely enough, the same thing can be said about cars, and even software.

I get that HN comments tend to dismiss Bitcoin. But the fact that for the fourth time this pay cut has happened without a hitch speaks volumes to what makes Bitcoin interesting: It's a rare combination of economic incentives and technology that keeps chugging. Nobody can stop it. And it's extremely resistant to change. It requires no governmental approval. All attempts at subversion or interference have failed. There aren't many systems that come close to that kind of record.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawi...

How would you salvage the article to actually explain the "double" part in detail? Could you do it purely from Bob's (or Alice's) perspective?

This is even a major point of discussion in the book. The incumbents always see it coming a mile away. They can't respond because doing so breaks their business model. Employees can't go to managers and say, "We need to enter this low-margin market for low-end products." Doing so is a good way to get sidelined or fired.

The "dilemma" is that either traditional option, compete with the upstarts or move further up-market, leads to the same outcome - death.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843151

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39828983

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

> It’s a dramatic exodus that comes less than 18 months after Stability’s 2022 fundraise that valued the company at $1 billion. Now, the company is facing a cash crunch, with spending on wages and compute power far outstripping revenue, according to documents seen by Forbes. Bloomberg earlier reported that the company was spending $8 million a month. In November 2023, CEO Emad Mostaque tweeted that the company had generated $1.2 million in revenue in August, and would make $3 million in November. The tweet was later deleted.

This sounds a lot like the two-year period leading up to the dot com crash. Insane valuations and no revenue model. Meanwhile those insanely-valued companies bought Sun Microsystems servers like there was no tomorrow. When the games ended, a lot of those insanely-valued companies went to zero and left a massive overhang of Sun hardware in their wake. Sun began its long nosedive not long after that.