Whenever there are layoffs of a major company, like half the comments here always bemoan the particular wording the article or company uses to describe the layoffs. It's a pointless exercise IMO (though I agree with you, ironically "firing" is less accurate than "let go").
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
Oh, even without looking into it, I would assume that Sircles is probably pretty dodgy. I just meant that SacToHacker's original points against it aren't necessarily bad. But can be damning in the context of their industry, yes!
> This is rather expensive for what looks like a home 3D printed toy with some cute software.
This attitude really rubs me the wrong way, especially on a site called Hacker News.
I think we absolutely should be supporting projects like this (if you think they're worth supporting), else all we're left with is giant corporation monoculture. Hardware startups are incredibly difficult, and by their nature new hardware products from small companies will always cost more than products produced by huge companies that have economies of scale and can afford billions of losses on new products.
So yes, I'm all for people taking risks with new hardware, and even if it doesn't have the most polished design, if it's doing something new and interesting I think it's kinda shitty to just dismiss it as looking like "a 3D printed toy with some cute software".
Hey it's fine to make a 3d printed camera and cool stuff like that. But it's another thing to make it a product, that isn't shipping yet and asking $399 with a shiny website and with closed source software.
I don't mean to disregard the technical feat, but I question the intent.
Check Ali for "shitty" minature key-ring C-thru packaged cameras that look just like this "3D printed toy with some cute software", going for $4.00, not $400!
>This attitude really rubs me the wrong way, especially on a site called Hacker News.
It's just that even in the realm of hardware by small teams built upon Pi boards this is very overprice and poor construction and cheap components for what it is.
Selling for $400 there are case solutions other than a cheap 3D print, and button choices other than the cheapest button on the market.
This isn't a hardware start-up, it's a software start-up using off the shelf consumer hardware to give their software product a home.
If it was a hardware start-up, the camera would be $80 built with custom purpose made hardware.
Once you decide to launch a hardware product composed of completed consumer hardware products, you are already dead. All the margin is already accounted for.
It would be cool if this was open source because looking at the pictured this is all off the shelf hardware. I am guessing only bespoke thing here is the stl for the case
As another comment mentioned, sodium ion batteries compete very poorly against lithium when portability is paramount.
But more on that point, it always struck me as bizarre that lithium was dominant in so many areas despite vastly different requirements. For home and grid storage, battery weight is almost immaterial, while it's a paramount concern in portable devices. I think it would be very surprising indeed if one chemistry performed best in all scenarios. Lithium became dominant primarily because it had so much research and supply chain maturity behind it, even if it was suboptimal for areas like grid storage. Glad to see other battery chemistries are getting more investment.
You may see a mixture of sodium and lithium batteries in grid storage; one for providing very short-term grid stabilization of the order of seconds to minutes, the other for long-term large-scale storage, which is by far the largest application. Possibly both within the same battery farm.
I doubt that could happen. The price is so low that it doesn't make a difference unless your sodium costs negative dollars.
I would say the bulk price of lithium ion batteries is the most you could possibly remove via materials changes. When smaller batteries are more expensive, that's based on factors that would also affect other chemistries. And the bulk price for laptop capacity, 50-99 watt hours, is $5-10 and dropping.
On the other hand the bill of materials of many gadgets is really low while having tight margins. If there are two $100 tablets on the market and the other can advertise a 30% longer runtime weighing 15% more at the same cost, it could be a differentiator.
> It's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there?
I don't understand why everyone always likes to bitch about why their preferred wordsmithed version of a layoff announcement didn't make it in. Layoffs suck, no question, but the complaining that leadership didn't use the right words to do this generally shitty thing is pointless IMO. The words don't really matter much at that point anyway, only the actions (e.g. severance or real possibility of joining another team).
My read of the announcement is basically saying they over-hired and had too many people causing a net hit to forward progress. Yeah, that sucks, but I don't find anything shocking or particularly poorly handled there.
There's a segment of people convinced that leadership must somehow be able to perfectly predict the future or they're incompetent losers, like running a business is somehow the easy part of capitalism.
Running a business is definitely the easy part of capitalism. Most leadership isn't just bad, they're bafflingly incompetent. Most companies fail. Of those that fail, they usually fail in extremely obvious ways built off of fundamental character flaws, like stubbornness or greed.
Tell me you've never a business without telling me you've never run a business. You're pulling things out of thin air and using it to support a position with no foundation.
If the stats were as good as the hyperbole in the article, it would clearly state the only 2 metrics that really matter: predictive value positive (what's the actual probability that you really have cancer if you test positive) and predictive value negative (what's the actual probability that you're cancer free if you test negative). As tptacek points out, these metrics don't just depend on the sensitivity and specificity of the test, but they are highly dependent on the underlying prevalence of the disease, and why broad-based testing for relatively rare diseases often results in horrible PVP and PVN metrics.
Based on your quoted sections, we can infer:
1. About 250 people got a positive result ("nearly one in 100")
2. Of those 250 people, 155 (62%) actually had cancer, 95 did not.
3. About 24,750 people got a negative test result.
4. Assuming a false negative rate of 1% (the quote says "over 99%") it means of those 24,750 people, about 248 actually did have cancer, while about 24,502 did not.
When you write it out like that (and I know I'm making some rounding assumptions on the numbers), it means the test missed the majority of people who had cancer while subjecting over 1/3 of those who tested positive to fear and further expense.
Nope, there is another important thing that matters: some of the cancers tested are really hard to detect early by other means, and very lethal when discovered late.
I would not be surprised if out of the 155 people who got detected early, about 50 lives were saved that would otherwise be lost.
That is quite a difference in the real world. Even if the statistics stays the same, the health consequences are very different when you test for something banal vs. for pancreatic cancer.
Careful: the stats you're reading are all-cancers, cancers aren't uniformly prevalent, and the specific cancers you're referring to might (and probably do) have much, much worse screening outcomes than the aggregate.
I don't see where this "probably" comes from; it could well be the other way round. It is a new technology and its weak and strong points / applications may differ significantly from what we currently use.
You're overfocused on the "technology" and underfocused on the base rate of the cancers you're concerned about. Just do the math. What you need to know is "just how accurate would this test need to be in order for most of the positives it generates to be true positives". The numbers will be surprising.
Say that you are hunting the elusive snipe, one bird in a million. With standard techniques, you will have a lot of false positives.
But if you learn that the elusive snipe gives off a weird radio signal that other birds don't, your hunt will be a lot shorter.
Same with relatively rare cancers. If you can detect some very specific molecule or structure, your test will be quite reliable anyway. That is why I don't get your use of "probably". Unless you are really familiar with the underlying biochemistry, the probabilities cannot be guessed.
There is absolutely no reason why tests for rare diseases should have high false positive rates. In many other diseases, they don't. For example (although the underlying technology differs), Down syndrome is rare, but its detection barely has any false positives. You can test the entire pregnant population for Downs reliably, and many countries already do that.
I'm not saying that you couldn't develop a super-reliable test for a rare cancer! The point isn't that these cancers are impossible to screen for. The point is that the numbers given in this article do not suggest that such a test has been developed in this case.
It surely does not make sense to screen the entire population for pancreatic cancer, but we already do have a screening for pancreatic cancer in Czechia for "at risk population".
Let's say you do have a positive test for pancreatic cancer. Overall 5 year survival rate 12%, but other than with other cancers, people continue to die after that. Basically, it is almost a death sentence if it is a true positive. Early detection will increase your odds a bit, and prolong your remaining expected lifetime, but even stage 1 pancreatic cancer, only 17% survive to 10 years. Let's say you are one of the 99% of false positives, because everyone gets tested in this hypothetical scenario. Let's say imaging and biopsy looks clean. No symptoms (which you typically don't have until stage 3 with pancreatic cancer, where it is far too late anyways). With the aforementioned odds, what would you do?
Panic? Certainly, given that if it is a real positive, you might as well order your headstone.
Get surgery to remove your pancreas? Well, just the anesthesia as a 0.1% chance of killing you, the surgery might kill 0.3% in total. No pancreas means you will instantly have diabetes, which cuts your life expectancy by 20 years.
Start chemotherapy? Chemo is very dangerous, and there is no chemo mixture known to be effective against pancreatic cancer, usually you just go with the aggressive stuff. It is hard to come by numbers as to how many healthy people a round of chemo would kill, but in cancer patients, it seems that at least 2% and up to a quarter die in the 4 weeks following chemotherapy (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41408-023-00956-x ). And chemotherapy itself has a risk of causing cancers later on.
Start radiation therapy? Well, you don't have a solid tumor to irradiate, so that is not an option anyways. But if done, it would increase your cancer risk as well as damage the irradiated organ (in that case probably your pancreas).
So in all, from 100 positive tests you have 99 false positives in this scenario. If just one of those 99 false positives dies of any of the aforementioned causes, the test has already killed more people than the cancer ever would have. Even if no doctor would do surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment on those hypothetical false positives, the psychological effects are still there and maybe already too deadly.
So it is a very complex calculation to decide whether a test is harmful or good. Especially in extreme types of cancer.
"Let's say you are one of the 99% of false positives, because everyone gets tested in this hypothetical scenario."
This alone is a disqualifier for your scenario. A test with 99 per cent of false positives will not be widely used, if at all. (And the original Galleri test that the article was about is nowhere near to that value, and it is not intended to be used in low-risk populations anyway.)
I am all for wargaming situations, but come up with some realistic parameters, not "Luxembourg decided to invade and conquer the USA" scenarios.
> Nope, there is another important thing that matters: some of the cancers tested are really hard to detect early by other means, and very lethal when discovered late.
You are arguing for testing everyone there. If you cannot detect them by other means, you need to test for them this way. And do it for everyone. You have already set up the unrealistic wargaming scenario. You picked pancreatic cancer as your example where you do have to test every 6 months at least, because if you do it more rarely, the disease progression is so fast that testing is useless. There are no specific risk groups for pancreatic cancer beyond a slight risk increase by "the usual all-cancer risk factors". Nothing to pick a test group by.
And a 99% overall false positive rate is easy to achieve, lot's of tests that are in use have this property if you just test everyone very frequently. Each instance of testing has an inherent risk of being a false positive, and if you repeat that for each person, their personal false-positive risk of course goes up with it. All tests that are used frequently have an asymptotic 100% false positive rate.
Are you mistaking me for someone else? I never said or even implied that.
"And a 99% overall false positive rate is easy to achieve,"
Not in the real world, any such experiment will be shut down long before the asymptotic behavior kicks in. Real healthcare does not have unlimited resources to play such games. That is why I don't want to wargame them, it is "Luxembourg attacks the US scenario".
"There are no specific risk groups for pancreatic cancer"
This is just incorrect, people with chronic pancreatitis have massively increased risk of developing pancreatic cancer (16x IIRC). There also seems to be a hereditary factor.
Czech healthcare system, in fact, has a limited pancreatic cancer screening program since 2024, for people who were identified as high-risk.
Prolonging the expected lifetime by several years nontrivially improves chances of surviving until better drugs are found, and ultimately long term survival. Our ability to cure cancers is not constant, we're getting better at it every day.
Even so. Current first-line treatment for pancreatic cancer is surgery, because chemo doesn't really help a lot. Chemo alone is useless in this case. So any kind of treatment that does have a hope of treating anything involves removing the pancreas.
Take those 99% false positives. If you just remove the pancreas from everyone, you remove 20 years of lifetime through severe diabetes. In terms of lost life expectancy, you killed up to 25 people. Surgery complications might kill one more. In all, totally not worth it, because even if you manage to save everyone of those 1% true positives, you still killed more than 20 (statistical) people.
And the detection rate might be increased by more testing. But it needs to be a whole lot more, and it won't help. Usually pancreatic cancer is detected in stage 3 or 4, when it becomes symptomatic, 5 year survival rate below 10% (let's make it 5% for easier maths). The progression from stage 1 to stage 3 takes less than a year if untreated. So you would need to test everyone every 6 months to get detections into the stage 1 and stage 2 cases, that are more treatable. Let's assume you get everyone down to stage 1, with a survival rate of roughly 50% at 5 years, 15% at 10 years. We get a miracle cure developed after 10 years where everyone who is treated survives. So basically we get those 15% 10-year-survivors all to survive to their normal life expectancy (minus 20 because no more pancreas). Averaging they get an extra 10 years each.
Pancreatic cancer is diagnosed in 0.025% of the population each year. In the US at 300Mio., thats 750k in 10 years. With our theoretical miracle cure after 10 years for 15%, that is a gain of 1.125Mio years lifetime. A 1 hour time needed for testing per each of 300Mio people twice a year for 10 years already wastes 685k years of lifetime, so half the gain already. That calculation is already in "not worth it" territory if the waiting time for the blood-draw appointment is increased. That calculation is already off if you calculate the additional strain on the healthcare system, and the additional deaths that will cause.
> If the stats were as good as the hyperbole in the article, it would clearly state the only 2 metrics that really matter: predictive value positive (what's the actual probability that you really have cancer if you test positive) and predictive value negative (what's the actual probability that you're cancer free if you test negative). As tptacek points out, these metrics don't just depend on the sensitivity and specificity of the test
This is a bizarre thing to say in response to... a clear statement of the positive and negative predictive value. PPV is 62% and NPV is "over 99%".
Your calculations don't appear to have any connection to your criticism. You're trying to back into sensitivity ("the test missed the majority of people who had cancer") from reported PPV and NPV, while complaining that sensitivity is misleading and honest reporting would have stated the PPV and NPV.
so possibly saving lives and late stage cancer care level medical expenses 2/3 of positive results vs fear and lighter medical care 1/3 of the time. is this not a win?
If you don’t trust the moderators, who have absolute power, what are you even doing here?
If you have proof or reasonable indicators that policy is a lie, let’s see it. Otherwise, being disdainful and cynical just degrades the discussion and foments unnecessary hate.
I don't like "submarine" PR articles like this, because I feel like the author didn't ask any of the obvious questions around this zipper:
1. No closeup pics of how the zipper is actually sewed onto fabrics.
2. Is this design more likely to tear fabrics than a traditional zipper? A video another commenter linked made it look more fragile to me, but I don't know.
3. The biggest issue with any zipper is snags. This design looks like it would be a lot more likely to snag, but maybe not.
4. As other commenters mentioned, can it be repaired without special equipment?
I'm not saying this design is good or bad, just that this puff piece article didn't ask any of the immediate questions I had.
> Its dominance comes from an unusual level of control: YKK manufactures its own machines, designs its own molds, and even spins its own thread. That self-sufficiency lets it experiment in ways competitors can’t, turning a mundane component into a field for continuous innovation.
I thought the point was that there hasn’t been any innovation??
"The biggest issue with any zipper is snags. This design looks like it would be a lot more likely to snag, but maybe not."
I can't see this new design solving that problem. Of all the day-to-day inanimate objects I've encountered I'd single out zippers as the most problematic I've come across. I cannot think of another device I've had so much trouble with.
They snag, jam, the teeth fall out or tear out with little provocation, they come 'unraveled' at the ends and cannot be easily fixed. Fly zippers have even caused me injury, and when used on sleeping bags and like they catch the fabric and either damage it or break in the process of untangling them. And if that's not enough, the metal parts of zippers corrode in washing detergents and stain removers—often to the extent that it's a significant cause of zipper failures.
Moreover, zippers are much more difficult to replace than buttons—I can replace a button on a shirt or fly in a minute or two but replacing a zipper is a major undertaking especially if one is not expert with a sewing machine.
Zippers on jackets are often the worst, I've an ex NATO military jacket that's tough and hard wearing and extremely well made that I'd never be without in winter but its YKK zipper gives me no end of trouble. And recently I've scrapped two perfectly good high-visibility jackets because zipper teeth have pulled out and in both instances the zippers weren't subject to abuse (these zippers weren't YKK brand).
Give me buttons any day.
PS: my other peeve is Velcro on clothing. I dare not mention the tortures that ought to be inflicted on the person who came up with that abomination of an idea.
You seem to have... very unusual experience with zippers. I honestly can't remember the last time I had trouble with one or ever having any serious trouble with one.
With respect, I think it's your experience that is very unusual. I reckon you must never go camping and use a sleeping bag with a long zipper or you wouldn't say what you've said.
The woman who runs the drycleaning shop near where I live also provides a garment alteration service and her main business is shortening jeans and replacing broken zippers! She even specializes in replacing long zippers on leather jackets as they break so often.
When they're such a bane for others one has to wonder why you have so little trouble, or how careful and methodical you are when using them, and or what type you're familiar with, what garments you have them on etc.
Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly? If yes, then you're a very lucky person.
I don't go camping. I have had exactly one thing in my life that I can recall that the zipper broke on it. I think it really depends on what people are buying, how rough they are with their clothing, and many other factors.
> Can you honestly say you've never had zipper teeth part company with the fabric or never had to apply candle wax or similar to the teeth so they run smoothly?
Do regular people ever wax their zippers? (ChatGPT says it might be done by sailors or leatherworkers on occasion, for whatever that's worth.)
Agreed, or they use plastic teeth that easily part company with the fabric as with my hi-viz jackets. The nylon loop type are usually much more reliable.
Nitpicking here, but this is not a submarine article. This is above the waves, straight-ahead, overt PR.
It’s a standard product launch article. The news is: Company Announced Product. The article is: what the company says about the product. There’s not much more to report than that, yet. Once the product actually hits shelves there can be more articles with real world tests, breakdowns, close-ups, etc.
The reality is that YKK does not actually know if the new zipper will cause more tears, snag easier, be harder to repair, etc. No one will know until the product actually comes into extended contact with the real world.
The biggest issue with zippers is durability. I’ve had dozens of broken zippers over my lifetime on clothing that was far from end of life.
If I could pay $20 extra dollars for a piece of clothing with a twice as durable zipper I’d do it. I’m pretty sure zippers cost a dime so that’s a good margin.
"If I could pay $20 extra dollars for a piece of clothing with a twice as durable zipper I’d do it."
Agreed, the biggest issue is durability, like you I've had many broken zippers which often seem to break at the most inconvenient time, embarrassing experiences such as having to secure my fly with bent paperclips pushed through the fabric come to mind.
But I think there's more to it than just durability as there are some basic design issues that are hard to overcome. For instance, if a tooth gets pulled out or it does not mesh properly with its opposite mate then all will unravel (and that happens surprising often). It only takes one missing tooth or the first teeth to be not properly anchored for the whole zipper to fail. Cascading failures don't happen with buttons (one missing isn't much of a problem).
First, in 2006, there was still a general belief I think that Western companies could profitably exist in China and be, if not a "force for good", than at least a force for slightly more openness. Google's options were either to not be in China at all, or to be in China and abide by their laws. So when they censored search results in the 2006-2010 time period, at least they told you they were doing it and that it was at the demands of Chinese authorities. I think it's a fair debate to have on either side whether this was a good thing, but I think it's a gross oversimplification to present that this was a simple black-and-white decision and that Google "never had a problem censoring their results."
Perhaps you could quote something from that section that you feel is relevant here. It didn't look relevant to me.
> Google's options were either to not be in China at all, or to be in China and abide by their laws.
OK. So, they chose "be in China and abide by their laws", and you think it makes sense to characterize that as "they left the market rather than bend the knee"? Those are exactly opposite descriptions. They bent the knee rather than leave the market. That's what happened.
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
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