i don't get all the hate in this thread. I literally was about to build this today, using my home server, tailscale, and some kind of web frontend. thanks for saving me time :)
eh... I'm pretty sure I mentioned net income (which i think is pretty close to profit in some circles) but if we care about debt servicing, buybacks...etc, let's just look at cash flow. And there too, in Q3, they posted $1B+ for quarter.
I'm not sure I understand the point of your analogy with respect to wining/losing at a casino. If I follow it, you are effectively saying something akin to, when Google first became profitable, its achievements should have been completely dismissed because of a decade of prior losses. That's not how tech companies work. Most of the value creation is 5-10-20 years out. You bear enormous losses with the knowledge that returns compound and eventually render irrelevant prior years' losses.
So? I can make the exact same point about Google and other tech companies that endured years—decades sometimes—of eye-watering losses, only to eventually build enormously valuable businesses.
yeah but even then, it's still just a contract. The legal math behind Cisco's decision might just be to extend support just long enough to meet obligations and tolerate the risk that the remaining customers might sue.
yes at Seam we've seen a number of large deployment in multi-family buildings where you need to deploy devices (locks, thermostats, water leak sensors) but wiring the whole building with wifi isn't an option.
I don't know if it will count as DIY, but take a look at LEGIC and their devkit for this. We (seam) work with them and I recall seeing a couple of startups doing demo's of their UWB solution at their LEGIC Connect conference.
Sounds like a really interesting technical challenge.
Couple of issues I can see: (1) most devices out there would probably be mobile, so no NVIDIA/CUDA for you; (2) even with binding to, say, Apple Silicon, you might still be memory limited, i.e. can you fit the entire net on a single mobile GPU; (3) network latency?
The reason this is terra nullius is because the river has moved that land around for centuries, and will continue to do so. That border attempts to follow the river but the river doesn't follow diplomacy. These people who take advantage of this fact are very short sighted and mostly bored middle/upper class kids.
Maybe if a bunch of libertarians get together for mutual defense, elect leaders, set rules on how they'll pool their resources, they'll be able to prevent this from happening...
Are you giving a definition of libertarians or making a rhetorical point about the inadequacy of democracy in the short term for avoiding a crisis, or arguing against any form of government?
Nathan -- thanks for your work on this issue. I'm the ceo/co-founder at Seam (YC S20). We're building an API for IoT devices. I have many, many thoughts for you.
For Seam, we purchase, set up, and test many individual devices and systems in our lab in San Francisco. During the course of this work, we discover quite a few interesting things. When possible, we work directly with manufacturers on addressing the more concerning problems we find. We maintain an internal device database (partially available here https://www.seam.co/supported-devices-and-systems) where we keep track of our findings on devices we test & integrate. One area that I haven't seen addressed here is data-storage jurisdiction. imho, that might be one of the more concerning aspect.
happy to have a chat; my seam email is in my hn profile.
For the wetter sciences, the answer is somewhere in between. We usually have somewhat of an understanding of the prior theory. We then throw a lot of stuff at the wall…. Oh, this sticks? Eh, why? And then usually some more clever person will come up with reasons for why X works beyond what we already knew. A few years later, the field reaches some sort of consensus around one of the hypothesis.
This is only true from the perspective of developing new theories for why are things happen. Of course new theories arise from other theories.
It's not true for Discovery in general. New phenomenon can be created and observed without any theory for why they occur, either before or after observation
You can't even observe something without theories. For example:
- I need to observe here and not anywhere else
- I can reliably interpret my senses/the instrumentation is working correctly
- Objects of this type normally behave in X way, because of Y
- etc
Think of it a different way. You can come up with a theory without any observation whatsoever. Black holes, for example, were conjectured well before they were observed.
Well sure, that's the point that you're trying to make. I thought anything most people felt you were claiming you need a theory related to the novel Discovery or convention. That is to say how it might work and what the expected outcomes are. I can't go to the lab without a theory that my car can get me there. That doesn't mean I have a hypothesis for what will happen when I mix two substances in the lab.
Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory.
Nothing, just words that don't have any predictive value or convey any understanding of the world.
Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together.
Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.
It might be a theory that a scale display a value when I put things on top of it, but that is a different topic, and not what I'm testing.
This Theory doesn't tell me how the world works and if the expected value is 0 lb, 3 lb, or 1 million pounds.
I could go into the lab with no operating Theory or hypothesis on what the value of two masses should be when added together and collect data.
I can collect data with no expectation of correlation, and after measuring the combination of many weights, deduce that there is a relation between the combined weights and the total mass, and in fact it is a simple sum.
> Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together.
> Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.
The relevant theoretical background here is hidden in the "weigh them together" step: that there is such a thing as weight, it's described by a single real number, you can measure it in such and such a way, and so on.
You don't notice these considerations when it comes to weight and speed and size because they're hardwired into our brains by evolution. We're not so lucky when it comes to, for instance, the quark mixing angles - we can't even conceive of them without a background theory, let alone start measuring them.
Im not making the claim that theory Never informs experimentation. I'm making the claim that it possible to make discovery without theory about what you are exploring.
If you want to count distant theories like "I exist" or "The world exists", then sure, every action starts with theory. But like I said, that is every different than a specific theory about what outcome an experiment has, and the underlying physics that make it so.
If you think nobody can discover anything without a theory for what could be discovered, you are flat out wrong.
Consider the story of an artificial sweetener being discovered by a chemist who didn't wash their hands properly and the bread they ate that night was sweet.
Are you suggesting this was only possible because they had a "theory" that bread is not sweet?
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