skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But since it's fashionable these days to push for a single-payer system...

Good. I'm pleased that evidence-based rationality is coming back into fashion.

...the only way to get low prices is to be willing to walk away.

Don't confuse individual choices with collective action.

Prices can decrease through economies of scale. Which requires investment.

Libertarians wax poetic about Freedom Markets (tm), conflating profit motive and incentive, ignoring externalized costs, ignoring the need for law and order to form open markets. It's exhausting.

OP wrote:

People who are dying are price insensitive; they would pay any amount to get a few more months of life.

Your misinterpretation:

I suppose I'm questioning the author's assertion that (rational) people are willing to pay any price for drugs.

OP makes no such assertion. The fear of death is the definition of irrationality.
Funny!
I would say a real breakthrough would still get done through gov't or non-profit support. It just might take a lot longer than a drug with clear financial upside.

DCA - dichloroactate comes to mind. It was promising but unpatentable. It got lots of funding.
Well yes, I do buy thousands of dollars at a time, you're right, it doesn't make sense to buy small amounts at a time.

By "a few" I mean more like a dozen.
Demonstrating that was not my purpose.
Not terribly rare for me - I probably do it about once a week.

Currently my threat-and-countermeasure model doesn't include obfuscation from the eyes of state actors. I do want to change that, though, so I'll have to break this habit.
Why are you spending your time posting on Hacker News when you could be rescuing babies?
The pace of productivity growth and misallocation in the United States
Commercial proprietary products have positive and negative externalities. These can improve the world even if they're not free.

We have am mixed capitalist system of free and publicly funded advancements as well as privately funded advancements.

The internet as it exists today is a demonstrate of that fact, as is the mobile smartphone market. This has obviously improved the lives of billions of people and would not have existed without both private (proprietary) and public contributions.
They did sue the non-profit HathiTrust (a coalition started by the U of Michigan) -- HathiTrust won, after many years.

Now, HathiTrust was not generally making _full text_ of in-copyright works available, but only search results. HathiTrust doesn't even provide snippets of your search results, just page numbers, unfortunately -- mostly out of fear of lawsuits.

But HathiTrust's court victory helped establish at least some fair use rights for scanning of books -- more than Google itself did, or was interested in -- if the settlement had been accepted, no legal rights would have been established for anyone, only Google would have had permission from the Author's Guild, endorsed by a court to give them -- but nobody else-- freedom from lawsuits from anyone else too.
Hey it's my bootstrap theme with my name misspelled ;-) Thanks! I'm honored.

PS: Check out my other projects like http://unreadable.website, http://indycast.net or the super-secret http://2words.io
>There are no submersibles capable of reaching the vents that are not large and expensive.

I think we both agree on that.

My point is that they could be made, if the goal is just monitoring. It could even be passive. No engines, no propeller, just a one-time way to throw the water out of the body to go up.

At a minimum, it's just a ball with a few video cameras, and a cavity that will hold the water, when it's going down, and keeps the air when it's going up. Even light is a nice, not must to have, because we're watching for other submersibles, which emit their own lights.

I still agree that it's not simple. I have not used this word in my statements above.
>Many countries have socialized medicine, some of which have single payer, and I've never met a person who experienced a single payer system who didn't think it was the right way to go.

Really? You haven't met many people.

However, I'm pleased to meet you, because I've lived in the US and Australia and I think that the US system is vastly superior (assuming you have decent insurance).

My objection to the Australian system is both practical (the standard of care is lower because hospitals are just government departments, they don't have a profit motive, it suits them to give you less care rather than more) and philosophical ("single-payer" health care just functions as yet another government-enforced transfer of wealth from the rich who earn it to the poor who vote for it).
Another-World-Bytecode-Interpreter
Like, living long enough to benefit from other life-extension procedures? I'm not sure how a few hundred dollars a years are going to hasten those processes. (I'm assuming that losing this money wouldn't prevent someone to live a healthy life in the first place.)

Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics.

If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.
Check out http://maps.me/ It's a really nice mobile app interface that uses OSM data.
I don't think Go is anti-intellect as a language. I'm saying it's feature set makes it a definite choice to track an austere path. This seems to bring about a certain zeal and, especially for recent converts, a seeming need to proselytize. It's as if those new to Go need to convince themselves by saying out loud that they are, in fact, heading down a good and righteous road. I just haven't seen this sort of quasi faith-based argument coming from the other languages in the Algol tree.
String library comparison
You are a stock picker. You just got lucky.
But it doesn't have to necessarily make you identify with it at first glance.

I, for example, enjoy how the poem captivates with its poetic form and how it makes you search for meaning (in its parts and as a whole). I think just the prosody and the process of finding meaning in the poem are enjoyable enough to call it beautiful.

I'm not dang but this is how I feel about The Other.
Expecting the free market to find balance is like expecting the weather to be on a regular schedule.

Economics is by now the only science clinging to the notion of balance. Everyone has moved on to thinking in terms of inherent instabilities, and either attempt to predict (weather) or manage (engineering) them as best one can.
> You write HTML documents to make the apps.

The front-end of the apps. Since the application layer in a typical n-tier architecture is replaced with a generic, application-neutral layer, the back-end business logic is, of necessity, all moved into the database (unless you propose moving that into the front end, which I suspect you don't.)

This isn't the first time this type of thing has been proposed, and its not necessarily a bad idea, but there are a number of concerns associated with it (particularly, that scaling out a typical middle-tier is often easier than scaling out Postgres, so this approach may limit scalability of the resulting apps.)
Want to play a big role on a small engineering team at Taplytics (YC W14)?
I've made $96,000 so far this year working online and I'm a full time student. Im using an online business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great money. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it.
Heres what I do...w­w­w.B­u­z­z­3­4­.C­o­m
The difference is that Tesco only knows about one aspect of my life: grocery shopping. I can handle that and contain the risk.

I don't use coffee shops but if I did they'd only know about my coffee preferences and work patterns.

Google, however, with search, Gmail and Now alone knows everything about the lives of its users. And quite a lot about the lives of non-users with whom they communicate.
Slight correction: VTSAX is a mutual fund; VTI is the corresponding ETF.

I agree that it's an excellent choice though -- easy diversification, very low expenses, low turnover. VT (which includes foreign stocks) is also worth considering for extra diversification.
This is true, but on the other hand the US does have a much higher standard of care.

In my experiences with the US hospital system I've been shocked by the way every single town seems to have all the fanciest, newest equipment. A scan that you'd wait days for in Australia you can get on the spot in the US.

That money is going somewhere.
>Why does every new "innovation" seem to be a stronger set of staples squeezing us to our work?

Because that is the goal of the system which charters the companies which employ the people which do the algorithms research, and there has been quite a lot of propaganda to imbue the people with loyalty to the system.
If music is the biggest generational gap when I’m 200, I’ll be pretty content with things.
Yes, but the fed/government backstops the s&p. Your only option really is to invest outside the U.S.
Google needs a transportation link between their new domed Googleplex and their private airport at Moffett Field. I was expecting a private Hyperloop, but this is more practical for a short run.
I am not sure why your post is being ignored. Having half the information that is biased in an unknown direction and not randomly selected is worse than having no information. If you have no information at all you will just guess and be right half the time (after accounting for risk/return), while if you have biased information you just get to be on the other side of an informed trade (ie be the sucker).
Actually, in my case I'm not formally educated in compsci. A couple of programming courses but picked up what I know on the job. It's fairly effective.
How do you know I didn't get smart?
Honestly if you can't bring yourself to read an article because of a brand used incorrectly, you need to get a grip. Fast.
As an amateur photographer (luckily praised by friends and family, thought I'd never try to make a carreer of it), I can tell you a good photograph, and photography as an art, are extremely difficult.

Technically it requires a deep understanding of lenses, film/sensors (and file formats in digital photography too), but mostly how light behaves. And then comes composition, imagination (to "see" a shot before you even try it, prepare the lens at a set focal distance, focus, aperture, exposure, ISO levels, if you need a filter or not, and how that would affect the shot), the "artistic" characteristics of the image, making the subject feel comfortable if it's a person, timing for the precise moment that will make or break the picture.

However, I didn't find it clear if you were referring to "seeing photographs" (apreciating them?) or "doing photography". Like I said, having a small knowledge on it, I find it as artistic and complex as all the other mentioned alternatives. Different too, but I wouldn't call it better or worse.
How do you tell the difference between slow growing cancers and fast growing cancers?

EG: for many men the treatment for prostate cancer has severe side effects and their cancer is something they would have died with, not of. Being able tell which cancers are slow or fast would improve many lives.
Thanks to mzs for recently pointing out [1] this page of string library comparisons referenced in an older HN post by shadowfox. [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10205997

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7191509
>Now if you would divert all cryonics resources towards existential risk mitigations, AI or rejuvenation research, that would be a different story. But pretty soon we'd have to discuss how other resources are allocated right now, and next thing we know, we're talking politics.

You say "talking politics" like it's a bad thing!

>If you ask me, the world can probably finance cryonics for everyone and AI research and anti-ageing research and existential risk mitigation and many other things I didn't think of, while preserving and improving our standards of living at the same time. The (huge) problem is getting our act together.

Well yes.
From: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/396713/

From: Daniel Borkmann
...
With 1 core netmap does 10G line-rate on 64b; I don't
know their numbers on 40G when run on decent hardware though.

So looks like netmap has not only nice API, driver-specific code is trivial, but also the performance might be good. If only netmap could do the "bifurcated driver" use case!
Right. Any data is useless until and if you know what to do with it.
> That money is going somewhere.

A lot of it is going on over diagnosing and over treating, both of which cause harm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnecessary_health_care
If you say 'have designed' instead of 'have built'... I don't think we'd say the world economy has been designed, exactly.
Call of Duty Black ops 2 challenging my record
And many cases where the copyright holder no longer even exists or can be found.
Mobile App Testing – Training Videos and Resources
The original wager is more extreme than that. Paradise is eternal Fun, while hell is eternal Not Cool. Cryonics, assuming you don't believe in the afterlife, only gives a hope of life in our world, instead of certain oblivion.

Life does not have infinite value. People, including atheists, sometimes give their own life for some higher purpose (another life, freedom, a better standard of living for their village…).

Of course, this would be different if you seek to escape Hell. (You might be religious, and guilty of some mortal sin.)
I have written some code but it does not seem to work as expected so any help will be appreciated.

http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/5126351/Csharp-Change-Di...
If the US stopped doing that there's no reason to assume that another country would magically step up to the plate. What if, as is the point of the article, the US stopped doing that and the world simply stopped getting as many new drugs?
Bonds would include long term bonds, and they literally cannot get any higher in price. Rates are zero, long term rate expectations are zero for a while. This is horrible advice. The only way to go is down.
Even if it isn't perfect /dev/random is a hell of a lot more random than just taking the current time stamp and PID.

Edit: For reference, this is exactly how the Netscape's original SSL implementation was broken: https://web.archive.org/web/20141214141822/http://www.cs.ber...
The nonprofit can also collapse, though.

Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.
PubPeer lets scientists comment on scientific articles on arXiv
One interesting aspect of Wirth's work, which is illustrated by Oberon, is that he always iterated — from Pascal (itself heavily influenced by ALGOL) to Modula, to Modula-2, to Oberon, then finally Oberon 02. Apple's ObjectPascal is in there somewhere. For example, as I understand it, Oberon was basically bootstrapped with Modula-2.

They're all Pascal-like, and therefore ALGOL-like, sharing a lot of similarities; not just syntax, but also concepts such as ranged types, range-bound arrays, enums, record syntax, etc. You can know Pascal and be able to pick up Modula or Oberon very quickly, since so many keywords and concepts are identical. At the same time, each iteration tried to simplify the language (the BNF for Oberon has only 33 grammar rules).
Here is a legal analysis of the Copyright Office's proposal to limit damages for orphan works, in the context of TPP requirements for damages, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

"How is this scheme, which provides for no damages (in some circumstances at least), compliant with the TPP requirement that the US must provide for either “pre-established damages,” or “additional damages”? No damages = no damages, no? A court would (as I read the new statute) NOT be permitted to award punitive, or exemplary, damages in orphan works cases – but the TPP seems to require that."
Do you study biochemistry or medicine? Because it would seem that your first point is completely true but technically an oversimplification when it comes to treatment of common cancers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparaginase#As_a_drug

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcr-Abl_tyrosine-kinase_inhibi...
A simple web server in SML
False dichotomy. I don't need to place a zero value on human life to disagree with this reasoning. I only need to place a finite value on it. Obviously our society only places a finite value on human life (e.g. because people sometimes starve to death, or die for lack of medical care).

Edit:
> In what kind of bleak world would no one be willing to pay for a probable return to full health?

This one. People die of totally curable conditions all the time in the real, modern world.
That's right; we can't know for sure and I'm sure you'll get some backlash for this comment. As with everything though, we need a balance.

If we say that we can't know for sure and give up, then no advancements would ever be made in any field. On the other hand, we should recognize that science does not claim to provide us with certainty. Many of us speaking "objectively" with scientific "facts" often become emotional and arrogant when speaking to anyone who doesn't agree with our conclusions.
Go's "channels" do a lot more sharing than the Go sales materials claim. If you send a slice across a channel, you're now sharing unlocked data across a concurrency boundary.

Go needs a borrow checker and a more Rust-like ownership model. Then you could safely use channels a lot without risk of somebody breaking an implicit assumption about concurrency safety.
> That's her point: given the data, claiming it's a meritocracy implies that Caucasian men are "better" than everybody in this field. That's not a useful attitude if you're trying to improve diversity.

It isn't an attitude at all. It's purely descriptive.

If you're saying it's wrong to describe it as a meritocracy because it isn't one then that's one thing. If making the industry more diverse would also make it more meritocratic then that is clearly the way forward. But then what we need to do is not to stop calling it or wanting it to be a meritocracy but rather to make it live up to its name.

On the other hand, if it is (more or less) a meritocracy already then what you're asking for is not that we stop calling it that, but that we stop it from being that. And if that's what you're saying then say it clearly so that more people can disagree with you.

> Then the particular field or company has evolved to favor Caucasian males (or if you prefer the culture that is highly correlated with being "Caucasion"). In other words, it's got embedded structural discrimination. If you want to improve diversity, that needs to be acknowledged and removed.

This is a really great exemplification of the failure of your entire line of reasoning.

Let's suppose that, culturally, the parents of white and asian males generally encourage them to study engineering at university and the parents of females and african americans generally discourage it. In this not altogether unrealistic hypothetical this explains the main cultural difference leading to the disproportionate representation.

Then companies looking to hire engineers logically require that candidates have studied engineering. You call this structural discrimination and demand that it be removed. Companies are expected to what, hire engineers who have no knowledge of engineering?

Sometimes the problem is not the culture of the industry. Sometimes the problem is the culture of the people.
Objective-C to Swift Converter project
Ah I was more thinking Greyspots referred exclusively to the front end JS library, not both sides. Cheers for the clarification.
You don't see any problem with "Rape My X"?
>the fact that they should both be avoided for similar reasons

Apart from the "legal framework" what would be those "similar reasons" be?
The business structure is irrelevant. There are either enough resources to maintain the procedure or not. If there are not enough resources, what legal entity technically owns those resources is irrelevant.
> and b) it was Google that did the questionable thing by ripping Sun off in the first place.

This is something I have never understood about the trial.

Google used Apache Harmony implementation, does it means that the ones ripping off Sun was Apache Foundation?
Go has generics. Channels and maps are generics. You just can't define any new ones. It should at least be possible to define things that work like channels and maps. Those are more like parameterized types than generics, and going all the way to generics may not be necessary.
Sounds like typical government modus operandi. Provide a service which is already provided by about eighteen private organisations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_ranking...) and do it worse.
SoftICE: a kernel mode debugger for Windows
Still weak. Read the seed value from /dev/urandom or get it from CryptGenRandom if you're on Windows.

I think it's also best to use #ifdef to prevent those hardcoded debugging keys from being included in production builds. That is, if you still need to keep them at all.

edit:

joelthelion: You are mistaken. It's not the 1990s anymore. Use the non-blocking /dev/urandom, not /dev/random.
(I can't seem to reply directly to you)
Wow thank you, this is awesome! It'd be great if you created a place where people could create PR's to share their own modules
That is truly a horrible seed. Use /dev/random
In npm, that's why you shrinkwrap.
Interesting how something that was intended to weed out bad colleges ended up as a tool to sell college on yet more people, with useless individual bar graphs for "comparing" schools.

It's like putting warning labels on cigarettes, you would be hard pressed to find any individual that is not either in favor or indifferent to doing that, yet this kind of initiative consistently fails to become law or ends up being neutered like this program.
Economics is insofar different that we are not just at mercy of the laws of nature. We have to deal with the nature of humans and their behavior but besides that we can make up the rules and could at least in principle set them up in a way that yields a stable system. If it is possible in practice I don't know, maybe stability inevitably leads to terrible inefficient systems or requires enforcing practically unenforceable things. But you are at least correct for our current system, there are several constructs that are not stable and lead to runaway behavior.
> the fed/government backstops the s&p

How so?
Yes it is. Sane people are comfortable with death. It takes a weird sort of narcissism to pursue cryonics.

Dying in the jungle in pursuit of the fountain of youth or bathing in the blood of the young rightfully comes off as bonkers to healthy people.
That's been true as long as treatments for cancer have ever been researched (reaching back to the 1800s). Only recently have immunotherapies started yielding significant clinical results for common cancer types. I think the change in efficacy has a lot more to do with the accumulation of scientific knowledge about the immune system (it hasn't been long since we even discovered T-cells or dendritic cells), along with huge improvements in genetic sequence & editing.
Not a kid, don't use Reddit, never have. From the HN FAQ:

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Was there some substance to your response that was cut off, or could it have been shortened to ""?