skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you're saying that "jack up the prices to wring more money out of dying people that don't have any other choice" is a perfectly valid, 100% ethical business decision that every single person on the face of the planet should be able to make without any hesitation?

Seems like a specious argument.
What if I told you there was a device that you already had that was capable of two-way voice and video communications in your pocket? ^_^
Blogging is not
Yeah, we do it that way, but Moties wouldn't.
Flexible cover images using intrinsic ratio
Wouldn't that presume that the cause of the person's death came as a result of something that the person in question was responsible for rather than a disease or other invasive medical condition? I could foresee your argument remaining viable in the case of someone refusing to drink tap water, dying and subsequently attempting to sue the state for maladministration perhaps but if the cause of their death was not directly correlated to their own actions (rather than the actions of another party that had ramifications) then I don't think they would be liable.
I don't link anything to anything. Stop pretending I do and we can live on happily.
I'm not so sure. There is the doctor that wonders "What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?" And the answer, clearly, is nothing at all. They are simply raising the price.

I agree the idea is deplorable, but it seems so obvious in retrospect. That the person who has made this idea a reality is a former hedge fund manager is just the icing on the cake.

I'm not sure what the best solution to this situation might be, but I think it's important to recognize that this is _also_ what happens when the only goal is "make more money." In that regard, it should not be a surprising development.
But what is preventing a different generics manufacturer to enter the market at that point? How long can an exploit like that go on?
Yes, in the short-term, being up written up in the NY times for what they are is the best way to deal with most egregious unethical behavior from scum like Turing Pharmaceuticals. It will be interesting to see if the prices goes back down as a result of this exposure.

Sadly, that can't prevent pharma companies from arbitrarily jacking up prices less dramatically on many other drugs and going "under the radar" as far as public outrage is concerned. For that, you need careful and assiduous regulation. But in an era where people run companies that do real things like a hedge fund, I am doubtful things will get better anytime soon.
At the moment $17B is wiped out -- the fine could be even bigger than that, and then there's the backslash of the damaged reputation...
>you are mistakenly calling raping young boys "cultural".

I'm not.
I thought, WP was successful, because it was easy to deploy and easy to use ... and not because all the newest cool things where included ...
Outfit Swipe
Came here and expected the first comment to point out the name is taken by the other Spark project. It’s not a web-framework, but it’s Java/JVM (Scala) and it’s pretty popular. I would change/refine the name if you want it to be not confusing.

http://spark.apache.org
I don't think you understood my comment.

"Socialised healthcare" is a system where a public institution puts capital to take care of a patient by using private-made products and services. i.e. the needles, IT systems, ambulances, drugs, etc, the public system is a platform, but not an industry.

Let the market be free, private companies are better at solving real problems. If the price of a drug is expensive (i) a public health system will take care of it, and (ii) new players will want a slice of that expensive drug by making one better and cheaper. This is my point. Governments are not good at making realiable and quality products and services.
I tried this on my HTC One and I found that I couldn't copy anything from the emergency call screen either.
The 4 Inflection Points of Social Marketing: Accelerating the Sales Funnel
Fastest way to create outfits and share them with your friends.
Down the tinfoil, dude. It's just that it's such an egregious breach of trust, from a company priding itself on reliability and green credentials, that it will clearly impact them deeply, even more so in a situation where they were already struggling to compete in the US market.
Sokal affair
The "block element" feature of muBlock allows you to block the popup that asks you to register. Just right-click on the popup, use "Block element", highlight the popup, click "Create", and do the same for the opaque background.
I think dingaling's point is that the headline is clickbait.
Four days ago, GM was fined $900 million for a known defect that killed over 100 people. If the VW fine exceeds that, something is clearly out-of-line with corporate prosecutions in the US.
One issue is that at some point "any profit" ceased to be considered a good outcome, and companies are now expected to do better and better when this makes very little sense.

I imagine a simple solution would be a "reasonable profit limit" law.

In other words, if there is evidence that your costs to manufacture are $X, your sale price (especially in a monopoly scenario) ought to be strictly limited to some "reasonable" amount over $X, period. Any desire for more profit must then come from additional products or by taking additional risks that incur new expenses.

In a situation like this where there is evidence that "yesterday" your costs were $X, it can then be clearly said that your costs most certainly did not increase overnight by over 50x so it shall be illegal to charge over 50x more.
When someone first dredged up the rights for this drug, it sold 667,000$ worth of pills every year for 1$ each.

GlaxoSmithKline produced it and it just wasn't worth the trouble to discontinue or to muck about with. No one would make a generic because it would be more expensive to enter the market than profits could be realized.

So the monopoly is natural because no one with any good sense would consider competing.

That GSK sold the rights to this drug (and quite possibly other similar drugs) to some other company in a rational bid to monetize inefficient assets and increase shareholder value has upset that monopoly but Turing just needs to exploit the market until the generics show up. That and the price they paid explain Turing's strategy.
The APA is a joke.
Huh, this was days in the coming. I am surprised it just happens today. I should have bet on it...
Reminds me of a similarly Rube—Goldberg-esque login screen circumvention in Windows 95:

https://media2.giphy.com/media/lN0A3biIDKepW/giphy.gif
This kind of behaviour will slowly push patient associations and labs to seek P2P solutions. A platform that connects patients, scientists and independent labs in countries like Japan or Switzerland would cut all the middle-men (pharma, FDA, etc) and would prevent these abuses.
I hope this clarifies my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10251846
I have to hand it to them, it takes a huge pair to actually design, develop and ship something like this to customers. I'd always assumed if anything this crazy as going on at least one employee would have blown the whistle at some point.

I guess this answers my Bond-villain henchman recruiting problem. I'd always wondered how those super-villains recruited henchmen and grunts necessary to run their island fortresses. Turns out it may not be all that hard ^_^
Depends on how you define "better." In any nationalized system with controlled prices, you will have shortages.
right. I guess I haven't factored the reputational damage enough, in a country where Tesla and the Prius are so highly regarded.
I think that it's a perfectly valid solution to the problem of being a business or corporation of making more money. I think it's a mistake to believe that ethics is a big part of that equation and I think history backs me up on that. For sure, I'd like these organizations to be more ethical but I also understand that can often get in the way of their primary goal, which is make more money.

I don't believe it's ethical, but I do believe it's perfectly valid. I'm saying I don't find it surprising and as soon as I read it, it seems almost kind of obvious.
Skype service taken offline by network problems
Greed is a good motivator to make up diseases, fake test results, and to use business tactics to jack up the price of ancient drugs by three or four orders of magnitude.

I see those as an adverse outcomes, so I would prefer a different way of funding drug development.

"The Benefits and Savings of Publicly-Funded Clinical Trials of Prescription Drugs"

http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/the-benefits-and-sa...

"Patent Monopolies and the Costs of Mismarketing Drugs"

http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/patent-monopolies-a...
I disagree. You can train for motion sickness and parachute jumps.

There were three final candidates:

Ponomarjovová graduated at Moscow Aviation Institute, had 320 flight hours as a sport pilot and 10 parachute jumps.

Solovjovová graduated at Ural Construction Faculty, had 900 jumps and was national sport champion.

Tereshkova had 78 jumps and no university or mid education, only 8 years of basic school.
Part of it will be investors who have previously expected some amount of future earnings from an apparently great product. This product has been shown to be a lie. They don't have one to replace it so those future earnings are now no longer there.
Yeah, it's actually plausible that this kind of white-collar crimes cause more death than a single homicide.

It certainly smells like impunity. Big corps are actually very good at making sure that there's no one to complain and no one to blame (from customer service to this kind of executive maneuver).
> any price it considers reasonable

What if the "reasonable" price is set by a delusional sociopath?
"The Benefits and Savings of Publicly-Funded Clinical Trials of Prescription Drugs"

http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/the-benefits-and-sa...
The government (FDA in this case) doesn't make the medication. They just get someone else to make it. They tell company X "You F'ed Up. Give us all your documentation and we will take it to company Y to make."

I'm trying to remember the name of the company that this happened to. It was like 8 years ago and I think I remember them being a cardiac arrest medical. Anyhow, the company CEO flat out refused the FDA regulators demands that they get their manufacturing process up to standards. The FDA went to another manufacturer (I believe Johnson and Johnson) and asked if they would make the medication and they accepted. The FDA then shut down the prior company.

When lives are impacted, the FDA doesn't mess around. They put CEOs in prison for the crappy decisions they make.
I would agree with you in terms of the general population. In this case, however, we're talking about a "former hedge fund manager".
From another article:

> The maximum Clean Air Act violation is $37,500 per vehicle, meaning Volkswagen's fine could technically be as high as $18 billion.
Why did we "have to" win WWII? What logic requiring that also doesn't require stopping China/USSR? We had to win Korea or give up influence in Asia.

But, yeah 2nd gulf wars were boondoggles.
How does the recall cost structure work?

The naive approach has them paying the car owners back for the full market value of the cars (which is probably higher than is warranted). Assuming $20k per vehicle (which, for the models in question, is lower than the actual prices), that's $10B on the cars alone. Add to that the cost of the recall itself, plus whatever fines, and losing $17B market cap doesn't seem out of proportion.
Only if you assume that actual harm to human beings trumps harm to the 'environment'. I'd argue it doesn't, at least not as far as the EPA is concerned.
Even with the looming threat of billions of dollars of fines, big co's STILL try to cheat the system.

In a deregulated market, how can we ever expect these co's to act honestly? We can't.
The rules for pharmaceutics manufacturing in the western world are very strict.

Any competent university lab could turn up a few Kg of pyrimethamine. You need a GMP compliant FDA-approved facility to make it for medical use.
Have you tried the "inline" option in TinyMCE 4? Basically you just give each editable element on the page its own, independently configured TinyMCE instance.

TinyMCE's markup output is probably as good as it gets.

http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/inline.php
The market was closed on the weekend.
Especially not something a German corporation does.
PyDev of the Week: Trey Hunner
What prevents US hospitals from importing the drug, for example from Europe?
It's so range inducing it's horrible. The guy is pure evil.

Though, my question is, what does it mean "to acquire/own/have the rights to the drug"? If the drug is 62 years old, knowledge about it should be in public domain and why can't some other company start making it?
US loves prosecuting foreign companies. Not so much local companies. So sure they could go after Volkswagen, what do they have to lose?
The point is that if you don't spend the money on the military, it doesn't mean that the money will be redirected to non-military research. We justify spending large amounts of research dollar in the name of "national security". If we didn't need a military tomorrow, social programs would get the money or taxpayers would simply want their money back.
The US has plenty of shortages of meds, but in that system the shortages are blamed on the intended recipient. "You didn't have a good enough job; you didn't have good enough insurance".
Why Apple will save the web
4 year old blows away the audience
Show HN: SAWS: A Supercharged AWS CLI
Separating style and content isn't dead. It's more popular than ever. HTML5 has brought in new semantic markup and discouraged presentational markup. Most sites even today work fine without CSS.
It is regulated... They just didn't follow the regulations.
Heres how you test emissions for a car. Lock the executives in an unventilated room with the engine running for half an hour. If they survuve it is ok to release to the public. Obviously I am joking, but it should be the goal to have no dirty emmissions at all.
> Instead I have to go ask permission from the government, fight for funds, wait for approval, build massive infrastructure just to prove to the government I'm not wasting their money, and so on?

As opposed to approaching private companies for permission, funds, approval, adhere to their compliance and management policies, and so on?

> So, I have a great but perhaps hare brained new idea for a drug/treatment. I'm willing to throw my tens of millions (heh) at it.

Your model where the financier is the same person as the scientist is not a common one.
It's not the recall or the fine, it's the fact that VW (and other german brands) tried to build up "clean diesel" in the american market for ages and that's now all ruined.
I worked with them and know that before they release software they do a risk calculation. They do it even for small mobile apps and if the risk is too high because they would need to regain public trust they don't release that app / software. So how in the world can it be that they released this? Normal employees there are not allowed to make such decisions.
Nice. It crashes my Chrome on hover over trees.
Thank you for inserting the Truth here.

I'm sick and tired of Apple's paid apologists trying to take over ever thread here.
It isn't just animation, it's audio.. it's layers of iframes and tracking scripts that slow down the rest of the page/browser/computer ... I don't begrudge tasteful, and limited use of advertising windows on a page... the issue is that many sites go too far beyond that.

When left to their own devices advertisers and the sites that cater to them, most recently the clickbait article sites, will use ever more intrusive methods of advertising. Much of which aren't easily avoidable... you see someone post something on facebook that looks interesting, you click it, you've already been abused, before you realize it's the same site that has abused you in the past.

These abuses include fly over ads, popup/out actions that are all but unavoidable, clickjacking, close filtering and more. It's not that the full-screen ads aren't enough, but there's pervasive and invasive ads that are disguised and integrated to look like content at first glance.

If it weren't for the bad actors in advertising we wouldn't have popup blocking built into the browsers. And as time goes it doesn't look to me like advertisers have learned their lesson. If Firefox wasn't such a performance nightmare with adblock on android, I'd use it more.. if I could get uBlock with chrome on android that would be better still.

As it stands, using my phone more has only served to increase my desire for ad/privacy software everywhere.
I would - but the app isn't available in the UK yet.
Should they be able to charge whatever they want when they have no competition? Isn't that against the whole free market ethos?

The logic being followed by this particular pharmaceutical company is that because it's a niche market the impact of these large price hikes is minimal. However, the impact is not minimal for those that depend on the drug, who are getting stiffed, either left with prices they may not be able to afford or increased insurance costs (either paid by the individual or their employer).

There should be a cap on behaviour such as this, such as prices cannot increase 50% above inflation in a single year. Details would need to be worked out but at least controls such as this would give the market time to respond, bringing in new competition, etc...
How likely is it that other manufacturers are doing the same thing?
It is strange that he is apoligfising for misleading people. The damage is the excessive toxic gas that was released into our communities.
You mean like we did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone
I'm really liking to see our resident Gourmet Libertarians either silent or trying a contortionist number on this one. ;)

I mean, if the drug is that expensive just create another one and sell it half the price!! amiright?
The Author of Our Best SF Military Novel Explains the Future of War
Careful! The paid Apple astroturfers will quickly down vote you off of hacker news!
That's a good thing. It means your kids are natural hackers. :-)
Harm to the environment is harm to humans. Especially when you are talking about carcinogenic diesal exhaust.
Care to elaborate what makes a German corporation so different?
API doesn't look very REST to me. It is basically just using HTTP as a JSON transport. The JSON contains a "status" code which appears to loosely follow the HTTP status code numbering. But if that was the intent then why not just use HTTP status codes like a true REST endpoint?

Otherwise, a neat idea. Needs a Office 365 connector too.
India has aggressively forced international pharmas to offer exceptionally low domestic pricing ... if they refuse, the alternative is that the Indian government authorizes generics, regardless of the patent status of the commercial drug.

India also has a "last mile" problem with medical care. It's still too common for villagers to slip through the cracks and not receive regular diagnosis or treatment.
Nice! I would suggest a sans-serif font though, aren't they better for display reading? Hyphenation would be nice too.
And in many cases they get away with it as DOJ often doesn't want to prosecute the "too big too fail", so they start finding the risk of breaking the law acceptable, especially if "everyone does it". I assume there are other car manufacturers who do this, but haven't been found yet, or at least were considering doing it in the future with more stealthy technology.
Come on, nightmare? It's kinda annoying, fussy and handle-turning, but taking a page that has been designed and fitting that into the template tags is really not all that bad for a days work.
Will you maintain relationship between sheets? For many API use-cases, I'd expect my data to be relational.
What to Do If You Don’t Go to Jail
KidInSafe
There is a new Nexus 5 being shown on Sept. 29th, it looks to be a pretty good phone. I have a Nexus 5 and I already got the update they spoke of.
Yeah but the emergency call feature, as far as I can understand it, is not an important part of this?
Without the military, who would have killed us?
It seems to me that the overall result would be other companies start manufacturing the generic and sell the drug for maybe 20% less than Martin and over time the price drops back down towards where it once started. In the meantime, this company either goes bankrupt or is sold off.

Or the government passes a law capping how much you can raise the price of a generic drug over so many years.
Previous discussion; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240001
This is highly despicable as it's pretty much guaranteed that some people will die from not being able to afford the med.

The market is not as efficient as we'd like to think. In a perfect libertarian world, another company pops up and competes to drive the prices down. However, even if the IP of the drug itself is public domain, there's a cost to ramp up a new production line, all for a product which has low intrinsic value commercially.

Shkreli purposely selected a drug that's needed enough (so guaranteed demand) but whose market is not too large, preventing bigger companies from jumping in. (And I'm ignoring for the moment his tactic to tightly secure the supply chain, essentially trying to build a little moat around this product.)

This puts would-be competitors in a tough spot, where the risk is to invest in setting up the manufacturing line, only to have the original company drop the price again and ensure they won't be able to recover their cost. For the sake of the patients, I can only hope there are generic makers who go for it anyway.
When CEO Comebacks Fail
Totally agree. But I'm having a hard time believing anyone explicitely ordered to make such a device. It would get caught soon or later anyway, right?

I fail to see how a big corp like this could not see the impact. Why take such a stupid risk?
> which is probably higher than is warranted

Why is it higher than warranted? They sold customers something that wasn't there, a diesel marketed as clean tech, when in reality it was 40 times dirtier than the law allows.

And it wasn't a design defect, like for example the GM ignition switch, it was designed and engineered to do exactly what it does, and exactly the opposite of what was sold, and exactly the opposite of what the law requires.

Full refund is entirely appropriate (IMO), in addition to fines and jail that may (or may not) result.
The point was that if they don't follow regulations, how can we expect corporations to act ethically if they're deregulated?
He owns the company that is the only current company making the drug. That has some advantages (knowledge of process; supplier and distributor contacts; control of distribution) but eventually another company will enter the market and undercut the price.

Other companies do similar things. Look at the treatment for Age-related Macular Degeneration - Avastin vs Lucentis.

Avastin is older, and cheaper. It's as effective as Lucentis. The same company makes both. That company refuses to try to licence avastin for use with AMD, which forces (at least, in the UK) doctors to instead use the very similar but very much more expensive lucentis. The compnay claims there are problems with avastin, but really those problems arise from incompetent handling ("People might use non-sterile needles to inject avastin! Lucentis comes in a pre-sterilised package!". Well, if you're worried about people using dirty needles you need to fix a lot more about that hospital.)

People are going blind because corporate greed.
They'll just make it so their cars run cleaner when executives are around.
Sure there is.

"We consider this law illegitimate and do not consent to be bound by it."

You may not LIKE that defense, but it's a defense - pretty much the canonical anarchocapitalist one.