skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indian person here, in case what I'm about to write is offensive to anyone:

The difference is that the Indian companies are simply stealing intellectual property paid for by American taxpayers. These companies didn't spend years and billions of dollars going through the FDA maze to develop the drugs. They simply stepped in after all the hard work was done, to develop an alternative process for a proven drug.

That's right, India has "process" patents, not "product" patents, for pharmaceuticals. Look it up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724031
https://weworkremotely.com/
and many, many others
> Your argument would hold water if the free market has been given chance at all.

The largely-unregulated market was given a chance. It created local monopolies and duopolies.

It's long past time to try something else.
Interviews, by definition, are not standardized tests. The more you think like they are standardized tests that should be done objectively, the more useless agony you're taking on yourself. It's never going to happen. It can't.

On the spectrum of human interactions, interviews are closer to a date, than they are to an exam. If you make a connection with your interviewer during that hour, (via whatever topic it is), they will go at lengths to hire you. Yes, you're expected to solve the given technical problem reasonably well, but beyond that, you have to leave it to "chance" and "pray" that you get a good panel.

That's how it SHOULD also work. Because YOU are also interviewing them at the same time. If you don't get inspired with the interviewers, you should also not join that company. i.e. you're also looking for a human connection.

I train for technical interviews for a living, at our exclusive bootcamp for interview prep: http://InterviewKickstart.com . Our entire theory is based on this premise i.e. that interviews are not a standardized exam; they cannot be gamed. All you can do is practice technical stuff really really well. In the end, who gets hired is not in your hands. And that's okay.
>How someone is allowed to patent something that already exists is beyond me

Obviously because the patent process is just a timestamp thing that says "I've registered this idea at this time".

It's then up to the court to rule on a any clashes, e.g. when somebody else has a similar registration from an earlier time.
Augmented Reality has so much potential as an always available source of visible information. I'd love a real-time augmented counter of 'real life stuff'.

My apple watch provides convenient access to notifications, but it's not always visible. Especially in colder winter weather where a jacket or sweater covers the watch and makes it hard to interact with the watch at all.
If you live near me, can I have a chat with your wife about her rankings of these surgeons?
The site's terms and conditions [1] state:

"You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content."

[1]: http://link.springer.com/termsandconditions
There is a historical case for this, as the entire reason for the "illogical" style to exist in the first place is to emulate period under quote in professionally typeset (with metal) prose, but using the limited medium of the typewriter.

The limitations of typewriters have also led to a number of other conventions baked into american style guides, such as placing two spaces after a period. It's amazing how strongly these odd rules are being held onto well after the typewriter has been made irrelevant.
Alternatively India has a lot of smart people and they can develop drugs if US companies don't. How much are US companies subsidized by both money and Indian scientists, and how would one determine this? Frankly I'm not sure where to go to find out the exact facts. I think you are right, but I'm not so sure anymore.
I like the ideas of the article. An abstraction over IO and being able to distinguish between inherently serial operations and parallel ones on a different level are good ideas.
I do not think this article exemplifies these benefits. Instead, it focuses much time on implementing a toy DSL. I want to see what Free can do but IO cannot (functionally or stylistically).
The free market gives us those monopolies. Other companies could emerge and get the funding to build another set of infrastructure, but they don't.
If the writer knew how bad the current practice environment is for many GPs, he might weave a little more sympathy into his article.
I think making cheap drugs widely available is a way for China and India to improve their soft power in a way that the west can't really match. However, they first need to find a way to counteract the safety fear-mongering with regards to drugs produced outside of western countries.
How would this bring us closer to the Singularity?
Not where patents are concerned.

If I join up with the Nazis, the Nazis are stronger.

If I file a patent, one more idea might go unclaimed by a major corp. Unless I am litigious on their level, the patent will hurt fewer people.
Why the disparity though? Why not have it cost $500 in both places? And why aren't there arbitrageurs taking advantage of this?
You mean if india started doing their own research? Well of course, we the general population would benefit. Nobody is stopping them. Except maybe cost.
What is the reason for requiring the single thread of execution in JavaScript? Trading race conditions for callback hell?

Even the concurrency provided by web workers, suffer from the same issues, you communicate with them via messages and they will not respond to messages if they are looping away somewhere else.

I'd love to have some simple pre-emption in JavaScript. Suspend code execution at one point and pick it up at another. Instead of having threads, have the fundamentals that allow threads. Has this been discussed and rejected by the JavaScript community?

I'd really like to know what the deal is here
Oh wow. Sorry everyone.

We were good nerds, but not very good con artists I suppose. We shouldn't have told them we were from Caltech (well I wasn't, I was just visiting a friend there) but the background story was that we all were.
At least some use publications like http://www.researchdisclosure.com/ instead. I know the print edition at least used to exist and have subscribers because there were some shelves of it in the local university library.
"I was just following orders" is not just about purges and/or the holocaust as you imply (something the parent didn't explicitly state).

It has been a standard excuse in tons of other, smaller scale, wrongdoings.

Besides, while having your employee file a patent on your work is not similar to those cases you mention in the scale of harm it causes, it's very much the same exact excuse used there.
That is incorrect. India changed to product patents about 10 years ago. If you read the article,you would have realized that Gilead licensed the drug for generic production in India and it was not someone "stealing" the IP.
Has anyone seen a link to the actual document filed to court for the lawsuit? I'd like to see it if so. Typically in class actions the lawyers take home the bulk of the settlement, with those actually affected taking home small amounts (except for perhaps named plaintiffs, with higher 'reward' payments than others in the class).
Exactly. The important part of these phrases aren't Technical or Conceptual, it's the 'Debt' part.
> You are paying for the cost of researching it and testing it

More accurately, you are paying higher because pharma can hire congressmen and senators

> If the US market didn't pay for these drugs, they wouldn't still be cheaper in India. They likely wouldn't exist at all.

Doubt that much, its quite a strong claim and requires strong evidence. My beef is that we have never even come close to testing this hypothesis

One of the oft repeated justification for the absurd levels of IP protection and patent extensions that pharma enjoys is the huge cost of trials. But if huge development costs are the reason for these protections to exist, guess what, these costs will continue to remain huge. Its just self perpetuating.

Patents are primarily a preemptive measure against a hypothetical scenario. The hypothesis is that unless market pressures are cordoned off, innovation will stop. It is a believable hypothesis but not a quantitative one, and this exactly where we need a quantitative one. How many years exactly does one need to subvert the market so that a satisfactory level of innovation is maintained ? Nobody knows an authoritative answer.

In these scenario what we need is a feedback system, and pretty much the only scalable and fair apparatus that we have for such feedback on economic affairs is the market.

So rather than subverting the market, market should be explicitly and actively involved to work out this trade-off. How exactly this is to be done needs to be worked out.

There could be a futures market on patents on drugs undergoing testing: competitors can promise to buy the patent to the (drug,usecase) pair at a particular price (even if its a dud) and if the owner decides not to sell the owner pay a particular compensation. Such measures will spread the risk. There should be mechanisms for a company to raise money for testing in lieu of rights over the product.

The initial period of validity of a patent should be short, like 3~6 years, following which the patent is on the market. Entities can bid to bring the patent to public domain. The owner(s) bids to retain it. Whoever wins gets the balance. Of course the "bring it to public domain" bidders will bid less because profitability is less when its in the public domain, but market decides who gets to own it. If the owner(s) think they can still extract lots of profit from the drug, bid high. We should stop handing out blank checks without a feedback loop, that is just bad design.

[p.s. fun to watch the votes go up and down :)]
How about drug patents, resulting in thousands of deaths because people in the developing world can't make and afford cheap alternatives?

And no, those patents (and the inflated prices) don't happen just to overcompensate for the "cost of research/FDA approval". The drug company often still has healthy, or rather ridiculously large, profit margins, on top of these costs.
This is very cool! These are small tutorial interactions plotting a function, running a regression, etc using various scientific frameworks in IPython (the kickass interactive interpreter format for python). What really cool about this is that you can browse the individual notebooks by tool (numpy for numeric processing scikit-learn or deep-learning for tensor-flow and others). When you click a .ipynb file in github it will render that notebook for you. This lays out a step by step view of the results from each command or group of commands. Definitely worth checking out.
I'm sure you didn't get what you had solely because of privilege. You worked hard. But that entire discussion is irrelevant. I hate it when people quote "privilege" as a way to shut someone up. It has become such a dirty word.

The point for me is recognizing that yes, I have been fortunate in my circumstances (solely by being born in a first world country in this century I was ahead of the majority of people born ever).

Having free time to pursue your interests is a luxury.

If I could extend that same privilege to others I would in a heartbeat because I think it would be both morally right and for the greater good.

If I don't recognize my already good place in the world I am disrespecting the people who worked hard to put me in the advantaged position that I am in.
So why isn't someone smuggling bottles' worth back to the US until the price equilibriates? That's a pretty nice profit margin even for the illegal drug trade, and the US can't even reliably keep things like heroin from being readily shipped on a retail basis.
Federal judge: Drinking tea, shopping at a gardening store is probable cause
From that article, I get the impression that the 6-month limit only applies to direct submission of prior art to the Patent Office. Patents can still be invalidated by prior art in court.
The only other name left is "entries", right?
Medications are not easily ameniable to arbitrage as they are not classified as equivalent goods with regard to customs- special licenses are required (often) to import them.

Plus, there are quality issues with third world drugs (which may or may not be valid) which rear their head when buying sight unseen
There is a point, even with bandwidth, where you get reducing benefits to scale. just because we've had an insatiable appetite for faster and faster speeds doesn't mean that will always be the case. honestly is there much you wouldn't be able to do with a symmetrical 1gbps link? eventually we will stop worrying about faster speeds probably once we get to 1/1gbps or maybe 10/10gbps even with all the applications we can dream up it will happen.
that's quite an imagination you have.
It could be because the government is not allowed to negotiate drug prices. (Medicare.) They pay whatever the drug companies ask.

Or, maybe because most individuals in the U.S. don't pay the full price. They pay a 'co-pay.' Insurance companies pay the rest. But, they can only make profit as a percentage of revenue. If they lower drug costs significantly, they significantly lower their potential profits. Why would they do that? From a shareholder's perspective, that's a very bad idea.

In the U.S. relatively few people really know how much a drug costs, so why would price be taken into consideration?
This is great - I've been looking for a good series to have on hand when I want to dive deeper into a math field on an as-needed basis. For example, the Linear Algebra one could be really useful if I decide to get deeper into any Machine Learning stuff - http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1670-4

It's possible to do things with statistics/ML even without having the greatest grasp on linear algebra, but it sure would help to have a firmer foundation. Thanks!
The article mentions, Gilead licensed 11 companies in India to make generics. I don't see how licensing to make generics make it stealing intellectual property.

Besides I am curious how $1000 in USA compares to $4 (about ₹ 265) with the per capita income in perspective, as a measure of affordability of the drug.
You're right, but it existed early enough (before Android's release) to be adopted by Android. Here is the relevant timeline -- http://www.pcworld.com/article/253666/a_timeline_of_oracles_.... OpenJDK was released in May 2007.
The quote says it is legal to download them

--edit: apologies, should be a response to parent
Authors here - if anyone has any questions or critiques please let us know.
this is good art.
This argument is pure propeganda from the pharmaceutical companies.

The modern world of lifesaving pharmaceuticals exists despite the American market's attempts to subvert it, not due to its largesse
I guarantee you, the minute someone is making a shitload of money off something related to their patent, there will be "offensive activity".
there is somewhat of a difference between "purchasing something for 0.00 with appropriate distribution after creating an account at a webshop" and "torrenting a pdf"
> If all that tissue is not needed, then why did evolution conserve it?

We don't need two kidneys, two lungs, most of our liver, arms, legs, two eyes, ears, etc. These things just make us better at surviving - more likely to make it out of childhood and to an age where we can reproduce. Turns out, we don't quite need all that matter in our heads either, it just makes it more likely we'd survive some traumatic brain injury. If this guy experienced a TBI with this little brain tissue, there's probably no chance of any meaningful recovery left. Meanwhile we see non-diseased brains recover from injuries that look immediately fatal, like having spikes driven completely through skulls.

What we've known is that our bodies are remarkably resilient to many kinds of injuries. This just extends what we know of our resiliency to this class of injury.

It's also important to realize that hydrocephalus like this is a "small damage over time" type of injury usually - this patient didn't go to sleep with most of his brain matter intact and wake up with it gone, it was gradually lost over months or even years during his childhood as csf slowly increased in volume, obliterating cells as it went. His brain was just quick enough at rewiring that it didn't kill him outright or leave him permanently seizing or in a vegetative state (as with the other half of patients with hydrocephalus this bad). We should be studying him to learn why his brain was able to keep up with the strain where others aren't.
It's a matter of market clearing prices. A gross oversimplification, but $4 is the price the market can bear. Charging $5 in the developing world isn't much different than charging $500—they just won't sell.

Arbitrage is attempted, but the FDA is pretty good about stopping imports at port. Also, the primary distribution channels are fastidious about not taking goods from other locales so the market is grey/black and not worth the effort in most cases. The people who would buy drugs from India are probably using means-tested assistance programs and can't pay the huge sums insurers can.
Will the real Ritesh Agarwal please stand up?
Searched for "Compiler" and was not disappointed.

Tim Budd's "An APL Compiler" is a classic.

I love the goofy title of Mads Tofte's:
"Compiler Generators
What They Can Do,
What They Might Do,
and What They Will Probably Never Do"

Paid a handsome amount for these and many others at Reiter's Books back in the day!
> horrifyingly difficult to enact practical measures.

I don't agree. Almost every nation, state, and locality in the developed world and a great many elsewhere have done it.

> Who determines what is the fair share?

We decide democratically. Most of those nations, states, ad localities have been doing that for a long time too.
Which Is the Best Age to Get Pregnant First Time?
I really like the idea behind beaker, but last time I played with it, the main issue/concern occurs for me when using a somewhat large (uses most of machine RAM) dataset, since using it in another language creates an additional copy of the data in memory for the other language to use. This multiplies the memory used by the number of languages that need an instance of the dataset. If there could be shared memory for datasets somehow, it would be much more useful (if they've figured that out since I last used it, please tell me).
Here's a great article about how Russia has developed a lot of useful drugs that are largely ignored in the west:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-des...

Another example: The French developed Tianeptine[1] and it's as effective as SSRIs as an anti-depressant, with fewer side effects, but it's largely unknown in the U.S.

Point being, even if they did develop great drugs, you'd never hear about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine
Intellectual property (incl. patents, etc) is a tool that countries use to stimulate innovation.

More practically, there's no market in India for this pill at $1000 and there is at $4. The original manufacturer's most reasonable course of action would be to step in and start competing at $4 per pill, with a slight benefit of the "brand". Then they would have $4 per pill whereas now they have $0.

And, you know, the company & investors planned to recoup the costs and profit based on projected revenues in US/EU markets. If their strategy was, we'll develop this drug, start selling it in India for 1K a pop, ...., profit!, they'd have problems far more serious than this one.

And speaking of fairness, you can hardly argue that using "stolen" knowledge is unethical if, e.g. with cheap antiretrovirals you save tens of millions of people. "Stolen"? who gives a fuck -- the drug developer & investors made a profit in the US, the model works, they'll develop new drugs again. Way more useful than the vast majority of foreign aid.

(And that's not to mention the benefits of economic activity and growth of human capital that wouldn't happen if instead the government was just buying the drugs from outside instead of having domestic companies figure out how to make them).

So, don't get your panties in a bunch :)) Things are going to be fine.
A few use cases:

1/ Make a modular backoffice for CMS based website. Make an app to manage users, an app to manage content, an app to upload and manage gallery of media etc.

2/ Make a distributed OS. All services can scale and use backend power beyond what a single node can provide. If you need to burst in the cloud due to a heavy process for instance.

3/ Could use it to provide a separation between the OS and the GUI, providing a UX I may like even if the backend server has to be Windows or Centos or ... Or remotely operating a part of my machine at home?

4/ What about reducing the cost of HW it needs to run? Chromebook style.

5/ What about being less tied in my Web App to Google Drive API + friends by adding a abstract VFS layer in between like a OS does? Same for texting, emailing? Sure it only uses part of this and don't need the client, but the architecture is well splited on this project between the two.

6/ It is multi-user as its core, so it can be shared across an organization and not only on one computer. You could even create one account per project/team and share a set of common tools / organization / folders that way across online services.

With the rise of web apps, it seems interesting to investigate the possibility of a web OS to administrate and make those ones collaborate more nicely. Or at least the possibility of separating the UX and the execution on two different nodes for general purpose systems as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803680
> You are paying for the cost of researching it and testing it, as well as a thousand other drugs that didn't make it to market.

Trying to think of other straightforward instances where a tremendous cost is spent on researching and testing, and directly affect human well being.

One example would be meat farming. As far as I know raising pigs or chicken evolved a lot in our lifetimes, extensive research was done on how to produce mor meat, there's oversight by a public agency and it is consumed by human so there is a decent amount of safety check and oversight.

Yet meat is cheap.

The more research that went into it, the cheaper it got. Provided meat as a product is more stable and less dangerous than drugs, I still think that it doesn't explain why meat would become cheaper while drug price should stay high and pharmatical firms should have extra protection to keep their prices high.

We're not paying for research, we're paying for monopolies.
FWIW, most pharma patents are short lived. The IP gets filed while the drug is still in development, is often granted before clinical trials start, so by the time the drug goes to market a decade or more might have gone by in what is a 17-year period of exclusivity. So not far off your hypothetical 6 year period.
What I was trying to say is that maybe Corel could argue that they can't be infringing a design patent for copying what MS calls aesthetic, when it's actually functional. In other words, they would say they were copying necessary functional aspects for user interoperability, so those aspects cannot be claimed to be aesthetic and covered by a design patent.
Sorry, I didn't read the carefully. Apologies if what you are saying is correct.
That was my old approach, but it quickly leads to a very cluttered folder full of dozens of "New folder" folders, and personally I never look back at any of them because it feels like a junk drawer.

OneTab's features for organizing and prioritizing are so much better when you're dealing with hundreds/thousands of tabs. Also you can browse by the date a tab group was added on.
Show HN: Eval.js.org
Apologies, I didn't read the article.