skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the purchasing power of $1000 vs ₹265 is not important; Gilead benefits, because they now have >$0 from each pill whereas otherwise they would have $0.

Identical to software piracy in poor countries: if people are buying DVDs with your software for $2, that's what the market will support. Nobody offers you a choice between $500 and $2, it's between $2 and $0 :) So you'd be smart to go and start selling it yourself for $2.
Revisiting 64-bit-ness in Visual Studio and elsewhere
7 sign you should leave your job NOW
>More accurately, you are paying higher because pharma can hire congressmen and senators

Corruption might exist, and I agree it should be eliminated. But the patent system is far, far older than this industry. And I doubt it would go away if you eliminated corruption.

>>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

I don't think this is that controversial a claim. No one is preventing other countries from developing their own drugs, and some do. It's not like there is a finite number of chemicals or diseases that need treatment. In what way is the existence of US drug companies preventing anyone else from developing drugs?

>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.

They have every incentive to decrease the costs wherever possible. It's just fundamentally a very expensive process. Especially if you want the very high levels of guaranteed drug safety and effectiveness that the FDA requires.
Another example, $1 cure for lung cancer developed by Cuba with 25+ years of peer reviewed hard science backing it

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/09/29/cuba-developed-a-1-lun...
> 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

Nor has the opposite been tested. Personally, I would rather err on the side of having plentiful drugs. Also, I think the original argument makes sense, but that's an opinion as is yours.
It's a matter of scale. Tyson and Cargil don't spend several billions of dollars to develop a new cut of bacon, essentially one SKU at the supermarket. However, Pfizer and Sanofi will spend billions to create one new drug.

Also, drugs do get super cheap once the patents expire. In fact, there are massive companies that do nothing but wait for patents to expire so they can make generics—take a look at Teva and Perrigo if you're curious about the model.
Someone seems to be down-voting comments on this thread with a passion. I upvoted yours to compensate.
North Korea's homemade OS is a 'privacy nightmare'
One of the biggest problems with the pharmaceutical/insurance hybrid system I experience is the inability to express choice.

My family has an insurance plan in which we pay a set premium cost monthly, and then for some set of health services our insurance promises covers (and thus reduce for us) some of the costs. I think most Americans are in a similar situation.

The insurance company is allowed to reject claims for some services. In particular, they frequently reject claims for drugs for which there is a cheaper "preferred" alternative.

To some extent, this seems reasonable and wise: if there's a cheaper, completely substitutable version of the drug, then let's use it.

The trouble is, things aren't nearly so simple. My grandmother has a strong preference for certain kinds of pain relief medication because some (let's call it Drug A) will knock her out effectively all day, and others (let's call it Drug B) let her function wonderfully and pain-free. However, Drug A is "preferred" to Drug B. As a result, the insurance refuses to cover it.

Every single incentive structure in this system is unproductive:

* My grandmother is left expressing her preference by voting with her dollars, out of pocket -- punishing her for expressing a preference. Because the price gap between Drug A and Drug B is inflated by the effect of the insurance company, this disincentive is so vicious that many people would be unable sustain this at all. Many consumers are effectively unable to express preference in the market because of the synthetically inflated price gap.

* The insurance company feels no pressure whatsoever to cover Drug B, even though the devastating side effects reported by my grandmother are extremely common. There's simply zero incentive for them to behave pro-consumer, or even to bargain the price of Drug B down.

* The drug manufactory feels reduced pressure to change the pricing of Drug B, because unless they drop it to below the price of their current high-seller Drug A, the insurance company will powerfully influence the market away from Drug B, despite the fact that it is in almost all cases superior to Drug A and no more difficult to manufacture.

By completely failing to align incentives to match good outcomes, we've ended up with a system that's pitted against its own progress. Hackers, can we construct a better market?
This is one area where iOS rocks. Seriously, how difficult is it to make permission system granular?
+1

A lot of dev, like me in the college, have the tendency to get everything right before starting writing first line of code when learning something new, in hope that orthodox practice will help avoiding pitfalls on the way.

But what I really learned along those years, is that pitfalls are inevitable, and expose yourself to them at the early phase of learning is helpful so that you could later appreciate other people's solution and the reasoning behind. Trying to get everything right from beginning hinder you from getting such first-hand and organic insight, and wondering with tools too much will stray yourself from focusing on the essentials.
Exactly—please point to a pharma company that is doing original R&D and creating important products in a country where IP protections are weak.
Yes, just a cursory search on Google Scholar found this article:
http://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Race-and-...
> It is much cheaper to file the bogus patent yourself upfront then to be extorted later.

No, it's much cheaper to publish your idea in sufficient detail where a) it can be easily found by examiner searches and b) a clear priority date can be established. With the advent of Google, even something as simple as a blog post can count, though establishing the date could be trickier.

See:

http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-to-make-an...

http://www.defensivepublications.org/defensive-pubs-faqs
Unfortunately there are thousands of type drugs we need, but maybe a dozen or two of different staple meat animals. Plus what you learn from one animal often applies to another.

Thus, I don't think we can analogize meat to pharmaceuticals.
FWIW, a Russian psychiatrist responded to that article, claiming the Russian drugs are ineffective, and the Russian studies are flawed or corrupted: https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychiatry/comments/2dsp2c/an_iron_...
How about drug patents

I believe the context was software patents.
Because this isn't the type of drug that one would buy off of craigslist? It's the insurance companies who are in war with big pharma.
>If ANY other country in the world except Israel had done this, the US government would be going ballistic

Not even close to true. I'm not sure what you think 'American sovereignty' means, but every single government does its best to influence other governments. It's called geopolitics.

As for direct lobbying, Washington is the world's capital of foreign lobbying. Off the top of my head come Morocco, Qatar, and the UAE, but every nation, from liberal democracies to ruthless dictators, they all try to lobby American lawmakers - the most important lawmakers in the world.
The primary distribution channels, pharmacies, want nothing to do with grey market suppliers. There's also not a lot of direct price sensitivity. People with 3rd party insurance have relatively inexpensive copays. The poor have access to Medicaid. In neither case are you paying full-freight out of pocket.

So you've got no mass distribution channels and a user base that is shielded from the true cost. People do try, drug co's all have "anti-diversion" strategies, but it's pretty well contained.
This is anecdotal, but a lot of people slump and have terrible posture when they jog.
Show HN: CardPi – Showcase collections of content in series of digital cards
App (iOS) download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cardpi/id941081241?mt=8 (currently on USA, UK, Canada and Australia stores). To create content you will need to register an account but it’s quick and easy to do, viewing does not require registering.

Website: https://www.cardpi.com. CardPi is primarily a mobile app but if you if you don’t have an iOS device please take a look at the site, keen to get feedback on that too.

CardPi is an app to showcase collections of content in series of digital cards on mobile and web.

The vision for this to allow content creators from independent bloggers and game developers to larger organizations to publish information in a way that is standardized and easy to access across mobile and web. For example a video game publisher wants to release information about an upcoming game. Instead of (or in addition to) a typical game promotional website with overuse of flash and no easy way to get at specific information or place for discussion, they can create series for characters, locations, items etc. and have cards for each character, location, item. Each card can be updated as little or as much as they like, they get discussion forums automatically for every update along with other features.

The idea is to have well organized nuggets of information or live documents in a standardized card form with imagery/text all grouped by series and subseries keeping related content together and with appropriate hierarchy.

Apple does not allow apps mentioning ‘beta’ or ‘preview’ so if you view it on the App Store, other than being version 0.0.0, it won’t say this but really it is very early days and a lot of changes are in progress and there is much to do. So now is a good time for getting early feedback.

To reiterate this is very early days and there is currently little content aside from sample data but I wanted to get some initial feedback so thank you for taking the time to take a look.
While "extracorporeal" evokes the supernatural, some scientists have been working on bringing this back to science. The Relativistic Brain Theory is a book by the neuroscientist that built some of the first brain computer interfaces along with a mathematician that worked on the Human Brain Project. It talks about how the magnetic field created by the electrical current in the brain creates some sort of analog computer. It's a very interesting read but I couldn't shake off the feeling that it was somewhat religiously driven.

http://www.nicolelislab.net/?p=665
> but that's an opinion as is yours.

Indeed, and that is precisely why I want acceptable mechanisms to test the hypothesis and correct for it, adapt the estimates etc (all mentioned in the comment that you are responding to). The fix seems far from arbitrary blanket protection from market pressures. Just like so many other things the market needs to be actively co-opted into the mix to set the prices right, rather than being cordoned off.

> Nor has the opposite been tested

BTW I did not imply any direction in the test, so "opposite" does not quite apply as an adjective to the tests I have in mind. Perhaps "estimation" would have been a better word
Meningitis jab in Africa a 'stunning success'
Your first statement isn't accurate. I used to work at a startup that dealt with Medicare. They have a process where they put contracts out to bid. In my companies case their allowable reimbursement declined by 90% in a single year. They have plenty of power to put screws to suppliers and use their power effectively.
The ramifications physically of bad posture affect you regardless of any of this. If you really want to cur out the outside world more while walking, wear a brimmed hat low on your face but keep your head up.
As a lumper, I'd like to relate this somehow to the "lumped element" model view of a system (e.g. circuit with discrete components connected by ideal wires) versus the "distributed" model. The splitters will chew me out on this, though, I'm afraid; the analogy cannot hold because of the differences.
Patents are supposed to be rejected before they are granted if they don't meet the requirements for patentability, though. To do otherwise destroys the value of patents for anyone but the wealthiest corporations.
This is because you (and most people here) fundamentally misunderstand how patents work and what these patents actually cover. Essentially, there are an infinite number of applications, variations and implementations of any given technology, and each of these may potentially be patent-eligible. The patent office's job is to only grant those that are sufficiently distinguishable over some combination of prior art.
This comparison makes no sense. The vast majority of drugs are super cheap, and we have more choices then ever before. Only ones developed in the last 20 years have patents.

The exact same is true in agriculture. You can patent a gene or a variety that you bred. But the only way to sell it to farmers is if it gives them higher yields than the previous stuff.

Agriculture did benefit a lot from research done by public universities. As did medicine. I'm hugely in favor of increasing public research in both areas. This is not not mutually exclusive with private research. It's not like there are a finite number of things that can be researched or invented.
"STEM" isn't a single thing (another reason why it's a deceitful term.) The term encompasses a lot of different fields with a lot of different economic situations. For example, you might find it difficult to find a job in nuclear engineering, but easy to find a job in computer engineering. There isn't really a "shortage" of people in almost any math or science related field. Whenever you hear management talk about a personnel shortage, what they really mean is that "we have to pay people more than we think we ought to."

If people want to advance science faster, the way to do it is to divert some of those truckloads of money that are going to blowing up stuff in Iraq and putting it back together, or buying fighter planes that even the air force thinks we don't need. Paying scientists and engineers less (by having more of them competing for the same pool of resources) won't advance science and may even hold it back if it makes the best people go into other fields where they can earn a decent living (like finance of medicine).
Me, I'm just a member of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat

Of no use to the revolution. :)
Unless it's a financial application...
> sustained gigabit connections for every client is way too good to be true.

I assumed the hot spots had a gigabit total, not to any one connection. Also, I thought such high wifi rates were only in the lab.
This doesn't help people who opened accounts before 2010, or people who have been convinced by bank propaganda that overdrafts "protect" them.
Larry Wasserman's All of Statistics is there at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-21736-9.

Optimization by Lange is at http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-4182-7

Time Series Analysis and Its Applications by Shumway and Stoffer (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-3261-0), who developed the EM tools for fitting state space models to time series by maximum likelihood, but were largely uncredited by the NIPS crowd.
An interesting side issue here is that bad conceptual model gets the more entrenched the more tests you add. Fixing the flaw becomes almost impossible because it breaks all the tests.

Testing is often presented as a panacea but this is one of the cases where it hurts more than helps.
I always here about stuff like this going on. What do people mean when they say stuff like "they do not have the resources to even meet BoA in court for a day"? How is spending too much time in court taking away innovating time?

If BofA has 100 lawyers on a case, and you have one lawyer, what kind of advantages does BofA have?

What kind of trouble can they cause that company? How does not having a lot of lawyers make it dangerous?

Seems like in a court room only one lawyers runs the show mostly anyway.
Is that really considered smuggling? If the whole 12 week treatment costs $84000 in the US and apparently $336 in India according to the article, you could take a nice vacation to India with your family, get your bottle of 84 pills there, and save $75k to $80k. A smart insurance company would cover it.
"We're paying for bad design decisions."

"We're paying conceptual debt."

Which phrase sounds more clear to you? Also, which phrase exists for the sole reason of communicating nothing while making you sound more intelligent? I truly hope "conceptual debt" doesn't become a new buzz word.
People tend to be splitters w.r.t. shit they care a lot about, and lumpers about everything else.

E.g. "all red wine tastes the same to me, but differently branded 12AX7 vacuum tubes sound totally different".

"These three Lisp dialects are totally different languages, but everything else is an amorphous Blub."
Your comment is not an argument. You are just stating that you disagree with nothing to back it up. It adds nothing to discussion. And accusing me of "propeganda" is just juvenile and uncalled for.

But if you really believe that, hen why are so many of these drugs developed in America? Why aren't other countries inventing way better drugs?
I think people should be able to vote for patent acceptance, if more than 60% of voters consider that idea is great, let company own this patent. Patent office should do research before publishing to vote. Otherwise people can patent everything.

- Technology the Sun uses to shine, technology and methods for light which creates light space in dark space.

- Internal structure of fingers to click mouse/keyboard

- State of the mind before buying something
...
Actually here is what they are trying to claim (formatted for easier readability:

1. A system comprising:

a memory operable to: store a customer account associated with a customer;

and a processor communicatively coupled to the memory, the memory including executable instructions that upon execution cause the system to:

receive an electronic request for a fund transfer from the customer;

initiate a debit of a first amount of a first currency from the customer account;

determine whether using cryptocurrency is optimal;

in response to determining using cryptocurrency is optimal:

transfer the first amount of the first currency into an account associated with a first cryptocurrency exchange;

initiate the purchase of a first quantity of a cryptocurrency from the first cryptocurrency exchange, wherein the first quantity of cryptocurrency is equivalent to the first amount of the first currency;

transfer the first quantity of the cryptocurrency to a second cryptocurrency exchange;

initiate, essentially simultaneously as the initiation of the purchase, the sale of the first quantity of the cryptocurrency at the second cryptocurrency exchange, wherein the sale of the first quantity of cryptocurrency results in a second amount of a second currency;

and communicate a message to a local automated clearing house, the message requesting a transfer of at least a portion of the second amount of the second currency to a recipient.

Even better formatting available here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150262173

Seems to me the only thing different from existing systems is the step of determining "whether using cryptocurrency is optimal". Shouldn't be hard to find a reference that does the same for conventional currencies and make an argument for obviousness.
This is the correlation-causation confusion again. Some countries have big pharma companies, others don't. Big pharma companies can spend more on research as well as on lobbying to maintain over-the-top “IP” protections.

The flaw in your reasoning is seeing the presence or absence of IP protection as an independent variable, and level of R&D as a function of that. I think both are dependent on the amount of cash pharma companies have to spend.
VertiGo – A Wall-Climbing Robot Including Ground-Wall Transition
Realize that "lung cancer" is simply an umbrella term for many diseases which can be quite different from each other. So which one does this supposedly cure?
I believe it would be just a matter a class if Chang had said nothing. The Theranos article posted yesterday had oodles of that. He decided to say nice things, however, which to me, means he wishes to reduce his association with failure by reducing Clinkle's failure.

Interestingly, when I was going through the history of Clinkle, I saw one person who was ostensibly there for a very long time write:" "without a product" is not at all an accurate reflection of the state of things (as the TechCrunch article and plenty of other sources can corroborate)."

This was contradicted by the very same TechCrunch article which asserted that they had no app, let alone product for a very long period of time: "Still, there was no app, and Shontell reported that contributed to internal turmoil."

I see a pattern between the words of Chang and this commenter, which is that if a person invests considerable resources in a venture that fails, they'll do everything in their capacity to make it sound right in their head. Even if that entails making it sound right in the public sphere.

I would be hard pressed to do differently in the same position.
This is somewhat similar to developing new semiconductor processes or CPU architectures. It costs a ton in R&D but once taped out, the individual cost is relatively small.

However, as in semis, the developer manufacturer will also look at what the market will bear. And things are complicated in pharma by copy-cats and gov'ts who understandably look the other way when a manufacturer undercuts the original manufacturer/license holder... So they, the orig drugmakers, kind of make up this shortfall in economies where the market will bear higher prices, so, in essence, developed countries subsidize the pharma costs of developing economies. And perhaps that's not so bad, given the comparative resources.
Your web / back end stack for 2016?
2015 introduced even more languages for backend. Now we are to have a big pool of languages, frameworks for backend programming, REST API: from traditional enterprise Java, JEE, PHP to bleeding edge like Swift, Elixir, Perl 6. What language, stack are you planning to choose for your next professional or pet project in 2016?
If it did India would just reject the patent. Medicines command a special place in market economics and hence all the confusion. For example, there is whole segment of market in India that buys only Ayurvedic products, and there are big cosmetic companies that ensure their product is categorized as Ayurvedic instead of cosmetic.
Register your drone before it's too late
srean: A system where market forces decide the level or duration of patent protection is an excellent idea. Could you share anything you’ve read or written that elaborates on this?
This was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800881, but another thread seems like a good idea, so more people can know about this. The intellectual riches available here are incredible.
How to Send SMS via Asp.Net Application
Well, if blog posts are the currency of credibility one can get away with many things. The allegation may well be correct, but for the purpose of the discussion and level playing field, lets stick to more traditional sources of information and claims.

BTW I see that you got downvoted. Lest you think so, it wasn't me.
There will always be a shortage of below-market-rate housing by definition. If there were enough of it, it would be market rate.