skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The BOM is an aBOMination. If you simply assume that everything is UTF-8 until proven otherwise, you can get pretty far - the legacy code pages produce text that's not usually valid UTF-8 unless they stick to ASCII.
This Colombian musician is killing it
BASIC for Android
"Superior" is a subjective term. Superior in what sense?

Trump for example got tons of coverage. Is he "superior" to someone who may be more knowledgeable, skilled and would "make a better president" but got less coverage? The amount of advertisement, exposure, and just plain psychological manipulation matters.

Is sugary soda superior to healthy drinks? Is bottled water superior to tap water? So we as a society really need to throw away metric tons of non biogradable materials every minute?

Thinking that something wins out because it is "superior" is just confirming the free market ideology - whatever wins must be "superior" is a tautology which makes the word "superior" lose all meaning.

Yes, lots of crappy products beat products that performed better in practice, because of external and network effects.

But what we should be asking is about the correlation between a company's incentives and polluting the planet. In the main, they are pretty aligned, which is scary.
Old media usually has had opposition, like there is Fox but there is also MSNBC. Facebook is THE social network, even Twitter is a joke in terms of size against it.
I don't judge the price of the drug in isolation to be fair or unfair. A drug that costs $10 million could be fair in certain cases(if 1000 people had the disease, and it cost $1 billion to develop, then $10 million would be a bargain).

If their earnings within 2-3 years exceeded double what they paid for the drug, I consider this unfair pricing without much further thought. (Edit) After the correction from the other commenter, it looks closer to an 87% margin. So probably they should've paid more for the company to justify charging that much.
>>cheaper and better

Those two adjectives don't often belong together.
Or use Kelvin like a scientist.
> A quick Google search shows that they paid $11 billion for the company that sells the drug(Sovaldi), and earned $1.3 billion off of it[1] in 2016

Well, we are only 1 quarter into 2016, and you are only looking at Sovaldi (when sofosbuvir is also a component of Harvoni)?

Q1 2016 is:

- $1.3B in sales of Sovaldi

- $3.0B in sales of Harvoni

So, that's $4.3B in sales in Q1, a poor man's approximation of multiplying by 4 is $17.2B in sales for 2016 at a gross margin of 87.2%. The profit on drugs that include sofosbuvir as a component in 2016 will probably be over the $11B purchase price.
When they came for the surgeons, I was not a surgeon so i did not speak out.
That "whining about treatment of criminals" you see is based on a lot of legitimate injustice in the prison industrial complex. Generally speaking, if it seems like whining, it's because you just haven't seen what people go through.

Honestly, I consider it criminal how prisoners are treated. In the sense that I believe the people responsible for this stuff should probably be imprisoned in the system they've built. They deserve it at least as much as the non-violent drug offenders behind bars that make up half, or more, of the prison population in some states.
It sounds like you want to stack another probability on top of a probability. The net gives you an estimate of P(C|x) and then you want a probabilistic measure of how accurate an estimate that is. This starts to get a little difficult for me to think about. It seems like you might be able to estimate it by running the net on a test set (disjoint of course from the training set) and applying standard statistical methods to the results, just like you could for any experiment.

EDIT: Maybe it's more complicated than that though because the experiment is itself estimating a probability, not just the value of some random variable. Maybe we need a real statistics expert to look into this.
It would be survivorship bias if the conclusion drawn was "if you have grit and perseverance, you'll succeed". That's not what I've gotten out of any book ever, it was always "these traits allowed me to take advantage of this opportunity that presented itself".

It's about developing skills and traits that would make you more likely to succeed should an opportunity present itself, or to help you realize an opportunity has presented itself.

There is no magic formula. There is no trait or skill that will guarantee success, but for every success story there is something that allowed them to take advantage of the cards they were dealt that without they would have been unable to.
Too bad it's advertising for a company that uses slave labor.
Right, I wish grades were reliable enough that we could put more weight on them.

The "days filled with extracurriculars" problem you mention is why I generally ignore "volunteered at senior's home / hospital / soup kitchen / etc." activities. When I say that I'm looking for exceptional achievements, a large part of what I mean is "has this student done something which nobody could or would conceivably do just for the sake of boosting their chances at getting a scholarship?"
Rocketbox | Mumbai, India | ONSITE

We provide B2B Transport services along with Transport Management Software. We use Ruby, Postgresql, Mongodb, Chef, AWS.

Software Engineer
- will be part of 3 member team working in a new Elixir based project
https://rocketbox.in/careers

Interview: A phone screen (about previous work), programming project (take home) followed by onsite work with team.

Include this hacker news link while applying.
- this guy took a huge risk buying this ‘life saving’ drug on the internet
- amounting his worth of his existence to $82,500

- the drug companies paid to develop this drug, non-profits didn’t.
- why is he not barking up their tree? http://www.hepatitis.va.gov/web-resources/advocacy.asp

- drugs sold in the usa have high costs to market including a massive tax burden on profits
- this would be a problem with our government, not the for-profit business
Really? Today's computers are cheaper and better than computers were in the eighties.
> and their desire to recoup their shitty investment still shouldn't be allowed to bankrupt people who just want to live.

The natural response to that is, "Well, okay then - we won't be investing in lifesaving medication development because we'll have to deal with constant cries of 'You're bankrupting people who just want to live!'" We already see this with antibiotics.

Now, boner pills, on the other hand - that's a smart investment. No one will complain if people can't afford boner pills.
So you censor his side and leave the rest up?
Joscha Bach recently said something similar. [1]

A society that provides a basic income may also need an ethic that encourages not-for-profit activity, creativity and community involvement. The "Universal Job" is just to be a healthy human being and make your community - no matter if it's the global civilization or just your own family - "richer" in a non monetary sense.

It seems to me that this would be a much more efficient kind of "employment" for the public good than paying people to do some useless bureaucratic work.

[1]: https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/727893059934031873
Read your comment history, realise you are a simple shill for the state, I am no longer interested in correcting your false information.

I don't care at all what you or people like you think. Goodbye, have a nice life.
No, it's "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". An open question doesn't mean there isn't an answer.
Thanks for adding the cite. To me that's enough to put this in the clear. It is a great summary of our problems here in the USA.
Flagged for insults.
Dylan also has macros.
The only people worried are the surgeons. I'd love a robot that doesn't get tired after pulling a long night shift.
> People are priced out of better lives all the time

But again, this is not what we're debating. It's why the "average car price" does not apply.
Offline docs (e.g. when you're in the 3rd world and internet is bad as)
This whole thing is unbelievable to me. We have Oracle spending who knows how much money suing Google and claiming that APIs are copyrightable. At the same time they, along with virtually every software company ever, rely on documented, standardized, ubiquitous protocols like IP, TCP/IP, and HTTP to create software that does anything useful. Even the most basic notepad or calculator application relies on APIs to function. I cannot imagine a world that forces us to treat every use of an API as a must-be-legally-contracted integration. Even the most trivial applications would never get completed because the cost just to agree to all these contracts would exceed any ability to generate profit from the resulting software.

If Oracle wins then in a way this might actually be good for open source; software developers would seek out the path of least resistance: APIs that could be licensed freely. This could simply extend the push of open source code further to APIs.
The top tier is still 3.5-4x the cost of the bottom tier, making for a big chunk of your bill to whack off with a smallish solar setup
A new and interesting perspective from someone who bootstrapped a billion dollar company without any investors.
Land of the free...
There's no maybe. You're weird. Nearly all maps we're exposed to growing up have North at the top of the page. However, you would be right at home in this segment of West Wing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH1bZ0F3zVU
Thank you. I have been a part of the Chicago CTO Forum for a little while. It doesn't appear to be a very active group, though.
I still remember vividly the death of James Kim, the CNET reporter who died because GPS lead him and his family onto a small mountain road that shouldn't have been opened in the first place. I didn't know him personally, but he was a close friend of a friend, and as the events were unfolding, daily I could see the worry and pain in my friend's face, until he was found dead (but his family was miraculously found alive). This happened about 10 years ago in the mountains in Oregon, notoriously treacherous during the winter.

Surprisingly, my neighbor revently described to me how she almost died in the same area by following GPS, just last winter, almost 9 years later. They blindly went up a mountain road in the snow as they were trying to drive to Portland from the Bay Area, and they went to the point where they could barely turn their car around. Had they attempted to stop later, they would have gotten stuck and it would have turned into a similar story.

Unfortunately, GPS needs a setting labelled "follow the safest, biggest roads".
Thanks!

It's always a bit of a tradeoff. A 512MB bucket size would double the size of the Replication Table and we want make sure we keep the entire working set in the buffer cache. 1GB also has the advantage of filling up slower, which gives us more time to close full buckets and create new ones as needed.

That said, 1GB is a bit of an arbitrary number which just happens to work pretty well. 512MB might work just fine. The exact number isn't as significant since typically we lose a whole disk at a time and thus needs to recover a certain number of TB regardless of the bucket size.
How a Mysterious Bacteria Almost Gave You a Better TV
Ask HN: Is it still worth it for a mobile developer to learn (front-end) web?
Hello lovely folks

I started out as a mobile developer ever since I started programming. However, I feel myself lacking in knowledge (and potential job opportunities) due to my lack of knowledge about web. I literally know basics of HTML/JS/CSS. A little bit of node and npm (mostly from tutorials). The build and tooling (coming from Android at least) makes me feel so spoiled (not having to worry about so many tools and configuration and that's primarily what's kept me away from front end web).

Should I do a deep dive into web dev proper (i.e. in terms of the build tools, frameworks, SASS, etc)? Or would it be better for me to concentrate my learning efforts elsewhere?

Sorry for the long winded question.
Essentially I am asking if it is still worth it for me to learn web dev?

I know this will be purely subjective but I am curious to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks!
It's ironic that one of Oracle's core products (https://www.oracle.com/linux/operating-system/index.html) was created by the very practice that they are trying to outlaw, as an independent implementation of proprietary software (belonging to AT&T).
I think you need to factor in that it's not the individual personally paying 5% of their earnings, the personal cost is simply one year of your insurance out-of-pocket max. Anyone and everyone should be ready, willing, and able to pay for one year of whatever their out-of-pocket maximum is in order to access a miracle cure for a terminal illness.

The better question is what are insurance companies actually paying and how much should they have to pay? And then we get to the actual reason the drug is priced so high... it's because it is actually less expensive per cured human than all the alternatives. At $84k, this drug is actually saving insurance companies money per-cure.

The problem is that the cure is so damn good that everyone wants it right away, where-as the previous choices sucked badly so only a small percentage of the inflicted even went for it. Exactly how the OP describes, the cure is so good and so free of side-effects, patients want it even before they are showing symptoms of the disease! Of course the insurance companies can't afford to cure the planet of HepC all in one year -- there has to be a way to spread the (lower) cost over time.
Ultimately if we want companies to do research but not be able to charge prices, then the government should be involved. It's like the case with Turing pharma. Everyone's upset at him for buying a (very old) drug for a very rare condition and raising the prices. Yet... why was he able to buy the drug in the first place? Look there, don't blame the person that found a golden penny.
Yeah, it is quite a lot like React components. Polymer and React actually came out around the same time (early 2013), but Polymer spent forever in development and only recently reached 1.0, so React got a lot of the developer momentum.

If you're doing webcomponents right (i.e. adhering to the Law of Demeter, not handing out references to internal shadow/shady-DOM nodes, defining an API for possible child components), then you naturally get centralized & predictable mutations as well. The methods & child nodes of a top-level component become the API by which events can mutate the page, and then any state changes propagate down to the leaves of the component tree only via well-defined APIs.
> It's also incredibly obtuse to call $84k a "30% premium" on raising a child. There are so many people who don't (because they can't) spend close to $245k[.]

Lots of people can't afford gas at $4/gallon, and need to buy gas to get to work. But does that mean the fair price for gas is $2 or $1? Does that mean it's reprehensible to impose a carbon tax that would make gas even more unaffordable for poor people? And when oil was $4/gallon, oil companies were making money hand-over-first. Should we have forced those companies to sell oil at $2 instead?

The answer to these questions is, of course, "no." Making oil artificially cheap would badly distort peoples' incentives, undermine economic efficiency, and harm the environment. Making sure that poor people can still get around is of course an important concern, but one we can solve through the appropriate welfare systems.
The explanation behind the title is summarized in this line from the article: "With rock-bottom wages and government assistance, the industry boomed."
I don't know where you live, but here in the US the IRS simply has to ask you if you have a foreign (or crypto) bank account and you'd smart not to lie to them.

If they can't get the money because they don't have he private key they can simply put you in prison.
If they have medium-range laser rangefinders, then they may be able to sense obstacles like this just at the edge of braking distance. Would work fine at night but maybe not so well in a sandstorm.
Even more interesting, the California Technology Assessment Forum (CTAF), which reviews the cost effectiveness of new technology, said the $95K price tag for Harvoni was cost effective.[1]

However, they also said that current budgets mean it would only be affordable at half the price.

[1]http://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/ca-panel-gilead-s-harvoni...
This is true, but you still have something you can trade for bread.
Yeah, I have an older car with not that great headlights. I imagine a self-driving car would have been able to "see" the hazard better than I could at night.
I probably misread it then.

That starts to get into the realm of being unambiguously unfair. At the very least, they probably should've paid more money for it so that the people who developed the drug could've gotten their share.

Maybe it was just a risky purchase that turned out unexpectedly successful. I've never evaluated a $10+ billion deal, but I imagine I'd be scared of it falling through if I asked for too much.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me. We rejoiced: work had been abolished.

EDIT: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/video/2016/f...
> then the government should be involved.

The government is involved. Most of these drugs would not exist were it not for the NIH.
Funny story. I'm from a smallish town with an average income of about 40k / year and it was MAJOR news when they finally got an Olive Garden. Apparently there is some strict criteria that Olive Garden uses to place their restaurants and whenever the city finally qualified it was a huge thing for economic planners, all over the paper. My dad called to tell me about it.
It's different in monotheistic theology. In pantheism, not all gods create everything equally. And the gods don't (typically) agree on what is fair and unfair. So the conundrum there is that the most powerful gods ends up winning 'moral' arguments, at least while they can.

As for the God of the Bible, I don't understand your point. It seems fair to say that people might not understand the whole picture and that it's not fair to judge God with limited wisdom and perspective. This attitude was Job's sin, not merely being weaker than God.

Are you claiming specific charges against the God of the Bible? Based on whose measure of morality?
First Look: TokenPay PHP API (beta) for easier web payments
I feel it may be a problem for them since it looks like they try to reproduce the program's setup/workflow, which is (in my experience) more than bioinformatics reviewers usually do:

>Authors are strongly encouraged to include an automated test suite covering the core functionality of their software.

> OK: Documented manual steps that can be followed to check the expected functionality of the software (e.g. a sample input file to assert behaviour)

You can see the checklist reviewers go through in any of the issues here:

https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues
>> the CNET reporter who died because GPS lead him and his family onto a small mountain road that shouldn't have been opened in the first place.

I feel for James Kim, but why is that a reason for the road not to have been open? I make a hobby of exploring back roads. I sometimes use a GPS, but almost always for locating myself and getting a view of my surroundings, rarely for directions. I don't like to see bad things happen to people, but I'm sincerely puzzled when the reaction is to try and prevent them happening through prohibitions. When there are no roads left to close people will still get themselves into trouble by not observing enough, not thinking enough, or putting their faith in untrustworthy sources.
Or Waze carpooling could come to the US.

http://9to5google.com/2016/02/09/waze-rider-app/
By the way pharmaceutical companies also free ride on public universities.

Free ride? You think pharmaceutical companies just come along and pluck the best drugs for free? No, they out-license it from the university and pay royalties.

How else would Northwestern University build a brand new chemistry building from their Lyrica royalties?
This has got nothing to do with 'survival.' Nobody is going to starve because they didn't get a university degree. We're talking about relative status within a class system. More specifically menial jobs vs. nice jobs.

Not all education is equal but there's no particularly good reason for the runaway costs. Quite simply, the middle class are willing to tolerate ridiculous tuition costs because it lets them stay ahead of the poor.
Most people don't know they have even been exposed to the virus. The test is not a standard test. You need to go in with specific symptomology, "like I have pain in my upper right quadrant.", or your liver enzymes are off, and you say "no" when the doctor asks you about your drinking habit.

As to profit, it's way too early.

The affordable care act will pay for it when your liver starts to break down from the virus. In what world does it make sence to treat a virus at that time, if you can kill the virus early? Before it does its damage?

My father died from liver cancer, and it was hell. Any doctor out there knows dying if liver failure is a particularly bad way to go.

I don't have an answer that's going to make everyone, including shareholders, all fuzzy, and protected. I think it's crazy to let them charge whatever they want for a particuliar, lifesaving drug.

I guess in the United States the right medication will go to the highest bidder? Poor folks, like myself, will just be Given the opportunity to watch the creative t.v. commercials? "I so glad Biff is going to live. Too bad he got those tattoos when he was finding his focus in life. Hay, but thank god we have money to pay for his medication." "Let's pop a purple pill, and have more rich kids?" "Gotta love America!"
Upvote/downvote buttons!
Thanks! I hope Doppio can become useful to many more people. :)

There is a proposal for value types [0] that Niko Matsakis [1] and Brendan Eich [2] talked about a couple of years back and could be used to implement 64-bit numbers in JS, but I'm still waiting for an implementation or a more complete proposal. Looks like it might be dead in the water, as the proposal hasn't been edited in quite some time, but I do not have my finger on the pulse of browser standards so I could be wrong.

[0] http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:value_object...

[1] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/04/01/valu...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/BrendanEich/value-objects
My recollection (and a quick review of Wikipedia) of the James Kim case was that GPS wasn't involved; it was a matter of following a seasonal road shown on a highway map.

The problem isn't so much GPS--although I imagine doing what a GPS "tells you to" can make the problem more severe. It's that in large areas of the Western US in particular there are a wide range of road conditions once you get off major paved roads.

ADD: As for closing off roads, there are a huge number of minor roads in the West that are more or less drivable depending upon weather, vehicle type, driver skill, and other factors. If you drive off paved roads in those areas, it's important to be careful and often to obtain more info than what's on the map.
>I still remember vividly the death of James Kim, the CNET reporter who died because GPS lead him and his family onto a small mountain road

Unfortunately you are vividly remembering some of the early speculation, and not what actually happened. James Kim died following a paper map - not a GPS or an online map, both of which were postulated but not true.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim