skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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. They make half of that in the US, and something like 10% of it in all places that aren't the US, Europe, or Japan.

That's a 12% return in 2016, which isn't nearly as good as the comments in this thread would have you believe. It's an okay return, but it wouldn't really be a good investment unless they can grow those sales more. It looks like they have had some growth compared to last year, so maybe it will end up working out for them. It's certainly not "100x in profits".

A Google search shows the disease is ultimately hard-to-transmit and preventable[2]. $84,000 seems like a fair price to me for this particular case. Google says the total cost of raising a child is "$245,340", so paying a 30% premium in rare cases doesn't seem unreasonable.

A separate complaint is that the financial industry isn't covering this case well. If you expected your insurance to cover it and they don't, that is an entirely separate issue than the price of the drug. Even if they don't, it seems like there should be a market for people wanting loans to pay for cures: It seems really hard to underwrite such a loan, but it could probably be done.

What does good insurance from a reputable insurance provider that reliably pays out their claims in cases like these cost?

(Edit) I may have misread the earnings report, thinking it was for the previous year rather than the previous quarter. So the percentage is closer to 50%, and a commenter clarified that they also had another product.

[1]
Earnings:

http://investors.gilead.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=69964&p=irol-ear...

Purchase price:

http://investors.gilead.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=69964&p=irol-new...

[2] Going down the list on one site that lists transmission methods: Don't have sex with weirdos carrying diseases; don't share needles with druggies; go to a licensed upscale commercial tattoo parlor instead of some shady cheap one
I am too.

The first I would paraphrase as: "The patient refuses to accept that his condition is psychological, and we do him a disservice by validating the idea that it might not be."

The second I would paraphrase as: "While there is always the possibility that this is a new condition we don't yet understand, statistically speaking it is far more likely to be psychological. Given finite resources, diagnosis and treatment for depression/anxiety is by far the best bet for giving the patient real relief."

To me the certainty of exclusion in the first message just immediately sets off alarm bells.
History of the Amiga – Series
Yes. The website is clean and readable, makes everything important (except the manual) easy to find, doesn't require JavaScript and has acceptable markup.
This isn't a new problem. Old media has been doing this for centuries.
If you're generating alphanumeric IDs, removing I, O, and U from your alphabet really does decrease the likelihood of the ID being perceived as English profanity.

Sure, nothing involving letters will be perfect, but this is something to take into account. You can choose a level of risk in your IDs somewhere between purely numeric IDs and the Automated Curse Generator [1].

[1] http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Automated-Curse-Generato...
How to Convert Blu-Ray to DVD 5
Guide to Automated Journalism
Its literally out of sight out of mind for people.

This is not an issue where democracy does well - what we need are administrators with a sense of morality and civic purpose, rather than a mob of people who will respond to any perception of being "weak on crime" by voting for the person creating that perception. There is, frankly, a systemic problem of motivation for anyone to actually fix this - everyone in power gets their cut of the profits here. It seems the american way at this point.
Maxim develops IC to prevent 3rd-party laptop batteries
Corner groceries in Europe have a surprisingly large variety. You may not be able to get everything you get at Costco, but you'd be surprised how much you can get, a little bit at a time.

I spent a few months living in Berlin and routinely shopped at places like Kaiser's and Netto. I never had any problems with product selection or diversity.

But yes, there are other differences in consumption patterns and psychology, too. As a general statement, everything in W. Europe is more minimalistic, since there isn't so much room to just store "stuff". It's hard to describe exactly what you would buy instead or what you'd do differently without knowing you closely, but I think you'd find it's a completely survivable adaptation. :-)
The median lifetime earnings in the US is $1.7 million or so [1]. $84 thousand is 5% of that. 5% of all the money you will ever make is a lot, considering that most of that money is already accounted for by college tuition, housing, and transportation. Also consider that this is a lump sum, that you weren't planning for it, and that this may happen in the middle of your life when you've only made a fraction of all the money you will ever make.

[1] https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/colleg...
U.S. Presidency could be won by a write in candidate (2015)
I'm going to be contrary and suggest that, when you're first learning a Lisp, write a macro every time you think "hey this might be a good place to write a macro" - and then try to achieve the same behavior with a function. There's no better way to learn when macros are useful and when they over-complicate things.
Note that a billion dollar profit would be a 3.8% return over the life of the drug (~10 years or whatever is left on the patent). You could literally get better returns with far less risk parking that money in Treasuries.
This isn't something I know about, but I would think that for a classification problem, if the right loss function is used then the NN should learn to maximise the chance that the true answer is within the intervals it provides. However...

> If we test the net and find such a confidence associated with an incorrect classification more frequently than predicted then we can say that the confidence is objectively incorrect.

On the test data performance is never going to match the NN's training set performance, so it would always overestimate its confidence.
Well that meaning of exploit doesn't have the negative connotation clearly implied above, which requires harm.
That's my sense from skimming the paper.
Corner stores may not, but there are plenty of compact grocery stores in Europe that do. And yes, the five minutes should not be taken literally. On the other hand, if it's on your way home--which is usually the idea--you don't need to park, walk from your car to the store, go through a lengthy check-out with lots of items, hoof it all back to your car, get back out of the parking lot, etc.
Sorry, all of this bullshit doesn't matter in the least
Makes you wonder how autonomous self driving systems are going to handle cases like these. How far could a self driving car "see" to realize the navigation data it has is incomplete and should instead improvise?
Not particularly.

By the way pharmaceutical companies also free ride on public universities. Research is often done there. Even if it is from grants, it often means professors end up working and spending their time for pharma companies instead of doing other things like teaching students.

Moreover, if our goal is to win hearts and minds and I don't know, promote Democracy (at least that is what the propaganda tells us), isn't providing health saving medication or building hospitals or schools working towards that goal better than say overthrowing their government or threatening to invade.

Going back to Western Europe, I hear it is already possibly to go to Germany (or was it Norway) and attend a 4 year university there for free. Isn't that free riding So they can have our pills and we can go there and not pay $200k in student loans. Globalization and free markets, we learned that was a good thing, right ...
a counterpoint to this is if there is a combination of high demand (due to demand, jobs) low supply (zoning laws etc.) then this causes the fuel to higher house prices. The real estate agents and sellers are the spark by trying for higher prices, or skilfully marketed auctions (in the case of Australia).

another counterpoint is expectation adjustment. If $1m buys you a house today but $1m buys only an apartment in 10 years time, then it still buys a home where a family can live and the same wages at the same interest rate can support it, but land prices have clearly increased in that situation.

Taking Sydney as an example: you can move away to cheaper areas but enjoy your long commute and/or low paid job (or no job). I am sure the same is true of many capital cities. (Sydney is the capital of NSW before you correct me :-))
AI researchers reveal the profound changes coming to our lives
How Intel lost the mobile market
The robot did something that previously took a very highly trained person to do. It's a huge accomplishment and not misleading at all.

You may not have read the article because it explicitly mentions the system you linked to:

> The current state-of-the-art robot for soft tissue surgery is the da Vinci system from Intuitive Surgical, but it’s not automated at all. The da Vinci is a teleoperated system, in which the surgeon sits at a console and manipulates controls in dexterous maneuvers that are mimicked by tiny tools inside the patient’s body.
Looks to be mostly craters - are there no volcanoes?
As long as virus scan doesn't start during the procedure :)
Don't worry everyone, we won't be seeing robotic surgeon's anytime soon, until the next time insurance companies look to enact cost cutting measures. Best guess, in the next few years. If you can still afford insurance then...
You can't have "real competition" in the drug industry. While the status of patents is debatable in software (where actual copying is rare), the generics manufacturers are always directly copying from the drug inventors. They don't have the capability to do their own R&D, or often even to develop a lot of the ancillary protocols themselves.

So you either have a regulated market, or massive free-riding, neither of which is "real competition."
EDIT: We went ahead and removed the limit entirely.
I wasn't saying I personally agree, I would rather have that money in my paycheck. But given their audience and the cost benefits analysis -- it does seem to make sense.
I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint. The world is not a static place, and there will always be cases where human judgement is required. Consider for example ice roads or mountain passes: thousands of people may ride them on a single day, and the next day the road may be closed off because of frost, thaw or avalanche danger. There is no way you want your car to only consider a different route after ten drivees have lost their life.
> In the search for a single factor, groups of factors seem like invalid entries.

Grit is most certainly a group of factors.

Nobody is taking about free will or determinism. You are introducing that as a straw man.

We are not on the same page. Weights or not, you are advocating intentionally miss-attributing effects to causes that are under your control. Making reference to 'confusion' doesn't change that, and looks like another straw man.

Given that you advocate self-deception, your response seems consistent with your policy. I salute you for your consistency.
> 4. I'm not a trucker, nor an SUV driver, but something to account for high-height vehicles could be useful for many.

This exact issue causes a fair number of trucks to hit this one specific bridge [0] in Durham, NC. Blindly following a GPS meant for cars when you have a tall vehicle is a recipe for disaster.

[0] http://11foot8.com/

[1] http://championtrucklines.com/latest-news/11foot8-bridge-cra...

[2] http://chapelboro.com/news/news-around-town/durham-can-opene...

[3] http://www.thetruckersreport.com/truckingindustryforum/threa...
If the net outputs probability of 0.9999 but lower CI is 0.4, then you don't have to trust it. With linear models you can estimate the CI from the data and mean squared error of the classifier.
The horror of getting stuck with a cheaper and better robot!
Or... $11B was a terrible price to pay, and their desire to recoup their shitty investment still shouldn't be allowed to bankrupt people who just want to live.

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, more that can barely pull it off, and even more that shouldn't have pharma rates kept artificially inflated on their backs.
Linux had the luxury of waiting until UTF-8 was available before settling on a Unicode strategy. Given that UTF-8 was extremely compatible both forwards and backwards, it was a fortuitous choice. I weep a little whenever I think about how Microsoft messed up by being an early adopter of Unicode - being an early adopter should have made life better, not worse.
Just out of curiosity, at what point would the cost of the drug not met your definition of fair?
True, not very easy though (if you want the benefits at least).
A broad definition is widespread:

* http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/release/libs/assert/assert.htm...

* https://wiki.libsdl.org/CategoryAssertions

* https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ew16s3zc.aspx

* https://github.com/questor/eastl/blob/master/assert.cpp

* http://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ/BUG

Plus my copy of "The C++ Programming Language" (3rd edition) includes an example of creating an assertion facility that uses exceptions. I don't know who you talk to, but when assert comes up in conversations -- even conversations limited to C or C++ -- I know what the assert is meant to do but I don't assume I know where it's defined or if it's a one-size-fits-all approach.
This line seems to suggest that the GPS wasn't ultimately at fault?

There's lots to the story that isnt the fault of Magellan or their data providers, starting with the fact that they ignored the GPS that told them to take US 93. And ID 51 isnt "a few miles to the west" of US 93, it's got to be a good hundred miles or more. It sounds like they had a paper map, which even the most undetailed of which would have told them the two roads are separated by wilderness areas, meaning there were probably no roads to get from one to the other. All of this before they got to the confusing crossroads. Had they stayed on 51 instead of trying to outsmart the GPS algorithm, they would have eventually hit I-84, arrived in Vegas a little late, and would laugh later about how they should listen to the GPS next time.

As another commenter pointed out, had they simply entered "destination='Las Vegas'" and blindly followed it (as the article ironically seems to argue against), they would have been fine.

EDIT: As for GPS options, the BMW-branded Garmin for my motorcycle has an "offroad" option. Because middle-aged men riding 600lb. "dirt bikes" like to pretend they're mighty adventurers. Better know what you're doing, because that thing will lead you down roads that aren't passable the majority of the year (or passable at all on an R1200GS, in some cases). What you propose isn't practical because one good rain and the road can go from "okay if you don't mind dings in your minivan" to "you brought a lifted Jeep, right?" very quickly. Or as a more recent example from my other comment in this thread, that road i bailed on this weekend needs snow tires and preferably 4wd right now due to snow. I'll bet in just a few weeks you can take a lowered Civic over the pass.
Lots of research in the US is university and government lab-based. Even if private sector drug development were cut back, it would not end useful drug development. I suspect the way government and university research is monetized could be improved so that more competition would exist.
Are you saying noone should ever choose a less lucrative career just because they will enjoy it more?
I think a more accurate observation is that we always exist in a state of incomplete understanding and we will never achieve full understanding. Wrong and right connote a state of absolutes that are often relative and even if not, their usage assumes there will be an end point to deeper levels of understanding. I think not. :-)
(1) As someone who was following the market when Gilead paid $11 billion for PharmAsset, it was not a sure thing that it would be first to market or a premier drug. They announced $137/share on November 21 for a stock that opened at $65.49 on November 11. People like to point out how much money Gilead made on the deal, but that is Monday morning quarterbacking on something where they easily could have lost billions.

(2) The article claims Harvoni was acquired. That is not really true. Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) came from the Pharmasset acquisition. Harvoni is a combination of sofosbuvir with ledipasvir, a drug discovered at Gilead.

The combination of the two is a key part of the treatment; sofosbuvir was still taken with interferon (and ribavirin) for genotype 1 HCV, the most common form.

Treatment for genotype 1 HCV, without interferon required ledipasvir. The notion that Gilead contributed nothing scientifically to Harvoni is false; they provided a crucial component to the all-oral treatment of HCV genotype 1.
Leaps in technology, finance, and engineering cure man of previously incurable disease. He is pissed.
I can only speak as someone who has gone through (the pain that was) High School, including many AP courses but I have to strongly disagree with this article.

> I usually use phrases like "society doesn't trust" but let's personalize it this time – for parents, think about whether or not you trust your kids teachers? Do you a large private, unaccountable organization more?

In my experience College Board is infinitely more accountable than any of the teachers. The AP tests are graded anonymously, with graders blinded to student and school. I've literally had teachers give me different credit for nearly the same work as another student because they "just didn't get the feeling I understood the material" or some thinly veiled attempt at saying the didn't like me. Looking back I wouldn't trust some of my teachers to wash my car let alone determine my future.

> You trust your child's teacher with your child's well being every day but you don't trust him to say whether or not your kid knows calculus?

If your kid can't take care of his own well-being by High School you've failed as a parent. If you think it's your job to take care of your student's well-being, you've failed as a teacher. You're supposed to teach them, not change their diapers.

> Then you teach the class and in May, one to two months before the end of the semester the kids take the AP exam - you don't see results until the summer.

This is the only point I can partially agree with. Having your entire score come down to one test adds a lot of variables, but in the age of testing this isn't just limited to APs. Thankfully there's enough data you send to college that a single bad data point doesn't hurt too much. And if you really understand the material, retaking a course isn't that bad.
No because the free riding is not actually substantive.
The maverick who shuns investors
I think you're describing accuracy, as in prediction accuracy.

Confidence is simply how much confidence you have that the predicted class is correct.

This is often important because in a real system you often want to know whether to accept the model's prediction or pass the case on to a more accurate, more expensive model (sometimes a human). You then can select a confidence threshold that gives an acceptable trade-off between false positives and false negatives (ie. choose an operating point on the ROC curve). If your model just gives a yes/no answer with no measure of confidence, or if you don't know how to interpret the output as a confidence, then you don't have sufficient information to do this.

Over-fitting is often part of the problem but in my experience things aren't as black or white as you seem to imply. There are things you can do to limit over-fitting but I don't know of any simple test that will give you a 0 if you're over-fitting and 1 if you're not.
Not at all. I've never heard "blacks" used by a non-black person in a context that wasn't racially charged.
Scientists Discover a Safe Way to Send Medication into the Placenta
At some point, the price of a thing is related to the resources a person can bear on a task. People are priced out of better lives all the time - cars, jobs, where they live, what they eat. Its the way society works. To make medicine a special case, with the govt providing infinitely deep pockets, is irrational. Inconsistent with how we run everything else anyway.

Yes I believe studying, working, getting ahead ought to give me and my family a better life. Else what's the point? Its not just a game with points; its survival. Its supposed to work that way. If money doesn't buy the most important things, then we need some new system of exchange that does buy important things.
The chart label of "% change since 2001" is pretty unclear, but based on the quote "ridership...has dropped a staggering 23 percent since 2001", it seems to mean "% difference from 2001", not "% change year-to-year, since 2001".
How so? The primary development incentive for the large majority of new drugs is the patent-protected revenue in the US.
doppio sounds awesome. from the paper:

Numeric support. Direct support for 64-bit integers would enable
languages to efficiently represent a broader range of numeric types
in the browser. The DOPPIOJVM uses a comprehensive software
implementation of 64-bit integers to bring the long data type into
the browser, but it is extremely slow when compared to normal
numeric operations in JavaScript.

--

how far is this from being solved?
I understand the concept, it still doesn't make it right. But why should it be OK for one set of people to keep beards, just because they really want to, but not for others? Or why should one group be allowed to keep knives, because they swear it's super-important to them, when others are not allowed?

If I'm just disgusted by, say, chicken, or broccoli, shouldn't my assertion to that effect be enough? Seems rather arbitrary to decide some sets of beliefs get special treatment over others, just because they were loud or big enough or "sincere" enough.
Oh, I would say it's a very "journalistic" complaint, unfortunately. Apparently, there is a fair market for that (given the popularity of sites like newyorker.com on HN), but in general what some journalist wants to write is almost opposite to what I want to read. I want to know news, meaning as short and pointed messages as possible, and "no news today" would be actually a good thing. A journalist who thinks he is "good" (note the "graduated from Ivy League" part) wants presence, wants to be someone, a (or, preferably, "the") trendmaker, the Lord of opinions, like that Spider Jerusalem guy. His ego gets in his way. Which is pretty natural, actually — not only for journalists, but for everyone who wants to be a Person, an Individual, not just a smaller part of the system. Which is actually good, I think, for a human.

It might be somewhat working with printed media and specialized news agencies — after all, agency wants something close to what the journalist wants: to have presence, for public to pay attention to them, not to some other agency. "No news today" would be a disaster for them.

I mean, it's all pretty natural, if we admit that typical news agency's goal is not to "give information". And Facebook's "trending news" section's goal, on the contrary, is quite close to that.
Downvote all you want, still, it's interesting how no-one took the time to answer the question, if facebook existed back then and had tried to stop Hitler getting to power would that have been Orwellian? It is our duty to always defend democracy even when we strongly presume it will bring destruction and misery?
Politicians say a lot of things, you're a chump if you actually believe them. Come on.