skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
are there really people this naive lingering on this forum?
I agree the real problem is the high cost.

It can be solved by extending patents in return for lower prices. Then the government must enforce patents internationally by putting pressure on countries that ignore patents.

Another concern is poor quality from knockoff manufacturers. You can partially solve that by lowering costs because the original product becomes more competitive. You can also try to apply pressure on countries that don't honor patents.

You can complain about the cost, but you can't just make pharma companies sell their products for less because you believe they are too expensive. You need to give them a reason to believe that they can continue to sell a good product and make money off of the research investment they put in. You also need to give them incentive not to make small changes to drugs to renew patents when the original version of the drug might be a better version.

Granted, it is sick when people make an excessive amount of money at the expense of those most in need. But, most of the bad that happens in pharma is due to suboptimal patents and suboptimal patent enforcement.
Because we have failed to decide that that is not acceptable.
"Average" is just that. There are many car options cheaper than the average, and many wedding options cheaper than the average. There are no other cheaper options for this drug except what the OP did.
Mighty Tiny Win - Habit Tracker
Best explanation I saw was from Beakman's World, a 90's Tv show.

Sorry can't find a YouTube video.
The #1 killer in the US is heart disease, but insurance companies cover those medicines quite readily, despite the fact that one can choose not to eat fast food or smoke.
Very cool tool. Makes creating charts easy for everyone.
I wish academics would publish pure python implementations of their "new" algorithms. Standard python with Pypy is enough for speed of development and runtime.

The biggest thing about t-SNE is that it's been used in competitive machine learning for quite a long time successfully by many different people because it's on R via CRAN and Python via sklearn. LargeVis has potential, but it could also be not so useful like the vast majority of academic work.
Michael O'Church /s
You're essentially saying it's ok to price out large segments of the population for life-saving medication. This is life or death, not a new Audi versus a used Hyundai. There is an ethical consideration that your analogues ignore.
Like if you were at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell on Jamaica Avenue, and you're trying to meet up with your friend who's at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell on Jamaica Avenue, you might never actually find each other.
The references in the article don't reflect the latest research. So far as I know, this is close to state of the art:

https://github.com/lemire/JavaFastPFOR

The links to the papers in the readme are useful if you want to learn more.
Things that GPS/Waze still don't do a good job of handling:

1. Toll roads - You can either choose to avoid, or choose to take. But I want to avoid toll roads when it will cost me > $x / saved hour. Or how about some optimization between fuel use and the value of my time? Paying $2 to save 30 minutes makes sense, buy not $15 to save 2 minutes. Where's the in-between setting/dial?

2. High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes.
The highway may make a lot of sense with 2 people, but not while being a solo driver.

3. Traffic levels and when to wake up. I wish Waze could integrate with my alarm clock to wake me up extra early when major roads are closed, and I'd be majorly late for work without giving me an extra margin.

4. I'm not a trucker, nor an SUV driver, but something to account for high-height vehicles could be useful for many.
Reducing the number of journalists implies that supervised learning[0] was effective enough to begin to replace some human effort.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning
Then people in the city are assholes for scoffing at the poor, because nobody in middle-class and up suburbia thinks that Olive Garden is fancy.
> I think it is deeper than that. It is psychological. People are not (yet) comfortable speaking into inanimate objects that do not respond back instantly. I imagine that most people still feel silly speaking 'into' or 'at' an object and waiting.

by "People" I assume you mean "Westerners". Go to China and be amazed at the amount of "People" using the voice messaging in WeChat

I wonder if it pre-dates WhatsApp's voice messaging and it might've been a source of inspiration?
Choose not to share ? A lot of times it is difficult to tell and if you have dishonest nurses like the one below [0], what do you then ? Victim blaming is easy but people can get infected not due to their own fault.

[0] http://www.nj.com/healthfit/index.ssf/2015/10/eeuw_nurse_in_...
That likely depends on what trade agreements exist between your country and the US. The dominoes could fall quite quickly.
Coming from of the United States and hearing about how federated soccer is all across Europe is really saddening.

In the US we have baseball where we have a sane semi-pro system. In football and basketball which are the real money, growth sports, there's the best-in-the-world professionals, the unpaid 20 year old college players and not a lot in-between.

In college, a buddy of mine became close friends do with a semi-pro soccer player out of Austria. He wasn't the best in the world and he was an au pair in the off-season, but he was in tip top shape in his late 20s playing soccer for a living.

It really isn't like that here. On the top end of the average case scenario, you have 3 years to make a living doing what you've been trained practically 20 years to do and then you're out in most cases. The whole employment market for these athletes would be a lot more sane if it were like baseball where you have families coming out to see minor league football and basketball players at reasonable prices.
> So it's fair for a multi-billion dollar company to exploit the "global market" by farming work out to 3rd world countries...

That makes sense. It is interesting that when usually there are "anti-globalization" protests shown in the media, the protesters are presented as fringe idiots, violent, with facemasks and so on. Sort of implying "look at these crazies not wanting countries get close to each other, trade and be friends". The truth is globalization is overloaded to apply only to large companies. And usually the more they "globalize" -- the more they create inequality and pain for those at the bottom. So then they also end up increasing border controls, formulate various laws and agreements and ram those through each country's legislature to protect segmentation and control of market.
That's a strawman argument and you know it. A car is financed over 5 years. You can't get financing on pharmaceuticals. The "average" wedding is an equally bad comparison and your figure is wrong - average is actully 26K with majority of weddings under $10k:

http://www.costofwedding.com/

It is absolutely reprehensible behavior. If $1,500 is a reasonable price point and profit margin for a company elsewhere in the world then $84K in another part is simply outrageous.
I didn't take a position one way or the other in my comment. But if anything, I definitely did not support the company. I was more concerned about the billions of people in other countries who will suffer because they will lose access to medicine even more. Some of the comments below pointed out that India had the ability to break patents if the government considered the drugs overpriced, so I'm not sure that's a very valid concern anymore.
Do you think charging $300K for a liver transplant is gouging too? Because that's what this $84K drug just replaced.
>A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct.

Such as the tulip bulb? Or spices? There are very few things that have stored value in a long term fashion and that's because they are rare in nature (e.g. gold, silver). Bitcoin's value relies entirely on faith in the system that places arbitrary computational constraints on generating new units of currency. It is still a currency controlled by people.

>I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum.

It was not flatly wrong. You did not account for the fact that currency in a bank would have appreciated due to interest. It seems you lack a very basic understanding of how the current banking system works and have dedicated yourself to pump bitcoin rather than objectively compare it to the existing system.

>In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern.

There has never been a case that wiped out all government currencies at once, which is what a 'massive sovereign debt bust' implies. Perhaps you meant something else and failed to convey it.

If you are referring to one currency collapsing, then usually what happens at this point is people just use currencies from other countries. Trading in commodities is a nightmare and would only be the result of massive global instability, in which case the bitcoin network would likely be taken down (or would fork several times) due to countries severing Internet connections.
That's 2x to 3x the before-tax income of your average non-tech-employed American. Are you kidding?!?!
And more importantly, much like student loans, even if OP was able to get a loan, it prevents him/her from taking other loans - say, for that car.

Economically crushing people (and removing them from normal economic activity by way of crushing debt) hurts the entire economy except for the pharma industry.
Is there anything that shows banks have had difficulty with the security or availability of bank-to-bank transactions?
Interesting. Instead of looking for God in the gaps of our knowledge, you are defining God to be the gaps in our knowledge. I haven't heard that one before.
If Gilead charged $1500 in every country it wouldn't have been worth to invest in the first place.

Remember they paid $11B for the right to the drug and they still had to bring it through development.
If C is binary or categorical, then confidence intervals don't make sense to talk about (although you could still talk about them if C is integer valued), and the equivalent thing is P(C|x). Unless I guess if you have a posterior distribution over distribution...

The definition of a Q (e.g Q = 0.95) confidence interval a < X < b is just that P(a < X < b) = Q. It's not even necessary that the interval contain the most probable value of X, but when you actually calculate them to want to tack on extra constraints to prevent stuff like that, like minimising the length of the interval.
Don't misinterpret my point: I think the government should absolutely pay for necessary medical treatment like this.

But, it's important not to confuse what are actually two different inquiries: what is the fair price for a Hep-C cure, and how do we make sure those who need get it. The first is a purely economic question, not a moral one. Otherwise you create a perverse incentive structure: people make lots of money creating things people don't need (a new iPhone model every year), while people make much less money creating things people do need (breakthrough cures).
Yes, $300k is even more unconscionable.

Medicine in the US is wwaaaaaaaaaaay overpriced. Things that are critical for life needs to be priced at a reasonable flat rate above costs, and conducted with the attitude of public service and human actualization. Let big pharma reap their R&D costs some other way
Yeah, hard for me to imagine, as we do a lot more that get ingredients for dinner. Packing school and work lunches, everything we drink, breakfasts, paper goods, cleaning supplies, personal care items, in addition to food, there's usually too much to fit in one large.cart.
I really think this article is spot on taking on an issue that I believe will become more and more pressing over time as baby boomers continue to retire.

However, this line felt of out of place:

- "And then there's Gilead. It didn't even develop Harvoni itself; it made a business decision to pay $11 billion to buy the company that did so it could be first to market and reap the rewards, $26 billion worth. There is something obscene about that. A billion-dollar profit would have been a very respectable return on investment, but Gilead is getting much, much more than that"

I mean, why is that obscene? We have seen crazier returns in [insert latest "stupid" app that made billions]. These drugs are difficult to manufacture AND to market. I am sure that if the return would have certain, then the seller would not have sold the company for that amount and would instead reaped the presumed returns.

I think pharma is entitled to big returns because their business is really risky.

I don't know where the answer is. Maybe it is government-driven pharma (yeah like the federal government is ever going to be good at anything), or a SpaceX for Pharma.
Spire API (golang) for avg Breath Rate per min over 24 hours
And I've seen plenty of Tahoes in the ditch after people think that having one will somehow make a difference. 4x4 is great for getting moving, but a soon as you want to stop it's all about the tires and traction control systems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11652542
I see this as a fundamental problem of the unsustainability of our economy. The incentive of every corporation is to earn an increasing amount of money, and thus to move more things from resources to garbage as quickly as possible. "But all those jobs!!" is a stupid argument. Jobs aren't the goal. The goal should be getting resources to the right people, and sustainability for the long term.
Jails and prisons accommodate inmate religious beliefs in food, etc, so I'm pretty sure that's an example of running justice according to choice of religious texts.
> A car is financed over 5 years. You can't get financing on pharmaceuticals.

As a matter of economics, the value of something doesn't (or shouldn't) depend on how easy it is to get financing for that thing. In fact, your financing example cuts the other way. That $33k new car is actually worth more like $40k to the buyer, because that's how much they pay after financing it. The market shows that people value an average new car at > $40k. So how is it unreasonable to say that the value of a Hep-C cure is at least $84k?

> It is absolutely reprehensible behavior.

Gilead is saving lives. Apple is making money hand over first selling shiny trinkets that nobody really needs. Which is the reprehensible one? What you're basically saying is that a company should make less money for creating products that fundamentally help humanity. That's crazy!

People should be able to get these drugs, even if they can't afford it. That's the difference between iPhones and Sovaldi. But it's the government's job to make that happen--the companies shouldn't be forced to basically be private charities.
Well, speaking as a completely non-representative sample (size 1) of the scientific community, I thought the evidence was fairly convincing - they looked at the different rates as a function of when lead was removed from petrol which varied considerably at the country level.

However I did also flag that they hadn't considered video gaming as an alternative possibility (but that's just a private hypothesis of mine). Certainly not fringe science though.
Ah, got it, so you're one of those people, one who heard the news about the Panama Papers, and rather than being outraged, thought "Oh that's a good idea!"
I recommend using https://github.com/technomancy/better-defaults as it's just about the only customization I do to Emacs.
New crowdfunding website
Agreed, it makes sense. And people buying it from India is like going to Vegas to get married in a drive-through chapel or going to the judge. Free market doing its thing it seems.
By monitoring respiration, Spire gives you the insights you need to stay relaxed, focused, and perform at your best – whether you’re running a 10K or working at your desk.
Looking for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in Cuba
Ironically, if the rights were owned by Skreli, Smith could've gotten the drugs for free.
"eventually to a confusing three-way crossroads. They chose the one that seemed to point in the direction they wanted to go. And here their troubles began."

This line seems to suggest that the GPS wasn't ultimately at fault?

My GPS has options for avoiding tolls and the like, but I've not seen one giving the ability to define the capability of the car. That said, there is huge variability in quality of unpaved roads, especially when impacted by weather.
Did the robot open the patient? Did the robot locate and section the organ? This is a surgeon as a sewing machine is a tailor. It's a tool. To call it a surgeon is very misleading.

Look at this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System
why am i reading this

this is the most worthless piece of thing i've ever read in my life
The article is probably filled with correct information, but starting off with a county jail example (there's a clear distinction between that level and prison) was a knock against credibility, given the title.
As long as it's not production code: You should actively seek out and learn/try as many things possible. Don't let anyone stop you. I once worked on adding a "maybe" keyword to python because boredom. It was a disaster. Fun though.
Typically quoted values are (in the current market), approx. $2-3B per product brought to market.

Drug development is incredibly difficult -- for very good reasons. The FDA has to be risk-averse in order to protect the health of the public and to prevent harm to be done.
> Let big pharma reap their R&D costs some other way.

That's easy: they'll just cut R&D and manufacture generics or toothpaste or something that is cheaper.
> Right now US citizens are basically subsidizing other countries when it comes to drug revenue via price gouging.

I am ok with that. They can take even more taxes out every month if it means people get access to better healthcare.
How is giving people jobs exploiting them again?
Making most out of our plans
JekyllConf 2016 videos are live
That's exactly my point point. Nobody should be driving their car through a city.

As for mental health issues, some people like cities, some don't. Without the traffic it would probably be a lot more pleasant.

It's tough to have a successful small town without it growing into a city.
First computer virus of Bob Thomas
A very harrowing story.

This seems to be an extension of what my family called "the Jeep principle". A jeep, and now a GPS, enables you to get stuck further from help.
Highly Recommended. It really helped me simplify the process of writing a compiler.
I think the parent poster's point was that ideological freedoms should not be limited to just religions.
Altrnste read: One third of Americans would refuse rail even if it were perfect and free.
Los angeles is a prime example of this problem. The demand has so far exceeded the supply the brokers are playing the flip game to a point now very few people who did not already start with a house in los angeles can afford one.

Even the current average tech worker wage at good companies will make buying a home on your own fairly impossible. Forget buying if you are someone who works a normal type job.

A house selling for 250k in a decent neighborhood in 2000 has jumped to 850k in 2016.
There is obviously something unbalanced in the pharma business, and I think it is one of the corner cases where unbridled capitalism fails - perhaps because it is a need, not a want, so it is not discretionary spending.

My instinct is that pharma development should be carried out by universities (the state), so it's benefits can be shared with all citizens.
I guess I don't get it. Does Google Maps reputedly have a feature regarding dog population?
Could previous lovers influence appearance of future children?
I disagree with pretty much every conclusion made by the author, and yet agree that there is some truth there as well.

The bottom line is that all of this suburban sprawl is a result of the extra land available in the U.S. combined with the automobile and combined with the growing middle class. The lack of municipal support for public transport is the other biggy. You can't build dense if everyone has to have a car to get around, and if the best you can do is a mediocre bus service that caters to the old and poor, you're not going to choose to build dense.

t may not have been the best idea long term, but the choice for developers at the time wasn't "build a nice Euro model town square" vs. "Build a sprawling suburban mess". It was "build in this empty field" or "pay alot more money to tear down these old buildings and put up apartments to replace them". And the biggest money to be made wasn't in building up.

The only good news is that mostly people have gotten to the point where they're not willing to travel any further out, and so more new development is happening by building up instead.
Does it bother you that Europe and the rest of the developing world also free-ride subtantially?
Curious about the last part. How does that work? If they make small changes and get patents based on the new formula, won't other companies be allowed to use the original formula?

I'm guessing somehow both formulae are covered by the renewed patent, but that is wrong on so many levels.
Doctors next in line after truck drivers...got to say I didn't see this one coming.
You don't and you can't. You accept it and adjust behavior accordingly.
Sounds like a good decision by india
It sounds like you are describing accuracy, whereas confidence is closer to a measure of precision. You can have class outputs with low confidence (relative to 1) but still have a highly accurate NN - so long as the correct output has a higher confidence relative to the other outputs (even if the difference is 0.0001). If you've got 4 outputs and you're getting results like {0,1,0,0}, then you should really make sure that you aren't overfit - because that is the most obvious sign of overfitting.
I don't buy this planned obsolescence bs. I get that most markets aren't very free, but they're free enough to ensure that superior products generally win out. Companies are trying to make money today. They aren't thinking: "hey, let's put out a crappy product that will be worse than our competitors' so that people will have to buy more of our stuff in the future!"

Any company that did that wouldn't make it to tomorrow.
What do you get if you merge Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram?
By the definition of exploit.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/exploit
"to utilize, especially for profit; turn to practical account"
The biggest reason is super simple. Emacs works in terminal mode (really well) and can be <insert pkg manager here> installed pretty much everywhere.

If you are ever in a situation where you are working on a remote system over SSH (possibly with low bandwidth) you will appreciate it. Also your terminal is in emacs mode by default, so all your shortcuts work there as well. Finally if you are an OSX user all of your _text fields_ understand emacs shortcuts as well :).
I was following a GPS at night just across the border in Mexico near Laredo. After driving for 5 minutes or so down a highway, I stopped because it seemed oddly dark and quiet. Checked the GPS for another route, and when I pulled a U-turn to head back, my headlights shown over the end of the road 20 feet ahead of where I'd stopped. The pavement just ended with a 15ft drop to a creek gully. I would have driven straight off it at 60 mph if I hadn't stopped.
It sounds more like a lack of real competition.