skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In extreme cases like this where a profit motive is the only thing keeping us from curing huge numbers of people, the US government should write a single check, take the rights, and start handing out pills.

Yeah, but, as your own link notes, courts (and the constitution) require fair market value for compensation. This doesn't save you any money at all; eminent domain can only have an impact when someone is refusing to sell at the market price. But Gilead is very very happy to sell at the market price. The issue is people upset at what that market price is.

If the US government could come up with the fair market value of the exclusive rights to manufacture Harvoni and Sovaldi, the problem wouldn't exist, because the same amount of money could also just buy all the doses of Harvoni and Sovaldi on the open market.

> As far as the company is concerned, that could even be a preferable outcome. Cash now and the marketing benefits to promote its other drugs.

Oh sure, they'd love for the US government to buy a million doses at $84k each and start handing them out. I don't think that solves any problems though.

Edit: Wait, or is your comment actually just an argument for single payer healthcare, and I'm just being obtuse? If so, my apologies for missing the joke, and I think you're right: The most obvious role for the government is funding universal catastrophic care, and I think this should be a part of that.
My brother is in prison in Texas. If this happens to his unit and my mother can't visit him I would be the most angry I've ever been in my life. I don't know how I would cope with that. The JPay extortion scheme is bad enough. This is demented.
Sadly most of that money is spent on marketing [1] and most new drugs are just minor tweaks to existing compounds [2], much safer bets than brand new approaches.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

[2] http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2015/07/06/serious-risks-and-f...
I downvoted your comment but please keep in mind that Facebook is a large company that needs to lobby the federal government on a variety of issues, which necessitates a presence in DC.

Also, the Secret Service employs some of the smartest and most capable people in the federal government. Any company is lucky to hire ex-USSS agents.

Using these two points as evidence that humanity collectively has "no privacy" is not only false on the surface but dishonest when closely examined. There are valid critiques of both the US Government's use of the Internet and, separately, Facebook, but these two are not intellectually honest.
To start a UK company, it is not necessary. To be in line with accounting compliance requirements, you need to be able to issue invoices from a UK company bank account. In order to obtain that, you need management to be based in the UK (i.e. be resident).
These Harvard economists always seem like clones of one another. They purged out all the Keynesian economists from the faculty - since Keynesian economics can't justify business selfishness - and since then they do everything they can to convince the world that everything is going fine with free market Rand-style values. I think someone must be living in a very isolated community to think that everything is going as well as this article claims.
As several other people have implied, I'm skeptical that these people have any familiarity with technology besides the ability to interface with the terminology in their powerpoints. It would be far more informative to know where people go after they leave the various NSA directorates. Unfortunately that takes effort, since their work experience on LinkedIn will most likely be euphemism meant to be unmanageable for outsiders.
An order of 100 pizzas might require human interaction (by policy, not by technological necessity) and depending on how the vehicles are configured, may only result in one vehicle being sent anyway. Order just a few pizzas, and space them apart in time - long enough that they won't be on the same vehicle, but short enough that the problem won't be discovered before the next vehicle is sent.
Certainly. And it should be just as fair to allow parallel imports of everything. Want to charge more than [retail price B + transport cost B->A + import tax A]? Guess what, the market is going to take care of this for you.
Building an awesome Devops team on the ashes of an existing infrastructure
Huh? Who said anything about "value"? You are the one who mentioned car pricing not me. My point is that cars are peoples single largest purchases outside of home ownership and for most people the only reason that is even viable is because a source of financing exists.

Why are you dragging iphones and Apple into this? You are way off point.

"the companies shouldn't be forced to basically be private charities." Wow, I don't anybody has ever compared a big pharma company to a private charity before. I had to reread that sentence twice.

How about Martin Shkreli the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who overnight raised the price of an AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750.00 a pill overnight? Is that OK? He shouldn't in your words "be forced to basically be private charity" right?
tl;dr: charity fundraising with no specific details given.
> 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!"

Of course they're doing that. They get away with it, because a) everybody else is doing that too, and b) they know that throwing money at marketing has much better ROI than making a good product. A little bullshit can paper over many faults.
> I would say he just changed his medium.

I would agree with this. Another change like the change from Cubism to Dada to 'make your paint' in reaction to production of factory made paint.

Cubism -> Dada -> Chess
To some extent, this could be addressed with standard error detection/correction techniques (e.g. error-correcting codes). But that would make the strings longer and often wouldn't help until they made it to a computer anyway.
You forgot the cartoon of a strong-jawed man. :)
Not sure if there is one in the USA, however in India the law does impose a maximum price for critical and life saving drugs (hypertension, heart related, diabetes etc.). There is ongoing process for adding some cancer drugs too to this list. I think the key here is that businesses should be allowed to make a 'reasonable' profit.
Show HN: Sensey – Android library to make detecting gestures easy
>a VC firm with government interests

That right there. That's the scary part.
HSBC cuts Zomato’s valuation by half, and why the “growth” argument is faltering
You don't have to bring a drug to market to make money on your equity. Acquisitions are the main route by which big pharma acquires a drug.
> Marcel Duchamp, the famous Cubist artist

I always think it is interesting to observe which are movement is used to describe artists who did work in more than one (in this case Cubism and Dada).

Not at all a nit-pick or a correction; Duchamp's writing on Dada has influenced some of my own research/work and so I just find it interesting which labels we choose (of course one label is easier than some label fitting a monarch: Marcel Duchamp, Painter of Cubism, Assembler of Dada, Player of Chess).
It's a US thing for everyone (regardless of gender and age) to dress in jeans and sneakers. Curiously not the case elsewhere in the world, though.
There is also Spacemacs which is emacs + Evil with some sweets.

http://spacemacs.org/
Back when I worked on self driving cars we called it the cliff problem. It's pretty straightforward to spot things that are in your way (trees, cones, broken down car) using LIDAR. It's really hard to notice when a road abruptly ends. From the perspective of the cars' LIDAR a roll over and a sheer cliff look pretty similar. Either way you just won't hit any targets at all with the laser beam. There was a silly obstacle on many self driving car courses that basically had the car drive up and over a relatively steep bump. At the crest of the hill the cliff detection would usually trigger and a lot of cars would just pause there, the roll over looked like a sheer cliff when the car was at a 15 degree up angle.

I assume we can make it work with computer vision for much the same reason humans don't routinely (though sometimes) drive off cliffs.
Show HN: EasyDeviceInfo – Get android device information like a piece of cake
The author, Gregory Mankiw, is a Keynesian on the Harvard faculty. Who does he seem like a clone of?
There's an added complication: in C, there are just five[1] names available for signed values: signed char, short, int, long, and long long. Additional, the number of bits assigned to each of those must be >= to the previous name.

Suppose your C implementation wants to have signed types for 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit values. If int is 64-bits, then you literally don't have names left to label those lesser-sized signed types. So in practice, int can be no more than 32 bits.

The solution is to always use size_t as a count or size of anything. Uses offset_t for a difference between size_t values, or a difference between pointer values.

An alternate practice (one I subscribe to) is to use unsigned as your default type instead of int. In this practice, 'int' means a variable which can be negative. In real programs, the vast majority of variables never contains negative values.

[1] char can be either signed or unsigned, so let's ignore it for this. Also, let's ignore the new char type names introduced in recent C++.
Well history has shown it takes at least that much time. It took that much time for the republicans to push our country to the right as much as they have; it would take at least that long to push it back to the left.
Not even then. It's such a contrived example, playing with the fringes of the language. It's certainly completely nonsensical without punctuation. No native speaker would get it on the first pass, either read or naturally spoken.

It's also nonsensical in content: "things from a place, which have things done by the same things from a place, themselves do things to the same things from a place" - it's tautological.
An Air Traffic Control Simulator in HTML5
I used to say this, until I actually tried teaching someone to read in Russian. Then I ran into all sorts of weird cases I had never noticed: "ничего" and similar, various silent letters, etc.

I mean, I agree that it's much simpler than English in terms of going from written letterforms to pronounced word, but there's still a bunch of weirdness floating around.
Yeah, until the US decides that it will retaliate by, for example, adding a 100% import duty to all goods produced in India and no longer supplying visas to Indian citizens.
"Let your subordinates start all answers with 'Sir, yes, Sir!', but not with 'Sir, no, Sir!'".
So right now lithium is at $5/lb. Let's say you have an incredible breakthrough and reduce it to $1/lb. The cost of that battery now becomes $96 with the same profit margin. I don't think that really falls into the category of "changing the world", at least in the sense of it revolutionizing the battery industry.
> They have all the right in the world to take their business elsewhere.

Nobody is claiming otherwise, just that they're stupid for leaving the profits to the taxi companies, who do comply with the background check laws. Either one of them could have become the dominant transportation player in Austin, but they were both too incompetent to make contingency plans.
I just recently had my gps get me to try and drive down a gravel road (not that bad) and through a ford that was clearly far too deep for my car, and had a sign on it saying that it was unsuitable for cars, all to save about a minute.

Google maps also doesn't seem to know whether roads are gravel or tarmac, and since they both have a 100 km/h speed limit, it will direct me down a shorter gravel road, that will actually take longer because I'm not suicidal to go 100 km/h down a windy gravel road.
Wow! I feel more intelligent already.
Ay, what part of Guatemala? That's my home country.

Here's another story: Driving across Guatemala on the Panamerican highway during hurricane Stan[0] (although we didn't know how devastating it was going to be at the time), we saw half of the highway that we had just passed collapse behind us down the side of mountain. We were one of the last 2 or 3 cars to drive west-bound that day. On that drive, we also saw full grown trees sliding down the mountainside, still rooted and standing vertically.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Stan#Guatemala
The idea the neighbors of my neighbors are likely to be neighbors is basically an assumption of positive curvature. In large codimension embdedded submanifolds can have very negative curvature, in which case neighbors of neighbors might not be as likely to be neighbors as one might first think.
Wow, what a racket. How can people work for these companies and sleep at night?
Making Lichtenberg Figures in Wood
The use of the Tempa.Dot thermometer in routine clinical practice
Go to college parties.
Avoiding Gated Communities with Diaspora, Friendica and Others
I don't think you'll see fully automated surgery soon because most ML algorithms can too easily be fooled by unusual sensor data or unexpected states -- and these are very much AGI problems as well. Those algorithms are no where near the reliability levels required for approval as medical devices. We will have advanced assist-mechanisms (like davinci robots) long before the decision making processes are incorporated into a robot surgeon. Essentially, there won't be a "computer surgeon" for a long time and the difference between Human Surgeons using modern assist technology vs a fully computer surgeon mortality will be blurred as assistance technology improves. So there will never be a 1% vs 0.5% mortality. It will be equal mortality at best before AGI allows improvements under as many or more conditions as a human. Just my opinion of course.
Google Summer of Code 2016 with Debian Reproducible Builds: Introduction
" to quit being too demanding and start acting like just another client."

Uhm, intelligence agencies are 'not just another client'.

Do any of you have any concept of duty, service, community?

You do realize that they are serving a cause much greater than you or I, and certainly Twitter, for that matter?

You do realize that Twitter is a primary propaganda and recruitment tool for some very, very nefarious people?

Of course the debate regarding the level of privacy we ought to have, and what amounts to government overreach must be had, and likely will never cease, but at the same time, this is a serious business. Lives are literally at stake.

"Plus, being involved with the government usually involves all kinds of regulatory nonsense and (sometimes) having their personnel on premises for whatever reason."

God forbid that other people have a responsibilities much greater than themselves, which doesn't involve making money?

I'm not so naive to suggest that government requests may be burdensome, and on occasion due to ill motives, but I suggest that the premise of your statement lacks perspective.

In this particular case, it would seem that the government should at the very least have access to public Tweets, this would be arguably one of the least intrusive measures they could make, after all, a Tweet by you, I, or an ISIS member is definitely 'public domain' in every sense of the term.

I wish there were more details.
You lost me at "…API (such as a website)"…. How is a website an API? UI I can see, but API? What do you mean by that?

In the case of UI, there's a good chance that, to the extent that the piece that is copied constitutes a method of operation, that piece is not copyrightable. For example, in Lotus v. Borland [1], the court ruled that the organization of menus and keyboard macro commands for the sake of compatibility was not copyrightable. However, certain more "artistic" things like icons and such are copyrightable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor....
IMHO such an argument from Google seems weak. Developers were more than happy to learn a new technology when the iPhone and Cocoa/ObjectiveC came along. And now these same developers all seem really keen on moving to Swift, a whole new programming language, because it offers compelling improvements.
Yeah, I've applied when this was first announced but I couldn't pick it up since they only allowed it to be picked up at their New York Embassy but I was near Chicago at the time. Now I'm in SF and apparently they are coming to SF on May 20th so I'll hopefully get to pick it up.
The 'had had' versions are actually a feasible examples, and don't rely on cutting out other words to make them work. Still, it's uncommon to put so many had's together.

You probably wouldn't use four had's in that particular example though - "All the faith that he had, had had no effect..." or "All the faith that he had had, had no effect...".
They are not fabricating it. But it is like reading a crime novel knowing who the murderer is. When you already have the ending - you can find your own path with the clues left inside the book.
It's not just PR. The post-Ballmer Microsoft has seen a lot of quantifiable changes regarding open source.
Actually a significant population in the US was infected by blood transfusion; the US didn't start properly/universally screening blood and taking precautions for hep C until 1992.

This is why there's a spike in infection rate among older people, and why hep C is considered a looming cost crisis for Medicare -- we don't yet know the full extent of the infectious disaster that was unscreened blood, but it's ticking away inside anyone who received a transfusion prior to 1992.
WordPress适合任何产品的王站模板 – Figero
It is not 'taking the moral high ground' to stop intelligent agencies from dutifully doing their jobs of protecting our safety and interests, so long as this is actually the case.

I suggest were you to have the opportunity to sit in on Mr. Obama's daily security briefings, you might have your eyes widened as to the scope of the violence that threatens us.

In Canada, where I live, our young Prime Minister had a rather negative tone about such things during the election, but the moment he was elected, and had visibility into the actual goings on, he changed his tune pretty quickly and the bills he was supposed to quash will remain intact.

Of course, lazy policemen wanting Twitter to do their work for them notwithstanding.
Could you add Finnish?
I wear jeans (made in the U.S.[0]), sneakers (made in the U.S.[1]), and t-shirts (made in the U.S.[2]) because they're comfortable. On the other hand, I very rarely go out to any place that most anyone would call fancy. "Fine dining" for my spouse and I is Taco Time or a couple of places in Ballard[3] that we know to be open late and have cheap late happy hour food menus. (Oh, and socks[4], too.)

0 - http://texasjeans.com/

1 - http://www.newbalance.com/made-in-usa-1/

2 - http://store.americanapparel.net/en/

3 - Seattle

4 - http://www.socks4life.com/specials/made-in-usa.html
Actually car companies are starting to patent vehicle control interfaces, (for e.g. Teslas patents for Sunroof control interface [1], Audio Control interface [2], etc)

If the current craze of IP-as-offensive-weapon were the trend back in the days where basic vehicular controls were being defined, I think we would have seen some similar behavior from car companies - (and in my opinion, their case would be more defensible than Oracle's software API copyright protection).

[1] http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20140403ptan20140095029.php

[2] http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20140403ptan20140096003.php

Edit: typo
Maybe if you have "x-industrial complex" and democracy failing on dealing with it, rather than to give up on democracy it would be a good idea to reduce the "industrial" a bit? I haven't heard other countries have these democratic issues with prisons. At least here in Germany. Maybe the industrial aspect simply corrupts politicians and administrators. How would they make different, less corrupt decisions if they weren't even under some democratic control?
Choreograph – A simple, modern C++ animation and timing library
We don't have national debates, as far as I can tell. Unless you're referring to things like this forum.
I don't think Java was ever associated with the Oracle brand. By the time Oracle acquired Sun, Java was already starting to slip away from being associated with Sun! "Java" was only ever qualified when referring to third-party implementations: you never heard "Sun Java", but you'd sometimes hear "IBM Java", etc. "Sun Java" at some point became just "Java".

Personally, as a Java developer from 2005-2012, I never associated Java with Oracle. I can't imagine that I'm the only one. Even now, when I need a JRE or JVM, I navigate to http://java.sun.com/ instead of wherever it is I'm supposed to go.
It's called fractional reserve banking because they don't have gold in their vaults, except for specific ratios. Very, very few banks have gold, instead they have government bonds. They don't have those in 1:1 either.

In the EU: 2.5% of the value of your deposits the banks own in bonds.

In the US: complex, but let's give a simple, not that wrong answer : up to 10%.

In Australia: 0% required, but in practice the banks have a little bit.

That's all the banks have. In our current Bretton-woods economic systems, banks create (and destroy) money.
Who wrote GTK+ 3.20
I actually say that :)

I just think the graphical Emacs provides the most comfortable environment. It displays images (and thus also PDF files or a graphical browser widget), doesn't swallow the Alt key by default, has prettier colours, and you still get to edit remote files with TRAMP.

This doesn't mean that Emacs in a terminal should not be improved. I sometimes use it when I ssh into my workstation from a machine that doesn't have Emacs installed.
Tesla needs 60kg of copper per vehicle. At current global extraction, new supplies are 2 kg/capita. That's a crimp on total vehicle availability. Most major mines are due for closure within a few years.

Total copper content of Earth's crust is fairly high, but little of that is economic even at massively higher prices.
Answer: How does SSL and website certificate work?
I would wager that most drugs are discovered by startups. Pharma has a very well established "farm team" system where venture-backed companies do the compound discovery and complete Phase I and perhaps Phase II trials, then get bought by one of the major players, for exactly the reason you mention -- nobody wants to rebuild the infrastructure to manufacture and sell pharmaceuticals.

However, the founders of those startups are rewarded handsomely for their effort, assuming they are successful.
"Free" does not mean "GPL" only. If OSX were released under any of the many free licenses it would be fine, but sadly it is just proprietary software with some free components.
I've used Polymer.dart for browser game consiting mainly of simple windows. From that I can say the most important downside is the poor performance on mobile (even with shady DOM). Despite that I'd probably still choose Polymer if I need browser framework because webcomponents encapsulation feels great from developer perspective.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=As%20We%20May%20Think%201945&s...

for previous submissions and commentary
Great Article on Using Jeff Olson's “The Slight Edge”
Hey! That'd be awesome! What is the best way to contact you?
Let’s Make a Varint
After having become so annoyed by the buzzfeedization of even traditional news, I was positively surprised when I discovered the "Current Events" page of wikipedia [1], which contains per-day lists of actually relevant stuff (ok, I would take out the crime and sports sections, but that's just me). I would love more neutral, concise media like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events