skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It does state that other governments set price controls in various ways - like the UK refusing to pay for a drug if it doesn't meet cost-effectiveness.. though I'm not sure how exactly that winds up affecting which drugs are available and which aren't.

The UK (strictly, English, because health is devolved in Scotland and in Wales) is tricky. There's an independent organisation called NICE who look at cost effectiveness.

I think Abraxane, a pancreatic cancer chemotherapy, is a useful example.

Currently there are two chemotherapies. Neither is particularly effective. One is slightly more effective, but has a lot of side effects. The other is slightly less effective, but has fewer side effects.

For Abraxane to get funding it has to be more effective than either of these meds. It isn't. Or it needs to have fewer side effects. It doesn't. It has the sub-optimal combination of the same high side effects as one of the existing meds with the reduced efficiacy of the other med, while being more expensive than both of them.

So, NICE recommend that it's not used.

That means that Clinical Commissioning Groups probably aren't going to pay for it.

That means that if people really want to use it they either pay for it privately, or they use their medical insurance (if they have any) to get it. But insurance companies probably aren't going to pay for it, because they're using similar cost effective calculations as NICE.

NICE gives special consideration to end of life medication, but even with these special considerations abraxane was not cost effective.

(There used to be a thing that people buying these very expensive and not effective cancer meds would have to also pay for the rest of their health care privately. I'm not sure if that's still the case. It was an attempt to stop abusive drug companies from exploiting dying people and their families who were sometimes selling their homes to pay for ineffective meds.)

Press release: https://www.nice.org.uk/news/press-and-media/nice-publishes-...

The actual guidance, which is pretty comprehensive about how they reach their decision: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/TA360
Most of their assistants just use AmEx travel (or some other travel agency software) -- which has a much higher per-seat license and actually ties in to the back-end reservation systems so you can see all flights, etc. As far as I can tell, Concur sources its data through site scraping in order to achieve the lower per-seat licensing costs (since flight data feeds are very expensive).
The original comment was

"The school system in most of the US works under an attitude that the smart kids will do okay, and don't need anything extra. Even gifted and talented programs are fading fast."

If they need something extra, like programs for talented and gifted children, that's an investment. A child that is assigned to a "Program for Talented and Gifted Children" will feel pressure to not let that talent/gift go to waste.

Your solution is to do nothing extra for them, just let them idle away in the library reading random books. Not a guarantee that they wont waste their time/talent by their own doing. While cheap, I don't think it would be very effective.
I’m not terribly surprised by this. Downsampling is a really effective way to create a “fingerprint” by which you can identify some data. And that’s essentially how an image-searching service works.
Interesting analogy and nice script for whiteboard story.
"Take us through a typical work day for you/your cofounder".

"Well for four to six hours we do X,Y,Z very focused and intensely and then we rest and think subconsciously/do nothing".

"Wait you mean you're only doing this halftime?"

"No we chose to do it this way because there's some decent research that suggests this is both the most efficient way of doing it and the most healthy way of doing it. It's a full time job."

"Ok, thanks."
Hard as hell and it makes me wonder... what if I'll never succeed?
Are you referencing Beneath A Steel Sky or did it actually say "be vigilant"? I just finished the game last week :)
Scientists Have Found a New Way to Create Mice
George is trashtalking the sellouts, but I wouldn't be surprised if comma.ai is sold in the first quarter of 2017.
I think that they'd prefer to send the message of "Nothing you did has any consequence whatsoever, but you're still an exile for life." It could deter future whistleblowers from following his example.

As ineffective as the outrage has been, the NSA and US government definitely would have preferred that the issue never came up to begin with.
The NSA most likely already knows this about you if you have a twitter or facebook.
> Go might not provide built-in support for classical inheritance, but that doesn't prevent you from rolling your own:

What you described is not inheritance. If you pass your "inherited" type to a function that expect the "parent" type it will not compile. There is no inheritance in Go, and you cannot roll you own.

> What Go doesn't make possible is tying inheritance to subtyping

There is no subtying whatsoever in Go to begin with. There is no point in "inheritance" if it is not polymorphic. What you just did is create a new type. that is not inheritance in a statically typed language.
I concur. I use todo lists aggressively and I've noticed that I often don't remember most of the bullshit/errands I have to do, even on the same day but e.g. after work. I rely on my todo list to remind me, and to inform me when I'm making plans. My head feels much "lighter" than when I had to juggle all responsibilities in it all the time.

That said, there's a caveat here - as they say, "out of sight, out of mind", and I find it too easy to defend from being overworked by simply ignoring the todo list and not looking at it. This is dangerous and leads to failed obligations.
Google's Burrito Delivery Drones Have Officially Started Testing in Virginia
Will be a perfect backend for QuineWebFramework...
> Just get out of the way and let them work ahead, or get their busy-work done fast and read on their own.

I would have loved that as a child. The problem was: All the interesting papers/books in the internet were behind paywalls (today we have SciHub and Library Genesis, which are nevertheless still illegal).
Why Concatenative Programming Matters
> You are always partially in someone else's hands unless you happen to own a private, dedicated connection to your client.

A listenable connection to your client is entirely different than handing your entire infrastructure and data to a third-party. I fail to see the merit of putting your whole business in the hands of a potential competitor.
That's a sensible argument. I can neither agree nor rebute until I get to play with Swift Playground. I can borrow my mom's shinier iPad Air when I see her. It'll all depend on how Swift Playground plays and feels. For example, there are some questions that will help me decide whether I'm being too cynical: will Swift Playground be only suitable for teaching kids or will it be good for advanced adult programmers coming from other programming languages as well? How much of Apple-specific API will it introduce, if at all?
It also means that people with similar faces might get identified as the same person.
I've added your blog to my daily reading list. Your thinking is so out-of-the-box!
Whether or not Snowden get's pardoned depends on one thing and one thing only: Whether Obama wants it as part of his legacy.

Either way it's not going to happen till after the election and most likely not till the end of his term in January. I'd expect it to be more likely for him to be pardoned if Trump is elected as otherwise Clinton, by association, would be dogged with "granting quarter to an enemy of the state".
Regarding ideas from GTD, I can't stress the importance of weekly review enough. I find it to be at the same time the most important and most difficult part of a productivity system. All my attempts of managing my work gave immediate benefits for efficiency and peace of mind, but then quickly fell apart because I didn't do weekly reviews. Now I forced myself to treat them as top priority thing to do (more important than my job, even) - and the system has been stable for many months.
Shouldn't we rather post direct link and add related links in comments?
If you only get one book, get this one. It is more about 'why' than about 'how' and shows what tradeofs are involved in one or another design, what problems you can run into with different solutions. Also, there is a new book by Sandi coming out: http://www.sandimetz.com/99bottles/
Her talks are highly recommended too.
I agree with everything you said, but it's a different set of problems.

Only publishing favorable results should be prevented with preregistration and requirements to publish. Ideally more (or all) pharma research should be done by independent researchers and not by pharma sponsors.
At the very least you'll be placed on some form of watch list and labelled a domestic extremist.
Why we need a new hybrid Product/UX role
Bayer confirms $66bn Monsanto takeover
Water is considered an important part of organic chemistry by everyone, but pedantic chemists. Original poster may have been thinking of cyanide but As is often found in plants and animals and is not man made. Which fits the casual definition.
More code, more complexity? See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
My argument is that most of the school systems work hard to retard and beat down students that are smarter than the average bear, or cripple their growth by forcing them to do unpaid labor as defacto teacher's aides. It would be nice to provide resources at a higher level, but that higher level material is beyond the capability of most of the people that are employed as teachers anyway, so the best, most economical result is to stop actively getting in the way of students that need to go faster than what the lowest-common-denominator can handle, and just let them.
Becoming a SuperLearner – An interview with DHH
Clues to how ‘super-agers’ retain young memories
Petitions cannot/should not be anonymous.

The fact that your name and address is known to the entity receiving the petition shows that you really mean it. Also, for some entities it might be illegal to be moved by petitions signed by non-citizen. Unfortunately, those petitions systems only ask for your address, not for your citizenship. But we can assume citizenship from the address for the first order.
Bayer wins over Monsanto with improved $66B bid
Not US specific:

* Ridiculously long patent validity periods. Let's put aside the fact that patenting a fucking molecule is even a thing, 20+ years is way too long a term to guarantee profit to a private corporation. Enforced by governments.

* Heavily subsidized (read: price artificially propped up) by insurance laws. This is student loans all over again. Again, created by governments.

* Astronomically high R&D costs, most of which is the cost of obtaining regulatory approval. Enforced by government agencies.

Free market? Yeah, right.
The link to the international campaign is broken and results in a 404 not found for me... did it work for you?
> UK refusing to pay for a drug if it doesn't meet cost-effectiveness.. though I'm not sure how exactly that winds up affecting which drugs are available and which aren't.

It means the supplier has a choice: meet the cost effectiveness model's price, or earn almost no money in that market. It's a powerful tool and run quite transparently. Look up the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.

There is occasionally some political blowback that distorts the purity of it, but generally it works pretty well.
Jajasblog
Here's the OOP model:

A program can be modelled as a set of communicating black-box objects, with their own state.

The idea is to separate concerns, abstracting away implementation behind well-defined interfaces, which can in turn be implemented by other objects to cleanly replace parts of the application.

The rest of OO is pretty much just understanding Design Patterns (a set of names for common interactions between objects, and methods for setting these interactions up), grokking inheritance, and the difference between inheritance and composition, and grasping how to design a good OO system (how thickly to layer your classes, how much abstraction and what sorts, etc.)

The best languages for learning OO are Ruby and Smalltalk.
I signed it and to be honest I'm not the biggest fan of Snowden but think he deserves an opportunity for pardon.

I'm honestly not the slightest bit afraid of retaliation, and if I was targeted it would be evidence in favor of Snowden's cause.

I don't understand how an American citizen could be afraid of exercising their free speech rights -- if they are violated, then one can vocally draw attention to their situation. I'm really not afraid of repercussions as a random American.
Can retrocausality solve the puzzle of action-at-a-distance?
On a recent vacation in the US a friend and I dropped into a pharmacy to pick up a relatively mundane and day-to-day pharmaceutical. In the UK this would cost around £5-£7.

We were told that it was available but we would need a doctor's appointment,a prescription and then to pay $100-$200 for the exact same product. They had a similar medication with a different active ingredient for around $20, but the price difference was astounding!
How Cold War rivalry helped launch the Chinese computer
For those that don't know what this is:

Amazon Echo (known in-development as Doppler or Project D and shortened and referred to as Echo) is a smart speaker developed by Amazon.com. The device consists of a 9.25-inch (23.5 cm) tall cylinder speaker with a seven-piece microphone array. The device responds to the name "Alexa"; this "wake word" can be changed by the user to either "Amazon" or "Echo".

The device is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic and other real time information. It can also control several smart devices using itself as a home automation hub.
In Soviet Russia everyone could be a criminal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_(...

Don't tell me just "Some of them" out of 111,091 executed Poles were innocent.
It might have been just "thank you for your vigilance" or something similar, but it strongly reminded me of a game. Thanks for reminding me of what it was called :-) great game!
Would you say society is not working now then? There's plenty of mistrust and people who are not self-reliant. By your definition we don't currently have and have never in human history had, a working society.
This! When I cook for fun (i.e. friends) I wouldn't count it as a chore, and the daily meals either I do big batches of stuff and freeze them (i.e. this sunday I cooked about 1kg of bolognese sauce that's now frozen in 1 servings) or I cook something that doesn't really take more than 20-30 minutes of active cooking.
Ron Paul: The Fed Plans for the Next Crisis
EPL isn't really about FP... it's more about programming languages.
jajas its good. its sweet and fantastic. go hack!
I think there are different types of people. Personally, I always have more things I'd like to do - much more interesting than job, errands, family time, etc. - than time for them. So I wouldn't e.g. go for fresh food to a store every day (other than as a part of the commute, or during lunch break at work), because I need the time for something else (like doing a home automation project, or playing a video game).

So I guess some people may be "busy" by inventing activities to avoid boredom (I'm pretty sure I know a lot of people like that), but others would love to have more free time to spend it on even more things they're already interested in.
I'm not sure it's so much better coordination on the part of the professional customers or even screaming louder. It's more that these VC-backed marketplaces all have a business model that can be simplistically described as taking a cut of every transaction.

So they naturally gravitate toward transaction types which create the greatest volume. Which tend toward the repeatable, industrialized, consistent, etc. In other words, the opposite of selling handmade goods, renting a spare bedroom by an owner who is only around between 3pm-4pm, or doing a one-off attic decluttering.
Even Snowden agrees that surveillance is necessary. However it is done outside of the public's eye and as we have seen without legal authorization. That's the part that made him blow the whistle.

Mass surveillance is deeply contrarian to our core values as a democratic society. If it is to happen there needs to be a discussion and a public decision. That's exactly what is set into motion by the Snowden revelations.
My new technique is put many more items than possible on the todo list then get comfortable with the Swiss cheese appearance. Life is irregular so keep a pool of tasks in mind, not a rigid series.
It ends up being a really terrible game. You get treated, and then you get presented with an outrageously high bill.

You then have two options - negotiate with the billing company, or go bankrupt. A large number of people take the latter[1]. The result is that the hospital then has to eat the costs of the procedure... which it then responds to by jacking up the price even further for everyone else, knowing full well that most of the uninsured patients who get the even higher price won't be able to pay that, either. The hospitals then use this increased price to negotiate better rates with the insurance companies.

So, you do get the treatment you need, but it nukes your finances, and everyone else ends up paying for it anyway in this ad-hoc, incoherent, uncoordinated mess.

[1]http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148
Largest-ever US military aid package to go to Israel
I think many American Republicans would consider France to be socialist.

And would view many other countries as socialist, if they have things like national medical insurance and free college tuition. Except China. China for some reason is viewed as comfortably capitalist, despite the pictures of Chairman Mao on the currency and at Tienanmen Square. And except Russia, whose authoritarianism is admired.

Talking perception here, not reality. The perception of people who used to be a marginal group of extremists but now have many people in positions of Governor, house of representatives, etc.

And unfortunately they now have a real shot at the White House in the personage of their tribal Duce (a pathological egomaniac whose politics are unclear and span all ends of the spectrum within any given time period).
As soon as you know a little bit, I would start as soon as possible to learn by copying existing code. Learn by using different frameworks, which show you how to do things.

The classic OOP examples ("This class is a car, this Mercedes class inherits from the car class, it also has a method to move, and this Mercedes object is an instance of a Mercedes") are pretty easy to grasp for a person of normal intelligence. The frustration is to then apply this when you are stuck thinking in a procedural or functional model. However once you have learned for example how to handle a database connection, you start to apply that on your own and when a similar problem comes along, you start to notice patterns: "This is really similar to the db object, I know I did right, because I just copied the concept, so I will do this in a similar way." After that learning the design patterns is quite easy, too. But at first knowing what - in this example a - singleton is does not get you anywhere, because generally you do not know how to start.
Am I missing something or does the business model look sketchy? A service that sends emails for me and wants me to pay only for emails not opened. And the number of these non-opened emails is determined, monitored and reported only by that service. Why should I trust them?
What is to stop the Government from saying "we will buy this medicine at X$", where X is a fair price they could negotiate. And if negotiations fail just go "right, you are taking X$, or we are taking your patent in the name of public intrest".

I know this is a big no-no in American culture (and other parts of the world), but it is close to what say India and China are doing by ignoring patents on medicine that is needed but not affordable. To me, this is a much preferable solution to "death panels".

Some would argue that, for economic reasons, this would lead to less research or pharmaceuticals pulling out of the US market. But history has shown the opposite to be true. Again look at China and some of the heavy restrictions it puts on foreign companies there. Do they hurt their bottom-line compared to the 'American approach'? probably. Do they still turn a profit despite them? yes. And that's why many companies still try to get into the Chinese market. profit is profit and as long as they can get some, even if it's pennies, they'll stay in a market.

Let's also not forget that profits in the pharmaceutical industry are insanely high, even when taking into account the cost of research.
I'm very glad there's a solidly researched counterpoint to the 10k hours and everything is possible stuff. Deliberate practice is still enough to get really good at everything (imo) but I'd say it's sort of like compound interest. If you start with more raw intelligence the learning will yield even bigger dividends.

What troubles me a bit is the underlying assumption that supergifted children are best steered towards becoming founders, scientists and whatnot. I don't think it's self evident that some wouldn't enjoy being a nurse or firefighter.
Organizational Doxing and Disinformation
In my opinion, for the sake of security, it is necessary to "cache" the whole Internet communication to prevent terrorists attacks and other dangers.

Except you know, it doesn't prevent terrorist attacks. At all.

All it does is make the pile of hay with the needle in itthat much bigger. And a hell of a lot more expensive to the tax payer that is paying for the privilege of being spied on by their own government.
>The truth is those school system are toxic, abusive torture to someone smart.

Nah, they're toxic, abusive torture to pretty much everyone.
Strictly speaking I was born in Iowa so I signed it using those creds, but I don't think any of it matters, to be honest.
I am not surprised and believe your anecdote without hesitation. XCode is better along multiple dimensions than it was a few versions back, but is still a crawling horror. Even so, the workflow (weird bugs and all) around provisioning is nowhere near as awful as it used to be. A small mercy, to be sure.
Don't forget to add stuff like banning Canadian drug imports. Medicine absolutely should be validated before being sold in a country, but other than that, I see no reason why Canadian companies, or companies from other countries, couldn't sell a competing drug in the U.S. for whatever price they want.

Obama played a big role in banning this type of imports. Just saying. And TPP/TTIP would make this problem much worse, and virtually irreversible, because then they can just say "well, we wish we could change the monopoly laws now, but it's in the treaty, you see...so tough luck."