skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I understand your meaning, and I know everyone else understands your meaning. Still, I need to clutter the discussion with misguided pedantry.

This is what I see when I read your comment.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy
Before you make an emotional decision, ask yourself these four questions
I'm in favor of government-paid healthcare, but you can't have a functioning free market when one buyer dominates. It's the mirror situation of a monopoly.
As someone who's published in Bayesian inference, that quote has always struck a cord.

I've met countless young researchers who embraced Bayesian practices. And all the opposition seems to come from older hands. It's finally turning a corner... Because of retirement!
The nice part about the match is it let's you get past the 401k contribution limit. YOU can only contribute something like 18k to your 401k, but your total 401k contribution can be much higher (~50k). So if YOU hit your 18k limit, the match is free 401k that you cannot get in another way.
> In your comment you suggest that most of the profits of pharma companies go into R&D but that's not the case.

No, I didn't say that most of the profits of pharmaceutical companies go to R&D. I said that most R&D funding comes from the US (and that a large deal of that funding comes from profits, mostly profits on sales within the US).
Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation.

Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS.

Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client.

Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux client.

Google Drive: Stories of unreliable syncing behavior, app instability, and so forth. No Linux client. Google history of killing non-core products.

--

Not only did Dropbox get there first, they did it mostly right, to the point where their competitors can be described as also-rans.

The other thing is that Dropbox has "good file sync service" as their entire mission, while every other provider of note has it as some value-add into their other services, meaning it's subject to the whims of what those companies are doing on a particular day.
Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user.

rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.
Can people please stop the myth of it being hard to get enough protein on a vegan diet? It's easy. Check out the protein values of beans, nuts and lentils. There are incredible athletes on a vegan diet.
> Despite that, it also happens to be the simplest way to render 3D images.

I'm not sure I would claim that -- with a line drawing routine in hand (a for loop), you can have 3D perspective renderings of objects with a few matrix vector multiplies.
Sure, one person giving it up may not stop the negative actions from eating meat, but we live in a society in which your actions influence thousands of other factors. If activists for causes we now commonly accept pretended that any change in their own lifestyle would be futile, we wouldn't have advanced much as a society.

I'm not claiming that veganism is beneficial to society, but that your argument is rather fallacious.
It's interesting that one of the main changesin the last few years is many of my friends are now working for Instacart or Uber. This means that many lower class people are again being paid using a piece-work system.
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I wasn't clear.

I agree that networks will continue to benefit as more users hop on the platform. What I mean is that the element of network effects that we consider prohibitive/oppressive -- the "walls" around the "garden" -- are artificial in cyberspace, whereas they are real in meatspace.

There is nothing in cyberspace to prevent that data from flowing freely; there is only the threat that meatspace thugs will come and take your liberty and property for failing to respect the imaginary lines. In effect, it's a political border.

Without the legal armaments at its disposal, Facebook could still be a central hub of activity, but the data could be freed from it and exported.

Instead of creating Google+ and hoping it caught on, Google, seeing Facebook's success, could get credentials from the user and automatically multiplex/multicast the user's streams from G+ and FB into the G+ interface. The user would be using G+ as an FB browsing device, and that should be legal -- just as legal as using any other software as a browsing device.

Yes, the browser could materially modify the content of the page, including stripping the ads off the child stream. But all browsers can do that. Should we make it illegal for Chrome or Firefox as well? The only difference is that Firefox is executed on a box a few feet away from the user, whereas a G+ browser is executed on a box that is (probably) much further away.

In this scenario, Facebook continues to directly benefit from the growth and expansion of its network, and more people hop on Facebook. The difference is that there is no barrier to get up against if you're viewing the network's growth from across the room, and you can tell people on your side of the room "It looks Alice from that other network is brushing her teeth". Facebook would no longer have a monopoly on the content generated by users who are "in their space".
how twitter/periscope hasn't figured this out already is beyond me.
If it is it will be interesting to see if they managed to get zrtp correct. It is a pretty complicated protocol with many use cases.
Leaving for more money is not the same as not being motivated by money. If they can make more money for doing the same/similar work it's a matter of weighing any tradeoffs (relocating, potential job stability, etc.) In fact, those variables will be the ones affecting whether that's "a little more money" or "a lot more money".

Assuming there aren't other issues - "make more money for doing something you're already doing" is a no-brainer option to take without having any ties to the motivation of their work.

I enjoy what I do and spend time improving myself not out of motivations for a raise (though that'd still be nice) but because I want to improve myself and enjoy it. But if I was offered double my current salary it'd be tough to refuse. If offered triple my current salary - my bags would already be packed.
Not exactly:

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu

One way to have good ideas is to have a lot of them and then filter.

Even in highly creative endeavors like say music and painting, volume of work largely matters. You have to spend a lot of time(years) doing a lot of work before you get anywhere close to good.
Let's say I toss a fair coin; before I look at it, the outcome is indeterministic to me: there's a 50/50 chance of heads or tails. Once I look at it, I gain 1 bit of information. To another experimenter, the 'me + coin' system is indeterministic: it's either me seeing heads or me seeing tails. Once I tell that experimenter the outcome, they gain 1 bit of information. To a different experimenter, the two of us with the coin is indeterministic... and so on.

Is this scenario fundamentally different than the quantum system? Is this scenarion also a "problem"?
The only reason that they can set these quotas in the first place is that US wholesalers can't (freely) export to Canada, and vice versa. If the ban on that had been lifted, AstraZeneca wouldn't be able to set quotas per-country in the first place.

Manufacturer control over whole gets the buy drugs and what they can do with it after that is a cornerstone of drug distribution strategy. It also maintains drug pedigree and product integrity. I can't see it going away.
I remember doing this with pen and paper ages ago when I read the book. Somehow it clicked with me a lot better than my Abstract Algebra lectures.
Saying someone is "fat" is an insult ( I think its considered an insult) you can be overweight without being fat. Fat has more todo with how you feel about your body then being overweight. I think you've found a niche market. ;-)
Proportionately to their revenue, pharma doesn't spend that much on R&D: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

And that's just compared to advertising - throw in other overhead, and separate R&D into genuinely new drugs vs. generics and flavoured aspirin, and the numbers are even worse.

Of course it's hard to get such comprehensive financial data, but that's just one of the advantages of private healthcare - hiding data to hide how much you're being exploited.
I've tried. They just stonewall me by claiming that the building is only wired for Comcast and refuse to communicate with me further on the subject.

edit: It's an apartment building not a condo. In my previous condo building it would have been easier to discuss this issue.
rclone serves as a great Linux client for OneDrive. I run it in a cron on my home server and at-will on my laptop.
You're point about the wrong impact is spot on.

I have a gift of getting good grades. I know what things will be on the test, I know how to answer questions so that I leave enough wiggle room to avoid exposing ignorance on a topic, and I know how to structure an answer to get partial credit if I really don't know how to answer a question. My GPA in my first undergraduate class was essentially all A+s (curse you intro to the philosophy of language!).

For my second undergraduate degree, I just flat out rejected that approach. I exposed my ignorance where possible (and typically as early as possible rather than on the final exam). What was surprising was how little impact this had on my grades. Some, but not much, and I learned a lot more. Now I try to pass that on to my kids, but the structure of school is such that everything in that system is oriented towards the wrong goal.

Really pushes me in the direction of homeschooling, I have to say.
Virtually all my classes in college allowed me to have cheat sheets of varying sizes for exams. Creating that cheat sheet was a good way to focus my studying, to the point where I rarely had to use the cheat sheet.
Exactly. You mean NYT has a headline that is not fact checked? :-)
Defining it as your project, makes it difficult to create a team and pretty much impossible if you're not the boss.

On the other hand, a person whose first response to the project is "rewrite all the code" is probably not the ideal person to add to a team whose job is to maintain and improve the code unless they are explicitly hired to rewrite all the code right at the beginning.

Possibly relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Tom Wheeler, past head of the FCC, weighs in with a cogent op-ed piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/opinion/how-the-republica...
Elixir's fault tolerance doesn't come out of the box
Scheme would be cool. Good point bout the language too.
That's exactly what I would have done given such a task if there was no good way to automate it.
> what works so well in Canada and most of Western Europe is right now R&D into pharmaceuticals is largely financed by the opportunity size available in the US market. If you were to just adopt the centralized model tomorrow R&D would grind to a stop

This is really hard to explain to people.
The adtech places I've worked at relied on cookies. They usually have massive networks of major sites and track your browser activity as you browse different.

However, the servers were always crashing and I was always wondering when the customers would figure out that they were throwing money away.
Yeah, I think the blogs even mention they get a kickback.
This only applies if everyone in the plan is using the routine dental, massages, and other benefits.

If, on average, only half of the plan members get dental check-ups and 10% get massages, the insurance company can still make the same 50% profit margin if your premium includes 75 cents per dollar towards dental and 15 cents per dollar towards massages.

Now, in the real world, fewer people use all these benefits, and far more is charged on the premiums. I suspect that the profit margin in the whole industry is much larger than 50%.
If you shop Kohl's make sure to use coupons. If you pay full price there for anything, you're paying too much. They always have some kind of deals, and you can usually "stack" them. So jeans for instance will frequently be something like "buy 1, get 1 half-price". Then, you can combine that with a 15% or 20% off coupon, which they run almost every weekend. You can get those on their website, or on printable-coupons.blogspot.com, and just show that cashier on your phone at checkout. So, two pairs of $48 jeans will cost you $57.60 (after 20% coupon), or $28.80 each.

Personally, I like Lee these days. They're good quality, not as expensive as Levi's, and not as crappy as the off-brand stuff, and seem to fit pretty well.
I was asking specifically about the WC example, not real life.
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What a poorly written article. It looks like just lumped all the business expenses under "sales and marketing". I think it's absurd to assume that all of that spending is completely discretionary.

Contrary to what people think, you need to do a certain level of sales support in the pharmaceutical market. The drugs don't sell themselves.
> After all, you could live somewhere smaller, consume less stuff, not take any days off, etc. It's so important for human civilization to progress, right?

Do you think any scientific research ought to be funded?
This is just another example of how messed up the US medical "market" is. Almost everywhere you look there are hidden prices, hidden middlemen and so on. I am not aware of any other market where things are so opaque and convoluted.

If the current administration was serious about markets they should mandate that all pricing becomes transparent so a real functioning market can actually develop.
Ack, we're on that
When it costs $1.69 to create a new drug, then you'd have a point.
Ironically you are violating another recurse center social rule in saying this: no feigning surprise, i.e. just because something is obvious to you doesn't mean it is obvious to anyone else, so don't act surprised when someone doesn't know or understand something.
Well played sir, well played, and yes! :)
Can someone explain the technical cause for flash sites crashing so frequently?

I think that is what killed flash. Everything else was just a symptom.

Because they crashed, the developers moved on, the community moved on, Jobs moved on and so on.
>the sad reality is that unless someone fronts the money, nothing will get done.

Its not the natural law of universe which cannot be changed. We humans create the systems of economic organization. So if you agree that profit is not main motivation for many creative jobs, then perhaps the optimization function of the economy should not be to optimize for monetary profits.

So perhaps other modes of economic organization be explored?
And that's fine for you and me, but limits its adoption (hence appeal, hence longevity) to people that download unofficial, unsupported third party clients and manually set up cron jobs.

The reason Dropbox is kicking ass is that nobody wants to deal with the manual work. Download a program, put stuff in folder, stuff appears elsewhere. No thought required. Simple.
Assumption Is the Mother of All F*** Ups
communism as an ideal seems impossible to implement in any way besides the authoritarian state-capitalism way that it has been implemented. that accomplishes the objectives of having a command economy with full employment (even if its monstrously inefficient), but it certainly doesn't come close to creating a just political order where the policies serve the people instead of the owners of the means of production (which is the state).

the Mondragon Corporation[1] is one of the few interesting experiments with a Communism-inspired system that does not immediately degenerate into authoritarian state-capitalism.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Then why not compress really efficiently by just transmitting packet sizes?
I can appreciate what you are saying, esp with health care.

However as I grow older I find money matters less to me (and not because I have a lot of it), I would just much rather ENJOY my craft. Crazy deadlines, horrible tech debt, bad management, are all things I have been thru and do not wish to repeat.

"Life's too short to be in a hurry" - batFastard
I had classmates who studied themselves into the wrong side of the emergency room. Some were proud of it. I couldn't understand. I liked things like my health and sleep.
I was thinking about almost this same exact idea the other day. However, I wanted customers to be able to submit requests that would not be initially visible to public facing web. They would be vetted and made anonymous, then people could vote on them.
If your drug is so good, you should let the market decide what the fair price.

Contrary to what people think, drug companies can't just charge whatever they want. Take a look at the HCV drugs. They priced too high and their sales are eroding very quickly. If they had priced lower, they probably would have seen even greater profits.
"My latest survey data shows that 76% of high-performance employees say trade mastery is more important than money when considering career decisions."

"My latest data shows that 76% of HPEs are not primarily motivated by money."

It seems unwise to just assume, without even saying so, that what people say motivates them is what really motivates them. People are not actually very good at understanding their own thinking, and there are countless examples of people (sincerely!) stating that their motivations are X while their actions reveal it's really Y.
RailsConf 2017: 5 standout performance sessions
I was all in on iCloud Drive, except when I discovered you can't share folders. So I had to go back to Dropbox...
We will look back at comments like these in 100 years and cringe :)
In my field the embrace of Bayesian methods seems to have come because of increases in computing power, rather than a decrease in "opposition."
BSD advocates will tell you this is a feature not a bug and object to your use of the word "taken" as if it is a bad thing.

Apple at least has contributed a lot back - they are a major force behind clang for example.
I feel similar. At best I can conclude that both the narrator and Bartholomew failed at their jobs, but honestly for the most part the story has an 'uncanny valley' vibe. It feels true enough to read the whole thing and identify with some of it, but somehow I've never quite encountered any situation quite like it - and I've experienced quite a variety of corporate/IT environments.

Actually, the story comes across as the kind of 'incomplete, subjective account' I'd hear from both sides in the past, somehow mashed together into one. Maybe that's what makes it interesting?
I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox...

Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

[2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home
Really? A conclusion based on science can be dismissed? It isn't just some opinion that you can disagree with like that, right? Its a fair cop - the action was ignorant and anti-science.
Maybe we should have scientists rotate through unrelated professions on a pre-set schedule?

Just putting it out there. Killing scientists to stimulate progress is out for ethical reasons, obviously.
The taxes I find most burdensome are those that take from me my time, rather than my money.

Forced bureaucratic form-filling is thus the most burdensome tax of all.

Grover Norquist can go stick his head in a pig... then stick the pig in a hydraulic press.
But that's their job! They are supposed to negotiate lower prices. They, in turn, can market their formulary to insurance companies by saying "If you use us, we can offer a lower cost pharmacy benefit."

And if you're a smart insurance company, you do your due diligence and don't negotiate a contract where you have no transparency into the PBMs costs.
Einstein finished his doctorate in 1905. He certainly was entitled to be prefixed "Dr." in 1906.
you're not describing Feudalism. you're describing an imaginary system that combines the worst attributes of slavery, theocracy, and lawless rule-by-violence.
Aren't most medical schools just pass/fail these days? They don't actually give grades or rank students, do they?
Some artist had fun with this: we have a woman talking on her cell phone while driving and a fully clothed man in a bathtub, with a monocle.
The flip side is that the market segment he operates in is very popular and this might blind some less disciplined buyers. So if you focus on the popularity part you still might be able to get a good price.

You have to be positive and down play the churn by saying that you haven't really been focusing on the company and that the new buyer can step in and make a difference....play to their ego....
Almost profitable is not profitable.
At the very least, waves could be damped by a vehicle that sees it coming from a long way away. But if everyone knows the average speed of the roadway, and doesn't suffer from the moronic impulse to push up against the car in front of them, waves will form less often, if at all.
Used to have Direct and got tired of the annual price increase drill.

Step 1) Get pestering phone calls to change your package for 3-5 months for FREE to include all of the movie channels

Step 2) Promotion runs out and you want to go back to your old package, but it's now $5 / month more expensive than it used to be

Step 3) Start refusing the free package change calls and watch the calls just keep...on...coming.

Plus, with Direct I can't use my Tivo Bolt...which is giving up a lot because it's so much better than any of their DVR tech.
I like the 'allow drugs to be bought from Canada' idea. I've been buying mine from India for years at about 1/4th the cost.
Drug companies spend the most on R&D out of any industry. The average is almost 20% of revenue. That means if you buy a drug for $1000, $200 of that goes back into R&D.

And no, the sales and marketing in that article is not advertising alone. It's mostly sales people who go and visit medical professionals to talk about their products.
Yeah, some days I think the US civil war was a mistake, and the south should have just become a separate country. Sort of a "Mexico North", or something.

With apologies to otherwise intelligent people that have to live in that hell hole...
ConocoPhillips signs $13.3B deal to sell oil, gas assets