skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a sweet spot for businesses who have massive regulatory protection the way pharma does, and who want to maximize rent extraction from society as much as possible.

For big pharma, this peaked in the past few years. The Mylan lawsuit and the outrage about Martin Shkreli are flare-ups that signal that public outrage is on the horizon.

In terms of social benefit, the trade-offs are not optimal at all. We are overly risk-averse to the point where FDA bureaucrats needlessly hold up drug approval, yet once a drug is granted approval we are very slow to sound the alarm if it turns out that additional data shows unanticipated risks. For example, the risks of Vioxx (as with many other NSAIDS) were well known to physicians long before the drug was taken off the market.

There is no such thing as a single wise entity that can appropriately vet all drugs for maximal societal value. Different people have different levels of risk-aversion. Our system exists to maximize the winner-take-all aspect of intellectual property protection for pharma, not to maximize the benefits of innovation to society or maximally incentivize innovation.

Certainly, someone who is 80 might be more willing to try a new drug with unknown 20 year side-effects than the parents of a 10 year old. The single regulator model is deeply flawed and creates massive harm on both ends of this risk spectrum.

But there is no need for big pharma to worry. We have broad bipartisan support of massive, long-term sponsorship of big pharma companies. Unlike Martin Shkreli, these companies play a longer-term game and for the most part avoid embarrassing fiascos such as the one that impacted Mylan.

But yet, in spite of this, they are insulated from competition by regulators and manage to extract sweeter and sweeter deals. Note the way Mylan gradually ramped up the cost of epi-pens following ACA? Mylan was just trying to get its share of the pie. Other firms, like health insurance firms, got their piece of the pie "de-contenting" bronze plans and removing high deductible options from ACA. The government got its share by being able to claim credit for passing a landmark law, etc. Like tigers tearing chunks of flesh from a fallen gazelle, the powerful interests manage to get what they came for, which is why the ACA passed in the first place, they all knew/expected the benefits to occur. The only group who got a bad deal were Americans relying on the ACA who were not poor enough to get a heavily subsidized plan... these people just had a massively regressive additional tax.
Bitcoin, Ether in bear market territory after declines
Well, you could always adopt the European model and go free universal healthcare paid through taxes.

E.g. in Norway, people mostly pay around 30% in tax, and 8.2 percentage points out of those 30 go towards free universal healthcare.

The Norwegian state's annual healthcare expenditure per capita is below $8000, for one of the highest quality systems in the world.
I'm a Python answerer on Stack Overflow, I teach Python at NYU, and whaddaya know, I write Python for my day job.

Why is it growing so quickly? I speculate:

Lots of people want to learn to program - and Python is easy to learn and teach.

I think it blows other languages out of the water. I'm going to compare it to its closest competitor, Ruby. Ruby is also open-source, high level, popular relative to other languages (which means you can probably get help if you need it), it has lots of libraries (meaning you can do a lot with it), ok tutorials, and a decent package manager. On the downside, Ruby is also a very large language, which makes it much harder to learn to mastery.

I think Python blows Ruby out of the water in terms of how easy Python is to learn relative to Ruby.

I don't encourage people to learn Ruby. I spent a long time (months) trying to learn it. I still don't tell people I know it.

I used to think that Ruby's syntax is twice as much to learn - now I think it might be even more than that.

Ruby's YACC file is ~918 lines long[0], while Python's grammar file is 149 lines long.

~$ wc cpython/Grammar/Grammar
149 879 6472 cpython/Grammar/Grammar

Even if 1/2 of Ruby's grammar output is whitespace, that's more than twice as much grammar to learn as Python's grammar[1].

I could compare Python to other languages, but I don't think they come close to matching the upsides of Python.

I still want to learn other languages, like Haskell, lisps, and C, to a level of mastery - but since I can be so productive so fast with Python, the other goals are something I work on in my spare time without a bunch of urgency.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/16629318/541136

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/reference/grammar.html

PS I can see that this comparison to Ruby isn't popular due to the downvoting - but nobody is contradicting my point.
Enough IS enough. When common arthritis drugs cost more than a year's salary, there is a problem. Normal people can't afford that. [0]

[0] https://www.everydayhealth.com/news/real-monthly-cost-arthri...
Full-Stack Developers
Green Mountain Power

https://www.tesla.com/blog/next-step-in-energy-storage-aggre...

and Pacific Gas & Electric

http://www.solarcity.com/newsroom/press/solarcity-and-pge-co...
If you aren't emotional about the environment, and fear isn't that emotion, that's you. The general reaction to the (utterly toothless) Paris Accord was indeed - general concern allieviated by rather meaningless blather. My reaction was increased fear for our future since nothing concrete was agreed; no penalties adhered to breaking the agreement. (Whereas trade consequences could have been tied to bad behavior.)

We like to think others are acting from fear whereas we are merely concerned, other married couples argue but we "discuss", etc. The old joke about this comes from Bertrand Russell and went something like this:
"I love children, you are a scout leader, they are a pederast."
Honestly I think getting someone to Mars and back at this point is an engineering problem in that:

1. Humans can live in space for extended periods (eg the ISS);

2. We have the capability to land something on Mars and take off again, rendezvouzing with an orbiting spacecraft. We did this on the Moon;

3. We have the capability of getting enough fuel and payload into orbit and then sending that to Mars and back. Now this part is tricky because every pound of payload you need has a knock on effect in terms of more fuel needed plus more fuel to carry that fuel. This I think is actually the trickiest part but largely comes down to a function of launch costs.

That all being said, it looks like it'll cost hundreds of billions of dollars and be an active mission for ~2 years. Is it worth it? That's a reasonable question to ask given how many unmanned probes we could send for that same money and what the value is of sending a meat bag to another world.

Now colonization is a whole other beast. My definition of colonization is that the colony is self-sufficient. For this, IMHO we simply don't have the technology. Far from it. Too much of what we rely on is provided "free" by the Earth. Air, water, plants and animals. Resource extraction is ludicrously cheap compared to anything in space or on another world.

But think about the daily things you need: clothes, food, computers, shelter, transport. There's a complex web of dependencies on any one of these things such that a good portion of the world is needed and a pretty significant number of people are required.

Also, does Mars even make sense? It has almost zero atmosphere. I've read that Mercury may in fact make much more sense. For one it'll solve the energy problem (solar on Mercury, anyone?).

Not that living on Mercury is without problems of course.
> Who exactly loses here? Rich people in the health industry? I don't get it.

You forget lawmakers reaping various lobbyist benefits, which is one reason why not much changes. Two sides bicker for a while to satisfy their constituencies, then compromise by doing nothing.
Firefox-nightly

vs-code

latte-dock(unknown for some people, but it's famous among KDE users)
Agreed on Ruby as a language, but Node also has the advantage of being isomorphic. It's hard to beat JS when it's the browser language, and then you provide a really nice server side platform for it.

Plus there has been a reaction to Rails size and complexity. I kind of hate that everyone thinks of Rails when Ruby is mentioned. But I thought Sinatra was a really nice microframework.
Did a quick look-up of appendectomy pricing based on published CMS data from 2015. Results listed here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vPg1jtV8CK3pAs5EXC48...

Source:

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
Show HN: Git autostashing daemon
I'm wondering what kind of legal tasks they cover for poor startups. Incorporation and whatnot is mostly automated , trivial and inexpensive but if they can help out with lawsuits, patent, trademarks, and general legal inquiries in an innovative way, it'd be awesome, as those cost a fortune.
So what fraction of GDP goes to health costs in US vs other countries?

And are Americans healthier as a result?
Publishing Your First PyPI Package By/for the Absolute Beginner
How do people create and manage internal python packages that work together as an ensemble? I've found the packaging system with setup.py dependency_links to be pretty cumbersome and not well supported. How do people version these internal packages and manage them? Running your own pypi seems nontrivial and using github eggs/releases isn't very functional either.

My experience with python has been positive but I don't understand how people who want to create separate libraries for specific functionality tie these codebases together without using deprecated features or containerizing everything.
Once it is reported stolen, it could capture the face of everyone who tries to access it. If you assign your police case number in iCloud, it could automatically send your police department these faces (with times and locations) to expedite recovery. With all the face databases popping up, they'll easily have a short list of people to follow up with.

Then again, this might create lots of other problems.
>Humans don't have an innate right to borrow money. It's a service provided by financial institutions for a fee.

This would be fine, except those financial institutions get THEIR money from the fed discount window. If their service was entirely private, that would be one thing but having the government involved changes the concept of "rights", especially when the fed loans out money with the express reason that the banks will loan it out in turn.
I agree. She beat a child to death. Instinctively, we all know she is a monster - even if she was created by her upbringing - and she probably should never have been let out of prison. There is no rehabilitation for what she did.
Who is losing money? A year ago BTC was under $600. Today it's over $3,000. Surely a painful lesson for anyone holding for 12 months.

Yes, you can fork open source software, but as you see the value doesn't come from the code intrinsically. BCH is at $500, even after pumping and a year long campaign of misinformation. Other alts have to provide compelling value to get a good market price.

Nobody ever said cryptocurrencies were immune from government interference. They are immune from government corruption. You haven't shown anything to the contrary.

IT's funny how, whenever BTC slips a little you guys declare victory, but you're kinda ignoring we're up 10X in 18 months.... where are your declarations of defeat? (if that's your standard- price movement.)

How many years of knocking down the same straw men is it going to take?
A single person can easily incur more than $30,000 of medical expenses, even at a hospital with reasonable prices.

So no, $25,000 isn't more expensive than buying everything up front for 4 people.

It's expensive, but the US spends something like $10,000 a year per capita on health care, so it isn't an outsized chunk.
This was discussed at length here [0] where the original link was the origin paper [1] for this wired post.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15055522

[1]: http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf
Part of the reason why the US Dollar is so valuable is because of its extensive use in illicit operations. Even if a cryptocurrency is used for illegal purposes, that use increases its value for licit activities, as niche as they may be.
Really simple answer...

University undergraduate classes in a variety of courses use it as their default language, so it is a bunch of students trying to complete their homework assignments.
All that beautiful meta-programming flexibility has come at a price. The research projects sponsored by the likes of IBM and Oracle to give Ruby a much needed speed boost are very slow in the offing – it feels like V8 was developed overnight in comparison. Aesthetically I think Ruby beats Python/Javascript/Perl but unfortunately that's not enough to move the needle on the dial.

It'll be interesting to see whether Python or Ruby or Ruby get to WebAssembly first – I'm correct in saying that none has of yet, yes?
If a judge issues a warrant allowing the police to compel the use of biometrics, can a person use the wrong finger? Courts can't compel someone enter their PIN. So can a court compel not only biometric "use" but the correct biometric?

My Android forces PIN entry after 5 wrong fingerprints.
That's why I have high hopes for Crystal. Yes, it isn't exactly Ruby, but it is a compiled language that has a very Ruby-ish feel.
Corporations don't have money. It's also a giant cat and mouse game, governments want to tax and companies want to minimize that. So you end up with weird situations like Apple and Google hoarding cash because they don't know how to put it to work and they sure as shit don't want to lose it to the taxman[0].

So if you substantially lowered or entirely removed corporate taxes they would bring that money back to the US and spend it in R&D or capital investments, or return it in large forms to shareholders via dividends!

What oh what, do people usually do when they get sudden influxes of cash? They spend it or re invest it! They don't just bury it or burn the cash for warmth like Pablo Escobar. That seems like a better end goal than having the cash idly sitting abroad or being spent by crooked politicians who by virtue of being in office propose to be holier than thou and always manage to spend money not earned by themselves
What advantage does living in the Martian underground have compared to living in a free flying space colony somewhere in the asteroid belt?

With the latter arrangement you have lots of minable resources at hand, only a small delta-v away from you. Ik you are ok with long delivery times, transporting them around doesn't cost you much energy.

Whereas on Mars, everything is much more energy-intensive, both mining raw materials and moving them through your industrial processing chain.

Space-based manufacturing is still an alien concept to us and while it comes with its own challenges, the vacuum and zero-gravity of space offers a lot of advantages too:

http://www.permanent.com/space-industry-environment.html
I wish I had been 5 years ago
There are a lot of ways to structure things that would fall into one of those exemptions.
Yeah, Python's environment/import logic is really convoluted. It evolved organically with little forethought, and only got a minimal pruning with Python 3.
Have you ever looked e.g. at the distutils code or tried to figure out how to use it without using Stackoverflow?

That function is easy to parse if you take 20 min learning the syntax. Object oriented monstrosities aren't.
> You can, if you do it right, walk off your job and refuse to come back, and if you're disciplined for doing so, sue your employer.

An employee's recourse for illegal retaliation is even easier than you say. You file a charge with the NLRB (which you don't need a lawyer for) and let the federal government investigate and litigate.

> Here's a thing that a lot of people on Hacker News don't know --- and I think this is a genuine case of something that the ownership class in the American economy doesn't want you to know: [snipped remaining]

I couldn't agree more. Thank you for this post and your constant efforts to inform workers of their federally-protected rights under the NLRA.
Check out the guys behind Dragon Ball Z Abridged. They are a parody of the original Dragon Ball Z series. It seems they are getting sued like crazy from Toei animation because they don't understand fair use and YouTube does nothing to help them.
I've tried it and get "Failed to activate certificates" errors.
From the article:

The point of jackets, mittens, and scarves is to retain as much of that radiant heat as possible, keeping us warm on winter days.

This is AFAIK not how clothing works - excepting special ones like space suits, firemen suits, etc. Clothes are primary to prevent convective cooling, not radiative cooling.

5C cooling in Bay area may be enough for most of the summer outside of top heat days in Jul-Sep. If that is substantially cheaper than installing AC, it could be a good solution for most homes and save lots of energy.
the issue is at some point you need to be able to convert btc to dollars. and if that avenue is completely closed, value of btc will drop.
Good luck to you Justin, and to your team. I left law and became an engineer because I didn't see how the legal industry could keep up its bloated and inefficient structure. Shake it up!
Price controls might see more resistance in the US than setting up a government (near) monopsony and letting that reduce prices (single-payer). The idea that price controls can ever, ever be a good idea is heresy to a lot of people here, to the point that they hold it as nigh-axiomatic that they always fail, and (clearly) no amount of real-world examples will convince them to add any nuance to their economic ideas.
Uh... please name the original thesis that is crumbling.

Coin supply limited to 21 million -- still in force.
Easy global transactions online that you can do with your phone-- still working
Censorship resistance-- still there
Trustlessness -- still trustworthy

What exactly do you think is the thesis that has crumbled?
Ubuntu Touch was sponsored by Canonical and Firefox OS was backed by Mozilla.

Plasma is truly a community effort. So of course you haven't heard about it much.

I think at any given time there are only a handful of paid developers employed by a few small and big companies working on it.

That means there's not much resources and almost no paid marketing. It's also not fashionable anymore.

Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS and a bunch of other projects got cancelled because the parent companies didn't expect a proper ROI.

Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources.

Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy.

Disclaimer: Used to be a KDE contributor, in no way associated with Plasma Mobile.
I don't like how Numpy, Matplotlib and Pandas are portrayed as "Data Science". There is nothing particular to "Data" in these three packages. All I see is "Science".

All scientists need numerical simulations or evaluations, plotting, and statistics. That's what these libraries do. Not "Data Science", but "Science".

The correlation with TensorFlow/Keras suggests Data Science, maybe. But I bet there is a similar correlation with scikit-learn, Scipy, scikit-image, basemap, and heck, Matlab, Julia and R--and those each suggest different scientific endevours.

TL;DR: In my opinion, Python is becoming the language of Science, which includes, but is not limited to, Data Science.
I worked for a furniture company that used Access for everything and I mean everything. HR, Payroll, inventory, ordering, dispatching, security, etc. One amusing use was having to make an entry that you took a soda from the break room. Totally on the honor system. You filled out an Access Form that payroll then billed you for (provided they remembered to actually do it).

My job was to get them y2k compliant and then start modernizing them.

Here is how the modernizing went. I was told to upgrade them from Access 2.0 to Access 2000.

Everyday users sucked down data from Oracle to run queries and processes that I developed. Users had access to everything, so a user could modify one of my queries. When it broke, I had to remember what the original query was. I did this by always housing a copy of the Access database on my local machine.

Every Tuesday Payroll was run at 5pm. Guess what? Every Tuesday I was there until 11pm as something always went wrong in the process. There were these misc pieces of compiled code other developers had written that nobody know what it did or had source for. Example: one developer wrote a piece of code in QBasic, compiled it and made it part of the process to strip out white space from data that was read in via a text file. He lost the source. When there were problems with this step he denied it was his code. Every database used this piece of code and everything broke.

I digress. I loved Access for what I could do with it. It served a purpose. It wasn't the best but it is what I had to work with to put food on the table. Now-a-days, using tools like MySQL Workbench and TOAD give me some of the same sense of creating views and queries to re-use but obviously these are not replacements for everything Access allowed you to do.
Unfortunately unions suffer the same fate as other "invisible" benefits: everyone takes them for granted and doesn't recognize their value.

Unions - the folks who brought you the weekend. (That's a button and bumper sticker.) Also the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week, which the US somehow lost.
Headlines are almost guaranteed to be misleading. That's why I click on the comments before the article. Sensationalism should not be rewarded.
But she was raped, don't you understand? She now has a free life pass to do anything to anyone. Rape is now a morally worse crime in the United States than child torture.
> I want something that works first time, every time.

My experience with Mint is exactly like that.

Coming from Windows, I was quite surprised to see that everything works from the start - I thought the transition would be much more painful.
Your “used” “joke” is so … satirical.

Your specific bug with CSV is a developer bug. The place where you copied the incorrect CSV format should not have had such substitution enabled. On the Mac, developer can specify for each text view and text field what substitutions are allowed by default. Likewise in web, it is possible to specify which substitutions should be allowed for text areas.

So instead of blaming incompetent developers for their incorrect use of system features, thus ruining some very narrow cases, let's hold back any kind of text input and processing advancements, because you are unable to input some CSV properly.

That's brilliant engineering right there.

When my mother types on her computer, she just wants things to work. When she searches for something, she doesn't care if she typed the wrong incorrect Unicode character. That's the cases that need to be solved for users.

And it is only O(2ⁿ) algorithm if you naively look at text as an array of bytes. Time to, perhaps, broaden some horizons.
I went on a 100% Slimfast diet 5 years ago. After 3 days I wanted to die. I quit, I felt horrible, and I only lost about 2 pounds.

I went on a 100% Soylent died this year for 1 month. I honestly never felt better. I lost 8 pounds. It was difficult, mostly because I missed my usual McDonald's breakfast, but it was definitely sustainable permanently.

I do think Slimfast needs to try and buy Soylent or they will be gone in 15 years. They do have similarity, but to not respect the innovation of the Soylent Team is beyond fucked up.

This article belongs on Buzzfeed, not the Washington post.
Show HN: List, chat and trade crypto currency. No fees, No KYC