skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is to discover real medicine that really cures the people.

If there is no clinical trial, how are you so sure that this treatment is better than the previous one?

You can trust the gut feeling of the experts, but that is not enough. The rules for a clinical trial are complex, but they are created to avoid some mistakes (or frauds) of the past.

In particular of the recent changes is traying to force preregistration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_registry Because it's too easy to massage the results after the trial to get a lot of results and then report only the "good" result and hide the others. The "good" result is an statistical fluke, so any attempt to reproduce the trial will fail.

Another older requisite is having a control group with a double blind setup if possible. For example, they tried this drug in 31 people. Did this 31 people get better average results than the other patients with the old treatment? They are probably applying the experimental treatment only to people that is not near death. If someone is going to die in a month and is very weak, you don't want to kill him because the new treatment has an unexpected side effect, or get blamed that the treatment killed him instead of the previous condition, or that the family later says that he was too weak to give an informed consent, or get random problems because the organs are too broken, or ... So there are some explicit and implicit filtration rules. Does the patient has any additional illness? Is s/he to young or too old? When you take the average result of the patients in the study and the patients with the normal treatment, are you using the same explicit and implicit filtration rules. What about long term effects? What about the periodic medical checks during the trial that detect early signs of other problems? Does they eat more healthy food during the trial?

So you need a control group chosen at random after you decide to include or exclude the patient in the study, so you try ensure that you have the same population. Preferably a double blind experiment because the patients may give inaccurate reports if they thing that the treatment is good, and the medics and nurses also are influenced by their expectations.

And in these trials, the control don't get a placebo, but the usual treatment, because using a placebo when there is some good treatment is unethical. This is a rule, because some people try to do this anyway, because it's easier to show that the new treatment is better than the placebo than to show that it's better than the current treatment.

Also, they have only 31 patients, that is barely usable to make statistics. The error bars for 31 subjects are huge (something like 5%). The difference must be huge to get a statistical significant result.

You can trust the gut feeling of the experts to think new treatments, but they must prove that the treatment is effective. Otherwise, you can't distinguish between a expert with good ideas, a moron and someone who wants to sell you snake oil.
Yeah, they had to make some quantity to run their trials. presumably it cost much less than $1mil/dose or they'd not have research funding at their level
I have been meaning to ask about this. How vulnerable are desktops to these exploits?
> If you merge the library projects together

Alas, it's not so simple. How much actual overlap is there to merge in Bokeh and Matplotlib, for instance? MPL renders images in Python and has no JS component. Bokeh does all of its rendering in JavaScript! The Python API is mostly just a thin wrapper around BokehJS. MPL has no server component at all. Neither of the does what Datashader does for large data sets. Neither of them has a high level statistical charting API, that's only in Seaborn or Chartify. Merging all these things together would cost a fortune in time and money, and at the end of the day not actually reduce the total codesize to any appreciable degree.
You know what is worse than either metric or imperial?

Having both in use simultaneously like we have in Canada, where we work with lots of things manufactured in the US or in Canada for export to the US.

So any technician will have to have both metric and imperial tools, occasionally things of very similar size will get interchanged accidentally - using a 3/4" socket on a 19mm bolt for instance, which will work for a while but eventually round off the head because 3/4" is slightly more than 19mm.
Target market: Cigarette smokers
Found: in retail locations.

People like the product but it's a new idea. I think I'm going to have to find a way to scale giving away samples in person.
I was thinking that it might be an overall large boon to Intel due to all the new computers everyone will buy...
Sidewalksurveillance
This is a throwaway account. I just need get this image crawled by the web so others may find it. To be anonymous is hard now. Every service requires email address.

https://imgur.com/a/YfwKwNx

#sidewalksurveillance @linknyc @rethinklinknyc @aclu @eff

LinkNYC is built by "CityBridge" who is sidewalklabs who is Alphabet who is Google. Sometimes free costs too much. Don't be a product. Privacy advocates are fighting this sidewalk surveillance. But most people don't know these kiosks have cameras and microphones. They are tracking our daily lives. And most people do not know they should care.

Excerpts from https://theintercept.com/2018/09/08/linknyc-free-wifi-kiosks/:
[These kiosks with three cameras and a microphone are sweeping up] enormous amounts of sensitive data from all users, such as “MAC address (anonymized), IP address, browser type and version, time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, device type, and device identifiers.” ... [LinkNYC’s privacy policy:] Third parties may include advertising partners or other providers that help us understand our users.” ... This distinction, privacy experts say, ignores the fact that device identifiers — even when anonymized — provide more than enough information to tell advertisers, law enforcement, or malefactors who we are, since most phones and computers are used by the individuals who own them. Knowing that a device has been in multiple locations, along with the history of the Wi-Fi networks it has visited, can provide enough information for someone to find out where individuals live, work, commute, shop, and so on. ... A recent Associated Press investigation found that many Google services for Android devices and iPhones were storing location data even if when users had turned on a privacy setting to prevent Google from doing so.

Thank you for care about privacy. The future that these kiosks can bring for us is too scary to do nothing.
Imba: if Ruby and React had an indentation-based child, what would it look like?
Keep in mind that for some take-home is a very big no.

I mean, if I attend a full day of interviews on site, after 4-5 phone interviews, asking me to code over the weekend after all that will just make me wonder what's wrong with the company.
I once had to design a function to open a series of nodes in a displayed tree from one given node down to another. Not so hard in general, but because of how the system was set up I had to do it using callbacks. So tell the first node to open itself and when done call the callback that tells the second node to open itself and when done call the callback that tells the third node ...
It adds a human component to your interview. As the saying goes, programmers are lazy. Based on the components you describe, I think it's safe to say, that you're not an entry-level hire and you have experience in your field. It'll make for a great story and demonstrates passion.
If they come out with a new version, they must be expecting it to sell in a quantity that makes the investment worth it. So maybe the pricing worry is just a temporary concern.
> Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against the priority of making complete mirrors of scihub.

Just to be clear-- the fundamental priority is for scientists to demand free public access to the research that pubic funds have paid to produce. There are many ways to achieve that. It could but doesn't necessarily mean mirroring scihub or even using scihub.

Whatever the approach it requires no technology. It's a social problem. Until some sizable group of prominent scientists take a stand and demand that discovering and reading research papers be as easy as discovering and reading a Wikipedia entry (and accessible/maintained by a similarly reputable entity) the fundamental problem will go unsolved.

Until then practical discussions about digital privacy are unfortunately part of a continual cat-and-mouse game.
I do this a lot but it wouldn't have helped in this case unfortunately. Also the code base is over 700k lines which added another parameter to the mix.
MinHashing
In this case it's already been approved for human use. So that's a non issue. But yes, I'm sure that is a hurdle for plenty of other pharmaceutical research
Everyone deaperately wants to be able to tell people that they've created a "startup".
Who should decide what's a useful behavior? What's a fair price? What's a reasonable lroduction/distribution strategy?

I think the free market should decide, not the government and its enforced monopolies.
A new business that isn't limited by local only distribution.
Taskbook: Like Trello but for the Terminal – Reaches v0.2.0
What you are forgetting here is that people and the market build houses with a short lifespan in mind. They could as easily build new houses with reinforced concrete. And if there was that much earthquake consideration you would see
support structures and dampeners as part of the regulation in non-trivial buildings (https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/earthquake-building-c...) (Also see regulation in Greece and Italy -- https://earthquaketrack.com/p/greece/recent).

The real estate market forces cheap wooden houses. It is not tradition or earthquakes... I feel here in California there is dangerous complacency regarding earthquakes (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/02/03/america-i...). People fear them but the rarity has transformed the fear into wishful thinking and avoidance.
I think the parent is throwing shade on the book as well. Can't say I disagree with the opinion.
> It’s also worth pointing out that all ideal circuit devices are non physical

This is not a useful statement - in this framing, all of circuit theory is unphysical.

Other ideal circuit elements could exist in the sense that their existence would not violate known physical laws. The criticisms of the memristor is that its existence would violate fundamental thermodynamic principles (esp. Landauer's principle).
I built a slot machine game with multiple lines, odds, payouts in unity. The slot machine math was suprisingly complex ( calculating the odds of lines and payouts ), and making the app performant was even more difficult ( 3D animations and UI in NGUI ).
Resurrecting mourned dead pets leads somewhere very bad.... see Stephen Kings “Pet Sematary”.
Building your own shell using Rust
Confused by Python iterables and iterators? It can be easy
This feels like grounds for a class action lawsuit. Amazon is clearly turning a blind eye and in many cases this is favoring Chinese knock-offs over American brands—-politically Amazon is on shaker ground.
Death toll rises to 76 in California fire
Getting clean off drugs and alcohol.

Oh, and debugging a DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) API for realtime communications to mainframes and other information sources (async and X.25) while running under Windows 386 - Windows 3.11. Every different network stack (IPX, Netbeui, LanMan, etc.) presented a new brainfucker of a problem.
As far as CS goes the hardest problem I'd somehow "solved" involves designing program that produces reasonable approximations of optimal solutions for TSP/VRP. The actual implementation took a weekend of wall time (which includes several weeks of single-core CPU time), but that was preceded by two months of reading papers with abstracts like "We present practical approach to solving intractable problems".
I would love to have taken his course. My algorithms course was taught using Skiena's text, and that little red book (algorithm design manual) is still a joy to flip through and reference whenever I need it. If only it came in hardcover, my paperback copy has seen better days.
Tell us more! What did you build, how long did it take?
I agree. When I first start getting my feet wet in AWS, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why would something as basic as the fanout pattern be missing with SQS. I read the documentation and thought I had to be missing something until I figured out that you had to use SNS+SQS. That still is completely illogical.

That being said, I made it an edict on my team that no process could put anything directly in an SQS queue, they had to use SNS and subscribe it to a queue.

But, keep making things obtuse. The more obtuse things are with AWS the more money I will be able to charge in my next life as an overpriced AWS Architect.
If an individual's philosophy is that you can always google stuff so you don't need to know anything, I don't see why that person should waste time in school.
Migrants get cool reception in Mexican border town
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Try deadbeef, it doesn't make real playlists (once changed they can't revert) but it's a carbon copy from another windows to linux convert. The UI editor is also substantially better. I just made an account to post this comment, so PM me for more details. It's all open source!
I saw a car with the club the other day - this first I have seen in I can't even remember how long. The car was in rough shape. Real rough. I mused to my wife that perhaps the car was there to protect the club.
Yeah, that scales really well. The answer to every overreaction and questionable policy is always, "Just rebuild your kernel."
Indeed. A lot less than $1million per dose, I bet.

I understand that there are regulatory issues.

But it seems pretty clear that the standard pharma industry model doesn't work for drugs like this.
> Isn't it wonderful that we live in a world where futuristic new treatments like this can be developed?

This futuristic new treatment can no longer be developed or produced by ANYONE in the world, without the consent of this company. Before the patent, anyone could. Do you think that's not a problem?

We'll incentivize researchers the same way we'll do with musicians and writers in a post-copyright society. People who think this disease is important will crowdfund the research, and those who want to receive experimental and personalized treatment will pay for it.

How do you think we should incentivize things like environmental research? Is our knowledge about climate change patentable? What if someone found a cure?
This article makes me wonder if we could see a Tegra successor for the data center: a chip with a few ARM cores that really just exist to coordinate the GPU cores and handle I/O.
Eh, probably some places (e.g. Uber) would love that kind of thing.
It is not more obvious in absolute terms but it is easier to spot in big retail stores.

The biggest clue is usually that it is the only brand that isn't a big name, and yet, there is plenty of it. On Amazon, there is a huge variety of lesser known brands, so you can't assume that just because you didn't hear about it, it must be the store brand.

The pricing is another clue. Store brands usually have a well defined spot, with no competition in that spot. Typically between the no-name stuff and the name brand. Amazon has a lot of brands in every price range.

I am of course assuming that it is not obvious. If a brand bear the name of the shop, or is used for every product category in the shop, it is obvious.
I had designed a PCI chip. Our driver team reported that the PC would hard hang under certain conditions. They suspected a bug in the chip.

Armed with a PCI analyzer, I figured out that it was a race condition where the firmware on the chip would raise an interrupt to the PC. And they would clear the interrupt right at the moment where the firmware wanted to issue a new interrupt.

If performed in the wrong order, the PCI interrupt stayed high even after the PC thought it was already serviced.

The solution was to just switch around 2 lines of code in the firmware, but it took two weeks to figure that out.

Not that long, but it was an insidiously subtle mistake.
This is brilliant idea.
It's a Windows issue (I don't keep up with windows so perhaps this was changed in the past few years, but I suspect MS hasn't done so due to back compatibility issues).
That's creative AF.

IMO if you can get around a system that's as good as going through it. It usually takes a certain kind of ingenuity to be able to do, so I can't be mad at it.
I like the twist at the end of saying it already exists and it is COBOL.

Maybe the reason nobody uses COBOL is for the exact reasons mentioned in the article.

The author really wants to make an ambiguous, confusing language not fit for logic or any form of serious data processing. Which is pretty much entirely useless.
Relatively negligible. I don’t know what the precise price point for biologics are, but equivalent techniques are routinely used in research; a bit of Googling found a lab services page pricing a an AAV (the kind of vector used in Glybera) batch at the neighborhood of $1k [1]. Would be much more for a medical-grade preparation, I’m sure, but not an appreciable fraction of a million.

[1] https://sites.duke.edu/dvvc/services/adeno-associated-vector...
I think that's a post appstore or post web definition. I'm all for unsexy startups if they can turn the entire city into a customer and yet not be relevant outside of the city
See if you can figure out where to find them online and come up with an offer they would find palatable. That might leverage your ability to give it away.
The real story here is why is NYT systematically attacking all the FAANG companies?
Most security cameras aren't monitored 24/7. It's just not practical. I'm sure they would have gone back and checked the tapes eventually, but as it happens they caught him before reaching that point.
A simplified universal parsing format (AST) that equally describes all languages. It needs to allow seamless switching between different languages in the same file and also allow recursively nesting of different languages within each other without resulting in a deviating from the simplified parse format.

The solution is written and it appears correct and viable. As in all things related to parsers the devil's in the details in attempts to prove edge cases with exotic tests and use cases.
Importing an Oracle database.
How to be happy.

For me it turned out to be jettisoning all of the stuff from my life that didn’t feel meaningful and reorienting my life such that all of my major time commitments positively impact things that I consider to be personal values.

This includes: hobbies, non-profits, and my job.

This does not mean I live an ascetic life. Instead, I live one that I personally find meaningful.
Is ‘deserving’ the right thing here? Or is it just because he happens to live there and has a longer term interest in the place than visitors for a day or a week?
In the early 1990’s I solved a major performance issue on a DOS based serial server by enabling the buffers in the 16550 serial controller UART.
Again, you're failing to understand the point. There is a difference between a business model and the business itself. There are many different ways to monetize a product/service besides direct sales.
And because our error handling code rarely, if ever gets executed(I often see trivial mistakes that lead to crashes in error handling case), I think the erlang philosophy of “let it crash” is the best approach IMHO.
"The state's previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states' rights and slavery, in that order."

I have emphasized the part that shows how, while that position avoids being formally completely wrong, it fundamentally misrepresents the situation. The reality is that the only significant issues (significant enough to lead to secession), with regard to the first two causes stated here, were over slavery. We don't have to guess about motives here, because the leaders were not shy about stating clearly, on the record, what their issues were.
How do you incentivize environmental research? How are we supposed to find solutions to climate change if they can't be patented?

Copyrights are just as bad as patents, and musicians/writers shouldn't make people pay for their music/books.

We should start giving money to causes we support, whether it's art, medical research, software projects, etc. It's a mistake to think we should only give money if we're forced to by law (through pricing something that's not scarce).
Tech? Probably not. But there is a lot of novice (polite term) money in crypto now.
Agreed! Why would anyone risk using Seaborn after seeing the way that library author treated potential contributors pointing out a valid bug.
The checksum issue could be addressed by having the compiler generate the checksums in a "sidecar" file and have the build system depend on those.

Obviously this faces the "not every toolchain will support this" but you could have a switch to use checksums and continue to use the older approach by default.

You would have to call cksum instead of touch in your Makefile.

With a modules system (like C++20 is trying to embrace) you could in theory generate a vector of checksums (with subranges in the file) for each file and only recompile portions of the file that needed it. It's rather an accident of history that we use the granularity of a file at all.
No, the idea is to put them off. It's basically impossible to "build infrastructure" to support them, whatever that means. There is no more room for trains or even sidewalks, so it would mean totally changing the cities into something else.
>It’s naïve to think that the language is responsible for the quality of code and that by adding some bells and whistles (or removing some bells and whistles), we can automatically make everything better.

Author doesn't understand the work done in language research, thus must be pointless.

>We were not happy with Fortran and COBOL, so we invented C++ and Java only to be unhappy with them too in some 20–30 years.

Great, so let's stick to the thing that made us even less happy. Screw gradual improvements, revamp the field or go bust.

>But we have to blame something. Being software engineers partially responsible for the world of crappy software, we wouldn’t blame ourselves, would we? So let’s blame the tools instead!

I fuck up all the time, my colleagues fuck up all the time. Some tools are actively helping us make fewer fuck ups over time.

With this article, the author is pretty much coming out as the archetypic blub programmer. He sees all this "new, seemingly pointless stuff" polluting an area he believes to be knowledgeable at, and rather than make the effort involved in trying to understand why people are bothering at all, it's easier to say "it's all a waste, you should just learn to program in blub, since you're only reinventing blub but with crap added in".
We don't need more laws. The problem is caused by the government. They're the one that enforce patents and regulate clinical trials. You think they should decide what "made available in reasonable ways" means? What could go wrong...