skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
no. the upfront costs for pharma development are prohibitive. the chances of a new molecule making it through clinical trials is really small.

the economic crisis has put a lot of emphasis on efficacy for inclusion on various formulary schemes, be it private ones like in the US or state-run ones like in EU. now you need an approved product that is also not only marginally better than existing stuff. just takes away some nasty side effect? no reimbursement for you, pharma-economics trumps this.

so, you have run ups of 10 years to line up a single new drug. scientists, the whole approval chain, supply chain, etc. then you get approval and your drug is good enough to be reimbursed, hooray. as the FDA process is public, your generic competitors have been watching - now that you have proven everything, they can flood the market and can undercut you significantly as they do not need to recuperate the initial investment of 10 years.

you have this happen once or twice and then say fuck it. let's play the lottery, better ROI.

the whole patent system was invented for a reason. it makes perfect sense for pharma. abolish it there and drug development will only happen through government programs.
I'm always assured by those who I presume are more in the know than I am when it comes to Apple products that all Apple decisions for two years after Steve's death had been planned and approved by him. I assume this is kind of how the script for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie was co-written and approved by Douglas Adams years before his death; yes, that can be verified, but the final product was still ultimately controlled by someone other than the original creator.

I think your point is valid. I have no doubt that Steve had his mind on the iPhone 5 well before he died, and may have even signed papers approving the exact final product. The question that remains is, in the year between his death and the release of the product, how many times would he have changed his mind or added something else? The answer to that determines if the current leadership at Apple knows how to properly shepherd the creative minds working for them or if they're merely following a directive set by someone who had bigger plans they might not be in alignment with.

I guess all we can say at this moment is that the new Apple is never going to be the same as the old Apple. The immediate question is, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Reform could also take the form of tightening the 'novelty' and 'nonobvious' requirements. For example:

• independent invention should be an absolute defense for infringement, and within a certain timeframe, evidence of obviousness as well

• allow a review process (perhaps when a patent is challenged) where a jury of skilled practitioners is given the same motivating problem brief and a few days to outline possible solutions. Anything they describe would be deemed 'obvious'
Science = prediction
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Actually, a reprapper has been able to do 20 microns. But it's after a bunch of tuning on his part, and I'm sure they were slow prints. (14.5 hours for the yoda, where as when I printed it at 150 microns, it took 2.5 hours). But yes, 20 microns has already been achieved.

http://www.makergear.com/blogs/frontpage/6591695-20-microns-...

https://davedurant.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/ultimaker-faq-bu...

In the second link, you can scroll down to see what 20 microns looks like up close. That orange thing on the left is his thumb. There's about 10 layers to one line on his thumbprint.
I mentioned that if 15 years ago you had suggested that in 2012 you would need HTML, CSS (and probably LESS), JS (and probably JQuery + CoffeeScript + Backbone), SQL or Mongo and Ruby or PHP or similar just to do a simple form application - we would have laughed.

This is a major reason I don't do any web programming. I don't exactly know where to start any more, and every few months when I think about throwing something together, there's been some change in what's fashionable - whatever was hot at the beginning of the year is now 'considered harmful' and so on.

I'm actually a bit encouraged by adobe Edge because I like their tools and Flash had a decent run, so I may get back into it. But I am so not into technology for its own sake.
Cortometraje “Tumor” « Contaminación electromagnética y otras radiaciones
Initially it was because I run/ran the most popular Ruby blog so the first couple of thousand subscribers came almost exclusively that way - http://peterc.org/blog/2010/306-1120-subscribers-in-2-days-m... - but since then it has been primarily a case of word of mouth and "domino" growth.

For example, many Ruby developers are into Rails. And many of those are into JavaScript. So I branched out into a JavaScript newsletter too and had a few thousand subscribers quickly. Nice (and unsolicited!) words from people like Steve Souders and Paul Irish helped with testimonials and it grew from there.

The next domino was HTML5 which was of interest to both JavaScript and Ruby people. So that one has grown even more quickly. And so on.. :)
Wow! Mind = Blown! Thanks for doing this and giving it away for free.
It's worth pointing out that those algorithms are also generally the ones that most benefit from being ported to a GPU, which removes the need for a shared-memory mechanism in the host-side language.
Benioff vs Roddenberry: who got there first?
Iphone 5 is a tall boy iphone 4
always does wrong site of street for me as well
I heard from a source that it's has to do with the extreme space and weight constraints of the iPhone 5, but that Apple wants to put it in eventually. But I am more concerned with the ecosystem - it's not just enough to put it in the phone, Apple needs to make super-easy to sign up for, both as provider and user.
I guess there is no success without failures. So if the next Steve Jobs walks in he/she must have had great many failures under the belt. One can't expect people to be greatly successful just by the way they walk/talk.
I though those timetables where more like guidelines !
Vanessa Paradis rejoint l’équipe de Fading Gigolo
Fading Gigolo accueille une nouvelle recrue. Il s’agit de Vanessa Paradis. L’ex de Johnny Depp rejoint Sharon Stone, Sofia Vergara et Woody Allen dans le film dirigé par John Turturro.
Will you seriously argue that cycling to and from work 5x2x10 or 5x2x15 minutes has no health benefits? That's more added time moving than many sedentary people get at all.
Reaching aerobic thresholds for over 20 minutes is only one mechanism of how moving helps your body. Should I forget about taking the stairs unless I work in a skyscraper? Should I ditch walking?
The "actively regressing" part I can only presume is a jab at Maps - which honestly is a huge capability regression for the end user.

And as an iOS dev I'd argue that the API advancements between iOS5 and 6 are fairly minor in comparison to the pace that Google is moving at.

I'm an iOS user, and my living comes from Apple's platform dominance, and even I will gladly admit that Apple has lost the initiative. Google now leads the pack in unearthing the next step in the smartphone evolution.
It takes time to prove yourself, and any idea, and the value of you and your idea. I don't think this can be done in a short period.
Have you done what you suggested would be a quick way to solve the stated problem? If not, then we're still dealing with your rectally-sourced speculation.

Additionally, what you're offering is like me -- suppose I live in a nice house in the hills -- going down to the ghetto and asking why people bother locking their doors at night and putting bars on their windows. I don't do any of those things and I don't have a problem with home-invasion roberries -- why are all these people so paranoid and afraid!?

Put another way: you would have no clue if, say, you were riding a bus full of predators, because you are not prey -- a woman more likely would.

I could type an entire essay here explaining how and why women have different motivations and risk profiles than you, but I doubt you would respond with anything more thoughtful than "obviously, problems happen." Instead of speculating as to why you might be so obtuse here -- I would guess it's because you are resentful of the seemingly inconsistent and inexplicable behavior of women -- let me just offer this: stop fixating on how things should be and start understanding things as they are now.

This is really no different than entrepreneurs bitching about how risk-adverse investors are, and how they won't respond to 99% of cold calls, even if only to politely decline. Or how investors vastly prefer known founders, even when they have been previously burnt by them, rather than taking risks on unknown quantities. But at the end of the day, investors have the money and women have the vaginas, so they make the rules and they don't have to be fair, scrutable, rational or consistent -- they only have to be advantageous.
Think of this in more precise economic terms. Say it takes $X to develop an invention that produces $Y of social benefit. If the invention is cheaply and easily copyable, people won't invest the $X unless they can recoup at least $X + some profit out of the $Y of social benefit. It's a classic free-rider problem. It's the economic reason why we have government-funded defense instead of private defense.
He didn't. He told the person how much money they spent on alcohol, or how much the house they were selling cost.

The house information would be available at a land registry, or on a credit report. The alcohol information might be available through a brag "I just spent 400 dollars on Z", or through some kind of facebook-tie in "I like X bottles of Y". Or loyalty points.
Personally, I think that the 3D printer fad is going to sideline itself before it ever reaches court in any significant way. Why, you ask?

Because people are lazy. I see farmers using these, I see clever immigrants and poor nations, sure.

But mainstream middle America? Probably not. How many people have a home lathe, mill, or drill press? Hell, how many even have basic power tools (circular saw, hand drill, jigsaw, and so on)?

How many people write code for the machines they own? The computer (despite how we may treat it even today) is hardly new technology, nor two decades later is the Internet.

I'm sorry to be such a downer, but I think that the vast consumerist masses will probably not ride a fleet of these gizmos into a post-scarcity future.

:(
And 4 pounds of small ABS pellets from ebay is $15.
"Don't use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels" is good advice, but it misses the heart of the problem: don't design user interface without a purpose. If "what is the purpose and goal of this website?" is the first question you ask when designing a site, you should never end up with "carousel banners!"

The image slider is a classic example of user interface being built without being designed around purpose and function. This is a shitty design paradigm that has somehow lasted for years and years, but there will always be trendy things to do that are extended past their original purpose.

Start with purpose, then design a user interface that meshes with those goals, and good things will happen.
Higher-end 3d printers are already heavily used for prototyping and architectural design work, which puts them about on par with very early computers (I'm not referring to home PCs here).
If anyone is looking for accommodations in San Francisco, we have a startup live+work mansion and would love to host a few of you :)

www.risesf.com - william@risesf.com
This is borne out of a massive incorrect assessment of the pharmaceutical industry. It takes a tremendous amount of money to bring a drug to market, billions. More if you count all of the drugs that are tried but fail to meet expectations (of efficacy or safety). If you don't allow drug makers a window of time in which to make back their R&D costs through high profit margins then you simply will not see as many new drugs developed.
I have physically traveled in time
A 3D printer is potentially a hell of a lot easier to use than a home lathe, mill or drill press — you download a design, and hit print. Next thing you know, you've printed out all the pieces of a chair for your living room, which you assemble using the pegs and screw you also printed out (think Ikea). This isn't too far-fetched.
I think proof of independent invention should at the very least establish a presumption that the invention is not novel. The probability of a truly novel invention being independently invented within some time frame is small enough that we can assume for the purposes of a civil case that it negates novelty.
I think when assessing personal risks people often don't realize that they have to 1/1000 or higher risk of dying next year of whatever.

Yes. Making yourself a bit safer is good if it doesn't bother you much but you should realize that life is just slow decay in hazardous environment and you have to balance your risks with what you want to do during your life and with your convenience.

As for helmets. Drivers tend to pass closer to bikers that wear helmets (UK study) and unsurprisingly bikers that wear helmets have more accidents. Success stories that tell "helmet saved my life after being hit by a car" are often failure stories because of your helmet you and the guy that hit you felt confident enough to share same space.

I never wore a bike helmet although if I owned one I'd probably wear it as additional safeguard. Even if I did I would relay mostly on sharing space with pedestrians not cars wherever possible.
I have a different view on this.
Future manufacturing is 90% 3D Printing. But its not about printing at your house. You get your orders printed at local mall and shops that has the right equipment (Only raw materials transported).
Undoubtedly interesting and important in current affairs, but this is really not hacker news. Flagged.
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I don't really think so. When I visited the website, the first thing (it took up 50% of the page) that I saw was a call out asking you to rate items, and reveal your fashionable interests so you'd get personalized advice. Then it asked me to join their VIP program.

Honestly, I'd have to click around a little bit to even figure out how to just search something without first joining them and going through the VIP program upsales processs.
How do you keep up with all the HN?
I don't understand. Google Reader has reached well over the 1000 news posts, and I can't keep up. Does any one keep up?
The issue is that in economic terms, the amount of money required to innovate is absolutely relevant. There is no need for any incentive if the company can recoup that figure before competitors copy the invention.
Awesome, one suggestion I would make is that the buttons should ignore input in when translating between on and off. It seems awkward that it will just keep switching on and off even though I have stop giving it input, or accidentally double clicking on it and set it back to what ever it was.
Becker and Posner tend to make pairs of posts on the
same subject. The OP is from Becker, here is the corresponding post from Posner: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copy...
On the main page (viewed from PC) they advertise a nice-looking tablet version, yet on my ASUS tablet with Android 4.1 and Chrome as a browser, I get the crappy mobile version of the site. Interesting.
Thanks but no thanks:

"But Facebook moves fast. It had been testing off-site web display ads, the first step to an ad network, on Zynga.com. Then a few weeks ago it revealed it would begin letting advertisers pay it to use its wealth of biographical and social data on us to better target ads shown on non-Facebook mobile sites and apps — essentially a Facebook mobile ad network."
My co founders and I had a discussion about this very issue. We all wanted the functionality initially but realized that we hated sliders as users of other sites. No one I know cares to re-read the slide that was missed.
Your last point is not completely accurate; with Persona and 2-factor auth on your email account, you would then have verified ownership of your email account via 2-factor authentication. This doesn't mean that every assertion generated by your Persona account will have been generated with 2-factor auth.

Still, as you say, an improvement :D
Nice work. Will increase adoption of nodejs within Rails community a lot more. Bookmarked, I would give this a spin coming weekend.
I don't read HN in reader. Nor do I bother trying to read everything, maybe just 10%. If it's important it'll either stay on the front page for a long time, or it will get reposted sooner or later.
Well, they are working on the front end of the problem.

DDG's real issue is that they don't use their own indices. As far as I know, they are still dependent upon the Bing APIs in order to actually perform the search. So, while they have shown that there is a lot you can do (wikipedia integration, for example), there is a lot missing on the backend.
Long term maintenance of web applications and Perl
He misquoted. The linked article says:

"The best typically worked in stretches of no longer than 90 minutes, three times daily."

So 4.5 hours a day, not 4.5 hours a week. That makes a lot more sense.

(Interestingly, this is about the same as the amount of focused coding time I can get in a day, and I structure it similarly: 3 intense periods of about 90 minutes.)
I think the response to the iPhone 5 so far (because of lack of new features, flaws or whatever) can also be explained by something I claimed back when it was clear that the iPhone had its sales-figures beaten by a single Android handset (Samsung Galaxy S3):

> This is the first visible sign of a trend which began quite a while ago: iPhone has peaked (just like the iPod did)

What the results of this will be in the long run, especially with consequence to iOS-design, we'll have to wait and see.
Neat project! To echo what everyone else is saying, thanks for putting this out there.

I am curious as to what most HNers think of doing server side development in JS. It's obviously the flavor of the month, but I have yet to see the appeal. JS is certainly not a bad language, but it seems a lot more tedious than, say, ruby. The nesting of callbacks, the lack of built in OO infrastructure (given that most of us are trained with class based inheritance), the many quirks associated with making the language accessible to nonprogrammers. Am I missing something? Is there a really good reason to use JS on the server?
Nothing is extremely painful for a federated identity protocol (although I think it should be a clear option for those of us who take these things seriously!). Printed reset codes are part of the way there, but how many people will actually save or print out the file?

SMS confirmation is another mechanism, and one that is viable in most of the world, but has a different set of risks.

I think a combination of these are a good approach, but this is a really tough problem in the identity space, and if you have any suggestions on how to improve it in a way that is viable for a large user base, your feedback would be greatly appreciated!
For what it's worth, you weren't the only one with that initial reaction.

I remained woefully ignorant of DDG until Spring of this year (no clue how, I just missed it), but once discovering it, my definition of a good search tool has been forever changed by a single character.

The ! (bang).

!walmart, !netflix, !.net, !clojure, !java, ...

!weatherspark (huh, it's not there, I'll submit that, now anyone can !weatherspark)

The ! means DDG is my single-point search engine for almost any site imaginable. And it uses that site's search feature instead of a naive textual scrape (a la Google).
I also dislike these percentage graphs, where you cannot see how "100%" changes. Maybe the server team fired their best programmer and their bug rate went up without any changes to the UI code.
I don't really get what people have against seat-belts.
Apart from "Nobody is going to tell me what I must do in MY car!" and some people thinking that being tossed out of your car is actually preferable scenario in most accidents.

I think there's too little data about road accidents publicly available. I think all documentation from police investigations of road accidents should be anonymized and made public after some time.
Just a further comment, anyone interested in writing such an analysis or document should contact us with any questions!
I've been to a lot of gay bars over the years, and I have never had a problem once I've made it clear I'm not gay. This may be in part that I've grown up having a lot of gay friends, plus I'm quite a confident and friendly person. I know quite a few confident women (not arrogant) and they never seem to have any problems with being harassed by men.
I think independent invention speaks more to obviousness. Let's say facing a new problem in a new market, five different teams all come up with something unprecedented in the same year or two.

Such an invention was definitely 'novel' to the first group, and was also 'novel' (as far as they knew) to the other four teams. But given the state of industry development, it was also 'obvious', because many of the teams that needed it all came up with it in short order.

There's no "progress of the science and arts" benefit from giving an extra monopolistic reward to a team that's just a little bit early (perhaps even earlier than the invention can be deployed). There might be a social benefit from rewarding inventions that can only happen with the promise of the reward.
A safe corporate job in a high-wage field can easily pay off $25K in debt in a couple years.
My reading suggests that we assume this technology is developed and ready to go. I too could see, once we pull out the singularity dust, a future where extensive body modification is possible, where my vision is trivially fixed to have larger spectral response and my skin is a flashing display of whimsy. But, that still supposes quite a bit.

Moreover, I'll take your breathing underwater example to point something else out, as well as the muscle/bone-density one.

We have that technology--some sort of Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus; a SCUBA, if you will. Similarly, we have ways of increasing muscle mass using steroids and other additives.

And you know what? This is largely the domain of the rich, or of those who have money and time to spend on frivolities. So much of the singularity tech that I see bandied about seems to fall very much in that camp (see also: http://archive.picturesforsadchildren.com/93/ ).

I'd much rather see better distribution and use of existing technology than wait for The Future--especially when it's presented as Everything's Possible With Science!

(Speculative fiction has done a decent job of picking apart some of threads of these sorts of futures...I'd suggest reading some of the Dangerous Visions anthology or more recently Paolo Bacigalupi if you'd like a properly melancholy commentary on the future with Science! There's this annoying problem of the many billions in poverty that somehow always gets waved away.)
When do we prefer male over female leaders?
We just released Mila, your next generation smart business assistant
This makes a great deal of sense to me--I imagine on-demand manufacturing working very well, outside of the home, for the reasons that I think it won't be popular inside the home: somebody else does the work.
Other commenters have said this as well, but I think this Mobile Playbook site is amazingly cool and kudos to the developers who put this together. Disappointed that the top HN comment right now is a complaint about Opera not being supported.