skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Am I the only one this seems completely reasonable to?

No, particularly from an "FDA" rather than "Congress" viewpoint. That is, independently of whether the law should have the FDA regulating devices used to diagnose disease, the facts seem to be:

1) The FDA does have that responsibility under the FD&C Act,
2) 23andMe began the process of getting FDA clearance for a device intended to diagnose a disease, and
3) 23andMe, when the FDA found the application wasn't sufficient and asked for more information to support that the device met the requirements for approval, failed to respond with more information and just accelerated public marketing of the device.

Unless there is substantial dispute over these facts -- which I don't see any indication of -- there doesn't seem to be any basis for criticizing the FDA action.
The endless debates we had Amiga vs Atari vs PC (Mac wasn't even considered). I remember vividly once we debated these three and Atari quickly fell out from the debate (numerous reasons why it was subpar to amiga). Eventually it boiled down to a friend debating PC (his) was better than Amiga and we all went over how 486 (up and coming at the time) was indeed better and with SVGA and stuff like that, but we were all team amiga. Said friend in the end convinced us PC is better (his). Somehow we thought his PC was, indeed, 486 with SVGA... it turned out it was a 286 with Hercules :) Amiga was so far beyond multimedia capabilities (especially AGA ones like 1200 and 4000) in anything in its price range that it surprises me to this day how it could've failed.
How Daily Deals Sites Are Killing Restaurants
Lovely blanket statement.

There are plenty of cases where it costs 25x more to attract a new customer (Think aviation), and 25x less to retain an existing customer (Think Twitter). It really depends what you're building and who you're selling it to.
Their FAQ mentions that they use quite a few private APIs.
Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6757491
You are correct, but I was referring to desktops, and the particular example is Coherent from Mark Williams Company which was demonstrated running on an IBM PC at the National Computer Conference show in Houston in 1983. Minix came in 1987, if I recall correctly.
In a word: yes.

It ain't all roses. You can find that it f's up your resume.

Example: maybe your startup takes 5-yrs to fail. Maybe for year 3 and the last half of year 5 you just kind of wallowed around the house, and didn't do much.

You will try to start circulating again and trying to get a job because your savings are gone. You'll find things quite different in 2019 ( do the math). There are different people in the hiring positions with different mind sets, looking for different skills.

This is just one example of how things can go bad.

But, for me, it's worth it to take the risk.
Fact check: libertarians think fraud is a rights violation, a crime that is properly punished.

On the other hand, governance by the FDA is tantamount to punishing for a crime not committed. It'd be like putting cameras in your home because you might abuse your children someday. And surely, a lot of stupid people abuse their children, right?
> I basically think that mining was a trick used to help adoption

Think again - mining is closely tied to a "proof of work", a guarantee that the coins are not created out of thin air. That property is lacking from the system you are suggesting. How do you prove that your "DollarPegCoin" is actually backed by anything?

I agree that this has caused an inelastic supply and wild price fluctuations, and these will continue, but it serves an additional purpose besides being an adoption incentive.
I lack the ability to downvote you to oblivion, but i want to.
Ask HN: Which are best software development conferences for 2014?
What's new? Console manufacturers have been doing this forever. As an example, when working on an [intended] Kinect launch game, my studio routinely liaised with other studios to discuss how best to implement X feature and Y feature because Microsoft simply refused to release any details. We strongly suspected it was because they themselves weren't even sure!

Anyway, is this even a bad thing? Presumably - hopefully - Google will take the natural groove that developers have found themselves in and use that to design the APIs that are missing/coming. It's not like the product is even close to being on the shelves.
Yep. I'm pretty sure she'd view it along the same lines as one of those 'reveal the breeds of your mutt' dog DNA tests.
Seems pretty stupid to me. I've enhanced DNA signals using the enzyme used for this in lab class plenty of times, and ran analysis on them. It's pretty trivial nowadays. 23andme does this and runs the result over a gene array and reads out the answers. There should be nothing illegal about this. If you want to slap a disclaimer that it isn't perfect on the mailing envelope, fine, but it's none of the government's business to say we can't have someone do it for us IMO. They should be hunting down fraud and not killing useful lab tests with pointless paperwork.
There are lots of proposals to simplify FDA's approval process, for example, automatically approve it if it's already approved in a number of Western countries whose approval standards are high on average.

But in this specific case, seems FDA isn't being totally unreasonable. For example, from the letter

"Thus, months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies necessary to support a marketing submission for the PGS"

seems like a good idea to require companies to do this
1. They sign a terms of use agreement.
2. 23andMe asks for "are you sure, this can have impact on your health?" when you want to see your health risks.
3. 23AndMe interface has health risks with a "confidence level", for example, my Alzheimer's probability is 10% higher than avg risk and confidence level is 4/4.

I find your argument invalid. If they get an approval from FDA, is it going to change their data processing logic or data set?
The most important thing in any business is that you really need to know who is your customer and who is NOT your customer. If you master that, then everything else is "easy".

Here is my take on this:

- if customer is leaving because he or she is demanding some feature to be implemented, then he or she is not your customer anyway.

- if customer is leaving because your service seems too expensive, then he or she is not your customer anyway.

- if customer is leaving because he or she is generally unhappy about the service, it is important to work hard to understand customer use case and whether your solution is really for that customer

- if customer is leaving because your service does not work or it is flaky, then... oh well fix it and try to convince customer via nice support. Or maybe that feature you are selling should not be part of your service...
One man's innovation is another man's Frankenstein Monster.

It was actually an 8088 not an 8080.

Anyone who had to deal with people using those damn Rainbow floppy disk drives has my eternal sympathy. I really, really want to know what they were thinking on both the format and how you inserted those disks.
"I'm curious, are there any other examples than Thalidomide?

I would guess you're asking to google for list of withdrawn drugs which lead me to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs

Another interesting side effect is most mass shooters were on anti-depressants, although that's probably not the kind of direct fatal side effect you're looking for. Its a challenging google game to track down the toxicology reports for each mass shooter weeks after the smoke clears and identify which anti-depressant they were on at the time. Sometimes its a different kind of med, sometimes they're not on any med at all, although thats kind of rare.
It's been years since 23andMe is out and FDA just noticed? Or am I getting it wrong?
I'm not sure if anyone should be happy about the prospects of literal class warfare, i.e., a large portion of society being so disenfranchised that they need to resort to mass violence in order to survive. There are 3 possible outcomes to that:

(a) the warfare is limited and we're back to the same decision point (how do we change society?) but lots people have suffered for no good reason;

(b) the fighting ends with 'permanently jobless' getting physically eliminated in large numbers - increasingly sophisticated military/police forces + growing drone warfare may make it a possible outcome;

(c) the fighting ends with them winning, and implementing, as I said, "drastically change our distribution of resources - where 'having a job' is not needed for living;".

Why don't we just agree on (c) and implement it without need for bloodshed?

There will be in my lifetime billions of people without a possibility for any economically viable "job", i.e., the rest of society doesn't need anything at all from them, not their labor, not their services, not their flesh. They still need resources to live. So either they'll (a) not get those resources and not live; (b) we'll simply give them those resources; or (c) they'll try to take those resources - but in the end it results in (a) or (b) anyways.
> I think most people view their service as fun thing

If they were marketing as an entertainment product, this wouldn't be an issue. They are marketing it as a diagnostic product (and apparently submitted applications for FDA clearance as such, but then just decided to ignore that process and continue marketing it for diagnosing risks.)
Doesn't work in FireFox at all.
I am wondering if the tagline got changed--it now says IBM doesn't make consumer, desktop operating systems anymore for a reason.
Are you logged in to YouTube when you're blocking ads?

Google could announce, "Hey, everyone who has ad-blocked over the last year violated our Terms of Use, and so we're deleting their accounts."

Or they could just shut down YouTube, because it's impossible to earn revenue off of people who aren't even willing to watch an ad before they feel entitled to watch a video.
doesn't seem to work on FireFox 25.0.1

ReferenceError: AutoSuggestControl is not defined @ http://atmb4u.github.io/AutoJS/:78
I think the line of reasoning makes sense: people will make medical decisions based on this information, but 23andme has never given us any reason to (or not to) believe their tests are accurate. Without someone reviewing their process, their error rate is unknown. That can be dangerous. This is similar to the problem with many alternative medicine claims. 'Alternative medicine' may be very helpful to an individual, but it's important not to overstate its effectiveness or reliability.
A number of western countries take a strategy that tries to make questionable-but-safe drugs legal-but-rarely-used. For one, they ban direct-to-consumer advertising; the USA and New Zealand are the only two developed countries where it's legal to advertise to consumers. And for another, state health-care systems will typically not pay for drugs that lack evidence of efficacy, and most people are used to getting their healthcare through the state health system. That leaves it technically legal for consumers to buy, out-of-pocket, a drug that can't be advertised to them. In practice a handful of people do so, but not too many.

It looks like they do sell this in Europe. Although I'm not sure if that's because it's approved at all, or just because Europe considers it some kind of novelty product rather than a medical device; the FDA and EU categorization of drugs/devices/etc. is a bit different.
> Government agencies empowered to weild regulatory force against citizens are a threat to everyone

Yes! How dare those jack-booted thugs infringe on my freedom to sell "Dr." Smacktoward's Bona-Fide Health Elixir and Youth Restoring Tonic (99% water, 1% radium) to anyone dumb enough to buy it!

It's turning into a dang police state, I tell you!
I would love to see a kickstarted to buy OpenVMS from HP since they are retiring it. It was a quirky but solid OS with some great clustering and security.
Nope, you're not the only one. I've been wondering for years how 23andMe has been getting away with what is clearly a flagrant violation of FDA marketing rules.
Ah, the "people will vote with their wallets" argument against medical regulation.

I'm with you. I'd much prefer a bunch of people die first so the rest of us can "vote with our wallets" instead of having a government agency step in and try to fix things before anyone gets hurt. I mean, my start-up is going to sell baby food laced with arsenic because I once heard that arsenic makes babies smarter and I think I once ingested some accidentally and I didn't die. If it really does end up killing babies, well, the market will eventually correct itself. And no harm, no foul, man. Except the dead babies. But at least I wouldn't have some nebbish bureaucrat knocking at my door trying to tell this American how to live his life.
The same way you bill for any other software services.

Seriously: No startup or SAAS is really charging for their actual software. The whole reason an MVP works is that you are selling an idea, and a solution to a business problem, not some code. The actual execution of the solution is an implementation detail. That's why many people can get paying customers before they've written a line of code.

Also, I think you overestimate a corporate customer's ability and willingness to clone a repo, edit and run a build script, and host their own solution. Corporations pay money to remove problems from their business. Evaluating a new open source package, ramping up on building/running/customizing it, and then maintaining it in-house all sounds like adding a pain point to your average company.

In short, are you meeting a need, and solving a problem that businesses have? If so, then people will pay you money for that. After that it's just a matter of marketing.
> jQuery/Dojo/YUI are not a frameworks.

Oh.
I think a cool spin-off of this would be to create two robots that can duel each other. Either some sort of Rock 'Em Soc 'Em setup (http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Em-Sock-ROBOTS-Game/dp/B00005BY8V) or maybe something like a tamer version of BattleBots.
You'd likely end up with a _really_ low SNR (if the current use and abuse of the 911 system is anything to go by). It'd be the 'cry wolf' app in no time.

There are other concerns I'd have too... Want to mug someone in a secluded area? Hit the HelpMe button on your burner phone and wait for them to come to you.
Intro to jQuery: Learn jQuery with Street Fighter and Hadoukens
In some sense, abstaining from perfectionism is the same as producing mediocre output.

I accept the fact that won't ever be mentally at 100% all the time, so I fill my day with many side-projects and can rotate whenever I'm exhausted with one task.

The output quality of each task might not be as high as when I committed myself exclusively to one thing, but overall I learn more and achieve more.
Although it doesn't quite work as intended if you type quick, it does in fact make a very useful drunk text simulator. Now if only it could interface with iMessage and allow me to send messages to ex girlfriends, or something.
the Guardian, the Mail's left wing equivalent

Ouch!
It's rare (unfortunately), but Dr. Jeffrey Leek isn't the 1st proponent of sharing raw data, or otherwise a believer in reproducible results. Dr. Eamonn Keogh has made very important contributions in data mining and is also a huge advocate of reproducibility. See for example 'Why the lack of reproducibility is crippling research in data mining and what you can do about it' dated 2007 @ http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1341922
wouldn't you just adapt to the difference eventually?
It's a matter of libertarianism being very broad rather than incoherent. They are more divided on economic issues than social issues.
Help build a school in the Philippines
A startup weekend project that wants to build schools following the devastation of Hurricane Haiyan, which has killed thousands and altered life for everyone there
That's kind of my point. Does that mean we should ratchet up FDA's precautionary attitude dramatically further, to the point where that number is perhaps 2 instead of 22? I don't think so. There's a sensible tradeoff to be made, but tuning exactly where that tradeoff should be isn't the kind of thing you settle with dramatic examples of things gone wrong.

It's difficult to measure how many lives were saved or made substantially more livable because the FDA was not more cautious than it has been. Surely that number is not zero, and perhaps it's greater than the net harm done by drugs whose effects might have been caught by more prolonged testing. I don't think we know.
I know it is, and I missed it while posting this to HN. Worse, I've semi-ranted about such Schneier reposts earlier :-/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641908
Then it's just not-private, but still anonymous (I don't need to disclose my name to get a Bitcoin address).
only if keeping a customer is exclusionary to having another in its place (e.g. consulting or services with limited 'slots' for customers).
Online Courses Aren’t Actually Democratizing Education
But 23andme do not make drugs. They do diagnostic tests. The cost of development for those are much lower. 23andme aren't giants in that field for sure, but they're pretty big. It's absolutely nonsensical to compare them to a drug company.
23andMe offers a very low cost way to open the door to a whole new world of having people understand something about their genetic makeup and the possible impact upon their lives.

The work that they're doing to show how genetic features correlate with the observed tastes, behaviors, and propensities of users of the site seems remarkably useful.

The FDA is doing exactly what it always does, stifling innovation while justifying its existence using the voluminous laws created by politicians justifying their existences.

If the FDA were useful, it would be helping 23andMe rather than trying to take them down.
Isn't 23andMe very open and explicit about the accuracy of their claims?
Summary:
5 years ago, 23andMe started marketing a test for among other things a BCRA indicator

July and Sept 2012 - 23andMe submits a form to the FDA saying "our test isn't really useful for diagnosis and thus shouldn't fall under these rules"

Nov 2012 - FDA says we don't agree with you you need to either prove your effectiveness or change your marketing

Jan 2013 - 23andMe says "it will take us a couple months to do the tests, we'll get back to you"

Nov 2013 - FDA says, "its been 11 months and you never got back to us. Stop selling and let us know within 15 days what you're going to do explicitly because you ignored us for close to a year"
Financing 100,000 Entrepreneurs
Just to hijack this thread: I'm looking for a autocomplete library (like typeahead.js) that works on textareas. Any recommendations?
Unions are about collective bargaining to result in rules that apply equally to everyone in the union, regardless of value add (instead of value, they reward seniority). YC is definitely not this kind of union. It's much more similar to a powerful advocacy group, whose influence protects its members from exploitation, but stops at about that point.
They are libraries, but they are used so fundamentally, that replacing them in a existing app is a pain, so most of them impose the problems of frameworks too :\
Schneier does somewhat address this:

"the Internet's winner-takes-all market means that privacy-preserving alternatives have trouble getting off the ground. How many of you know that there is a Google alternative called DuckDuckGo that doesn't track you? Or that you can use cut-out sites to anonymize your Google queries? I have opted out of Facebook, and I know it affects my social life."
I see your point, I do the same for myself, but it cannot be applied to everyone.
Actually, for most developers, this isn't actionable advice.
Many brands post jobs looking for specific players to join their team. Someone who can whip up some ruby or node.js easily (but not solidly) will be useless.
Yes and no. While all transactions are public, you can use a "mixing service" that will mix your Bitcoins with other people's Bitcoins, effectively covering their origin.
I would've called it cheat.js but there was at least one other library out there with the name.

Also, it's a surprisingly-SFW Urban Dictionary term that I find amusing: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cheet
No it's not. The market offers the price it's willing to pay for it. If what you were saying were just 'true', the price would already reflect that.
If they made a transaction with the exact amount stolen, maybe we could say it is the same wallet as the one stolen, but it could also be a false positive.

I would think the thieves are smart enough to make multiple transactions to move this money, in which case they won't get caught at all.
> business can profoundly influence government. Hong Kong, for instance, was largely allowed to do business as usual after the British handover.

Yes, as part of an agreement with the UK, without which the handover would not have happened. Nothing to do with business.

> That China has been able to create a massive manufacturing sector with what seems to be little regard for workers would argue against the OP's assertions.

Industrial Revolution Britain managed to create a massive manufacturing sector with an even more antagonistic stance to unions than China has. There were substantial efficiency improvements after workers' rights became a thing, though given the technological change at the time it's hard to reliably determine cause.
Bravo for creating your own opportunities and thank you for sharing your story!
Make no mistake -- after having stomped on this "not little guy", any new little guy that comes along is definitely going to get stomped on. Which of course means that no new little guys are going to come along. This is the process whereby established players obtain a monopoly. In other words, what doesn't kill 23andMe will make it stronger.
This seems absolutely reasonable. The letter indicates that the FDA has notified 23andMe that their products are not satisfactorily cleared, they're reached out to them several times, and they've offered assistance through a group they specifically set up to help companies in this situation.

Meanwhile, 23andMe went ahead and began marketing and selling their product, despite the FDA's concerns.

Relevant quotes:

> Most of these uses have not been classified and thus require premarket approval or de novo classification, as FDA has explained to you on numerous occasions.

> However, to date, your company has failed to address the issues described during previous interactions with the Agency or provide the additional information identified in our September 13, 2012 letter for (b)(4) and in our November 20, 2012 letter

> To date, 23andMe has failed to provide adequate information to support a determination that the PGS is substantially equivalent to a legally marketed predicate for any of the uses for which you are marketing it; ...

> ...we have proposed modifications to the device’s labeling that could mitigate risks and render certain intended uses appropriate for de novo classification.

> As part of our interactions with you, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications, we provided you with specific feedback on study protocols and clinical and analytical validation requirements, discussed potential classifications and regulatory pathways (including reasonable submission timelines), provided statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies...

> Thus, months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies necessary to support a marketing submission for the PGS.