skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that was an interesting read. The article does not discuss the implications of surveillance from a potential of abuse. In the article there is a comparison of food ration consent (india), car driving consent (america), land owning consent (most places). Do people care about the government knowing where you live? Apparently most don't despite how invasive that would seem if that wasn't the case to begin with. The real question is, how much would a government with this new order of consent, really need to know about you? Would they need an online ID assigned to a GPS location, or everything that Google has on you to perform their function?
The same incompetence that leads to accidents being possible also keeps us safe.
Right, but you get to keep the book, not give it back after 6 months.
Thanks, would love to see your guide! You should see some results much sooner than 6-12 months (assuming you're cranking out good content).
"I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french.
[...]
I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school"

So, which is it? Should I read "must need" as "Microsoft assumes I need two layouts?" Isn't is possible to disable the French keyboard on the phone?
> Without this "privilege" a company has no incentive to develop anything new

How much are they developing vs how much are they marketing? A lot of pharmacological studies are preformed by public universities and an insignificant amount of money that many think goes to "research" instead goes to "do you have <made_up_disease>? talk to your doctor about <our_new_drug?>" type commercials and other marketing.

> Try this for a comparison - Germany declares that all software sold in their country should be priced at $1 or less.

If that software will end up saving lives, then it should be sold for $1 or less and the government should develop/buy it/fund it.

Or how about another comparison. Open source software is priced at $0. Are people writing it? Why? They shouldn't according to your logic. So maybe someone will bother developing and researching life saving drugs without being granted monopoly on its distribution.
Show HN: a minimalist HN reader built using only JavaSciprt
Plus, you're also paying for the rather large profits made by companies in this sector.
I've gotta agree with the author on this one. Upon first glance at the example code, JSX looked really ugly and unnecessary. As I started to use it, I really came to appreciate it in the context of React. JSX syntax allows you to do React-y things, like call child components and pass in props, in a very concise way.
Congrats Cy!
That is a fair point, and I do think the drug industry should be rewarded for making a product that saves lives.

If we were making the comparison to the software industry again we wouldn't make that same comparison, we would just have the people close up shop and start another startup when their product fails and they fail to pivot.

I guess the analogy just starts falling apart there.
The biggest thing that R has is just an incredible amount of really well documented packages, that are quite frequently cutting edge (unless you want to do any deep learning work). Not to mention that the base R has just a tremendous amount of useful stuff baked in.

I've kept an eye on Julia and would love to use it in my everyday work, but also know that for now that's just not possible because of how many built-in functions and packages I rely on.

However solving this is just a function of time and community (Julia just needs their Hadley Wickham). I remember when people scoffed at Python because it has nowhere near the ecosystem that Perl did.
Well, most of the syntax he shows here is just calling functions. A lot of dynamic languages have similar syntax for functions calls. But you're right that Julia's syntax is superficially similar, with function definitions like

function foo(bar, baz)
end

and 1-based indexing of arrays (although Julia's use of that was to be similar to MATLAB).
>> Can it really be attributed to XboxOne and Surface?

Hardly the Xbox One, consoles generally lose money on the hardware for year(s) after release.

Otoh, the revenue was the record and not the profits? For that, more hardware certainly helps.

Edit: polyomino has a point, it seems components + build are about the same as the sales price (but not including e.g. transports and profit for the shops selling them). Edit 2: What tanzam75 said.
This reminded me about quote from "Player of Games" a Culture novel by Ian Banks.

Said by a character with diplomatic immunity after a particularly interesting anti government statement: "We pretend they do not listen to us and they pretend they do not hear anything."
I don't know, I work close to the Twitter HQ and the other day I saw some Twitterites (I could tell by their badges) half assedly walking down the sidewalk while on their phones occasionally plucking up a piece of trash with one of those trash picker-uppers...it seemed like it was 100% for show and actually made me hate them a little more.
The Surface Pro devices have received strongly positive reviews for the right applications. They are expensive and a little niche, but are nonetheless impressive machines.
In a big-picture sense, it's only unexpected if one doesn't realize that privacy is inherently in conflict with their business model.
I figured he was just talking figuratively, speaking for the Everyman.
Governments can take your land through Eminent Domain if it is shown to benefit society as a whole.

By the United States Constitution, in the United States such a taking must be with compensation (reasonable, market-based compensation). And the same is true in most democratic countries with an independent judiciary. (This is notably not true in China, which is why seizing land from peasants is a favorite way for corrupt local officials to enrich themselves.)
That's a common reaction among people who see a Kubrick film for the first time as well. The best (only) advice is to watch it again, in context with other films from the same era.
I just moved from Android to Windows Phone, went with the Lumia 925 as well.

Having used it for a month now, I like it. Maybe missing some apps (Sonos was one I was looking for and disappointed, for example.) But on the whole, I am happy with the phone. Feels quite polished.
According to the article they do, and just as in the movie they kept it secret.
using five adjectives in a row, LOL
>The only people that bought their phone were people that bought because of price point.

Not really. I bought my Lumia Phone and Surface pro for its features and also because it did seem to solve a few of my pains. The main selling point for a Nokia Lumia was the camera, I don't think any other phone on the market can match that. Its also simple enough to use, has offline radio and maps so I don't have to hunt for a 4g/wifi. As for the Surface Pro, its is a great device when travelling, fun + getting work done and my laptop automatically syncs up the changes to my laptop with BitSync when I am back.
That seems silly, they pay dividends. I'm perfectly happy with flat, dividend-paying stocks.
And governments have to pay compensation at market price for your land.

Look, I don't think Bayer will complain at all if India (the country) pays for the drug used by patients in India, like the health systems in UK and Canada. Bayer's complaint is that India doesn't compensate the company.
A clever way of not differentiating Windows 7 and Windows 8 revenue.
DON'T:
Be scripted.
Ask stupid questions that are supposed to be leading, like "Do you want to increase your revenue and cut costs?".
Go straight into pitch mode.
Call them so often that it pisses them off.

DO:
Keep it brief, don't give the full pitch.
Ask for 15 minutes on the calendar to explain in more detail.
Ask if you caught them at a good time. If not, ask when would be better to call back.
Leave a voicemail.
Be casual and genuinely excited to talk to them, like hearing from an old friend.
Send 3-4 sentence email, both for intro and to follow up ("My voicemail" subject lines get good open rates).
Call multiple people at different levels in the organization (and ask if they're the right person to speak to).
As far as I can tell the payment industry is about hiding the fees. To consumers, credit cards seem not to have any fees because the merchants pay them. (This is why they can give you cash back.)

Accepting Bitcoin is a different way of hiding fees. It's somewhat difficult to compare prices to USD because you have to do the exchange rate calculation yourself. Merchants could easily charge a small premium for Bitcoin transactions and consumers can't easily tell if the deal is slightly better or slightly worse. As a result, there's little incentive to give a discount for Bitcoin since it's unlikely to get more sales.

The fees are still there; they're hidden in the bid/ask spread for exchanging bitcoin for dollars.

So yeah, this is "innovative" and possibly disruptive but only in the same way as other financial innovations that seem to give you a good deal while actually charging more.
Germany declares that all software sold in their country should be priced at $1 or less

It would be OK if this were known in advance; software developers could decide whether the absence of future German revenue meant they should (i) not develop a German version and/or (ii) not develop a product at all (as the non-German revenue would not be sufficient).

Changing the goalposts after development decisions are made is different.
The issue is that it is possible the user is telling the truth and now then Google is deciding whether you are or not by asking you to supply documentation. As Google is moving forward with integrating G+ with other services, it seems a burden for existing user and future user to prove their identity.

Yes, there is a value. I often find people I read on technical paper or newspaper or from tweet and I can find out their contact information by Googling their names. That's great, but I argue that they don't need to "police" users. They shouldn't "police" users. The user isn't doing transaction. It's just a Google plus profile. Plenty of people stay "anonymous" with a pen name. Take Bitcoin's "inventor". Should anyone use that name the second time, will Google just say "no, prove to me you are this guy?" People who wish to be searched will always enter their real name. In fact, my wild guess is most Google users always enter real name when they first sign up for Gmail and therefore, Google doesn't need to worry about people provoding fake name. I know Google wants to provide better social and identity graph, but again, there is a limit to how much Google should "police" this real name policy. I can call myself "Jesus Christ" and my guess is Google will not accept that. I have a friend named "Mee You"....

Disclaimer: I am not a guy who hate Google or have anything against Google+ and I personally am okay with Google showing me on search result, but on the case of real name policy I am a nay-sayer.
I'm a new investor who's learning about technology stocks. Will someone with a better understanding of the market explain what this news means to prospective investors?
Thanks for replying and for your work on CoffeeScript and Backbone. I might give this a try as I love Backbone's Model layer. I think I like the second approach you suggested better. That might almost turn the Backbone.Views into ViewModels, right?

I'm still up in the air on how I feel about the whole JSX thing but I'm willing to give it a try.
[Disclosure: I work for TabbedOut]

Thanks martin for the mention!

We’ve spent a lot of time working on this problem space. Ultimately, there are a few different takes on solutions and different ones make more sense in certain situations. The IRL vending machine scenario outlined in the original article may make sense in some counter service places, but far less in a white tablecloth restaurant situation.

While on the surface it may seem like it is not a hard technical problem, it can be. Two approaches to solving the problem include writing middleware integrations for incumbent point of sale software (eg. TabbedOut) or write the point of sale software yourself (eg. Square). Both can have hurdles to overcome on the technical side as well as the human side.

So some of the obstacles in place are: is there an existing point of sale? Would the restaurant require something more powerful than an old school cash register? Who should be processing the credit cards? How quick does fund settlement take place? How much disruption of the normal business process is acceptable (fix things, but don’t make a server’s life more difficult)?

On another note, from the end of the article where Nick mentions that he would be happy paying an extra 10% tip, that seems like a nice gesture, but in practice that isn’t a common mindset from the consumer. When TabbedOut launched, there was a $0.99 service charge for tabs opened with the app. Overall, the concept of making the consumer pay for the service was not very well received.

We’re constantly working on improving our solution and would welcome any feedback. Oh, we’re also hiring engineers if this sounds like a problem anyone would like to help solve [careers@tabbedout.com].
Figlet sighting. Font: big. :-)
"made me hate them a little more"

It seems like your whole perception of the situation is skewed by your preexisting disdain for these folks.
Am I the only one that kind of thinks most websites should just be static pages? Like, I get pretty irritated when I go to read a blog post on Medium or wherever and it loads a header and a blank page, and then loads a bunch of javascript (mostly tracking and analytics frameworks), and finally goes out and gets the actual content. And then if I scroll down, it has to load some more garbage from Disqus or something.

PLEASE JUST GIVE ME A STATIC PAGE WITH YOUR CONTENT.

I really do not care if the comments don't refresh live.
I have a few students using Surfaces. If you can stand Windows 8, they're pretty nice.
So, the last round of gentrification is mad about this round of gentrification and thinks these new folks should make these token gestures to gain better acceptance? Sounds like a perfect plan.
I think the "backlash" is a symptom, not the cause.

The cause likely has a lot more to do with an unnatural supply constraint imposed previously as well as very little in the way of a public transportation infrastructure that would better enable workers (both tech and other) to live where they would like, at a price they want to pay.
JSX isn't markup, it's a compiler that transforms common HTML-like to custom React.DOM objects. From the doc [0]:

> JSX transforms from an XML-like syntax into native JavaScript.

[0] http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/jsx-in-depth.html
Just replace the term "court order" with "warrant" above if it makes my point clearer.

The opinion that kicked off this sub-thread is that all wiretaps should be illegal. "All." That would also eliminate wiretaps that would be authorized under a warrant.
If the patents original disclosure was with mobile in mind then its fair enough to report it as windows phone revenue. It's not the type of win MS would want, but they did invest in the R&D
What does what they were "looking at" matter one bit? I don't understand why the 70 years he was "looking at" matters at all, if he wasn't sentenced to 70 years.
Basically, what Bayer is asking is for India to enforce US patent law and to not enforce Indian patent law (which allows this exception). It doesn't help that Bayer's CEO comes off as extremely racist: '“We did not develop this medicine for Indians”.'
Javascript object inheritance library with IE6 support
Simplest JQuery Plugin to display square images and thumbnails
Would selecting US-English as your language preference fix this?
They doubled their surface revenue in the last quarter, they never released last year's surface revenue
People dont change wholesale until they are forced too. The backlash hasnt affected the individuals, only the collective. Until people start to feel unsafe or targeted the only people who will organize improvements will be their employers because public opinion of big companies affect the bottom line.
Juveniles facing lifelong terms despite rulings
Is Facebook coming to an end? (CrossValidated)
True, good point. Still, I'm not sure it's a net benefit to kick off a sizable subtree debating the merits of a two-word comment. It might be considered an investment in future comment quality, but downvoting all the meme comments that we are able to is probably as effective.

Personally, as long as it's restricted to articles about dogecoin I don't find it annoying, though I wouldn't want it to spread. Clearly your mileage varies.
I'm aware the choice was deliberate. That still doesn't make it any better of a system.

And of course proponents like the idea; they're already invested in Bitcoin. The more new people who use it, the greater value proponents' existing stockpiles will have.
This is the offensive story I've seen on HN in the past four years reading it. I hope anyone who buys into this disgusting Christian / altruist guilt trip loses everything they have, lest they be around another day with the money and influence to spread the disease
Fair enough. But you ignored/changed the foundation my reply was built on. I'm replying to TFA saying "speed is second" and maintainability is... not considered. You're talking about "correctness being first" and speed/maintainability being not considered.
Let's say the drug cost $1 billion to develop (factoring all of the other drugs that failed that they also need to pay for). Now they price that out so that they can recoup that $1 billion over the lifetime of the patent, plus a reasonable profit (remember these are public companies). Let's say that they want to sell the drug in India, and expect to get $50 million out of that market.

Now, since India is no longer a market for the drug, the amount of money that Bayer needed to make from India needs to be made from the rest of the world. That's $50 million more that the rest of the world will need to spend to subsidize India.

Even worse - what happens if the Indian generic form of the drug hits the international market? Now Bayer needs to recoup even more from the remaining international patients/insurance.

Or, what happens if patients from wealthier countries start going to India for treatment instead of staying home? Even more that Bayer needs to charge the rest of the world.

They need to make a profit to finance their next drugs in their pipeline.

The cost savings in medical tourism are usually attributed to lower labor and facility costs, not necessarily cheaper drugs.
> I grew frustrated trying to edit Haskell in Emacs; there are a bunch of half-baked modes out there.

What's wrong with the normal haskell-mode? https://github.com/haskell/haskell-mode

(interestingly another commentator here claims that Emacs' Haskell indentation is superior to VIM's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111521)

> It's not great at doing version control [...]

Have you tried magit? It's probably the best version control support I've ever seen in an editor.
If you think profits are high, why don't you set up shop and develop your own drugs and undercut your competitors?

After all, profits attract competition.
Minimalist Browser Notepad in One Line of Code
> I mean, why not though? Why is it OK for the government to have any secrets?...Maybe we shouldn't be sending out special forces teams or covert operatives.

This gets at the heart of the issue. As I mentioned in my parenthetical above, the arguments in favor of operational security are only relevant if you assume operations are happening in the first place. If you philosophically reject all warfare, espionage, and law enforcement, then there is no legitimate reason for a government secret. However, it's no light matter to reject those things altogether. It implies a society whose structure is fundamentally different from our own. I'm not saying it's impossible (nor am I saying it is possible), just that we're now tremendously magnifying the scope of our claims. We're no longer talking about a particular government policy (nuclear launch decisions), but a complete rewrite of society from the ground up.

> Or perhaps systems should be built with redundancy and decentralization. It shouldn't be up to any one person to make the decision to launch a nuke, or any other attack. We have methods such as Shamir Secret Sharing that would require multiple people to agree to something before being able to provide something to authorize a use of force.

That doesn't address the problem the White House faced in the Cold War. Namely, how do you ensure the nuclear deterrent is credible even when lines of communication have broken down? If you rely on Shamir Secret Sharing, then retaliation would be impossible if the secret holders are unable to communicate with each other.

> Unless that "hypothetical, worst-case scenario" is the government going awry and surveying it's entire populace and killing its citizens without going through any process set down by the constitution of said country. In that "hypothetical, worst-case scenario" is it really OK to be giving the government more power and leeway while decreasing the transparency?

You're shifting the meaning of "worst-case scenario." I used the term to refer to a physical threat, external to the government, which the government is responsible for defending against. You're using the term to refer to a pathology of the government itself. So, the scenario you envision is not the one to which I was referring.
Morale in this context is not about being happy or depressed. It's more of a technical term. It's about doing your job diligently and effectively. Low morale then would be shirking, dragging your feet, not following through, etc. "Because why bother, they don't like what we do" and then doing nothing, rather than less or different.

But, point taken.
Here, I'll fix it:

> "My comparison between Hacker Panic to the War on Terror is not meant to imply that a few teenagers being scolded by cops is equivalent in any respect to raining missiles down on wedding parties."

This is entirely non-material to the point I am making. Frankly, if anything, it strengthens it. You are nitpicking.
If someone develops software that can directly save a life, then yes, it should be affordable by literally everyone.

The same applies for medicine. If you are with-holding drugs that can literally cure cancer but require you to cough up, say, $50,000, then I sincerely hope a hell exists for you because that is straight-up unapologetic evil.

If R&D is that expensive and you need to recoup costs, then the government should fund the research of such drugs.

No matter what the circumstances however, you don't get to restrict access to a drug that cures cancer based on financial capability and somehow take the moral high ground.
I personally would love to see all software be given away for free. Put all the code on GitHub in the public domain. That's the world I work towards. There'd be just as much money to be made, only it would be spent on actually employing workers and getting stuff done and not on fighting over licenses and intellectual "property".

The patent laws of the US are responsible for Bayer's business model, and in a lot of ways it's a good tradeoff. But it's not the only possible way to figure this stuff out, nor is the money the only possible incentive.

Anyway, it's not like Bayer wasn't aware of India's patent laws. They are still going to make billions on this drug, regardless of what India does, and they can spend that money bribing its government officials to change their patent laws. Don't worry, it'll all work out in the end.
So much of what America produces is intellectual property. If India wants to take it without paying, when then America should stop buying Indian products.

The problem is both sides are being assholes here. Bayer is charging WAY to much for the Indian market, but the compulsory license is way too cheap.