skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Politics aside, this is such an interesting market dynamic from the economics point of view. In a competitive market, pharmaceutical manufacturers would all compete on making the same drug at the cheapest price. But patents make this a Government-granted monopoly. On the demand side, patients would like to buy the same drug from the cheapest vendor but because of insurance agencies, do not even see the full cost of the drug individually. This lack of pricing information, combined with the demand for medicines being inelastic (and also not following the law of diminishing returns), makes the demand curve completely vertical.

While the insurance agencies could negotiate with drug makers for competitive prices on similar drugs, they are also competing with the Government-backed insurance entities like Medicare which have vastly different incentives. Clearly lawmakers and budget-conscious bureaucrats would like to get the best price from the drug makers but given a near perfect inelastic demand curve and a monopolistic supplier, there is absolutely nothing they can do.

Since Government granted this very monopoly for the sake of encouraging innovation, any attempt to revoke IP rights that threaten the monopolies' entire business, will be met with extreme resistance. Is it better for the consumers to be in a monopoly market where a necessary medicine costs twice the annual per capita income or risk being in a competitive market where no such medicine might exist if the IP right advocates are to be believed?

Aligning the incentives for all entities properly in this market is not straightforward, especially if you consider US and the rest of the world as being indirectly linked. Gilead knows they can charge $84,000 in the US because of their monopoly. This makes it possible for the rest of the world to get the same medicine cheaper. What remains unknown is, without US being such a cash-cow for pharmaceuticals, how would the rate of innovation in drug formulation change? If Merck, BMS, Pzifer, and J&J can't charge what they want, will pharmaceuticals and India and China take over and create new drugs? Manufacturing drugs is a minor variable cost. Question is, will the fixed cost to create new drugs be made by others? If so, why isn't it being done already at the same scale?
Maybe they can also open an inquiry into why water costs $5 / bottle at airports
Oh! The censorship I meant was more-so in regards to banning Gawker links when they outted violentacruz. I think the child pornography subreddits being banned was fine.
If an app "wants to do x", where x is a defined do-able thing, then it shouldn't be too complex to say no. It's not like an app wants permission to drown my puppy in the aquarium in the living room; it wants to do things set as do-able in android. I don't see what's so complex about that. Instead of a blanket permission policy where an app fails to work because I didn't install it coz I don't like the permissions it wants, let apps fail because I denied them permissions I didn't deem necessary. An app can simply tell me it won't work unless I allow it to drown my puppy in the living room aquarium, and once I say "leave my puppy alone", it stops working and sulks away. Mind you, I'm not a developer, so I don't know what I'm talking about at a technical level. I just want to be able to say no when a flash light app wants to send sms messages. Or when a flea extermination app wants to drown my puppies.
Look at many articles, including this one: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21595437-america...

I'm afraid the USA is much less meritocratic than Europe. In the USA, the class into which you are born is a more important factor in where you will end up than it is in Europe (which I realise is the opposite to most people's belief).
It's a common misconception that prices are even remotely related to costs. They're primarily based on what the market will bear. As it turns out, thanks to the american health insurance system, the market will bear truly shocking prices!

For comparison, in Canada's healthcare system drugs are bought in monolithic purchases by the government health board. While you can sell pills at $1000 a pop to patients who face serious illness without them, I can guarantee you that Gilead is not going to be able to sell their pills for $1000 a pop to a government agency. Canadians are going to be paying a lot less for these. Why would Gilead agree to selling their pills at a cut-rate in other nations? The market there won't support it, and being locked out of an entire nation's market is bad for business.
Well, it's like Jonas Salk said: you can't patent the sun.

Clearly somebody has realized that's a fixable situation.
No, it really doesn't. This is yet another magical medical care "retail price" that has little connection to reality.

First, you can be sure that medicare, medicaid and private insurers have negotiated that price down.

Second, Gilead itself offers a coupon to reduce co-pays to $5 per refill for health insurance plans that don't cover the entire cost of the prescription[1], up to 20% of the total cost (so it appears if you have a 20% out of pocket copay for prescription drugs, you pay $30 total instead of $16800).

So, who is paying $84k? If it's like most other medical costs, the answer is only people who don't negotiate the price down first. The important aspect is that by charging $1000/pill retail, they probably get tax benefits from offering it for less, and anyone on a healthcare plan (if such plans still exist post-Obamacare) which caps lifetime expenditures who get the prescription get a good chunk ($84k) taken out of their lifetime healthcare coverage, which the insurer would love.

To get to the bottom of it, it would be good to know: What are the typical prices (definitely average, median, and perhaps various other percentiles) that Giliad gets from these prescriptions? What does Gilead's internal accounting for the drug (separating R&D, advertising, and marginal costs) look like, and what are the tax consequences of inflating the sticker price?

[1] https://www.sovaldi.com/copay-register.aspx
I suspect there was research conducted by public universities to create this pill, IE that it was publically funded.

The ethics of "I researched this I made this it's mine so you pay what I demand" is one thing. The ethics of collective research, where part or all of the actual labour is conducted by individuals who are working on the public dollar, or while studying (grad students are infamously used for most of the labour in university research), or have no residual income from the results of the research, or a mixture of the above.

If university students did most of the work, is this company then justified for asking this price?

We don't know whether any of this is the case. In our discussion, without additional research, our only metric should be "what are the manufacturing and distribution costs". The public health is the concern, first and foremost.

If, for example, an illness reaches epidemic proportions, it's entirely reasonable for a government to step in and say "it is more important that citizens NOT DIE than that your company makes a profit".

Hepatitis C is not at that stage anywhere in the US to my knowledge. I suspect that this drug just happens to be the straw that broke the lawmakers' back; they're arbitrarily choosing to make this particular drug the battleground for stopping a negative larger.
Http://debitoor.com
Gilead bought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmasset, discoverers of the $84k drug for $11B in 2011. So that's one place to start.
The cost of switching is generally very low and it's quite likely that most people with data in the UbuntuOne system that they wanted to keep were already using another service like DropBox simultaneously.

The biggest cost here is to the Ubuntu reputation. They stand on the promise of LTS releases: with the quick timeline for removal of support from what could be a critical piece of customer infrastructure they signal that they are willing to sacrifice relationships for convenience.
I doubt links from any of these sites would be considered bad by the search engines (i.e. you wouldn't get penalized). If the link they provide is rel nofollow, or a 302 redirect - which they often are - they aren't going to help you very much though. Of course you can get indirect benefit if people following these sites decide to link to you from their blog or something. This has happened to me for even a very niche interest website.
Shared health benefits? Child custody rights? etc...
This is a long debate and I think there is no easy answer. There is an article about expensive drugs (targeting rare diseases):
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520441/a-tale-...

Also recent bayer-india case makes things more complicated:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/04/us-india-bayer-idU...
"Microsoft had previously been in discussions with Stac to license its compression technology, and had discussions with Stac engineers and examined Stac's code as part of the due diligence process. Stac, in an effort led by attorney Morgan Chu, sued [1] Microsoft for infringement of two of its data compression patents, and won; in 1994, a California jury ruled the infringement by Microsoft was not willful, but awarded Stac $120 million in compensatory damages" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics]

"Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, RealNetworks, Linux, and others." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft]
DuckDuckGo: the plucky upstart taking on Google with secure searches
Louis Vuitton Luggage On Sale
I'm searching for a combination of "totally normal" smoke detectors (for safety) and a possibility to trigger an additional remote alert on my mobile phone. Is there some arduino project for something like that?
>It's a common misconception that prices are even remotely related to costs.

They're not related to production costs; they're related to the cost of researching drugs in the future. That is, prices determine what pharma companies will be able to do later on.

Not saying I agree with that, but that's how it is.
It is different, but it's not any less an injustice. One could even argue that it's worse in some sense.

Let me play the devil's advocate: an homosexual couple cannot conceive a child, so by giving then them the chance to adopt your somehow extending their natural rights. On the other hand restricting one's freedom of movement because one was born in the wrong country seems completely arbitrary.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support the struggle of homosexuals for equal rights, but why it's considered acceptable to maintain that non-citizens have less rights than citizens escapes me. It should be exposed as xenophobic behavior, exactly like campaigning against homosexual marriage is homophobic.
My PHP5-FPM vs HHVM performance test. Need your feedback.
slight edit (but important):

The preservation strategy in every age has been data redundancy, but it's much easier to duplicate and copy digital information.

Glad we had all those monks copying the copies of copies so we still have all that ancient philosophy. =)
Was that an engineer, or an intern? Interns often staff labs, but they're usually taught that anything beyond an introductory question warrants seeking out the appropriate experienced engineer and introducing the developer to them. Heck, even real engineers who simply don't have expertise in the area know how to find the right person who does have the appropriate expertise.

Googling or using Stack Overflow to answer someone's question is simply wrong. Even if it was a really basic introductory question.
Everyone in VC for sure - if you are working with VC you are expected to be trying to get a multiplier payout for them. So presumably this person spends his time evaluating companies on exiting. If you were talking to someone who worked in loans, I'd bet the question would be closer to how you plan to cover costs.
We might still both be right. Released through the website might still mean that you have to go through a process to get access. We only know you will not be required to fly to Rome anymore.
>Societies can not have rights, as society is nothing but many people

This is pedantry. The many people that comprise a society hold in aggregate the ability to enforce rules that ensure their survival and prosperity. This is the basis of all governance.

>Where would such right come from?

Governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, regardless of the institution that governs. The right comes from the unified concurrence that some behaviors are dangerous to social survival, and the unified strength to enforce that concurrence.

>Why do you think I have the right to tell you what you can and can not do, even if it doesn't concern me at the least?

See above. The government has the right to forbid behavior insofar as the people believe that behavior to be detrimental to their survival.

>Why do you make special emphasis on sex - why do you think I have the right to say how you can have sex? Sex is one of the most private affairs in our culture - why do you think it is especially appropriate for me to intervene in it when you engage in it without my participation?

I put special emphasis on sex because sex carries very unique properties. Sex is the only mechanism by which a child can be conceived, which roots it directly in the core of a society's concern -- their perpetuation, their survival is directly impacted by sexual practices.

Furthermore, most people have very strong sexual instincts and impulses that are evolutionary necessities, but are threatening to social survival if they are not checked by the aggregate behavioral standards of the populace. Some people have powerful violent impulses, but not most people. Some people have powerful psychotic impulses, but not most people. Sex is special because almost everyone has overpowering instinctual responses to sex, and sexual behaviors or displays therefore demand special control and attention from the governing authority.

Sex is super great and everything, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it's dangerous as well as necessary and pleasant. Rules must be established to ensure that the dangerous side of the coin sees minimal face time.
Doesn't look like it uses any kind of vectorized execution. So the only advantage one gets is reduced amount of data to process. It also doesn't mention execution on compressed data so it has to decompress the data which doesn't come cheap.
Do you also understand that those countries get access to these drugs because American taxpayers and health consumers subsidize the cost of the drug?
Ask HN: Airbags / parachutes for airplanes?
Just some thoughts after the watching some air crash investigations.

Should airplanes have outer airbags which can be triggered before the crash - to reduce impact?

Should airplanes have some kind of parachutes - may be 100s of them which can be triggered before the crash - again to reduce impact?
Spotify Engineering Culture – part 1
Is SyMenu the best free portable menu launcher for Windows?
Even if it is written in .NET I'm using it for years and it's becoming better and better.
Are you using it? Does exist anything better for free Windows?
Could this email tool save you time?
Hepatitis can be fatal, Hepatitis C is the worst out of the lot. Current treatments leave a lot to be desired, but this new drug has a 90% cure rate (existing is more like 50%). So yeah, people will die who wouldn't have, if they could've afforded this.
That's an interesting thought. Since the Supreme Court and Congress have sold control of elections to corporations and the super rich, consumer choice may be one of the last ways for the rest of us to express our will. If we only get to vote for whoever money puts on the ballot, then we may have to also or instead avoid or favour products and corporations aligned with our views.

That's a terrible future.
It's what I like about GTalk and Facebook Messenger. They simply use XMPP (mostly) so I can use Trillian to talk to everyone there. I've always wanted that. All those other things? Whatever. If people want to talk to me there is email, jabber/XMPP and Skype in the worst case.
Sometimes just the presence of code triggers a bug because of dynamic dispatching / whatever, and a hotfix is necessary. You could remove, but then later programmers wouldn't have context to fix the bug properly.

# TODO: Figure out why do_foo is triggering a bug
# http://my-company.org/issues/42
# def do_foo(self):
# ...
My first week as freelance
"Overnight, he went from a 3.5 star rating to a 1 star rating"

QED
Apparently, Harvard's copy of Practicarum quaestionum circa leges regias is actually bound in sheep skin, not human flesh, at least according to this article: "Harvard Law School's 'Human Skin' Book Isn't Really Made of People" published on 03-Apr-2014 at http://gawker.com/harvard-law-schools-human-skin-book-isnt-r...
Japan and Germany are mainly in such a position because they lost a war - their territory would look very different otherwise. That doesn't mean that in (currently still very hypothetical) case of war, they wouldn't try to gain us much territory as quickly as possible - it would basically be a necessity. On the other hand, (potential) nuclear warfare has pretty much changed the game. It seems to me 'warfare' between industrialized nations is now everything about cold wars and alliances with nuclear capable countries. In case of Japan, food will never be a problem as long as they keep being allied to the US.
Nest’s smoke snafu only validates the Internet of Things
Personally, I wouldn't trust an Arduino for anything safety-critical...
> It's a common misconception that prices are even remotely related to costs. They're primarily based on what the market will bear.

In a free market with low barriers to entry and low transaction costs, prices are very much related to costs: the price of a thing is the same as the marginal cost of the last unit of a thing produced. This market is also an efficient market.

You may note that the market for treatment of a particular condition has some pretty steep barriers to entry - patents and lots of research and FDA approvals. IT IS NOTHING LIKE AN EFFICIENT FREE MARKET.

In this case, it sounds like they more or less have a monopoly on the treatment, and will charge whatever price maximizes their profit. (This may be multiple prices, if they can do effective price discrimination: charge more to customers able to pay more, less to customers able to pay less.) So yes. "Whatever price the market will bear" indeed.

Postscript. To some extent this is the idea behind a patent on anything: Spend money doing research / design! Receive monopoly pricing power in return! Society gets to use it at will N years later!
I'm using http://debitoor.com (I'ma developer on the 40-50 person debitoor team)
I used to use e-conomic.com. But now debitoor has everything i need for my 1 person company.
I don't believe so. INAL but if the photograph attempts to exactly replicate an image I'm pretty sure copyright doesn't hold. So like, a high resolution image of a Caravaggio is still usable as public domain.[0]

I'm pretty sure the Vatican's got to "ruin" the images with a watermark or anyone would be able to use them as is for whatever they want. It'd be different if it was sculpture, but these pics seem to me like they'd definitely fall into the "slavish reproduction of a public domain work" category.

[0] http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/public-domain/welcome/#...
MS employee here. AFAIK puzzles have not been used in a long time.
I tried to log onto my IM client (Pidgin) and found that my google account had been disabled. I clicked their contact/appeal link, and the response I received gave no information whatsoever -- just repeated the same message to review the policies for over a dozen Google services to try and figure out on my own what I might have done to get my account disabled.

The google account I created 4 months ago to use for IM (over gtalk XMPP) is only used for this one thing -- Pidgin IM with my coworkers. 2 of my coworkers google accounts they created for this purpose were also disabled on the same day. When I created a new google account, it was disabled within an hour.

My normal personal google account I use for gmail, and my business google account I use for google apps, still works without a hitch. The only thing I can assume, is that Google no longer allows you to use them exclusively for XMPP instant messaging - unless you use their google talk interface built into gmail.

Especially frustrating because there is no way to tell if this is true. I'm just taking a guess, because that's all I can do. If there's some other reason my account might have been disabled, there's no way for me to find out. Now I'm worried about the lifespan of my other google accounts. Don't really know what to do, because Google won't give me any information about what I did wrong. But it makes me afraid they might one day shut down my gmail account also, without telling me why or giving me any means to find out why.

Some google products I like, and some I don't. I hate google+, for example. But webmail is something I rely on, and until yesterday, gmail was such a slick implementation that I had no reason to investigate using anything else. Now I realize relying on a behemoth corp for something that's mission-critical (to me) may no longer be acceptable.

It's ironic and a little bit weird (in a Twilight Zone kind of way), that Google seems to be behaving more and more like the Microsoft of old, and yet I'm watching the annual MS developer conference that's taking place this week (channel9.msdn.com for the video), and the things they're doing -- git support in team foundation server, universal apps built in JS that work on pc/tablet/phone/xbox (and maybe ios/android soon through cooperation with xamarin), open-sourcing the .net compiler, etc -- make them seem like more like the google of a decade ago.

Creepy. I'm not sure how to react.
We already have open standards for unified communication: H.323 (old), XMPP and SIP.

Also there are a lot of companies using and/or offering great software based on these open protocols: check Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/) or Mizutech full stack offer (http://www.mizu-voip.com/).

There is only one problem: When VoIP companies grows, all of them are switching to (at least partially) proprietary protocols.

There is a big hype now around Twilio. However there were apps like that even before solving the same problem. For example mizutech SIP webphone also has a nice javascript API and it is completely SIP compatible (without the need to use any third party obfuscating cloud service like in the case of Twilio. It will just connect directly to any SIP server ...without the cloud hype).

It just seems that technology or open protocols doesn't matter too much. The winner solution was and always will be the solution offered by the company with better marketing.
But, in the end, still market-bearable costs. Maybe we'd see a reduction of the costs of doing research if there weren't so much tax-payer and insurance money involved today.
> We really need stronger tools for discussion to make tectonic changes in political culture

One of the primary purposes of all political structures is to prevent tectonic changes, especially to themselves. This concept is nearly incoherent; a political culture where tectonic change is easily accomplished is better described as a lack of political culture.
How about the web as a communication platform? Check out awesometalk.com for video, for example. No need to install anything, besides a compatible browser, of course :)
And OKCupid is still using javascript, though it was invented by Eich himself. The stupid, it hurts.
People will pay any price they are capable of to not die. This is what makes many of these situations so morally outrageous.