skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The FDA has more than likely directly prevented hundreds of millions deaths worldwide. It's literally one of very few safeguards you can rely on to know that you're not eating poison.

Amusingly, the top comment on a front page HN post [1] right now concerns one of the first court cases [2] that gave FDA some real power. Before this case, companies could sell a poison like emetic tartar and market it as a hangover drug. Selling stuff like this still happens today in countries without an FDA equivalent. [3] It even happens in countries with a drug regulatory body, but one that's weak. [4]

As with all regulation, there's a balance between benefit/risk. As you point out, there is a financial and time burden of regulation. But with warts and all, the work that the FDA has done and currently does far outweighs these burdens.

> The only good thing I can find to say about the bureaucrats at the FDA is that they respond to regional regulatory arbitrage - to medical tourism - by loosening their grip and letting things through. Or at least they do when said treatments are so widely available elsewhere in the world that the risk of looking bad by continuing to block them in the US is worse than the risk of looking bad because one of the outcomes of a normal, low error rate in medicine gets picked up by the press. Look at simple stem cell transplants, now available in the US these last couple of years, for a good example of this in practice.

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this rant. But I'll point out findings from a 2012 NEJM study comparing the FDA to the EU's EMA and Canada's Health Canada: [5]

"RESULTS: There were 510 applications for novel therapeutic agents approved from 2001 through 2010 — 225 by the FDA, 186 by the EMA, and 99 by Health Canada; among the applications, there were 289 unique agents. The median length of time for completion of the first review was 303 days (interquartile range, 185 to 372) for applications approved by the FDA, 366 days (interquartile range, 310 to 445) for those approved by the EMA, and 352 days (interquartile range, 255 to 420) for those approved by Health Canada (P<0.001 for the comparison across the three agencies). The median total review time was also shorter at the FDA than at the EMA or Health Canada (P=0.002). Among the 289 unique novel therapeutic agents, 190 were approved in both the United States and Europe (either by the EMA or through the mutual recognition process), of which 121 (63.7%) were first approved in the United States; similarly, 154 were approved in both the United States and Canada, of which 132 (85.7%) were first approved in the United States."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7758508

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._11_1/4_Dozen_...

[3] http://ijp-online.com/article.asp?issn=0253-7613;year=2007;v...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1151014/

[5] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1200223
The Talk on Talks
I fully agree, but isn't that roughly the same with Github?

Technically it's much much different of course, but if you commit some private keys/etc to Github, you have to invalidate everything used and assume that someone saw it, Google saw it, and it's cached in multiple places. Right?
>Because if they are "heavily" spying on the U.S., they already knew all what Snowden had, and more.

We don't know this, and how would the Chinese know specifically what Snowden has? Do you have anything to suggest that they did?

>How many gov employees + contractors have top security clearances in the US? That's how.

This doesn't say much. Just because you have a clearance doesn't mean you have access to classified documents. In the miltary, for example, almost all aircraft maintainers have a secret clearance and they just fix tires.
Yeah won't even open the tables for me, and wow 38.1kb.
Stretch Genes - Allen Orr reviews Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance
Why Computational Complexity Prohibits Macro-Quantum States
Similar to sqlite it looks like, it returns VEDIS_BUSY if concurrent write operations are attempted for various calls.
"... to the cloud!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR6xbulUmsg

"Yay, cloud!"
Reminds me of The Website Is Down, episode 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0mwT3DkG4w
> If you're really trying to help the poor at the (presumably managable) expense of everyone else, then subsidize the subscriptions of the poor households by explicitly taxing.

Isn't this exactly what local governments are doing? It's just that the tax falls on the (shareholders of) broadband companies, who are presumably not, for the most part, local residents. The reason this is more politically feasible is not that it isn't a tax, but that the tax is not being levied on voters. Or does the name matter that much?
Interesting experiment to forbid editing. Though the delete key doesn't work, cut-copy-paste does. Forbid that too! ... otherwise I'll be tempted to cheat :)
I was wishing that Tim Cook would actually do it. I wonder why not?
As someone who has been a member of HN, longer than most I would say you should not apply that rule too broadly. Unless I am missing something, he just said "I'm probably gonna get down voted.". There is nothing wrong with that. People say that all the time on HN. [1]

That guideline talks about the case when someone explicitly complains about getting downvoted after the fact. Even comments that say "I don't know why I have been downvoted" are okay imho. Everyone should be allowed to ask why they are being down voted.

[1] As a site note: Usually types of comments actually get up voted. HN rarely down votes for unpopular opinions if they are well founded.

EDIT: See if you don't believe me:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=I+am+probably+going+to+get+downvot...

You can try other variations of that phrase as well.
I watched someone die of cancer possibly years too soon because it took Genentech an extra two years to get approval for Avastin for his condition, volunteered for a patients rights NGO, and worked in several companies heavily regulated by the FDA. I know all too well about the cost in human lives of not just the FDA but the companies who gouge customers on the cost of insurance, medical equipment, and even the basic technology needed to look closely at a cell in an academic lab.

You can talk about the economics of human lives but the reality is simple: removing the FDA won't bring on a Golden Age of medicine that will bring back the dead. Instead, the companies developing the medicine that can actually save people, companies that are now "delayed" and overburdened by regulation, will be beaten down by a market of charlatans with big marketing budgets and limited liability.

Thanks to Facebook, I know of half a dozen former classmates who have close relatives that lost years of their lives because they chose to listen to some neo naturalist instead of their oncologist. That is the alternative. It already exists and destroying the FDA would unleash the flood of crazy that it has tried, with so little actual support, to hold back for all these years.
Depends on who your boss is, and how much they value real productivity vs. time spent at your desk.
> Since this was written in 1997 and C, C++, and Java have all evolved considerably since then (And Ada?) I'd be interested to see an updated version of this.

Ada has seen 2 major updates to its standard -- the Ada 2005 and Ada 2012 standards.

> Also, I remember hearing/reading somewhere, possible in a class I took on compilers, that the Ada language was so complex that it very likely would never have completed development if it were not backed by the government.

There's a lot of weird myths floating about about the complexity of Ada. By the standards of the early 80s its certainly somewhat more complex than, say, C or Pascal, but it's orders of magnitude less complex than the C++ standard, and certainly easier to parse and compile. By modern standards its certainly a simpler language than Java.
Sometimes job ads are written this way to allow a company to say that no qualified candidate exists. They are then able to bring in an H1B.
>Snowden was never taken into custody in Hong Kong.

Why would he?

>Anyway, everyone already knows what they need to know: if you're acting against the "interests" of the Five Eyes countries (primarily the US or the UK), don't trust any computers in or from those countries, unless you can reliably examine everything.

Well, that really goes for any country who has the capabilities, I would say.
It looks like there's something of an art to how they handle corners and diagonals. At sub 10 second run times I think the agility is really the hard part of the programming, not the actual maze solving algorithm.
> Readability, comprehensibility, and approachability all matter too, and this architectural technique is bad for all of those.

That's a matter of opinion.
While your criticisms are valid, I think the best way to consider developments like this is as if they were a new branch of math.

These are new things we can do with the logical/mathematical system. As of now, the best application may not have been found. Saying how these new discoveries are 'not useful' sort of confuses the spirit of exploration.
I was thinking the same thing. It is a good exercise to test a genetic algorithm but a numerical solver could have been used as well.
Fantastic video. Even just the sound of Theseus's operation is fun to hear.

"This is a bank of relays: telephone relays."

On a tangential note: just the other day I was having a conversation with a friend who felt that "phone" was an inaccurate and perhaps inappropriately diminutive term for the pocket computers that so many people carry now. I argued contrarily from a language-evolution standpoint, but if I were to find myself in a similar discussion again I think I might instead point toward what a tremendous role telephone systems and the people like Shannon who built them played in the development of what we now call computers. Smartphones are descendants of telephones but they're equally descendants of telephone systems.
Neat idea. At first it wasn't completely obvious to me that you could click on a node to expand it. You might want to add just a little bit of text to help people out there.

Additionally, it seems that as the graph spreads to the right it disappears outside of the div and I can't find any way to click or scroll to keep following it horizontally.
When I see the RSA logo, I must reconsider using this service.
What I learned from participating in TechCrunch Disrupt’s 2014 Hackathon
Seems like they're making a lot more of an a big deal about polymer and web components than dart. You can find those right away just from the titles.
It's possible they're delivering academic materials through iTunes, I suppose.
As opposed to... Synchronous javascript?
Norvig himself has a different take on that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zihTWh5i2C4#t=86
In the presentation you linked by Baidu's Ren Wu on page 6 it says:

Deep Learning:
AI Brain - World's first RI

What is RI? I haven't seen the acronym before.
Nifty. Could take it further and prohibit capitalization and punctuation. (Perhaps, allow one sloppy stand-in punctuation placeholder no matter what you type, like &middot;.)
The paper says that C and C++ don't support fixed point numbers, though with C++ you can write a fixed point class that's nearly the same as a native version. However, it would still be nice if C or C++ supported a native fixed point type.
Soros clearly had confidence in it. That's why he's the player that won the pot.
You must be kidding, right? The for the last 20-30 years the head of the FDA has been a very volatile position covered with public scandals and the agency has an insane turn over rate due to the structure, workload, and public pressure [1].

Actually it looks like the developed countries with more, better treated bureaucrats are doing far better.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/r/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/201...
Thanks for the link to draftin. Looks very useful. Fwiw, the op's work seems equivalent to draftin's "Hemingway mode" .. which (if I understand it right) doesn't permit any edits at all.
Artificial Forgetting
If you just want responsive tables, you can pop this into your CSS:

img,canvas,iframe,video,svg{max-width:100%}.overflow-container{overflow-y:scroll;-webkit-overflow-scrolling:touch}

This seems to be doing a lot more, of course, including sorting, column selection and more.
So when is the kickstarter?
It's not regulated so we haven't studied it enough but yes, it's called probiotic sepsis [1].

[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/83/6/1256.long
I used them for a while, but have switched back to the open source ones. I don't do anything that benefits from the proprietary drivers and prefer to use open source.
Vedis is a standard key/value store similar to Berkeley DB, Tokyo Cabinet, LevelDB, etc. but with a rich feature set including support for transactions (ACID), concurrent reader, etc.
"When your only tool is a hammer..."

I really feel like this is a misapplication of a blockchain. Block chains are already heavyweight, when you suddenly add arbitrary data like git repos you go from 17GB to hundreds of gigabytes and potentially much more.

Pushing also becomes a slower affair, you need to get your data into a block and then get confirmations.

I don't want to crush innovation, especially in the cryptocurrency space, but I really think this is an example of using the wrong tool for the job.
Why Microsoft Dumped “Stack-Ranking”
Fascinating concept. I could see the "next big thing" being a social network where this was the default
The object data doesn't go into the blockchain, it is sparsely distributed across the nodes
Bad copyright rules killed Hadfield's Space Oddity
Building a Blog: Month One
Taking Showers in the Dark
Have you ever taken a shower in the dark? It's not as good as a float tank, but still works well.
Pixel Shaders An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming
I don't know. If you want to increase the number of skilled workers, wouldn't it be easier just to raise immigration quotas on them?
I thought Perl is what is holding the turtles together?
My understanding is that it is not uncommon for VCs to push their companies to start drug testing. Can't vouch for exactly why that is, but it seems to be something that happens.
I agree. The idea is to safeguard against github going down by storing data in a dht. I don't see why just hosting a repository on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaidSafe won't work here.
I understand why you want to trade in on the Redis name and brand, but this is NOT an "Implementation of Redis" in any way as far as I can tell. This is a facsimile of a subset of the commands available in redis.
I love Dokku for my Node apps. Still trying to find a good setup for WordPress installs that need to be able to upload media.
Agreed. It pays for itself immediately. Anyone with a PS3, PS4, and/or Vita that doesn't have PS+ is objectively Doing It Wrong. Anyone who is such a non-gamer that there isn't a single game on PS+ that they might conceivably enjoy is such a non-gamer that their big mistake was buying a game console to begin with, not the fact that they did or did not get PS+. Seriously, it is that good of a deal.

Finally, anyone with a modern or semi-modern Sony console that refuses to pay for PS+ based on "the principle of the thing" needs to revisit their life choices and find vastly better principles to fight for (trust me, there is a limitless supply). Again, it's that good of a deal, and FFS it's only $50 people.
Of course, it will cost "only" tens of thousands of dollars to make a second try after getting real-life experience from the first one...
Just because you can do something in the blockchain, it doesn't mean you should. The blockchain is a good innovation, but it's not gonna complete with the status quo.
nvalt in a single directory on Dropbox. Some other junk in Evernote.

Keepnote is worth checking out, if you're on Windows or Linux, but it runs like crap on OS X.
Yes, that chip was used on the Galileo satellite but the Silicon-on-Sapphire version that NASA used for that mission is significantly more expensive. The $100 version has error correction built in but it's only rad hardening is any packaging and specs (low power + slow clock speed). A current generation rad hardened CPU comparable to the SOS version in the Galileo would be the RAD750 [1]. Several Arduinos in a lead box would be roughly equivalent to the consumer RCA 1802 chips.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
This is not a binary issue. I don't see why we can ban alternative medicine and have some regulations, but make them more reasonable.
> Not by the ISP.

Major service providers are very much involved in the development process of industry specific/optimized equipment.
To be fair, a lot of the people working in support roles in academia are pretty much unemployable in the real world. They show up at 10 am, take constant smoke breaks all day, and leave at 3 pm. When I was in physics (which used the main university servers for most things) we had a sysadmin who was in charge of some printers and a couple of server boxes. He had inherited those boxes from a former student who set them up, but he was functionally illiterate in managing them. At one point I needed a package installed. Not only could he not figure out how to install a package on a ubuntu server on his own, he couldn't do it with emailed instructions either. I had to go up and physically stand over him telling him what to click on and what to type. To make matters worse, he was so hard to actually catch "in the office", that I had to have the department secretary (whose office he was next to) alert me when he showed up. Not surprisingly, the functions of those servers were soon moved to desktop machines in various offices. As far as I know he's still working there though. He's a union employee and it would be a ride through deepest, hottest, hell to get rid of him.

Note: I am not saying all university support staff are like this. Some definitely are though, and they're probably the reason why good people sometimes find it hard to be properly remunerated in academia.
They're talking about using the host terminal's text-selection mode and the system clipboard, rather than tmux's built-in text-selection mode, which does.

I too generally use tmux's built-in text-selection and clipboard when I'm copying from pane to pane, because it's more convenient.
"an AAA game"

Hopefully the "an" is a typo and you don't actually pronounce AAA as saying the letter "A" three times. :)
Or perhaps solved more purely using Calculus of Variations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7757894
"with a hope of making a few million a year salary ONLY near the end of your career"

Hardly anyone will ever make even a "few" million dollars/year salary.

Honestly, this is an unrealistic dream and if that's your aspiration, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

You might as well decide you want to be President or a platinum-selling music star.
No NASA Spends Billions. Cost does not equal value when you're going to space, SpaceX proves that.
Bidirectional interactive video. Poor areas would benefit most from telepresence teaching.
Government can barely deliver the mail and you're going to offer broadband competitively?
>Well I'm saying the two things a person needs to learn Clojure are the practices already described in four decades of Lisp's literature and the Clojure interop.

I agree. However, the Lisps all have subtle differences. For example, Clojure's interop is one difference, but it's not the only difference. These subtle differences still need to be explained in that Lisp's context to receive a full understanding of that Lisp. This is what I feel nonrecursive has achieved with his writing about FP in Clojure.
To be fair, right now it's all but impossible to entirely take code down for "copyright reasons" if incentive exists to pirate it. I don't know that this is necessarily a strong argument for using a blockchain in this way.
> Mergers and divestitures are fragile things

Why is that the case? Is it just human nature and people are weird and illogical?

It seems to me like if a deal makes business sense at Friday at 11:30 pm, it will still make financial sense next Tuesday at 10:30 am.
White-Hat Hacker Schools Security Pro School
I wasn't arguing against constantly reviewing effectiveness and reassessing regulation, I was responding to the vilification of a consumer protection agency by someone who does not have the credentials to be deciding what "reasonable" is in this context.
I think it's ironic that almost all other industries actively discriminate on the basis of appearance, and yet the tech industry is the one under attack for being prejudiced.

I think one reason for this is that anyone who complains against an industry discriminating in favor of attractive people looks like a loser.
Generally, the shaft would rotate with a drill bit at the bottom. But, it seems in the case of Superdeep Borehole, they developed a new mechanism to rotate only the drill bit at the bottom of the shaft[1]. They pumped pressurized "drilling fluid"[2][3] down the shaft to spin the drill bit.

[1]http://www.ritchiewiki.com/wiki/index.php/Kola_Superdeep_Bor...

[2]http://www.supertightstuff.com/03/18/featured/kola-superdeep...

[3]http://www.damninteresting.com/the-deepest-hole/
Oh, I've heard this one before. Then the physicist fills a balloon with water and sticks a straw in it, proclaiming it a dynamically optimal system (in the absence of gravity); and finally the engineer sprays foam insulation on a glass jar and calls it a day.
Apparently he wants everyone to say "a game with a very large development budget" because "AAA" is some sort of Americanism and he doesn't approve of Americanisms. As a compromise measure, I would actually go along with this if the rest of the English-speaking world would let go of the term "maths".
The Death of the Podcast
> From my experience screen isn't on a lot of systems either.

Can you name one distro that doesn't include it by default? In my experience you can rely on just about every system having a core set of utilities: bash, vim, screen, ssh etc.
I've seen the acronym used for Restricted Intelligence, though I'm not sure that its the intended meaning here.
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> As soon as the accident was discovered, the SCCM server was powered off – however, by that time, the SCCM server itself had been repartitioned and reformatted.

That made me laugh. Poor SCCM server :)
Also some wonderful color on Shannon's early life, career at Bell Labs and in academia in The Idea Factory (a fantastic read for any Hacker News reader).
I'm a fan of SpaceX but you're wrong.

SpaceX is standing on the shoulders of what NASA and other space agencies have been doing for decades. Government agencies spent billions of dollars developing space exploration and SpaceX is able to use that knowledge to cut costs and take the next step.

It doesn't need to cost billions of dollars to travel into space anymore.
I wonder how much of that is inherent manufacturing cost vs. low volumes recovering R&D.

Also, any compliance issues around rad hard components (they're also used in nuclear weapons, and fairly restricted as a result)
> Where I live Comcast is barred from offering me Internet access

You can partly thank the FCC for this. They imposed limitations on Comcast's growth that effectively require Comcast to sell off an existing market if they want to enter a new market. I'm sure their intentions were good at the time but it turns out if you limit the growth of company they might try to find new revenue streams like I dunno... paid traffic prioritization.