skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to a 2009 CBO report[1], direct-to-consumer (DTC) accounted for about 1/4 of total promotional spending (not counting the retail value of free samples to doctors, which, if included, would cut the DTC fraction in half). And that apparently doesn't count aspects of "marketing" that are not related directly to promotion (though it's hard to see how CBO or anyone else would draw a clean distinction there). It was also dropping in both relative and absolute terms as the number of new drugs with broad patient appeal tailed off.

Even if you think DTC is worthless or actively harmful, surely there's some value in marketing to (nominally) informed, expert doctors and insurers, unless you think marketing anything is an essentially fraudulent or worthless activity. Would Ford or their potential customers be better off without marketing? What makes drugs any different?

[1] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/105x...
I'm a woman CEO and it doesn't change anything
This is a really good thing to have in the old toolbelt. Thanks for creating it.
Fastmail. If I needed a secure path for email, I'd encrypt it myself with GPG and exchange keys out of band.
Ninja – full stack web framework for Java
Interesting to see Germany with 4.9 below the US with 7.6. In Germany, long stretches of quite a few Autobahns do not have a speed-limit at all. There are, of course, other differences between driving in the US and in Germany.

source: I have been driving in both countries for more than 8 years; moved to the US little more than 8 years ago.
I think it more depends on your jurisdiction. When I'm driving somewhere new, I'll make sure I'm not going faster than average (even if that's below the speed limit). In places that I'm more familiar with, I'll do 9 over.
Heh, fair enough to be sure. However the video and the associated article that I linked do in fact reference multiple official studies.

Examples:

- http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/97084/9...

- http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/eng_publications/speed_...
Enough to get my attention (bigtime), but not enough to hurt.
How long ago did you buy your house? If a person bought the house today, would they still pay only $640/mo?
And it's apparently controversial:

Just as Megge can point to the results on hundreds or thousands of roads which have become more safe or equally safe when the speed limit increased, other researchers looking at data sets of speed limit changes have come to the opposite conclusion and advise that raising speed limits comes with the price of thousands of roadway fatalities.

Although the article seems to support Megge and the studies he likes, it's not clear why (other than maybe that it makes for a more interesting blog post).

And honestly, I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels comfortable going 80 on a 65 MPH highway but not on a 55 MPH highway. I guess it is possible, but it seems hard to believe.
Honestly, the climate is not that great - we have both extremes (really host in the summer, and snow/ice in the winder), and I do really miss the beach - that is the #1 thing I miss about CA. Central Oklahoma is also fairly flat, so if you like mountains in the distance and a little colder climate, Boulder may be more your thing. The key for me is how much impact I can have here. I feel like Boulder already has a lot going for it, but OKC is on the verge of something even better. There is a lot of room here for more tech founders and more tech companies to make a real difference and not be "just another tech startup", if you know what I mean.
I don't care that much for chess engines, but the code looks really pythonic. I learned a lot from reading it! I already started to believe that real pythonic projects don't exist.
I wasn't responding in order to clarify "why" the visa system is the way it is. I was simply pointing out that your assumption that "no developer would ever illegally migrate because they couldn't get a job once in the destination country" argument is flawed.

The way the current US visa system is structured self-sustainability isn't really their primary motivator, the primary motivator seems closer to "just keep everyone out UNLESS they provide enough value to US society as a whole" (e.g. people with high sought after skills or qualifications).
First, I second the call for totally open client code for all core functionality. I think it's find that Google keeps some apps like Maps closed for competitive reasons. But there is little or no secret sauce in the GMail client, it ought to be open and support web-of-trust and strong encryption.

Second, I would like a phone that actually takes advantage of what the network can do. I should be able to set up virtual PBX-like groups, for example, have rolls for automated and human attendants, and have call control functions for moving calls around the group. I know that's boring old telephony stuff, but some people still dial and answer calls on these things.

And I want an audio path for phone calls that the app processor can access and encrypt.
We're not talking about multiple metrics, the exact same metric is being used in empirically identical circumstances and the results are conflicting. The only way to square that position is to assume the conclusion is wrong or the data is wrong. Essentially the epistemological underpin isn't important; operationalising a system no more allows for unrepeatability in empirical data than does any other consistent scientific method - after-all if unrepeatability were allowed then the logical basis would be self contradictory.

Rather than arguing from abstract implications about my assumed knowledge why don't you address the question at hand?
You're competing with SumoMe, which does essentially the same thing + is free (with one-off cash charges for upgrades/prettier templates, etc).

What's the differentiation here?
Shoe Lovers/Burlingame, CA/Front End Engineer

Shoe Lovers is hiring a Front End Engineer to join it's growing team of 8!

Shoe Lovers (https://angel.co/shoe-lovers) is the world’s largest online community for shoe fashionistas. We are working to become the world’s largest social marketplace to discover and buy the hottest shoes and fashion, curated by shoe lovers for shoe lovers.

Our goal is to bring value to our users and customers by delivering the best experience. As a Front End Engineer, you will specialize in building responsive and elegant web applications that reach millions of users; fashion, design and beauty are part of our DNA and as such our front end mindset should adapt to it. You will work closely with our design team to translate design concepts into best-of-breed HTML, CSS and Javascript.

We are looking for experience with the following: JavaScript, JQuery, HTML, XHTML, CSS, AJAX, XML/JSON.

Our stack is a broad SOA platform with mostly PHP and Python on the back. We believe in aggressive decoupling of independent concerns to facilitate team independence and platform stability. We move quickly, strive to release several times a week and believe strongly in automated testing to help maintain our quality and velocity.

If you are interested in this position, please send your resume to: jobs@shoelovers.co
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Humans vs Dolphins

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much the wheel, New York, wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams
What type of products / scenarios could you see this delighting the users?

My first thought is that variable pricing on many items, would do more harm than good -- I would much rather pick a higher price up-front, and miss out on some buyers, than confuse my audience with fluctuating prices on when they aren't expecting it.

I would hate two friends to realize they both bought tickets to the same thing, one whom paid twice what the other paid
If they read their own customer forums, they're aware.

If they don't, they're almost criminally negligent, so you wouldn't want to buy from them anyway.
Erm… the query is sorted by most recently indexed, this is code which was just changed, the top hit at this moment is https://github.com/mdilaver/mdilaverins/commits/421298cf9bf1... which is 5 days old.
Kung Fury (Kickstarter funded movie)
My house cost $76,000 when I purchased it 7 years ago, and it would be only slightly more today - around $85,000 or so. Also, it of course depends on interest rate, loan term, insurance, local taxes, etc. To be fair though, it's a small starter home that my wife and I bought when we first got married. A house we might buy if we were moving now might be more in the $150k-185k range for a nice 4bd. 2.5ba. newer house on a good amount of land (up to 1 acre).
Does obfuscation help with security? Or does it at least help with identification in some way?
Scraping an Indian college admissions' website with shocking results
The data from Montana always struck me as interesting. It's not an awful lot of data presented in this report [1], but there was a substantial increase in traffic fatalities when Montana shifted from "Reasonable and Prudent" speed limits to posted-and-enforced speed limits.

I then found this report [2] which indicates that yearly fatalities are approximately double of what they were in the late 90s (and is now around the third highest fatality rate in the nation [3]). It's a good guess that traffic volume has gone up, but safety technology has improved as well, so there are a number of variables that have to be accounted for. The differences are certainly stark enough that it merits some consideration, though.

Nationwide, traffic fatality rates have been on a steady downward march over the last couple of decades [4], so Montana's tremendous leap in fatalities is absolutely anomalous. If I was debugging it, I'd start looking at what changed around that time. On the face, it certainly looks like posting and enforcing speed limits made the roads less safe, though.

[1] http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm

[2] http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publications/docs/brochures/safety/hsp...

[3] http://missoulian.com/news/local/report-montana-highway-deat...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
Xiaomi Overtakes Samsung in China Smartphone Market
This has been mentioned a few times. Knocking this to the top of the todo list.
This is established by making a one-step random walk in the friendship graph.

Things get more interesting when you start taking longer walks. If you take a long enough walk in a (strongly connected) graph, the probability of ending up in a particular place becomes independent of your starting point.

In fact, social graphs are said to be "fast-mixing", which means that "long enough" is typically only O(log n). In contrast, if you were walking in a two dimensional lattice, "long enough" would be O(sqrt n). This is the idea behind the "6 degrees of separation" factoid.

So what is the limiting probability distribution? That's actually the pagerank.

Which means that if friends randomly pass on a token, it's likely to end up in the hands of someone very influential with a lot of friends. It's been used for vaccine delivery.
Exactly. Ideally, speed limits are an expression of policy that reflect the normative values and desires of a jurisdiction. The best case would be for us to build roadways that reinforce those values.

Many roadways in the US were engineered under a set of assumptions that are incongruous with modern empirical understanding and with modern values. Wide roadways with big turning radii were thought to be safer. Turns out that encourages behaviors that are less safe for a multitude of roadway users. Similarly, there was a 20th century modernist notion that we should use the car for everything. Our bodies (everything from stress measured by cortisol levels, to obesity, to heart disease) object.

The 21st century task of planners is to figure out how to retrofit a system built around monoculture into a system that can accommodate a larger aggregate number of people. Part of that is traffic calming.
Zidisha crowdfunding campaign raised $54K (YC W14)
I just did the SF --> DFW move this week. Housing is 10x cheaper so that tipped the pluses ahead of the minuses for me, and it's still a big city so you can find decent things to do outside of work. Have my own b2b company that I'm bootstrapping, so I realized I wasn't tied to SF anymore for any particular reason. Will be interesting to see how the next year goes!
No. Redis caches single objets, Varnish caches whole pages (unless you're using Redis as a full page cache).

If you're using Redis as your database, I'd suggest not doing that anyway, as you'll start running into problems as your dataset gets bigger than available memory and it has to start swapping. I've found it works much better if you use it like memcache with a richer set of data structures.
Show HN: Blast.js – Rip text apart in JavaScript [ Stripe OSS Grant ]
Tablets really are the new PCs; nobody needs to buy them any more
This appears to be a clone of Bounce Exchange. The tactic works. Some of my clients have deployed it and site conversions went up dramatically. I personally don't love the user experience but it's hard to argue with the results.
I agree that more resources should be directed towards dealing with the causes of homelessness and helping those who need help. But in response to your question, consider this:

About two years ago, my wife saw a woman in the parking lot of a large retail grocery/goods store holding a sign that said "anything helps". She had noticed this woman before on at least one occasion, and it occurred to my wife that perhaps this time she would do something to help somebody out.

In addition to the things she needed, she purchased everything required for a large spaghetti dinner to include Parmesan cheese, a large loaf of fresh bread, and a box of cookies for dessert. She ensured everything was bagged up separately so all she had to do was hand it to the woman with the sign.

After loading up our car, my wife drove over to the woman in the sign. She got out with the bag and as she walked towards the sign-holder, explained "hey, I just wanted to help out so I bought you everything for a dinner..." to which the woman replied, "food's not really our issue."

My wife told me that she essentially closed her still-open mouth, did a 180 and got back into the car. We had spaghetti that night.

I relate this not to imply that everybody with a sign implying need is a fraud, but to suggest that there may be a non-trivial number of people out there who do not act because they've had an experience similar to the one my wife had.
I've a VIC-20 here running chess. 3.5k RAM. And people even got it to run on the ZX-81, with 1k. Now that's impressive.
> As in, the actual height/width.

You would also need distance from the user's eyeballs. This is especially important for screens that can be significantly closer or farther from the user depending on the use case. See Google Cardboard. See also larger monitors that could be used as lean-back television displays in dorm rooms.
So maybe the only option would be The Hobbit?
I was thinking it was "orphaned" fonts that belonged to font houses that had closed and so were released to wander amongst the gutters and margins.
Why did I got down voted for that? It's true. Proof: http://www.crackajack.de/2014/08/04/visual-microphone-audio-...
This is a pretty small python module at the moment. To fetch metadata, it downloads a 230mb zip from PG and parses it for a few categories. Project Gutenberg has some metadata about Subject, but the info is inconsistent, but there is sometimes a Library of Congress code in the metadata.

Not all books have an html version. Most PG books are plaintext, and _some_ have a separate html variant. A handful are written in a markup language that can become html or plaintext.
The Third Wave of Photo Sharing
Your dream date with Google's Eric Schmidt could happen
People who drive slow in the left lane are a problem, people who pass on the right are also a problem. Both these problems can exist independently. (Frustrated drivers don't have to pass on the right; on three-lane highways, people sometimes pass in the rightmost lane when the leftmost lane is free.)
I know this doesn't really touch on the meat of her column, but I was kind of surprised that Mathilde uses "woman CEO" and "female CEO" interchangeably. Usually people have a strong preference for one or the other. (Personally, I prefer using adjectives as adjectives and nouns as nouns, and don't think there's much of a need to turn "woman" into an adjective.)
Suggestion: wherever the information is available (with the understanding that it's usually not public), a very helpful thing to know is what the conference's default policy is on travel/lodging for speakers.

If a conference is far away, but pays for travel and lodging, that's very different than if you're going to be out a lot of cash if you want to speak there.

Knowing this up front can make a big difference in deciding whether to submit a talk.
Alright, not to add to the problem, but I've been thinking of getting a video enabled drone for fun. Any advice on which model etc?

I'd like one that can possibly send back real time video, also maybe "hackable"? No need for Hellfires though ... I promise to be good and fly it in unpopulated areas.
It would be much easier to read if the 111 lines where separated into their own file, though. Otherwise it's hard to discuss what is really important for the engine and what isn't.

Sidenote: independent from the discussions about the lines I consider it an awesome piece of work. Even in 388 lines it's still much better than what I could deliver.
I've lived in the US all my life, with my excessive number of years split between Michigan, North Carolina, and northern and southern California, and in all of those places the proper range of speeds was anywhere from the posted speed limit to a hair under 10 MPH over the posted speed limit (I prefer the latter :). Go slower than that and you start blocking traffic, go faster than that and you might get a ticket.

This is when driving on highways and major roads, at least.

I vividly remember the days of 55 MPH speed limits in the US, and it was pretty much the same then (a hair under 10 over was the optimal speed, but 10 over was a lower speed back then).

Anecdotal experience and all, but at least for me and other drivers that I've observed or talked to about it, just because people tend to go over the limit doesn't mean that the limit has no effect.

This is all fine by me. I only mention it because this is exactly the kind of topic overly logical people (and/or inexperienced drivers) tend to get bent out of shape about. Just because the speed limit isn't strictly enforced doesn't mean it's useless, and just because a cop could theoretically take advantage of people's behavior and give a bunch of tickets to people for going 5 over doesn't mean that it's a conspiracy by the police.
In high school chemistry (mid 1990's), I was told that "sulfur" had become standardised over "sulphur". Seems like this began happening in the mid 70's...
http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=sulfur.sulphur
AI potentially 'more dangerous than nukes,' Musk warns
Reminds me of the technique used to uncover "invisible" motion by amplifying the tiny movements found in a video:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/scientists-uncover-...
Show HN: Text marketing tool for small businesses
LinkedIn Pays $6 Million for Unpaid Overtime, Damages
As a kid (in the early 80's!) I accidentally figured this out while "hacking" a sound based "walkie talkie" with a photo cell and a LED pointed at each other through a little telescope, from my house to my neighbors across the bock.

The device worked, but had a bug. a hummmm on the receiver.

For the longest time I could not figure out what was the "hummm", till I noticed it was there even with the transmitter off.. and then, I heard strange voices even with the transmitter being off!

Then I realized the humm was the reflection of incandescent light on the window, and the voices where the people in the room making the window vibrate too..

Ahh.. those where great fun days early on "hacker" life as a hacker. :)
To J Sonmez:

No offense, but on the basis of your opinion, you're recommending people should put their greatest faith in the facts? Have you carefully thought through on what you're saying? To wit: How can one reliably recognize a fact versus an opinion, let alone a theory? Even being an eye-witness - the most primal way we each may determine and declare something to be a fact - is still a means fraught with errors.

Here is some food for thought. Though we moderns tend to conflate "fact" with "truth", the word originally was in regards to something having been made or done. A fact is a small bit of history or proto-history, if you will. The veracity of a fact will always be a matter of trusting the source, whether that's your own experience or a story from someone else. However, facts in and of themselves do not explain the world, and even so, how does one properly sort out which ones should be believed and which ones are suspect. Can one reliably see through trickery; can one avoid misinterpreting or misremembering what was seen?

And really, how does one "prove" a fact? That is to say, beyond being able to convince someone else that it is? Feel free to bring up evidence, if you like, but evidence comes from the word "evident" - something that is clearly seen or understood. Which brings one back to being either an eye-witness or believing that one already knows.

I'm not trying to be cute here, just saying that facts are not inherently provable.
This is a clear bug. I bet the author would appreciate if you open a ticket on the project page.
Glad you mentioned it! Originally I was using that as a mount for the microscope, but unfortunately the lights placed in it weren't strong enough. The iPhone camera flash turned out to work best.
Does this mean we can have buttons that look like buttons back?

I'd love that.
Funny how people assume long hours for software engineers is self-inflicted. I take it you guys don't have non engineering managers.
Editorial: Why Apple, Inc. isn't worried about iPad's IDC tablet “market share”
Learn how to kiss
I cannot be the only person in NY reading HN! NY Mag has it wrong.. maybe it won't be the next Page Six, but there is an audience here in NYC.

Uber is so entrenched, I am not sure Lyft will ever catch on at this point. I, for one, will never get in a car with a pink mustache.
You guys are douchebags for shaming his ambitious effort. This tool is awesome in concept.
The speed limit drops arbitrarily from 65 to 55 from MA-146 to RI-146 at the state border. Risk of a ticket aside, 80 is fine on either side of that invisible line (long straight flat highway with trees on either side).
We should all support HaAretz because...they're centrist? The author argues, "[HaAretz] has the most potential for bridging across biases and political barriers."

Bridging across political barriers is not necessarily a good thing. When the party on the other side of the political barrier is founded on a mix of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories [0] and a certain, profound religion-inspired racism [1], then it is good if such messages are suppressed.

[0]: http://archive.adl.org/main_israel/hamas_facts.html#.U9_kdPl... - "Hamas Covenant 'echoes the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and charges Jews with an international conspiracy to gain control of the world.'"

[1]: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp - Hamas Covenant calls for the killing of Jews to usher in the Islamic apocalypse.