skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's important to look at the FDA's job in terms of diminishing returns, or maybe as a classification problem. You have some number of drugs coming in, some of which are helpful and some of which are harmful. But you don't have any perfect means of figuring out whether a drug is good or bad. If you start from no screening it's very easy to stop a lot of bad drugs without stopping many good drugs, but as you apply tighter and tighter criteria the ration of good drugs you accidentally stop for each bad drug you stop gets higher and higher.[1]

In practice, of course, some of the rejected drugs aren't explicitly rejected by the FDA but rather rejected by the system because they are never put through the FDA screening in the first place, but the principle is the same.

One would ideally want to set the difficulty of getting through FDA testing to maximize some quantity, such as the average effect of an approved drug on people's Quality Adjusted Life Years. But it's clear that this is not actually what happens. When the FDA rejects a drug people never hear about the lives that were not saved by it, but if even a single person is killed by a drug that was let through FDA screening. Every study on the matter that I've seen says that the FDA is actually way too restrictive in how it regulates drugs. And I should mention that this is in contrast to other countries such as most of Europe or Canada or Japan which have much saner drug regulation regimes.

I should also say that this is only a criticism of the FDA in it's role as a drug regulator. It seems to do a pretty good job as a food regulator. I suppose the number of voters involved in food production dwarfs those involved in drug production.

[1] You get more type 1 errors for each type 2 error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors
Improving education involves improving the approaches used by teachers, whether teachers already employed or new teachers. These kinds of things don't change overnight, but they can be changed over generations. Studies are, in theory, an effective way to determine what aspiring teachers should know and apply.

I don't think driving down the advantages of becoming a teacher is an effective way to improve performance. Many people interested in making a difference would, rightfully, forgo being a teacher for their own sakes and take a different approach.
Ask HN: Whether to flow with the tide or to swim for a goal?
A quote from a letter Hunter S Thomson wrote to his friend! I having been stressing myself lately with this one. Help me telling what you feel about this.
On the science and ethics of Ebola treatments
Algebraic Terraforming: Trees from Magma
Author seems confused as to the naming of chemical elements. Just because the Russians might use different names for elements doesn't mean they have discovered chemically unique elements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements_namin...
TCP packet injection with Python
> really smart but simply too analytically inclined to comprehend normal prose?

I can not connect this type of comprehension problem to the analytical trait/skill/etc. I have definitely see similar comprehension mistakes in non-analytical people.

I think it is unlikely that If you saw some one you thought was not smart make the same mistake would you claim it was because they were too analytical.

Coming to conclusions quickly and acting on them is viable useful strategy on many occasions. It makes sense that it would be used at most levels of intelligence. Taken to far it can be jumping to conclusions and can have heavy consequences.
Ask HN: Should higher education be expensive?
In Belgium we have enjoyed a relatively cheap tuition fee for a number of years: ~600 euro without scholarships. However, with our new (conservative) government this is set to change. They want to cut 413 million euro of government funding, and the only way to recuperate this loss is for institutes to increase tuition fees.

The arguments from both sides boil down to:

In favour of a higher fee: "We don't want to pay for someone else's tuition" and "Higher education should only be for a certain elite". And from the populist side "students should get jobs and stop drinking and attending festivals" or "other countries are way more expensive than Belgium" (mostly pointing towards the USA or the UK).

Against a higher fee: "Everyone should have a chance at higher education" or "look what happens to students in the USA, they start their career with a huge debt" and "in Sweden and Finland there are no fees, and it works as well". And also fear that a new class of citizens is going to appear, who earn just a little over what's required for a scholarship, but won't be able to pay these higher fees.

But these arguments seem too simple, so I was hoping to get stronger arguments on HN for either side. I don't really know which side to choose here, because our tuition fees would still be low after raising them.
Are you in the US? Because in Europe all electrical products are certified under strict EU directives, and (at least in my country) there are routine inspections to ensure that all products for sale comply. You can walk into just about any supermarket and get a pretty trustworthy power strip, electrical appliance, or what have you.
Considering that Stalin died in 1953, it's improbable that he had any influence on the communist parties of Europe during the 80's.

I'd also refrain from conflating the "communist" parties from Europe with "Socialism", despite the obvious, ideological connections. Times had changed, labels were still being re-used.
I wish this was the top comment :(
Unless you can prove that applying additional regulation always leads to bad outcomes, you need to prove that in this case it will before rejecting OP's idea off-hand.
It's not how many they sell that matters, but how much money they make on them and how that compares to the cost of getting a drug through the FDA approval process.
Guys, we are launching our handcrafted shoes on Kickstarter and are trying to build a pre-existing community to get backers. Our team worked hard to build this page, but conversion rate is quite low. Only 5% visitors signed up to get engaged, while in survey we had over 95% people admiring the quality of the craftsmanship and shoe designs.

Would really appreciate if you could give feedback on how to improve it or what hacks we may use to improve the conversion rate. Thank you.
I like the design, all the way down to Copy Past Z. I think grandparent post is out of touch with your target demographic :D
Many reasons:

The site today is just text with a simplistic search engine attached. This make relocating them very simple, duplication very simple, and running it very simple. Because the site is that simplistic, removing it gets that much harder. Its like trying to remove illegal numbers from the internet, and expecting that one large raid on the number central will do it.

What lobbyist are trying to do is takeing the site down through DNS by getting TLD's responsible for the internet at large. This is a bad idea(tm), and is being pushed against by the TLD's. It would also not work.
How to Talk About Climate Change So People Will Listen
Network Forensics Puzzle Contest 2014 Walkthrough
It' not "almost as though" but they are meaningless terms (and harmful to political discussion in my view). American politics likes to force every issue into the "liberal" or "conservative" category but reality is much more subtle.
The first bit of the article is an analogy to highlight the bizarre situation described in the second bit.
To say that drug patents are nothing but greed is way off base. The cost of R&D together with the work needed for FDA approval is typically astronomical – the only way you're recouping that is with a monopoly and a high price.
I'm not sure about US law, but there should be a provision like importing a non-licensed drug for a named patient, with declaration from the doctor and pharmacist saying that they bear full responsibility in case anything goes bad. Using this the doctor can import any kind of drug as they wish - but of course they must be responsible for it as there is no more "screening" from FDA.

Singapore has this provision because the market is too small for lots of drugs to come in.
The oil boom in northern Alberta, Canada is another good example of high paying jobs without any skill or at least education.

Many small towns and fishing villages have been de-populated of men aged 20 to their 40s who went to work in the oil fields.

Going from seasonal work drawing unemployment benefits to $100,000+ working six months and all your food and lodging paid for even free tickets to fly to and from home.

Small towns now have big loud trucks from Alberta and lots of "that's not how we do it in Alberta" arguments. Small town poor boy makes it big can create some assholes.
Defcon 22 Badge Contest
RoryGlyphic thanks for seeing "the need to be so 'internet'"!
Why Not Diaspora?
Yes, when I read the title I was expecting the article to talk about Alexander Shulgin.
I work in the software development field and I'd say only 50% of the QA & Dev people use touch typing... and I've worked in 4 different companies.
You're right, Gaza is more like the Warsaw ghetto than a concentration camp. History never repeats itself exactly.

But I should say that I didn't really want to emphasize the "conservative" aspect of what Orwell wrote about Hitler so much as that he was able to get away with a lot of what he did in the early days because the "property-owning classes" allowed him to. That is the part I found chilling.
>Singapore has this provision because the market is too small for lots of drugs to come in.

Interesting how do doctors end up bearing "full responsibility"? It seems like something has to work differently in civil court or current culture most be different enough that the doctor is not run out of business after a few patients die after importing and taking responsibility for a drug.
The FDA specifically on-label approved ritalin for kids, hormone replacement therapy, and statins for people with high cholesterol but no signs of heart disease. Your faith in regulation is misplaced. If you take FDA approval and a doctor's recommendation as proof a prescription is safe you are misguided. (The AMA is a lobbying organization to which about 15% of doctors belong and is irrelevant here.)

There is no reliable government organization out there stopping harmful medical treatments. I just want to acknowledge that as fact rather than pretend otherwise and deny people choices.
Is this what passes as journalism now? I mean:

>“My 19 year-old boss was taking home $35,000/year with benefits,” he said. “Plus they train you on the job for free. She told me that she was on track to be a regional manager by the age of 30 and would make 100k by then.”

>Katie Nellis said managers of Walgreen's drugstores in the US “often retire in their 40s.”

Are we just taking these wild, likely highly exaggerated claims at face value? And did the BBC really just re-publish comments from Quora as a story with no additional verification?

In that case, the most surprising salary is for journalists at the BBC - I'm surprised they can keep a job at all.
> Plus, construction booms typically lead to more widespread economic bubbles.

If there is actually a causal relationship there, I would have thought it was the other way around.
Can't tell you how it feels, but I've been on the paying end. My outside (and completely unpaid) interest is community theatre, where I do some light design and administrative stuff. We're pretty much all-volunteer, but we always pay the musicians. There's a guy, a television station tech by day, who moonlights as an intinerant drummer at several community theatre venues, well known in our tightly-knit circle, who's not making a fortune but is always welcome to play. Nice guy. Maybe you could be him someday. See if you can find out who the musical directors are at local small shows in your area and get yourself added to their rolodexes. (Heh... "rolodex". Bet most of the kids around here don't know what that is.)
Code Verification for Practical Machine Architectures
Yeah, I mean, if you ignore domain constraints, the following is a great compression algorithm:

$infile = $ARGS[1]
$outfile = $ARGS[2]
touch $outfile

This was one of my favorite examples in Data Structures and Algorithms in college.
PB has been hosted by an ISP belonging to the Pirate Party of Sweden since 2010. Shutting it down would be seen as political censorship.
The pic on Wikipedia doesn't say much without context. You could have gone to the supermarket nearest to my apartment in the week after (I live in Tokyo) and it would have looked similar. People were definitely hoarding, but as far as I know they were paying for the stuff. Mostly, anyway.

Obviously, there is going to be some looting. But, consider a previous natural disaster of approximate magnitude* which took place a few years previously on a coastal city in the US. Compare the response by the US government, the Americans there, and more broadly American society. The Japanese have something figured out that Americans have forgotten, or more probably never had.

(*Not really, Tohoku was considerably worse than Katrina in magnitude and scope.)
I wish you were right. I wish my little brother's Minecraft addiction would lead to something productive. He's talked about learning to program because of it; but of course, he hasn't actually started. That's because he's a child, and lacks the force of will to do anything which is not as immediately satisfying as playing videogames. If he was forced to learn programming, he would probably like it, but he's never going to do it on his own. Because it's hard.

Cartoons are even worse. There is nothing more vegetative than watching TV.
Not exactly the same thing, but this helped me a lot.

https://www.headspace.com/
In that case there can be schools geared towards uni prep and others for education. Choice would open up, not close!
> The FDA specifically on-label approved ... statins for people with high cholesterol but no signs of heart disease.

You say this as if it were bad, but the net effect is to save lives (at a cost of money and increased diagnoses of diabetes). Statins are an example of the FDA and the industry actually doing the job they are supposed to do.
You have to keep in mind the history of the FDA. When kids were being born around the world with flippers instead of arms and legs because of thalidomide, that wasn't happening in the US because of the FDA. Incidents like that breed cautiousness.

The pendulum swings back and forth. A decade ago, the FDA got hammered for being too cautious. Then Vioxx happened and they got hammered for being to lenient. I think the FDA does a dam good job to be honest. Mistakes are made, but I'd give them an A- overall.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the US has pretty lenient "supplement" regulations. As long as you can prove it's safe and don't make efficacy claims you can't backup the FDA will often leave you alone. I'm often amazed at what the FDA allows regular citizens to buy.
function c(i,j){return $("#color-"+i)[0].getContext('2d').getImageData(0,0,1,1).data[j]}
setInterval(function(){$("#color-"+(1+(c(1,0)+c(1,1)+c(1,2)<c(2,0)+c(2,1)+c(2,2)))).click()},1)
Considering that he is an activist, his description might not be entirely accurate.
Explaining Broadcast Anonymous Routing (BAR)
> Ah the "no looting in Japan" myth.

Oh, come on. In the countryside farmers put vegetables in unattended booths for people to grab and put a coin in a hole for payment. Nobody's stealing. Where else in the world do you see that ?
This is cool! One suggestion: I currently can't bookmark a URL that just contains my email with public key in the querystring, because the app complains that some parameters are missing. So for example https://diafygi.github.io/emailpk/?from=<myusername+publicke... will fail. If this worked, and automatically told the app the "from" address, that would make it easier to just hit a saved link or bookmark containing that info so I could get right down to business.

Other than that, a bit of polish and this would be fantastic. One problem might be running into the maximum URL length allowed by browsers (2083, limited by IE, if I am correct), if you store the ciphertext on the URL, but I don't see another way to get around that short of a very clever HTML email that performs a form post... which may be possible, not sure.
Hey Laurie. To be honest, if the undergrads can knock out presentations as good as your presentation on DOTA2 analysis then, we, at PyData London should be actively trying to get more undergrads to come to our meetup.

An unbalanced group is, as you say, a problem. The key is to get a wide gamut; people with ideas and some idea of implementation, flat-out implementation people (devs and designers), business people and investors. A lot of the undergrads I know are green but they often have a lot of energy, ideas and can be fine coders.
Yes, it's associated with Asperger's syndrome. Some people do not automatically recognize non-literal communication forms like metaphor, hyperbole, analogy, satire, irony, and so on. Those who are clever and aware of their deficit can often compensate by recognizing the patterns analytically. Those who are clever but prideful assume everyone else is wrong, and become indistinguishable from trolls or cranks.
What does it take to get into construction? I wouldn't mind doing physical labor for a change of pace. I would love to learn construction skills and I could always go back to programming when the construction market busts.
BBC's articles often report direct quotes from average Joes, it's part of their style. I don't like it either.
You still need a visa if you want to stay more than 3 months.
By analogy, you could say that the Inquisition was inherently unchristian, in so far as Christianity has an ideological character beyond simply "Christ worship".

Similarly, if we do the obvious thing and conflate "left wing" and "socialist", and believe that socialism has an ideological character beyond simply hating the existing organization of society, then extermination, slavery, thuggery, coercion, and violence are inherently anti-socialist.

This view is also the conclusion Orwell was operating under---the utopian ideal of capital-S Socialism which he approved of was used as operating cover to assist in the seizing of power by technocratic middle classes.

This view was pretty much explicitly stated in the Goldstein treatises in 1984, which described "English Socialism" as actually a form of "oligarchical collectivism," and claimed that "The Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism."

Similarly, there's this bit from the supposedly ex-Trotskyist James Burnham (who Orwell rightly abuses for being a power-worshiping scumbag):

"Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has ‘never had a chance’. This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries — Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France — the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism... These parties have, in practice, at every historical test — and there have been many — either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is not going to come."

To be fair, it's easy to believe claims about Stalin not being a socialist are simply ego-bruised leftists invoking the No True Scotsman fallacy. I don't think this necessarily applies simply because socialism is inherently an ideology. If someone claims to be a pacifist while marauding through a public place with an assault rifle, massacring people as they go, we have no problem resolving this dissonance: the murderer's claims of pacifism are simply lies.

Of course, pacifism was never taken all that seriously to begin with, so it's safe for us to simply say "you're lying about being a pacifist." We feel a bit more constrained telling someone they're lying about their status as a Christian or a socialist.
Show HN: Find the best places to promote a business online
Singapore is not really as litigious a society as US, I don't think there is ever a case where the patient sues the doctor because s/he uses an exemption (non-registered) drug. In some cases the patient probably doesn't even know that the drug is not registered.

Importing a drug under exemption is "serious business" and is usually only done by the most senior doctors (or by approval from a committee of senior doctors). They must exhaust all registered options first before moving to exemption drugs, and the pharmacists play a role in ensuring that (another incentive to do that is the paperwork can be rather significant).

Because you need a pharmacist to do this, it usually happens only in larger establishments like hospitals, where pharmacists are readily available and cooperative.
Making more than websites
I'll admit that on average the FDA has gotten better over the last few decades. They are genuinely better than when they caused 10,000 excess deaths a year for a decade due to their refusal to permit beta blockers during the period they were in use in other countries. But you can't say "Both Type 1 and Type 2 errors are occuring, so they must be balanced."
That kind of already exists. US resident are allowed to import up to 90 days worth of a prescription drug. For drugs that aren't prescription-only, the FDA doesn't really care unless they feel the drugs are unsafe.

Most of the drugs mentioned in the article can be purchased by people in the US through the internet.
Rural Wisconsin. I worked on a road crew during college and we'd rarely have guys buy stuff during breaks/downtime.