skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm just wondering something probably very stupid. Shouldn't an FOIA request turn back all information that the article claims the FDA is refusing to give away ?
Looking at the FDA FOIA exemption list (http://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/FOI/ucm390370.htm or http://www.foia.gov/faq.html#exemptions), there's none that seems to match a drug name, a lab's name, a detail on a mistake or even communication between ab and FDA. The only things that I would think apply would be internal FDA comm, and patient names.
None of the things I cited sound like :
- national security threats
- internal rules
- breaking federal law
- trade secrets, commercial or financial info
- inter/intra agency comm
- personal privacy (if we exclude patient names)
- law enforcement info
- supervision of financial institutions (that's an interesting exception to see BTW)
- geological info on wells (totally off topic, but I'm kind of curious about this one).

It looks like the author si as baffled by the assumption that misconduct fall into the "commercial info" exception...

Really scary also is the whole orange book thing. I thought generics were actually the exact same molecule, as in "we've done a mass spectrometry of the stuff, and it's the same shit, only cheaper". It looks it's not at all the case... Reading the wikipedia talks on generic drugs, it looks like there was confusion there as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AGeneric_drug#Orange_book). As of today, there's only one reference to the word molecule in the wikipedia article ("[...] most small molecule drugs are accepted as bioequivalent if[...]), which doesn't seem to address the confusion.

Assuming (and it's a pretty big assumption) that insurances really want you to get better, it would then look like the should tell you _not_ to use generics, rather than pushing you to. Argument could be made that you only depend on them for a limited time. I guess the same argument could be made for public healthcare systems (like France), in the sense that you're less expensive dead on generics than alive on the real stuff, but I sound a bit cynical, even to myself.
How much of this could be solved by replication?

The FDA won't approve a drug without at least two positive phase III trials (some exceptions for oncology and other fatal diseases).
Puts me in mind of a study a few years back where they had socially housed monkeys self-administer cocaine [1]. Like all primates, each group of monkeys ended up with a dominance hierarchy. The most dominant had a relatively nice life compared with the subordinates: more grooming from others, more play, more attention in general.

It turned out that the subordinate monkeys were much more susceptible to the temptations of cocaine. In contrast, the dominant ones were able to resist its allure a lot more effectively.

The researchers also looked at the neurobiology of the monkeys. Before being socially housed, they were kept in individual cages for a couple of years. They looked at the main pleasure centre of the brain and measured the level of dopamine receptors (of the D2 type) present there. These receptors are directly stimulated by naturally occurring rewards like social activity, food, sex, and so on - but also stimulant drugs like cocaine.

All the monkeys had pretty much the same D2 receptor level when they were cooped up in single cages, with little variation. But when they were socially housed, the D2 levels of the dominant monkeys rose significantly higher; this too was associated with their lessened vulnerability to cocaine.

So it seemed that social environment can have quite the effect on the neurobiology of one's reward pathway, and potential for drug abuse (as the Rat Park experiment suggested).

On reward pathways - in human stimulant addicts you also see lower D2 receptor levels than in non-addicts [2], although this is lacking a comparative reading from before they were addicted, so we don't know if that's near the state they were in when they started abusing the drug. Having said that, in non-addicts there is a natural variation in D2 receptor levels, and those with less D2 enjoy stimulants a lot more [3], just like the subordinate, lower D2 receptor monkeys.

Unlike Rat Park, however, all the above is based on stimulants, which directly affect the aforementioned receptors. Whereas morphine takes a more indirect route, with different receptor types, so it's not quite comparable. Still, interesting to think about how much we may be slaves to our neurobiology, and our social surroundings.

[1] doi:10.1038/nn798

[2] doi:10.1177/026988119901300406

[3] doi:10.1176/ajp.156.9.1440
It's the same reason that SF gentrification articles come in waves on HN. There is a cause du jour, and it only lasts a little while until the new one.
Alabama police officer leaves Indian grandfather partially paralyzed
> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that’s a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that’s as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people’s freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn’t make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others’ freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not “freedom” but “power”.

A more pragmatic way to put it is that it restricts you from using the code in the many real-life situations in which GPLing your entire program is simply not an option. The ideology behind the GPL is fundamentally utopian: it starts with a result - that users of software should have the freedoms to use, modify, share, etc. - and reverse engineers the rest of the world from there, including business models that are very different from the way most companies operated at the time of its creation and now, and which are not always practical. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to a quite firm and well-defined set of principles, and can serve as a lighthouse for real businesses to try to navigate towards. But it means that individual developers often find themselves in situations where the GNU philosophy is irrelevant - while it's talking about the choice of whether to write free or proprietary software, or this blog post is considering marginal issues like the physical difficulty of distributing source code, they have, for various reasons, already found free software unacceptable as a premise, and are faced with the choice of what software to use. By virtue of their employment or business situation, they are not in the "club", and certain software only available to the "club" is therefore unavailable. From this standpoint, it's easy to see why the GPL feels like a restriction of freedom.

Sometimes the premise is more mutable than it originally seems. See "Why CLISP is under GPL"[1] (an email thread barely younger than I am at 22), the old Apple Objective-C thing, and probably a lot of other cases; or look at the case of the Linux kernel, where the utter technical dominance of a GPLed program over all alternatives in certain spaces (particularly embedded) has made a lot of companies who clearly want absolutely nothing to do with free software put up source release webpages. Such examples are often cited as benefits of the copyleft strategy, and rightly so. But for better or worse, they're the exception rather than the rule.

[1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...
There definitely seems to be something odd with AmEx lately. Australia changed to Chip & Pin exclusively sometime last year (signatures no longer accepted), and yet AmEx still haven't sent out new Chip cards so it can be used in retail stores. It's as if they've given up on the Australian retail market. Very strange.
Request: Open source the Hacker News front-end code
Open sourcing the front-end code of Hacker News on GitHub would be fantastic, and an interesting experiment given the target audience.
Nobody is making it impossible. People are asking (by means of the public courts, as is their right) for equal access to that knowledge.
Anyone ever tried kato.im? It seems free.
zoloft works pretty well.
EBM involves using science to determine the safety and efficacy of any given treatment. Oftentimes multiple studies are combined using metaanalysis, an approach that has both strengths and weaknesses.

SBM, despite the name, believes that using science to study medical treatments is often a waste of money regardless of whether a treatment is very effective or completely ineffective; their claim is that there will always be some studies that say the treatment works and other studies that say the treatment doesn't work, and spending more money will just yield more unreliable data. They therefore believe that the bulk of scientific resources should be dedicated to research reinforces society's prior beliefs, and that research on the efficacy of any given drug should be weighted based on society's prior beliefs. You can read more about this philosophy here:

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/hello-world/

If it seems somewhat muddled and handwavy as to how exactly prior beliefs and evidence should be weighted, well, this is why I personally think of SBM as the 'white person stamp of approval' approach to medicine. But certainly they have a point that a lot of medical research is complete crap.
It is a great way of framing the difference. However, in many (most?) instances, the data are also random in that they have uncertainties that hopefully you have some handle on. As the great geophysicist Peter Molnar said, 'If you don't know the error, you don't know the number.'
Kanye West Debuts at Adidas Fashion Show
1) Talk to a doctor.

2) Who cares if your emails are in some NSA server. They already are on some server that you don't control, gmail, work, etc. What is the practical difference?

The numbers of approved wiretaps is really low.

You have a much greater chance of being spied on, legally with a warrant, by traditional police.

Or, worse really, getting sued and then having lawyers crawl up your ass in discovery.
>Because they agreed to follow said laws: the ADA.

Something being the law doesn't mean that it's fair. I shouldn't have to explain that. Also, it hasn't been established that these universities are actually breaking the ADA.

>They have options if they choose not to follow the laws.

What do you mean by this?

>They do not want everyone to lose access.

Well, that's the likely outcome of suing a university trying to offer a free service.

>Please explain why you feel it's okay that organizations should be able to ignore and back out of laws they don't agree with.

Again, it's not established that they were breaking the law.

I see nothing wrong with breaking immoral laws. If the ADA forbids disseminating educational material for free unless it follows a certain format, the ADA is immoral.

>Please explain why you feel you have more right to the material than others.

I don't feel that I have this right. I feel that deaf people don't have the right to demand that educational organizations curate information in a way that suits their fancy. How would you feel if the swahili speakers of America sued MIT for not translating their free educational videos to swahili?

>Please explain what it's like being a petulant, self-entitled child?

Nice ad hominem. You aren't even explaining why you're calling me that; you're literally just name-calling.
Statins are the most widely prescribed drug on earth. The drug company's report that myopathy occurs in 1% of the population. Field reports show that number is around 20%. One in five people statin intolerant due to muscle disorders. Its common knowledge these drugs can cause serious muscle problems, yet most doctors are unaware.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463373/
"It is impossible to discern the true incidence of mild muscle complaints because these problems typically are not examined in pharmaceutical sponsored trials and because of study design. In HPS, for example, subjects were not randomized to simvastatin or placebo until they had successfully tolerated simvastatin 40 mg for a 5 week introductory period (17), and most trials report muscle symptoms only when CK values exceeded 10 times upper limits of normal."
About 25% of Firefox Windows users run Windows XP.
Pinterest Said to Plan ‘Buy Button’ for Site in Coming Months
Yes, a repeated game like Iterated PD is a different game with a different solution. The Grim strategy for example.
Amazon Instant Video can also use Flash. See "Player Preferences": https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/settings
Upvoting for the link, and for your summary.
I'm waiting until they get JWPlayer working. So many sites still use it.
Why? To discuss the law 'as it should be' invites nothing but a cacophony of opinion. On what basis could such a conversation proceed?

If I were uncharitable, I would suggest that such a discussion would serve only one function: that is , to create a distraction from the law 'as is'.

I'd prefer to assume your intent is to understand or construct a notion of morality. In that spirit, I offer the following question:

What is just?
Interesting. You know "too much" (or think too much) about these terminals! :) Cheers!
Does this make it difficult to do the "blame" thing that Github does to see which commit created which line of code?
The author of GPL code can (try to) profit via proprietary dual licensing, but others cannot. http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html
These are some good points. I took 7 years from entering grad school, without doing a Masters along the way. I take full responsibility for how long it took -- my first thesis project was over my head. I would not have forged ahead without funding, so my Plan B was to take the Masters (i.e., pay the diploma fee after passing qualifiers) and then pick up a quick Masters in electrical engineering.
I believe mitmproxy also sniffs HTTPS, but I think it uses a different method by dynamically generating a cert based on the true one http://mitmproxy.org/doc/howmitmproxy.html (bottom)
THE 5 MYSTICAL PRACTICES OF GREAT ENGINEERS
> If you have a simple method implementation that does not depend on instance state, it is a good idea to make it static, for both maintainability and performance reasons. Carrying around the class instance just to make the virtual call off it makes life harder for runtime.

Also anonymous inner classes retain a pointer to the parent which can impact memory usage.

Additionally although not relevant to the code in question, the author's habit of using if/else vs. ternary (or if-only) can have performance and caching implications:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4706696/which-if-construc...

http://kennethxu.blogspot.com/2013/10/ifelse-statement-vs-te...
Convincing other people is an unnecessary burden.
A beautifully crafted argument.
I think emacs is as close we are going to get to a Lisp Machine today.
David Carr was one of the english language's finest cultural critics. His recent (last?) piece on Brian Williams & Jon Stewart was utterly piercing: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/business/media/brian-willi...
I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :)

Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub:

https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/
Help out his family by buying his excellent memoir.

http://www.amazon.com/Night-Gun-reporter-investigates-darkes...
> The redactions are not surprising to me. The FDA is a regulatory agency that deals with very sensitive and confidential information. They are not a criminal agency, and this isn't some district attorney asking for the information.

Yes the FDA is a regulatory agency. In my mind, it's similar to the IRS, SEC, or FBI. It ensures that specific people and organizations are complying with rules and regulations; in other words they enforce the law. Also I'm not sure how the agency has to hide whole bogus studies to protect confidential information. It's not like they can't redact sensitive portions (things like drug names and misconduct don't count) of it instead of just hiding the whole thing. Am I wrong?
> VERY researched

Except for double-blind placebo controlled trials, which are apparently unethical.

... in addition to the article here which casts doubt on all drug research.
> "set -u" does help the bash programmer to reject incorrect bash programs and to put "test" where necessary, just as the Haskell compiler helps the Haskell programmer.

Except the Haskell compiler (GHC here) doesn't just equivalently put test "where necessary", but it puts test everywhere and on everything which would be wildly impractical and tedious with bash.
Making Unstructured data analyzable
At Datashop we are making some of the most needed unstructured data for research, analytics, developers, etc. available in analyzable / parameterized formats. Right now the use case is limited to business research. Will love to understand more of the datasets that are stuck in unstructured formats that a lot of people need.
If the company is worth so much, why are insiders selling their shares?

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?action=getissuer&CIK=000...
> A code base littered with Maybes is certainly a code smell.

It's not because Maybe (and usually more practical Either) have functor instances. What this means is you can use fmap to apply pure functions to Maybes, Eithers, or any other type that has a Functor instance.
> Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B.

I think selling GPL'd software is a difficult proposition yes. I don't think I know of any of any GPL projects which are sold for profit (unless there's some other value-add, in which case they are selling the value-add not the GPL'd software).

> As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important.

In a limited view of software where you're only talking about websites you're possibly correct...
The worry of a lot of us is that the cheapest and easiest way to comply is to remove the content. Once gone the problem is solved. That may not be the intent, but if I were in the universities shoes that is EXACTLY what I would do. Even worse if I have to pay lawyers and transcribers.
JWPlayer support is difficult because there are many JWPlayer variants and old versions out there. It's easier to test and whitelist individual websites to start.
> (as someone coming from the industry)

What do these particular failings referred to in the article have to do with the FDA's lack of resources?

From what I can see all you are doing is trying to change the subject of discussion away from the industry.
> Nobody programs like that for their entire program.

That's exactly how I programmed when I was learning BASIC in elementary school. :-) I still remember my friend trying in vain to explain what a FOR loop did, and I remember when it finally occurred to me why GOSUB/RETURN wasn't pointless. It really makes me appreciate structured programming!
>People are asking (by means of the public courts, as is their right) for equal access to that knowledge.

"Equal access" is not free. If universities are given the choice of not providing free educational resources and paying shit-tons of money to provide free educational resources accessible to every random group that sues the university over the way these free materials are presented, universities will obviously choose not to offer free educational resources.
America's Advanced Industries What They Are, Where They Are, and Why They Matter
The most recent handover was minimal, yes. I'm more curious as to whether any single organization in Hong Kong existed prior to 1842 that still exists today, thus having survived two sovereignty changes.
> suggesting that Go popularized typeclasses smacks of fanboyism

I'm not exactly a fan of Go nor am I a fanboy, quite the opposite these days. I don't have to like go to mention that the way interfaces are used kind of accomplish the same thing as typeclasses.

I also feel that (sadly) Go is more popular than Haskell. Partially because of the number of Haskell programmers I've encountered in real life is much lower than the number of Go programmers I've encountered.
Not redesign, but recycle old ideas. It might change in details, but as far as I've thus far observed, IT operates in cycles. The terminal + mainframe -> the personal computer -> the cloud (personal mainframe) -> ?

Like cycles in economics, climate, fashion, etc.
at destroying your libido.
i asked a question yesterday and then i was doing something else while waiting that 5 minutes. then today i realized i forgot to check it out later and i closed that tab already!
International hotel rates more affordable in 2015, according to TripAdvisor
> Repeated can sometimes be replaced by postfix ..

Always, not sometimes. ;-)
The clean and crisp look of the site is stunning. The fact that there's no busy sidebar cramping up the content makes a huge difference.

Does anyone know if it's an available theme, or if it was custom built?
http://imgur.com/HlkYt5i
I don't really disagree with you too much except that lobbying is relevant when considering regulatory capture.

And if you want hard numbers to analyze the impact of lobbying, you're not going to get it, because lobbyists have lobbied against transparency laws. Anyhow, the impact is real such as with Merck and Gardasil. Further, it's not only laws that matter but court precedent and CDC policies.

But certainly you're right that many unbiased/disinterested people agree with pharma. It's definitely not an issue only related to profits.
> Maybe instead of the "good luck" attitude we should start pushing an "upgrade or suffer" attitude.

"Upgrade or suffer" rarely works in practice. Rendering (or rather the lack of rendering) malformed XHTML is a great example of this
How so? Fads generally involve some lowest common denominator form of a thing lots of people enjoy. Once the novelty wears off, reinventions (candied bacon, anyone?) become part of the fad's empire until it fizzles or reaches a background-level steady state.
Try taking Ashwagandha.
Lyft Is Said to Be in Talks to Raise $250M
Thanks! I didn't know that. I just tested an Amazon Instant Video in Shumway, but the video fails to load because Amazon's video player uses some Flex libraries that Shumway doesn't support yet.
Maybe that's because a "Lisp person" who did so would be considered a "Prolog person." :)

I'll give Prolog a shot!
Apple has already committed to (and rolled out support for) SPDY. If you have iOS8, your Mobile Safari can use SPDY. Presumablely they will shift to HTTP/2 as well.

http://zoompf.com/blog/2014/06/spdy-coming-to-safari-future-...