srean

I think you got me wrong. I didnt say that questionable patents lead to drugs that have no effect. Infact if you read it again you will find that I explicitly pointed to that possible misinterpretatio…

Thats not the full story though. The article mentions that the manufacturers were aware of the fact that it was ineffective on humans and hid that data. Discrepancy in animal and human efficacy isnt n…

Ineffective modification of an existing drug as a means of extending the validity of a patent is a widespread practice. This was possibly not the case here. But given that we are tolerant of such pra…

Interesting set of events. But the artificial dramatization really reeks of a cheap B grade pulp. I am sure the fictionalization could have been done more tastefully. It evokes Sam Spade or Tracer Bul…

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious…

Theanine is supposed to increase GABA levels in the brain by passing through the blood brain barrier. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine Rather, its primary effect seems to increase the …

This is has been on HN a few times, old comments can be found here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750858 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=55597…

Correct. But it still does not address the issue why a credit card user bears the risk accruing from his/her behavior, whereas a investment bank can essentially muscle its way into offloading its risk…

To me the major problem seems to be that anyone who is in a position to fix the problem has no incentive to do so.

I am a little slow on the mobile devices front and do not own one. So never knew that android 2.3 can run native code. Now that is something I find exciting. http://d.android.com/sdk/ndk/overview.htm…

Those chips ran hot. I remember 40 degree celcius (104 F) summers with no AC, when I would compile the 2.4 version of linux kernel on my PC with its case removed. Those heat conducting pastes solved t…

See my comment on the parent post about downvote. I couldnt reply to you earlier as HN disables posting to downvotes for a while, I think.

This is for kingkilr, I accidentally downvoted you. Damn, my sloppy clumsy fingers. Really sorry. Could anyone upvote him to compensate please. And erm could pg increase the gap between the up and do…

So, Yahoo acquires Viaweb and rewrites it. The end result is inferior to the original Lisp-based product. Sony acquires Naughty Dog and decides to eliminate the Lisp-based development infra…

The auto keyword has been repurposed to do some basic type inferencing. It helps save a lot of typing (both senses of the word apply here). This is in c++0x and most compilers already implement this u…

I am not a good or a professional C++ programmer by any means, but still I find these quite basic. I think you will encounter them in the first 5 items or so of Meyers.

rauha's was mostly a rhetorical question, a response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2082751

Have never been more touched by any other science fiction movie. It lingered within my mind for days.

To me a big weakness of the prediction API when I checked it out was that it cannot handle (i) missing values or (ii) sparse data formats. Both are very common in real life data.

If you like this, you should definitely checkout the gallery, the simple python source and all other beauties at Andrej Bauer's http://www.random-art.org/ . He has an interesting story of migrating f…

Too late to edit, but meant "possibly permanently".