There is a similarity, but there is also a difference. The general difference (among PyPy/Pyjion/Pyston) is "what to do with CPython C API". As far as I understand:
* Pyjion says "we gonna add a JIT API to CPython" - so no touching the C API at all (or the object model)
* Pyston says "we gonna implement our own object model supporting CPython C API", but they seem to have copied large portions of CPython. This is a semi-rigid approach compared to Pyjion, because it's not runtime-swappable
* PyPy says "we gonna implement a fake layer on top of our own object model" which means that while C API is feasible (and mostly implemented), it's gonna be always a compatibility layer with slower approach, but the underlaying data types/GC can change at will
Yup. It's hardly any different to the standard sorting, because facebook's business is controlling what you see. I don't know why people keep spreading that like it's some protip.
I think that sets a bad environment, because who decides what historically important is? How many years does it become "historic"?
A much simpler and better solution is to not extend copyright to 120 years or whatever the hell it is now [1] (Thanks, Disney!). Twenty years or so should be plenty for all artistic works.
No, but I think as long as the bug bounties pay enough to keep someone comfortable (along with added notoriety/resume padding with it), you'll have enough moral people choosing to reveal them to the companies rather than bad actors. Maybe that's naive. $1k bucks though probably isn't that number. More like $50k or $100k for 0-day level stuff.
States are not really the buyers to be concerned about. In many cases, the state already has tools that give them enhanced access to target data, all the way up to the authority to obtain and execute warrants. The people that are really worrisome are private malicious actors.
I know this is anecdotal, but everyone I know uses Venmo. I have never met anyone who uses Square Cash or Messenger, and I have both apps. To be fair, I don't know anyone in the US that uses WhatsApp, but all my friends in Europe use it. So, maybe it's a regional thing? I would love to see real usage statistics on those.
I think it depends on the circles you run in. I think clusters of friends and family members probably use different services. My extended extended group of 100+ people all use Venmo (can tell by activity in Venmo feed).
That being said, I ran into someone recently who uses Square Cash with all her friends, but that's the first person I've hear using Square Cash (I downloaded it when it came out but no one else was using it.)
A very interesting real-world example of the network effect among second tier services. Second tier as is not FB, Pinterest, LinkedIn.
It's definitely anecdotal, and as a sibling poster said, it depends on your circles. Mine anecdotally happens to be all square cash and no venmo given the ease of setup for square cash.
Why would they need samples when the chemical structure is so widely known[1]? It's not like it's a biologic where sequence and other formulation details are critically important. Can you explain?
Edit: I noticed that paulmd, further down, explained why this is important. I didn't realize the rules were this stupid. The FDA should be able to force companies to make their product available for comparison testing. It's insane that it isn't the case.
Formulating the generics isn't the hard part (well, beyond the chemistry but that's straightforward enough - once you know something can be done, it's just a matter of time and effort). Once a generics company does that, they have to perform bioequivalence testing. It makes a lot of sense, because generics can have different inactive ingredients (fillers, etc.) that can still affect the patient.
But in order to perform that testing, they need examples of the brand-name drug to test against. If a manufacturer can prevent them from gaining access to those examples, then the generic is never coming to market. They can't get a doctor to just write up a prescription for somebody, so they have to go through established distribution channels. There are a lot of other, equally nasty ways manufacturers can use to try and forestall generic versions of their drugs. It's not easy to do, because the laws are written to incentivize generic competition, but if a company thinks it's profitable enough to try (and certain factors are in their favor, like with Daraprim), they can.
The FTC has a really interesting document available on their ongoing efforts to fight anti-competitive pharmaceutical practices if you're interested:
So perhaps in these cases we should place the blame on certain shortcomings of the FTC's regulation rather than the companies who take advantage of the loopholes. I don't agree with the practices of this company, but if the loopholes exist, I'm not sure we have much reason to expect companies to behave any way but capitalistically.
Not american but yeah the law enforcement agencies should be more careful about these loophole or at least try to fix them as quickly as possible once they are found out. Maybe there are some other incentives (sometimes) at the top.
But none of that excuses what these guys (I don't have any reasonable word to describe them). Its like saying there was this loophole that makes this kind of murder (not self defense btw.) not punishable by law so I went ahead and killed 50 people. If people dies from these diseases I don't see how it's not fair to put these guys in some murder trail. I wish we had some reliable tools to detect lies and CEOs and PR guys like these had to pass the test before such claims and actions based off such claims (we are trying to make a better drug) could be taken.
Stuff like this often makes me consider writing an open source version of whatever the software is. If I really had to base my long-term livelihood off a piece of proprietary software, I wouldn't want to perpetually have such a sword hanging over my head. I work with many pieces of software where the core functionality is actually quite simple (more complex if you want nice features), and I'm actually doing this for one of them.
Because of course you would write some software that CERN, with 100's of engineers and scientists, finds not cost-effective to build its own version of, on a sunday afternoon...
The naivete and total absence of awareness of how things work in the Real World in this thread make me shake my head. 'Hey all, someone should write an open source version!' - sure, and in the mean while, those same people gush over some guy raising 300k for "the next generation code editor" who then barely manages to build something that works at all, let alone is an actual improvement.
Software is hard and expensive, especially software that has actual domain knowledge embedded, unlike the 1000th 'micro js framework for single page apps' and fads like that. All the hate on people and companies who make a living selling software (gasp!) is... well, there is no other word for it - plain dumb.
(yes, I make (part of) my living from selling software)
Yeah - no. Do you have experience with high end scientific software¿ Because I have, and that sort of software is hyper niche and requires highly advanced domain knowledge as well as expert software engineering, and is usually the culmination of several man-decades of research and development. If it was truely the easy to replicate cash cow some seem to be assuming, there would be competition all over the place; or a lab would get some intern to replace it in 6 months. But they don't because it's impossible and they realize that Adam Smith's point about specialization holds for software, too.
Right. The university paid a high price for MATLAB licenses (fine go ahead and claim that's not "high end" enough for your example), so they're going to teach their students MATLAB, even when the free and open source combo of IPython+Numpy+Scipy+Matplotlib is at least equivalent, in many aspects better, AND uses a saner scripting language (Python) than MATLAB's with all its crazy warts and lack of modern (15 years ago) programming paradigms.
> If it was truely the easy to replicate cash cow some seem to be assuming, there would be competition all over the place; or a lab would get some intern to replace it in 6 months.
Okay, now I have to ask. Do you have any experience with interns at a university trying to write even, let us assume, a relatively simple and straightforward piece of software?
Don't get me wrong, I partly agree with you, nobody's going to rewrite the high-end scientific software in a weekend.
But you seem to be saying that's because it's too hard. What I'm saying is that the people with the domain knowledge (physics students, interns, PHDs, whatnot, even the computational science guys) are pretty much uniformly shit at writing software. It's a big reason why there's not a lot of code sharing going on in the scientific community: Shame. And that if it was published nobody would want to read it, and there's a rather big chance it would reveal fundamental research errors.
The real reason this "high end" scientific software is guarded so heavily is because the fact that they have other users than themselves, they know they are in possession of a unicorn.
Then there's the part where all the old professors have their (unreadable) scripts written for that ancient unicorn, so even if something better comes along, nothing's going to change much. And even if the students translate (read: completely rewrite and fix some longstanding bugs) those scripts to the modern software, the professors won't have anything to do with it because they don't want to learn the newer thing since they spent so much effort getting to know the arcane old thing (though they will claim they don't trust the new software yet).
Dinosaurs. People will wax nostalgic over having worked at (gasp) actual UNIX terminals in their university years. Except it was the year 1999 and you had to FTP to the one machine with a floppy drive to take your stuff home. Sorry I digress, but yaaaaay science.
Someone's using arguably overly aggressive copyright laws to squeeze someone for cash they couldn't possibly come up with! Let's debate the ethics of selling software!
EDIT: The proper way to handle this would've been to say "Hey! Your site license doesn't cover this. Please don't do it again, as we depend on that license revenue to pay our bills to write great software."
> The proper way to handle this would've been to say "Hey! Your site license doesn't cover this. Please don't do it again, as we depend on that license revenue to pay our bills to write great software."
That's mostly the proper way to get people to not care and end up killing your business anyway.
As opposed to "Fuck these guys"? Even if their software isn't replaced with an open source alternative, this buys enough bad will to have someone patch their binaries to prevent them from calling home and distributing them via torrents. That seems far more likely to kill their business.
Perhaps making the student share a portion of the cost would be smarter. Maybe make the student pay 5 or 10k or the 30.
Alternatively, everyone could be adults and settle for a smaller, much more reasonable amount proportional to harm. Especially considering the company wasn't really harmed substantially by this since he did have access, just not on that machine.
Not my opinion, but what I think lukasm was getting at is that a majority of players in the startup game aren't VCs or founders, but suckers taking low wages and/or options and/or insane hours on the promise of a big future payout that never comes.
"Because it's there. Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man's desire to conquer the universe." - George Mallory
Why do people run marathons? It's a personal challenge. Hundreds of thousands of people do non-record breaking runs which are pain, suffering and followed by elation at success.
That he was the first was a big part of it, but the reality is remove the words "never been climbed" and the sentence still works. Climbing everest, running a marathon, [insert challenging sports thing here] - each person strives within their own measure and tries to exceed their own expectations.
