skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The examples may be "artificially" hard, but, aren't they still hard? And, by your own definition (solving big problems=hard problems), don't they still qualify as big problems?

It's true that big problems have to be "hard" in some way, or it would be presumed that these problems would already be fixed. However, in ordinary usage, problems can be made difficult by something that is not technologically or intellectually challenging, but by something that is just practically difficult.

I think a good example would be Dwolla. Or, you might consider deposing a cruel dictator a "big problem." But it's one that was made difficult by the "artificial" challenges of rallying the right type of support, circumventing corrupt government institutions, and so on. Dealing with institutions that have made change difficult is a real and non-trivial concern, even if it's an "artificial" one.

At the same time, the Millennium Prize problems are arguably some of the "hardest problems," but people don't run around talking about how they're the world's "big problems." It isn't implausible to say that solving problems that affect people significantly may be considered "bigger problems" or at least more worth solving those that are not.

On a somewhat related note, I think some of the most important "big problems" are those which are technologically challenging and practically challenging because of current moral fashions. Many of us here may think it important to get humans to a self-sustaining colony off Earth. But most people today don't at all consider it one of the world's "big problems." Still, I think we can do it...
> You could write a more complex cacheing layer on top of memcached that looked first in memcached, then fetched from solid state storage if it wasn't there.

I wonder how that would compare to just setting up an SSD as swap space.
Am I the only one thinking that charging huge amount of money for education is a net loss for society?
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I doubt we'll see them, but it would be pretty cool to see some support stats, split up by user OS. Number of support requests per copy, average emails and time taken per request, successful closure rate, most common cause of problems, that kind of thing.
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His remarks about how unreadable the book is, and the quotes from it, had me laughing out loud (really)... the guy is sharp and funny.

This summer I also read his fantastic essay "Why Philosophers Should Compare About Computation Complexity": http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=735

Speaking as someone who has been out of CS and working as a programmer for 10 years, it was REALLY accessible for such a lofty topic (and well-written). I managed to finish it in just a few days and understand almost all of it. I wish all academics would take the time to review the necessary background info for an educated reader. That is difficult but shows real understanding on their part, in addition to helping to spread their ideas.
What a great idea, if I remember correctly Illumination Software is written by a husband and wife team and this seems like a really nice way to shape your customer base without being rude about it.
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Sad but true. But more a testament to the difficulty, and frustration, of getting things done in government rather than the lack of an intrinsic need for the CTO/CIO positions.
PG is never afraid to mince his words. If you suck at presenting for example, he will tell you.

By reality distortion, PG has an amazing ability to sell you on a vision. It's often times because he has spend a lot of time thinking about a problem or a solution, and there's no real way to argue back in real-time.
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Deoxit, which is carried by Radio Shack under their own label, will probably do a better job of dissolving grime and oxidation, and with less chance of unintentional destruction of innards.
Interview with Richard Garriott: Life’s a Game and Then You Die on Mars
I would propose an equity model instead. If a student can't afford tuition, then he/she can sell a portion of the future earnings to the education provider. This equity stake can be bought out at a fixed price at any time in the future.
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Isn't that just more of being a visionary?

I get the reality-distortion field from Jobs thing, but that was much more specific to his personality. He didn't care whether or not things were possible, he just told people to figure them out.

I'm sure that overlaps with vision casting in some sense, but I would hate to see the word "reality distortion field" pop up all over the place and start being a SV buzzword when people are really just referring to leadership.
No, written tests first means you make the code easy to test. That may make it easy to use to, but it is not likely. Easily testable tends to mean that the class knows to little. And as a user that you have to tell it too much.
So does anyone know just why it was invalidated?
There is no consensus among scientists on the global warming
You can always write your shaders in Haskell... : http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GPipe
HIV is a huge problem, but one in twenty people is crazy talk. It's simply not true.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+the+usa+v...
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Getting S**t Done
Please excuse me when I point out that the mentioned big problems are big first world problems. The true big problems are how we as humanity cope with growing world population in the face of dwindling ressources. Desertification and water scarcity, climate change. Having shelter and food, water. Reducing the toxification and killing of mother earth. Global justice.
Our standard of living feeds off of the uncounted lives of other humans (and animals). Simple examples: the poor people mining Coltrane for our newest gadgets under inhumane conditions and the children in Ghana burning our electronic waste in the open, inhaling the toxic fumes, to get a little metal to pay for food.
These are challenges on massive scale.

So. A place to store my birth certificate? Srsly?
Not really a problem.
A good read, thanks for the insight into YC!
Makes me think of this article: http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/02/us-gov-sues-the-art-inst...

"Last month, the US Department of Justice filed a massive lawsuit against the company behind the schools, Education Management Corporation, accusing it of fraudulently collecting $11 billion in government aid by recruiting low-income students for the purpose of collecting student aid money. Whistleblowers claim that students graduate loaded with debt and without the means to pay off the loans, which are then paid for with taxpayer dollars."

Are government guaranteed loans simply a bad idea for student loans? Seems like schools will simply charge as much as the government will guarantee. Why wouldn't they? It's free money!
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You can select different gift bags online which come in bulk prices as well. Find a bag which is big enough to fit your fist with enough space for other items. The bag that you chose should have a ribbon to make it look classy. There are loot bags that are meant for heavy objects and this is preferred for wedding favors.
Actually /home was the first automounter map. Brent Callahagn at Sun had built this thing that, in conjunction with NIS (YP) or NIS+, could locate which server your home directory was on, and automatically mount it, decided that the automount point should be '/home' this was distinct from /usr/xx since /usr/xx was xx's home directory on this machine whereas /home/xx was xx's network home directory that would follow them around.
That means they are unable to deliver the same quality across multiple platforms, still want to sell their software to Mac/Windows customers.
West Palm Florida CDFA Mary Elias
This is interesting, but I'm worried about the way they're implementing the discount. They explicitly don't sell different versions for different operating systems, instead they show a lower price to browsers that identify themselves as running on Linux. Isn't this basically what Amazon got busted with back in the early days? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies#Differ...
Looking at: http://gittup.org/tup/ex_dependencies.html

I see the following warning about half way down the page. While I understand the first time this happens tup has an issue, I don't understand why it can't automatically remember it for future use (or does it?)

*** tup errors ***
tup error: Missing input dependency - a file was read from, and was not
specified as an input link for the command. This is an issue because the file
was created from another command, and without the input link the commands may
execute out of order. You should add this file as an input, since it is
possible this could randomly break in the future.
>I'm an actual developer (not a scientific programmer) and it took me a little while to understand what PyPy does.

I'm a scientist, not a scientific programmer or a developer and this is all I really care about: PyPy is currently--in it's partially implemented state--much, much faster than CPython on the vast majority of things it can do. If I am able to use PyPy's NumPy and it's faster than traditional NumPy I will do so as long as the opportunity cost doesn't outweigh the speed increases (NumPy is pretty useless to me--maybe not some--without SciPy and matplotlib).

I don't care that PyPy is written in RPython any more than I care that it has a JIT, or that CPython is written in C. I also don't care how that JIT works or how CPython compiles to byte code or how Jython does magic to make my Python code run on the JVM. I do care that it "works," as a scientist. I do care that they are "correct" implementations, as a scientist. As an individual, I am interested in the inner workings of PyPy and CPython, CoffeeScript, Go, and Brain Fuck, but when I'm working on research the only thing that actually is important as far as the language implementation is concerned is that it just works. The interpreter is just a brand of the particular tool that I'm using.

I would certainly prefer it if PyPy was 100% compatible with the CPython C API even if it was at 80% (maybe even 60%) of the CPython C API speed because then I don't even have to think. I'd be using PyPy because it's faster overall and I can do the analyses I want faster.

Anyway, I think if you're explaining all of what you mentioned to a NumPy user or a PyPy NumPy user you'd be doing it wrong. Or maybe the PyPy folks would be doing it wrong. Because this is how that conversation would go with my peers.

Sad Panda: "Ugh my code is running slowly I think I have to jump into C"
Me: "Have you tried PyPy's NumPy yet?"
Sad Panda: "What's that?"
Me: "It's faster Python and NumPy. Go here [link] and download it see if it runs your code faster"
Sad Panda: "Okay I'll do that"
..a while later..
Sad Panda: "It was a little faster, but I ended up getting one of the CS guys to help me run it on a tesla cluster with OpenCL. But I think I can use it on the spiny lumpsucker data I'm collecting."
Please note that the software is based on Plasma Active, KDE's workspace designed specificly for tablets. More about that:

http://plasma-active.org/
Tried the demo. Didn't work in Firefox 9.0.1 or Chromium 18 on Linux
The real lesson here is a hidden one for YCombinator startups:

YC gives you money, but they apparently do not provide you with advisors, handlers, lawyers or PR people who will intervene to stop you from making such a boneheaded, potentially explosive move, nor step in and help you figure out how to gracefully recover from a mistake.

Seriously? Credit where credit is due? Ha ha, it was stupid, we stole your design AND your assets, hee, aren't we a trip, funding, something something, TechCrunch, split testing makes it alllll better.
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Nice, I was going to suggest a similar list (Tesla and SpaceX definitely).

There's Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory Lovins' energy conservation research lab. A little thin on product, but he's done a lot of the thinking that's materializing around low-energy transport and alternative energy now. There are numerous other players in the energy field as well.

I'd argue that California's High Speed Rail Commission is, if not a private startup, at least a partnership tackling a Hard Problem (perhaps intractable, though I'd like to hope not).

I'd be interested in seeing this list developed further.
You know what else fixes busted home buttons? AppleCare.
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That's pretty much what student loans are..
On Hiring: How To Be a Non-Technical Co-Founder
I saw the Salon domain and made a point of grabbing a beverage before settling in and clicking the link, hoping to read an engaging, well written, lengthy article.

While I was initially disappointed to see that this wasn't at all what I was expecting, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the list was engaging and well written, even if it wasn't a lengthy magazine article.

This is a rare case where the HN headline would be better, to me, if the "25 Things" was left in the title, even if that is technically against the submission rules.
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If you're using Chrome on Mac or Windows, just add

--user-agent="Linux"

as a command line parameter when starting the browser and you get 'You are running Linux. Well done! 25% discount applied!'

For Firefox you can use something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-rg...

And don't forget to donate the saved money to a charity of your choice..
With Jobs, wasn't it his ability to get people to suspend disbelief and bend their view of the world to his?

In any case, visionary applies just as much.

I'm not unique in this observation, other founders say the same thing.
From the readme: "On a single core of a 2.67GHz Intel Xeon X5550, CityHashCrc256 peaks at about 6.09 bytes/cycle. The other CityHashCrc functions are wrappers around CityHashCrc256 and should have similar performance on long strings. CityHash128 peaks at about 4.31 bytes/cycle."

I think it's fascinating that they're able to determine the number of bytes their code processes during a single cycle. Does anyone know where to start looking to learn more about how to do that? It reminds me of a comment I think I read on here a month or two ago about the number of pixels that could be processed per cycle with an algorithm implemented on a 500MHz FPGA.

Edit: Thanks for the answers!
So what's your assessment of what he actually accomplished (or didn't) while in office? Agree or disagree with rdl on that?
Some less popular heroes
>Every internal GitHub talk is automatically recorded, uploaded, and viewable to every future employee.
... on a Kinect-powered Arduino-based motion-detecting portable video recording platform.

Um, more please! Wtb a video of that in action or meetup presentation or something.
Africa's 'father of technology' on sparking a tech revolution
Is this really new? Initial check-in is July 22nd on the source tab.
I think it's most likely working as a lubricant. WD40 leaves a lubricating residue that in my experience works well on creaky door hinges. I never thought to use it on sticky buttons though!
Why? If it's a rebranded WD-40, why will that work?

"unintentional destruction of innards" - can you give some examples? I've never had it destroy anything.
A cash register sound would be appropriate!
Pure mathematicians are always motivated by a problem, even if it isn't a "real world" problem.
Deoxit is different to WD40. Deoxit is a contact cleaner while WD40 is a lubricant. They work in nearly the same way but WD40 leaves residue which will build up over time while deoxit completely evaporates.

WD40 will work but I wouldn't use it on anything I want to pass on to my children.

I've also heard some second hand horror stories of WD40 penetrating old IC casings and destroying them but I can't confirm them myself.
This is a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...
S'ok.

The point of "redheaded stepchild" is that nobody loves it cuz it's not THEIR baby. Making it the perfect metaphor for this product. :)
I think it ends up being simple arithmetic once you access your processor's cycle counter. For example, on x86 you used to do it via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter and that may still work given the right circumstances.
The problem with these problems are that they aren't scalable. The problems you listed are quite US centric, but startups aren't happy unless the market is international.
I didn't understand the responsive design analogy. I assume it's not the operating system that the developer responds to, so what is it?
Looks like you were using the design for a new product as well (http://www.sharebooster.com).

http://i.imgur.com/MXCuN.png

You going to take that down also?
So might they too fall prey to the same issue, of losing sight of the problem they are solving?

i.e. that the equivalent of a README would also help pure mathematicians? I guess that would be a statement of the problem: a formal definition of assumptions, and the outcome (if possible). Though I think getting to that point would be where most of the work is.
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can a moderator remove the "coding horror" prefix from the headline? It adds nothing but brand.
Timestamp counter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Stamp_Counter

The question is how representative this measurement really is. Performance of a hash function depends heavily on memory caches. This looks like a test with many iteration where all data are as close to the processor as possible - hardly a real-life scenario.
I think a more justified way is to sell linux only licence on discount, and allow them to be upgraded to universal ones by topping up the cost.

Of course if that user operates on Linux, the likelihood of needing support at the first place would have already been lower...
i use the graphite of pencils on door hinges. also the soft eraser on the end is quite good at cleaning contacts on motherboards from grease and the like.

that and a non conducting pencil is handy for raising the guard on uk and irish power outlets to plug in 2 pin cables.

just that i find it easier to carry a pencil in my toolkit than risk a possibly leaking container of wd40 near the rest of my electronics.
People price things in gold as there is a roughly known and finite quantity either in vaults or in the ground.
USD's however have no upper bound and can be conjured into existence as 1's and 0's.

Remember there are three functions of money

1) Unit of account
2) Medium of exchange
3) Store of value

Currency is not a good store of value - it can be printed at will. It does store value over a short time frame but if you were given a box from 1930 that inside held somones life savings from 1930 - would you wish it to be in USDs or gold? Hint: USDs is the wrong answer!
Currency is an excellent medium of exchange. You can buy food at the supermarket with it. Just don't save your surplus wealth in it.

Gold is used as a store of value instead of orange juice concentrate since it has historical value, it is fungible, divisible and inert (ie: it won't spoil). Also you are not impinging on the economy by hoarding it as a store of value since it has relatively little utility otherwise.

If you think gold is not valuable because you cannot excahnge it for food, then ask yourself why the US Government banned its ownership in 1933 for citizens and why the Euro has it as its number one asset on its consolidated financial statement - above all currencies - including USD
http://www.ecb.int/press/pr/wfs/2011/html/fs110706.en.html
Former Palm Head Jon Rubinstein Leaves Hewlett-Packard
I disagree. We love saying "This fkin, piece of st code!" every few minutes.
Looking at the code it looks like it's heavily optimized for x86 family of processors.

What is suitable option for ARM processors? Similar Murmur hash depends on ultra-fast multiplication unit (which consumes a lot of energy).
The industry of selling education is ready for disruption by the digital revolution. It happened to many classic business models (book publishers, movie industry, music industry), it will happen to colleges as well. In the coming years, I predict a stronger rise of online education (Bill Gates is already investing a lot of his money into it), and I expect the classic education industry proponents to kick and scream themselves into oblivion. They will not go down without a fight, but it's a battle they lost in advance. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, it is unstoppable.
Yes, spread this around and encourage it, so that it becomes widespread enough that the vendor has to stop offering the discount for Linux users. Or, maybe you can convince them to switch to the much-less-convenient platform-specific versions.
I believe the system we have in Australia works decently. The government discounts 10% for those who pay upfront, or you can take out a loan against the government (called HECS). No payments need to be made on this loan until you reach a certain level of income upon which it is taken out as an addition to your taxes. There's also no real interest, as it's set to the inflation rate.
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Sure, its faster, but is it well distributed and has no known immediate flaws? I understand its not cryptographically secure, but does it perform as well as Murmurhash3 in those areas?
How about a Facebook OS (maybe fork Chromium OS like Amazon did with Android)?
Time frame is always a tough one. Let's try to bracket it with what we know, and be clear about the goal.

First, if we're talking about running an uploaded human-equivalent AI, we've got the processor power for that now, but it takes up a large server room. So I'd say we need to shrink stuff by at least 2 orders of magnitude to launch that into space. With corresponding gains in efficiency. So for that I think we're looking at 10 years at current rates of progress. Tack on another 5 for radiation hardening, because that estimate was based on commercial-grade hardware, which is almost as fragile as meat.

After you have that, it is a small matter of programming :-)