skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More on the concept of the Top 100 retreat --

http://www.edibleapple.com/2012/01/25/inside-apples-top-100-...
We're already there [1] for vectorized code (Haskell vs. Hand written C). Note how they compare naive haskell solutions with their vector library vs. heavily optimized C code and using finely tuned libraries. And they are competitive, actually beating the finely tuned library in non-toy examples while still using naive haskell.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.278...
Agreed. Not sure why people are downvoting you. It blows my mind every time I think, "I wonder how <some program> works?" and I'm able to just "apt-get source some_program" and check it out.

Working with Linux and having the source (and the ability to change it) for entire stack all the way down to and including the kernel is liberating. As a programmer it feels like the entire world is open to me.

I guess that's GNU's dream brought to life, really.
Apart from the SMS/MMS issue, the rest of the article is about how you shouldn't used inexperienced developers to draw conclusions about a platform. This quote is very telling:

"We discarded the iPhone prototype we had been working on for a few weeks, polished our rusty Java skills and had an Android alpha out by February 2013."

If you'd said "we abandoned out Android prototype, polished our rusty Objective C skills, and released an alpha on iPhone" I'm certain you'd be saying exactly the same things, just about iOS development instead of Android.
Put 100% of it into education in the most economical way possible.

I believe that all problems in this world are caused by a simple lack of education.
Visualising Crime Hotspots in England and Wales using ggmap
What do you mean by "writing these down somewhere"?

I took a quick look at your account and it's fine.
So it seems like the new hot way to do integration testing with RSpec + Features [1]. Any sources on doing this well? I find myself writing methods that read like cucumber.

[1] http://pivotallabs.com/getting-by-with-rspec-feature-specs/
>WebM is clearly a far inferior experience compared to gif on firefox

No it's not. I'm using nightly on linux so my experience may have differed somewhat, but 90% of gifs load just as fast or slower for me. Ever since I started seeing webM videos appear online I've enjoyed them immensely more than youtube videos or gifs because of the quality and loading times (they usually start immediately), and the fact that they're usually very short which forces them to be packed with the most in-demand content, but can be longer than a gif if need be. I'd take a webM over a gif any day of the week.

edit: and I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 on a laptop with an intel core i5 and integrated graphics and not experiencing any problems, but I'm also closing the videos after I watch them. The fact that they don't pause/stop when you scroll is kind of a minor bug that can be fixed pretty easily.
> The fundamental flaw you're making is US citizen = rich, which is factually incorrect. Especially if you expect them to subsidize medical care world-wide.

Price discrimination is only a subsidy if the drug manufacturers are selling the drug below cost in poor countries, therefore losing money on it. What's the marginal cost of the drug itself? I imagine it's pretty cheap, so the company makes a profit either way. Why would they sell in poor countries, if it loses them money?

I see the cost of a drug as two parts: the one-time, large research cost, and the marginal cost per-treatment. The former is quite big (hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars), while the latter is quite small. This is why companies can afford such price discrimination.

I can't really understand what kind of subsidy you're seeing here, except maybe for how poor countries get to benefit off research paid by rich country patients. Is that it?

> Nonsense. The poorest people who would forgo life-saving drugs for financial reasons by definition have no money.

I don't think that they really have "no money". The question is how much money they have. The Walmart worker in your example would probably be able to afford the treatment at India prices. The problem is that you can't easily do individual price discrimination in the same country. You can't sell the drug cheaply to the poor US worker, and very expensively to the American millionaire (if you could, that itself would be the solution to everyone's problems).

> And once again, if you want to help those people in other countries, by all means propose a bill to explicitly subsidize medicine in those countries. But take the money to fund it from this country's rich rather than its poor.

Drug companies don't take money from either rich or poor, they take it from whoever needs the drugs. Now if you're proposing government-funded or -operated drug research, that's another discussion. Otherwise, I don't see what the rich have to do with the economics of medical drugs.

Also, after posting my previous comment, I realized I can make a good economic argument for price discrimination. When you look at countries as independent markets that a drug company operates in, the company will set the per-country price for each drug at the point where the profits for each country are maximized. In reality, the countries are not independent markets. The existence of black market for drugs in richer countries (where individuals smuggle in cheaper versions of a drug) should have a positive effect: it pulls the price down, due to the competition (because the company now has to compete with its own drug, it has to lower the price). The only real problem here is that, in many cases, it's either illegal or very difficult to move drugs across borders.
I would create a scientific research group composed of the best physicists to work on 1) a functional quantum computer and 2) practical room temperature superconductivity. Both of these would have a huge impact on the world. Solving (1) would also increase the chances of solving (2) since a quantum computer would allow polynomial time quantum simulations that would assist in ascertaining which kind of materials might be superconducting at room temperature.

3) I would found a cancer research group. I think everyone is immensely sick of this disease and the fact that it hasn't been cured yet. It wouldn't hurt to direct even more research toward it.

4) I would buy 10 boxes of raspberries from the grocery store and eat them all in one sitting. Those things are freaking expensive, but they're delicious.
Google bought my 5 person company for our team. They hired everyone but me.
As a very long time Linode user (recently switched to DO for all my servers) I never received emails when my instance would go down (and being in the Fremont DC that happened quite a few times). Maybe that is new but it certainly has not been the norm.
It's hard to say it would be a battle between immediate versus long-term. And by that of course I mean I would have to share it with poor around the word I think most people would.

Water, food, vaccines, education all important but water is probably the most needed.

But if invested smartly a smaller amount over a longer time but time is the enemy, do I help more people right now and fewer later or a few people over a longer time period?

I don't think I want a billion dollars it's too much responsibility and I'm not even very good at managing my own life.
I'm a fan of both iOS and Android — so I'm not in any way saying this out of disdain for Apple — but it seems that the mobile app space is clearly moving toward Android. Comparing the exponential growth rate of Android to that of the iPhone, it's hard to imagine that developers will consider "iOS first" strategies in 3-5 years. [0]

The author briefly addressed this point, saying something along the lines of "more installs doesn't translate into more customers," but this argument wasn't really fleshed out.

Working for a company that makes mobile apps for a broad range of Fortune 500 firms, I've noticed, anecdotally, a seismic shift in clients' attitudes toward Android. From financial services to biotech to retail, many clients have gravitated toward an "Android first" strategy and boosted customer engagement by doing so.

[0] http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/800-million-android-smartp...
Anti-tech protesters target Kevin Rose's neighborhood
I would create a semantic wiki with domain specific ways of easily inputting information, spend enough cash to incentivize folks, to store all biological knowledge in a way machines can reason about. We're all studying a giant elephant. No one is putting it all together in a crowd-generated, semantic, computable way.
Assuming Half-Life the game was using this without tweaking the engine parameters much, I have to say this is the only engine that really "felt" 100% right to me. In Quake 1-3 I felt heavy/bulky, like my body didn't collide where I expected it to, Tribes 1 and 2 were very floaty, etc. HL1 was so natural.
I think the argument is that every native application is effectively something akin to facebook's walled garden.

1) sharing data between apps is near-impossible, unless format converters are written (they never are) and explicit manual steps are taken.

2) linking between apps is impossible (e.g. you configure an address for a client then click/tap on it to navigate to said client when the application is not made by microsoft).

3) searching across apps is impossible. You can't just go to google.com, type in what you remember and have it show you the app.

4) native apps are expensive, because they never have a huge market (compared to online apps).

5) native apps are really badly supported.

6) you can't give anyone else access to your data (easily, just look at how long it took microsoft's army of developers to give office some semblance of real sharing. And it's still not up to par).

7) anyone you want to give access to a doc now has to buy your (expensive) mobile app.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you are forgetting quite a few facts here. Native apps are usually self-contained, small, unmaintained things. Yes, that does have some advantages, but it also has large disadvantages.

I would even agree with the "ads are good for you" argument to some extent : these companies are "spying" on you in order to attempt to create (theoretically) win-win economic transactions. Essentially they show you stuff you want, in order to make you want to buy/have/rent/... it. That is good for you (you get "value" in the economic sense), the other side gets some money, and a small "tax" is paid to the intermediary. Economic activity goes up, and it becomes easier to get a job, ... etc. Of course this argument only holds for pay-for-transaction ads (ie. not for banner ads, not for things like facebook, essentially only for google's model).
I just listened to NPR's Planet Money latest episode about the lack of choices in ISP in America. Very interesting indeed: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/04/04/299060527/episode-...
I find 'yummyfajitas arguments painful to read. Most of the time, they create an annoying feeling of knowing he must be wrong, via a sort of deontological spidey-sense, but not knowing exactly how to rebut him.

Part of the reason for this is that my underlying values are nearly the same as yours. In terms of values, I'm nearly a standard NY liberal [1]. For example, you probably favor either Basic Income or a Welfare State - I prefer a Basic Job. Our underlying reasons are the same (don't let people starve), we just differ on which policy will actually achieve the best outcome for the lowest price.

In contrast, someone with libertarian values would be fine letting people starve, even if he preferred a Basic Job to other policy proposals.

[1] The only big points where my values differ are on inequality, which I don't view as an intrinsic problem (maybe it's an extrinsic one, but I'm unconvinced). I also don't buy into the racial/sexual collectivism of modern liberalism - I.e., I don't believe "women" have rights, I believe only an individual woman does.
GitHost adds metrics for private GitLab instances.
I wouldn't say I'm doing it well, but I'm doing it. I resolved to make myself do TDD for a few projects and today signed up for a month of Thoughtbots Learn program. They're big advocates of integration spec testing, and have written quite a bit about it.

I'm not wholly convinced its the best way to go, but it does offer some advantages.
I don't think that MongoDB or any nosql is right choice for financial application. You can build for yelp but not for banking.
Just over 20 years now and loving every bit of it! I started with hobby electronics and failed miserably at it, I was just not cut out for hardware, after having failed more than a few times on a simple amplifier circuit, software felt like heaven as it was more lenient towards my trials and definitely cost effective!

Blessed enough to have Indian parents who bought me a computer at unproportional cost to my dad's middle class government salary, discovering the joy of creation, the magic of computer graphics, the wonders of 3D modeling and gaming (Michael Abrash's book was my first inspiration, I still have all my books from back then), pulling night outs at college computer lab, wide eyed at Internet and the black IRC chat window, ending up in enterprise software as a professional, fortunate enough to be enlightened on the intricacies of enterprise software by the veterans of BaaN software (it runs Boeing), lucky enough to build 3 enterprise software platforms from scratch and now the fourth one is by running my enterprise mobility PaaS company from India with a team of wonderful young new generation developers who beat me squarely at my old game!

Thank you for evoking all the nostalgia :-)
Pay off my debts, give some to my family, then basically whatever I wanted.
The context switching added deeper understanding for me - mentally I might gloss over something that I could dig deeper into with a good source at hand - I love the format.
I do this with RSpec + PageObject:
https://github.com/cheezy/page-object

An example that's similar to what I do:
http://youtu.be/e9tfC-gLW8c?t=8m28s
How about sponsoring some alternative fusion research ? Aside from ITER, nothing seems to have even basic sponsorship, and ITER makes no business sense (price/reward). Same thing with battery research. Or try to find a better Fisher-Tropsch process (that would solve global warming, energy storage and energy transport without requiring us to change cars or power plants. It would literally make a 30-year old beater green, so it wouldn't require punishing all the poor by either taking their cars away like all other green initiatives do)

If you're going to do high-risk high-reward research, you should probably be prepared to spend tens of millions on it though.
I can't edit the question anymore, but if I could, I'd add a sub-question for the founders who have already created things worth a Billion: "Did your answer to this question change between the time you were starting and the time you had the money?"
Holy crap, that looks fantastic.
Target Aid to Students Most Likely to Succeed
if you're in SF - webpass. I have it in my building, about $40/mo. They claim that its a 200mbps shared across my 100 unit building. In actual speedtest.net testing I almost always get north of 200mbps up and down. I've seen it clock over 300 now and then. also, no throttling, "real" downloads regularly come in over 10 MB/sec or higher.
Submit new entries here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Z2qOKog--r2dKUuHBUYPfCdwEG6...
oom killer always seems to target sshd in my encounters. Handy when you're at home.
> Now, he's thought of in SV as a bigot, despite all his efforts to reverse that opinion.

He's expressed his bigotry, he's in fact made political maneuverings to enact his bigotry. He's done nothing to apologize or rescind his bigot actions. People are judging him off his actions and lack of words, the best criteria.

> Perhaps you could explain why saying he was ruined professionally is false?

How about the dozen or so huge honchos who have so far made statements about standing with him? They clearly don't care about his actions and as you can see on this website a majority find valor in him making donations like he did, so no I don't see his professional life ruined (sadly) by his actions.
I've done a lot of volunteer work with the homeless and learned a lot from social workers in that field. There tends to be three categories that the homeless fall in to.
1) Temporary homelessness: those that have experienced a major economic fallout. They tend to be homeless for about three months before stabilizing and finding a home again.
2) Long term homelessness: those in this category tend to be dealing with substance abuse
3) Chronic homelessness: the people in this category almost always have some severe mental disability. Most people in this category have case workers who even help them find housing yet it is still difficult to keep them in that housing.

It's not as simple as more money or more housing. Although the article's suggestion may work for the first two categories it won't work for the third category. The third category needs better medical care.
This was new to me.
http://fabiensanglard.net/duke3d/index.php
What a great read combining code readability and game design.
Back in the day, didn't someone market a product called, "Provider in a Box"? And didn't New York's Pipeline (before they were acquired) rather cheaply set up ISP services?
Jef Raskin's Swyft Card
Very much a caricature, though some of the details were funny. Is Peter Gregory supposed to be PG?
Nice find. I think the key quote is:

> The actual findings of the study do not show that there is any risk to public water fluoridation (if anything, they show that it is safe), but the study was seized upon by antifluoridation activists and distorted for their propaganda purposes.
It says Alan Kay has a library of 5000 books. Do you have 5000 books?
Yes. Other than that it seemed pretty great.
Wow, last thing I figured is my answer would be given by someone else. I love the negative results answer.

I'd also:

Endow a non-partisan original-reporting only, no-pr, news site with no sponsors to bias results, ever. Now that all news is corporate sponsored in various ways, we need alternatives.

Use part to endow a rationalist organization dedicated entirely to the spreading of rationality as determined by the results of research on how to most effectively spread rationality.

Create a cost-effective ethically acceptable platform for testing drugs and theories on a human-ish system. Basically this would be an attempt to strap a rocket to modern day testing and drug discovery by making it as effortless as it would be if you could put humans in various conditions without ethics or harm considerations.

See if there's a way to use my money to undo the corrupting supreme court Citizens United decisions and decisions about Super PACs.
Martin Thompson has a blog and a series of talks on "Mechanical Sympathy" -- being in tune with the machine to extract performance, like a race car driver.

"How to get 100K TPS with 1ms latency": http://www.infoq.com/presentations/LMAX

Blog: http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.in
Crowdbetting/Crowdtrading (etc)

A sports betting website that uses crowdsourcing to make the best bets. As a user, you predict the outcome of some match, but your final bet isn't necessarily what you chose, but what the crowd data indicates is the best bet.

Much like the CIA found crowdsourcing to be very effective in forecasting global events (http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-...), I think there's a good chance you could successfully crowdsource things such as betting on sport results.

The way the CIA thing works, I assume (the article doesn't get into much detail), is you have 3,000 people, you ask them to make some predictions, and in the end you select the top 1%. When you compare the future predictions of these top forecasters with those of CIA analysts, you find that the average Joes tend to be more correct (even though they have less information than the CIA analysts).

So you can do something similar with sports betting. You have a group of top forecasters and their predictions for some game assume some probability distribution (like, 30% bet on the home side, and so on). By comparing this distribution with the average odds set by the major brokers, you can identify where the odds have been set incorrectly (according to your crowd) and exploit these weaknesses. For example, let's say that your crowd says that the odds of the Away team winning should be 2:1, but the brokers set the odds at 4:1. Then, this would be a good bet to place, assuming the crowd is 'more right' than the brokers.
How does one even go about reading 5000 books? I know it only says his library is 5000 books, but what's the point in amassing a library if you haven't read it? That would be nearly two books a week for 50 years. Imagine if even 5% of those were text books.
I think Peter Gregory is supposed to be Peter Thiel considering they described Gregory's 100,000 grant similar to the Thiel Fellowship. But it might be PG.
"Bernie Coyle wants to hire people. In this hopeful moment in the recuperating American economy, he wants to give 40 new employees health insurance, dental insurance, good wages and a 401(k) plan with a company match.."

Why do employers think they are "giving" people a job? Would they say the employee is looking to "give" them labor? Its business after all, both parties are exchanging something. Nothing is being "given".
Is this really a commercial license? Check the license text:

"You may, free of charge, download and use the SDK to develop a modified Valve game running on the Half-Life engine. You may distribute your modified Valve game in source and object code form, but only for free."

Sure, you can't make commercial products out of it, but you are allowed to re-distribute any modifications for free. This can be used by people who want to make free, open source games, for example.
How refreshing, a classic style of troll! Upvoted and flagged.
I am working on a project to categorise your files/code projects. You can give them tags, comments, and then sort them in that way. I want to see something like this for any type of data, and I think graph databases would be a good thing to explore!

It's not quite done, and I will be making demo videos eventually but if you are curious check it out!

https://github.com/Jonovono/um
This sounds pretty out of scope for what I'm thinking of.

I'm trying to solve the problem of people sharing data within an organization. I'm not trying to make a social community of database engineers.

Cool idea though! Feel free to contact me if you'd like to chat more.
ECE 4760: Ultrasound Gesture Detection
> My router becomes profitable when I make its bandwidth scarce. The same incentive applies to everyone else with a router.

If you make your bandwidth scarce (and expensive) someone else with a router may be incentivized to make their bandwidth slightly cheaper; so you end up with zero profit (as you have no customers). This is the fundamental reason why market-based strategies are effective; you are competing with everyone else's router, not cooperating.
Keep in mind that the top 2mm of your skin is mostly dead material. Nothing will happen if you put something into it, and there are places where it doesn't get renewed.
I'm sure sp332 meant having a centralized place to understand the intricacies of HN mechanics.