skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But it's all considered in a vacuum. Even though the majority of the population don't understand the problem, this is ok. We have an economic system that benefits those who predict impending needs and place themselves in situations to provide for them.

Take a look at the green industry ramping up. In the not too distance future, I think most of us here expect oil replacement to be highly profitable.

I disagree with these doomsday predictions from pure arithmetic. It seems to me that the reverse is true - exponential "problems" provide the core drive for our economy. What drives the entire start-up industry? I'd say it's identifying profitable exponential growth scenarios and providing for them. To me, this explains how primarily capitalist countries tend toward stability, until them become strangled by ever increasing regulation (that's not to say I'm against regulation in general, but I think we need to be as proactive about removing it as we are about adding it [wow, I went off topic there]).
If you watch the video, you'll see why "find more land" isn't a sustainable solution. Ultimately, population growth just needs to stabilize at 0% to solve the running out of space problem (but not the running out of resources problem, which is where technology is more likely to help).
2checkout is an option. We use them for Visual Website Optimizer.

Though their transaction costs are high: 5.5%
Because they don't mean the same thing?

There are lots of hypocritical people and cultures but not all of them are interesting.

Also, "hypocritical" carries an air of condemnation, and perhaps that's not what the poster wanted to emphasize.

Finally, sometimes you get your point across better by letting the reader discover something ("hey, that sounds awfully hypocritical ...") instead of bluntly asserting it.
a component is something that plugs into the server that can receive messages on the domain and reply as anybody
I didn't say "just give them contraceptives."

That's why education is key as well. People who are well-educated have less children, on average. Look at the US, for example. So educate them, and enable them to become wealthy. Right now, they can't.
FWIW, certain legal documentation mandates the role of an "executive officer" or "president", but clearly those are mere formalities in companies of this size.

I've always preferred to keep titles quite "loose" (e.g. "Member of Technical Staff","Sales","Support", etc.) outside of "Executive Staff" and "Founder" since nomenclature eventually reflects expectations as the enterprise scales.
He didn't fix the screen for $21.95; he fixed it for free using parts supplied by the client (his dad) that cost $21.95 retail.
Square is badass but it doesn't offer simple menu capabilities such as modifiers. Restaurants have fairly particular needs in terms of data structures. Also, doesn't Square only support personal accounts at this time and has specific weekly transaction limits based on a credit check?
Additionally, Square can't control cash drawers, etc, and if you take in a lot of cash (restaurants often do), you need a place to put it and a way to correlate it at the end of the night.
But seriously, Square has the most beautiful iPad app/control panel, and for the most part it is very intuitive to use.
Replacing the screen is easy, but potentially risky; paying Apple to do it is purely a matter of liability. Higher MSRP = greater liability if they screw up and need to send you a replacement.
If you're a couple of freelancers it may help if you can bill and present yourself through a corporate identity. Corporations have less of a problem outsourcing to other corporations than they do hiring individuals, especially if it is more than one individual for a single job, even if they apply together.

It makes it very hard to manage responsibilities when you subcontract with multiple entities at once so a corporation will likely pass you over for that reason alone.
How easy is contracting w/large companies w/o going thru contract agencies?
I understand the function these companies serve; I have a contract job thru one right now. But they sure get a lot per hour for my work. Are there ways to avoid using them?
Good job! Looks like a web interface to apache bench :)
Anyone find any good graphs about population growth? I asked wolframalpha and was pretty dissapointed, google found this article which I found interesting. Second graph in particular. Seems at 1000 and 1400 there were some drastic growth rate shifts.

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/18/1387/0641
My experience with my first Mac has not been one of it "Just Working." I get periodic whole-screen graphics corruption (I took a photo of the screen with my digital camera I was so surprised), infinite loops when connecting to shared folders if I type the URI wrong, and other issues. Plus, its UI is a lot slower than the custom PC I paid the same price for. It mostly sits unused now.
There is no sustainable growth without sustainable decay. Makes you wonder about those financial systems based on economies with compounded interest -- exponential growth -- which are supposed to be resident on a finite planet.

The population bomb is kinda heading the other direction though. People moved to cities, where kids were a liability instead of an asset, life was exciting, and women had opportunities. Now birth rates in modernized countries are below the replacement rate (which causes exponential decay as impactful as exponential growth), which is largely made up through immigration.

In the limit case, birth rates in modernized countries are close to zero, and the entire population is comprised of newcomers from the places that are above the replacement rate. These countries could places for opportunity, not familyeither be like companies (where people work and live much of their lives but don't replenish themselves), or they could be like retirement homes.
There are many good reasons for incorporating as late as you can get away with and for some situations, for instance, YC actively discourages people from incorporating before applying.

This also helps in a different way, it is much easier to reshuffle after the 'shake-out' period if you have not incorporated yet.
I never said how or when it should happen. Just that it should. (Would be great if it happens peacefully and gradually and with some effort to not hurt other folks feelings.) I also never said I think English is the "best". I only think it's the path of least resistance. Of all the languages that are serious candidates, most reasonable people would agree it's already the closest thing we have to a global standard language, especially in science, business and programming. Also, you can have and preserve culture even when a people's default language changes. I also would argue that there is nothing inherently special in "culture" which is distinct from it's component elements -- much of it is random and arbitrary and due to different choices and evolutionary paths caused by geographic, racial and tribal/breeding differences. I'd argue that much of what we now consider to be national culture will blur together and fade away over a long enough period of time. And the pace has likely accelerated due to modern travel and communication technology (eg. jet airliners and the Internet). I also think it would be a net-win eventually if all nations merged together into a single nation -- among other things, it would eliminate or at least drastically reduce the need or justification for large standing armies and the military-industrial complex. US wouldn't need to make another country a boogeyman (USSR/China/Iraq/Iran/etc.) and vice versa. What would have become a military/espionage situation in a multi-nation world become perhaps at most a legislative or law enforcement action.

Just thinking outside the box. Long term.
> Titles are for insecure people that need to have their egos re-inforced...

Can't agree more...I'm glad I got over the need for titles with my first (and maybe second) girlfriend(s).

I can't think of a time when my cofounder and I will prefer our actual (read: legal) titles as opposed to "co-founder". I suspect it would come when some external pressure starts demanding it, a la board meetings and VCs.
Lack of consistent UI? Android phones have 4 buttons that are universal across phones and across applications. If anything, it has a more consistent UI for that reason.
I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html), which deals with very similar issues on an entirely larger scale.
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I feel slightly rickrolled.
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Other than the money they have, they don't have __anything__ that anyone else has. An idea? Who hasn't thought of making an (open) social network?

They saw an opportunity in recent events surround Facebook and took full advantage. They don't even have a contract or guarantee with the people paying them that anything has to get done.
Then again at $60k for one person it may include the ability to afford a decent home + car etc...hence by the time the second or third person rolls in the extra cost to achieve that happiness is not $60k per person. It could be even lower than $30k.
Assuming that Apple is the fount of all retail innovation is a bit unfair to the rest of the world, don't you think? Surely there exists a store somewhere that could make iPads work in this setting, even if Apple doesn't try.

Still, I agree with the post, and would expect a cheaper, more durable device to take whatever market exists. I know that programmers have been dreaming of making a successful wireless restaurant pad for a very long time, so someone might just figure it out.
Android's Advertising
Truth is, I picked CodeRay for two reasons. It's fast and it's pure ruby. Pygments is great and I spent some time on a version that used it but CodeRay just fits better within our app. It's pure ruby, supports most languages I thought we should start with, it's extensible and has a roadmap for things that I could see our users asking for.
It's not linear. One person = $60k. Two = definitely less than $120k.
Dear Microsoft, You Missed the Boat
Interesting - any place I could read about the reasons? Thanks!
Java, on the other hand, is able to inline the cached (virtual) method altogether, not just its address.
Warner Bros sued for pirating anti-piracy tech patent
Nahh, only because it's counting on google hits, it doesn't mean it's worthless.
Look at sourceforge.net and compare perl and pythons numbers (2700 vs 4200). And that's where i thought there may be much more perl projects on sf.net since sf.net is quite old and may have a lot of abandoned projects.

It's also in conjunction with my own experience. There may be more job offerings that mention perl (because of decades of legacy scripts) but in general nearly every job interview we've had or every student working for us didn't know perl.
Especially for students: You don't learn Perl (thank god!!) but C, Java, Python, Haskell.
http://ycombinator.com/faq.html

Other reasons:

A founder may not work out, once he's got stock that's a lot harder to resolve (if you didn't include a vesting cliff, for which, again, there are reasons for and against).

Founders may find that they can't work together after all (personal differences).

There are a lot of things that need to 'find their place' when you start a company, and in my experience you only really know your relative positions after a couple of months of collective hard work.

Setting things in stone early can be problematic, costly or fatal.
I didn't mean to imply that messages are faster than JIT compiled calls. There's still at least one level of indirection in the optimal case, not sure about in practice. However Dalvik being faster today doesn't mean that Obj-C is suddenly not fast enough. And when it's not fast enough you can make it so.

It's not as nice as it just being done automatically, the JIT is still preferable (imo). But when it comes down to Java vs. Obj-C, even with all the verbosity, I prefer Obj-C. Even at the price of typing stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:withString: and some (rare) manual optimization.
I agree to some degree. I feel like this guy thinks he's playing sim-city and setting the population growth rate. Tell me he doesn't remind you of the domestic advisor!
Check the date.
Those optimizations have a high runtime cost, that's why there's a difference between the client and server profiles in the JVM ... and I'm not sure such optimizations have been enabled in Dalvik.
Hehe, that's really a neat way of putting it.

Personally I like 'janitor', it has many subtle implications.
San Diego 5th Hacker News meetup is this Fri at 7:30pm (free but need RSVP)
Oh, I agree.

Clearly, my point is that the aforementioned suggestion is not a well reasoned statement.

Suppose I post a comment on HN like "hey, maybe we should physically segregate blacks and hispanics and whites; there will be a few problems on the way but surely the crime rate between races will go down". I'd expect that comment to be regarded either sarcastic or downright trollish. It would not be insulting to consider it as a joke.

(Of course, this example is an exaggeration to make my point clear. I don't mean the original comment is trollish.)
Fair enough. I hope that everyone learns English too. But I also hope that if it does happen, it does not happen at gunpoint or to the exclusion of other languages, cultures, literary and oral legacies. That is what happened when Old English was merged at swordpoint with Norman French to produce the language we're using now.

I happen to disagree that "culture" is a null word or that it can be translated fully. Virtually all multilingual people I know think the same way. It's ok to disagree with, but not dismiss, that opinion.

Where one stands depends largely on where one sits. Would you be willing to give up English --completely, not even teaching it to your children-- for Spanish or Chinese?
65,000 New Android Devices Ship Each Day. How Much Are They Worth To Google?
State of the Stack: A Ruby on Rails Benchmarking Report - 25 May 2010
You mixed up the thread :)

I'd swear there wasn't a reply link under your post at the time.
I think they refer to market value or in this case market capitalisation, which is well defined as share price * # of shares. Both prices you listed are just the asking prices, the true market value will be somewhere between the bid and ask prices. The bid ask spread in a liquid market is small under 'normal' circumstances, eg Apple shares bid/ask is currently 243.50 x 400/244.00 x 2600, people willing to buy 400 shares at $243.50 and sell 2600 shares at $244.
I learned from this (surprisingly interesting MSFT history) that Bill & Paul didn't formalize even a simple partnership between the two of them, let alone incorporate for about the first 2 years, during which time MSFT was operating and bringing in revenue.

http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.h...
So the real problem is people don't understand the logistic function? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
Well, you can do it with only 1. But it would him/her several years and a LOT of effort. I think parent was saying that to get a "functional" team, a minimum of 5 would be needed.

Even with the 5 people, I think the estimate of 1 year is a bit extreme. Unless you get brilliant programmers that can work together really well, I'd imagine they would need more time than that.

I don't know what the product is, but to be able to compete with a mature product(even a bad one) takes a lot of time and energy. It all depends on what you want version 1.0 to do.
Man, so many of his tech imaginings are getting implemented.

And by so many, I mean two. Still, it's pretty impressive. (The first being the virtual world in Snow Crash, from which Second Life was based.)
People don't understand exponentials very well because human perception is scaled logarithmically. For example, both the apparent magnitude scale for celestial objects and the loudness scale for sounds (measured in decibels) are logarithmic.
For a big application like that, I would hire someone to write up a draft spec so that programmers can have an idea of how much effort it would take.

Writing a draft spec wouldn't cost you that much(a few k perhaps) and you would have to do it anyway. I think of it as a feasibility study.
Though this is logically sound, the core issue remains. Are we to tell them a little starving and death now is good for you in the long run? I think it is extremely interesting to ponder where lines of morality lay on issues like this.
Is Twitter 'mainstream'? It's complicated
> I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do.

s/good/well/

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx

:)
Ah, that's when you're too quick. HN only shows the reply link after a couple of minutes. To discourage flamewars. The workaround is to click the 'link' link on the comment, there is another reply box there.
I think the devices _delirium is talking about aren't point of sale devices per se.

In Japan, most chain izakaya (restaurants that serve a wide variety of food an drink) have devices that waiters punch your order into instead of writing it down or remembering it. This is especially useful there, as it is common to go with large groups of people (6 to 20+), and the menu often has about 100 different food items on it.

In addition to staff operated devices, some restaurants have consoles where you can order your food from by navigating a software menu.
You're right -- I should have either said "most valuable" or "largest by market cap".
Posterous was in my YC batch and the first thing I suggested to them was reST support. They've obviously had bigger fish to fry. Meanwhile, instead of taking an hour to implement a simple script to process markdown files into HTML and send them to Posterous, you've chosen to complain that a super-niche feature was actually released.
Magento Commerce Bolsters Mobile Commerce Offering
Brian Reid, 54, laid off from Google in 2004, sues in Age Discrimination case
Turning Points That Made Apple No. 1
LG Panther Appears Ready to Pounce
What's the best way to send you feedback from a non hardcore programmer perspective on a chapter by chapter basis? I am very much enjoying your book and wanted to contribute back.
Cool spec'd rig ... and you paid how much so that iTunes can run properly?
"Update: Just so people don’t get the wrong idea, I am a rabid iPhone user and develop for the iPhone first. This blog entry is to call out a threat that Apple should take seriously."

It's really sad that such a disclaimer is needed.
His Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)

Highlights:

* 1982 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award winner
* Stanford EE Professor
* His lab at DEC created the first firewall
* 2002: Director of Operations at Google
* 2004: Fired, 9 days before IPO
* Now: staff scientist at ISC
It was over in 2003. It's time to consider the ends of iPhone and Facebook eras. =)
I'm not offended by "them food aid."
love their logo :)
I've gone through 9 chapters of this tutorial, but I don't know if I want to finish it. The first few chapters were great and a lot of fun. Michael removed a lot of magic that I never understood. But I suppose my worries are irreconcilable: Michael attempts to please both programmers and non-programmers at the same time.

For example, I enjoyed things such as Figure 2.11 (a detailed explanation of MVC in Rails), but then Michael flashes through Ruby in Chapter 4. I understood it because I'm a programmer, but I don't know if any of the other target audiences would.

And as the tutorial progressed, I felt that Michael explained concepts and topics less and less.

For example, for user sign-in/out, another Rails book simply insert a session[:user_id] = @user.id, but Michael goes through the trouble of creating a new User.remeber_token field (Chapter 9). Why?

Security? Surely not, since he previously explained that cookies are checksumed to make sure that it was not tampered with on the client side. Efficiency? Nope. The session[:user_id] = @user.id is more efficient.

Then there are also other quirks such as modifying the Users table everytime the user logs in (it calls User.remember_me!). (I might be wrong about this, please check me).

I started this tutorial to remove some magic fairy dust from my eyes, but I'm afraid it has blinded me even more.

Michael, I'd really appreciate it if you could answer some of my questions.

NOTE: I've played around w/ RoR before, but not much.
I don't remember the source, but "it's easy to take a reservation, the hard part is filling it." Meaning, of course, that Facebook privacy has continuously eroded, so some (myself included) have no faith that such a dropdown has any persistent effect consistent with what might be inferred by what is written on it.
Why is it clear that they'll lose the #2 spot to Android? It certainly may happen, but it doesn't appear to be anywhere near certain. Notice that at Google I/O, they said that Android was #2 in the US. Why didn't they say in the world, or in the US and Canada, or in the US and Europe, or even in the US and Australia? Obviously it's because the US is the only major market where they've been able to beat Apple. If Apple announces a multiple carrier version of the iPhone at WWDC, I would say it's likely that Google would lose the #2 spot in the US.
Part of the problem is that the distant future to humans is never any further out than ~70 years - eg our lifespans.

Exponential resource waste, population growth, etc doesn't become a non-survivable event for a few more generations - at that point we may actually start to see realistic change.
Africa is not a barren land, much of Africa is perfect for farming. Much of Africa is not "perfect" for farming, but well good enough. However, if you have external nations bringing you food for free, why the hell would you go through the trouble to grow a crop, it's seriously hard work!

And, if you're in the part of Africa where growing crops is not feasible....move?
Yeah, JS is pretty good, he's going to win some stuff

http://www.motogp.com/en/riders/profiles/julian+simon
"The practice makes a man perfect".
Java — maybe getting close. Others — no. Ruby and Python (including RoR and Django of course) are quite popular for new projects. C/C++ will always be there and let's not forget LLVM adding more interest.
Well, 1 thousand deaths now to achieve self sufficiency, or X deaths later, where x is likely much larger than 1 thousand.

Not to mention, why the fuck in this day and age is the west still responsible for African people eating? We have the technology, the entire country has been geographically analyzed for where maximum food can be produced, etc etc. It is not a geographical problem, it is a political and cultural problem.

It seems fairly obvious they can't sort out this problem, so whats the next move?

We can tell them where to grow food, and where not to. We have given them Billions of dollars in aid. What else can you do?

Of course, this is assuming foreign aid exists to achieve what it says it is trying to achieve....I can think of several groups of people that would like to keep Africa in the stone age for the time being.

However, this doesn't dismiss the responsibilities of the leaders and citizens of Africa. All the technology you need is available on eBay, how about some charismatic man rises up and convinces you to get your shit together?
Sure; my point is that people are perhaps misspending their income anyway. That is, the guy making $1 million per year could just as easily decide to earn $200,000/year and have a lot more freedom.

(In any case, $60k/year is meaningless without some reference to cost of living. $60k/year is an ample relative salary in the Dakotas, but much less so in San Francisco.)