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>But taxes in Europe is higher than they are in the US, 35% to 25% avg.

In "Europe"? You mean parts of Europe or even most of Europe. In Switzerland, Lichtenstein, etc., it's lower.

>This only applies to citizens living in tax shelters (ie Switzerland, Luxembourg, etc.)

Uh... why do you think that is, eh? Think about that for a minute.

>and if you are putting your money their and not honestly reporting it I have no sympathy at all when you get audited.

Oh yea? If I live and work there and happen to put my money where I live and work you have no sympathy for me not wanting the US to bother me about it? Why does the US need to know? Why is it there business? I don't use their resources. No other first world country does anything like this and there is no excuse.
A quick check of Wikipedia states: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius)

Why technical articles use a mix of kelvin and Celsius scales

In science (especially) and in engineering, the Celsius scale and the kelvin are often used simultaneously in the same article (e.g. "…its measured value was 0.01023 °C with an uncertainty of 70 µK…"). This practice is permissible because:

the degree Celsius is a special name for the kelvin for use in expressing Celsius temperatures, and

the magnitude of the degree Celsius is precisely equal to that of the kelvin

So based on that, it is permissible to do 0C == 273.15K.
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That's pretty annoying. Up there with company blogs that don't actually link to the company website.
it's sort of hard to classify swingly as a typical startup... it's more like a company incubated within a larger corporation.. they are licensing TONS of data from their parent company, which has been collecting this type of data for 10+ years or something like that
Who am I?
I'm a Product Manager in South Africa. I'm passionate about software and specifically the mobile app space. There's quite a well developed software industry in SA and I'm gung-ho for contributing and making it better.

What I'm doing?
There are two projects which I'm running in my not-paid-for spare time: starting a Product Managers association in SA and a 'Netflix' for books.

South Africa doesn't have great access to books (expensive) and the public reading infrastructure is poor. I believe you are what you read and for our people to grow and develop, we need inexpensive access to top reading material and hence I started the John Galt Library: www.johngaltlibrary.com. One of our niches is in the collection of software books I make available. If you're serious about software development there is a 'biblical' list one should read and I'm continuously investing in adding these books to the library. Attending BoS would help me, and indirectly help others, to find the best software reads.

Product Management is not a well known discipline in South Africa (even in software circles). I've really found a calling in it as a vocation and am gathering together other Product Managers and folk who perform product management functions in order that we can all learn from each other and collectively lift our game. Attending BoS is a definite product management skill enhancer which I intend to share with Product Managers in SA.

Why I can't come?
Cost. From Johannesburg, it's a long expensive flight - 21hrs. Accommodation and conference fee are even more than the flight. The 7:1 exchange rate doesn't help either :-p

Thanks
Neil, I've followed BoS for a while now. Its a great resource so thanks for the initiative.

Adriano
adriano(at)johngaltlibrary.com
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That last one is odd. Should it not convert them first on the same base first? But then which on should it convert to? If you go for 0 celsius to 273.15 K then you'd get 0 K + 0 C = 273.15K if you do the other way you get -273.15 C. Whoa now I have a new tool to explain that AB is not always = BA to friend ;)
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>That's trying to pin a bit of an exaggerated worst interpretation on me, isn't it?

No, I'm trying to get you to look at what you just said. Spending money on killing people isn't an "investment" no matter what you find out in doing so.

>Look at the trillions spent during the cold war, paradoxically spent to avoid violence.

I think if you look into it you'll find that that money was indeed spent on violence. Just by violence by proxy.
No.

It's converting EVERYTHING to K, then doing the arithmetic, then converting the result to C.

0C + 0C = 273K + 273K = 546K = 273C

0C + 0C - 0C = 273K + 273K - 273K = 273K = 0C

0C - 0C => 273K - 273K = 0K

0C + 0K = 273K + 0K = 273K = 0C
As a group, humans also seem all too eager tear anyone down who seems to achieve perfection. Though this is worse in some cultures, it's present to some extent everywhere.
> People respond to fear; they don't respond to the Higgs Boson.

Is there no hope that we can educate people to be more rational? To look past the short term? And to stop seeing boogy men everywhere?
Tcpcrypt is aimed at passive attacks. Not everyone who has the power to listen in and perform a passive attack can modify the traffic and execute an active attack.

Even when you can do an active attack it's not trivial in practice. The user my get suspicious if they've previously been able to initiate a tcpcrypt connection but can't do so now, and if you do this on a big scale (e.g. government sanctioned sniffing at an ISP) you'll probably be found out.
It doesn't feel as readily accessible or friendly as Threadless, despite the school-paper design. I was thinking it might be the subject matter, being that love of product design isn't quite as ubiquitous as people who like t-shirts, but it also occurs to me that while both demand community participation, the Threadless site has lots of cheerful looking people. I wonder if this impacts on desire to participate.
Just imagine the immense satisfaction of delivering a well executed spinning kick to one of these things when it drives up to you on a Monday morning squeaking "Hey, what's happening?" - ka-zonk!
When talking about python I found http://diveintopython.org/ to be an excellent book for beginners.
They didn't design the government that way because they were afraid of government incompetence. They were afraid of replacing one tyrant with another tyrant or small group of them.

And also of majorities persecuting minorities. And of the government getting caught up in "popular passions" and overreacting to things that people briefly got very fired up about.
Been a fan of the setup for a while, thanks for the engaging interviews.

Wanted to let you know that your rss feed seems broken.
The amazing and terrible thing about programming is that you can learn enough about it without physical contact with another human being. I suspect that content about programming on the web shows a huge bias towards being technology based -- if you considered all the possible topics and ideas in the world and their popularity, the ratio of popularity-on-the-internet to popularity-IRL is probably highest with technology and programming. Well, you'd have to exclude porn and other taboo topics for which the anonymity aspect of the internet, rather than information sharing aspect, causes their ratio to explode.

That was a bit of a tangent. My original thought was that there are several thousand lifetimes worth of programming knowledge online, and it's getting more and more organized by the minute. Google and StackOverflow will be your best friends. It may take you some time to learn how to ask the question, but beyond that you should be able to find solutions to any problem that you run up against.

With this in mind, it's important that you actively apply that knowledge. Learning is one thing, doing is quite another. I've often times postulated to myself that there's probably some optimal ratio of studying vs. doing, in all things. Then, I realize there's more to it than that -- there's the context switching. If you spend 5 years learning, then 5 years doing, you'll never learn as much as if you spend 1 day learning and 1 day doing for 10 years straight. Learning and doing feed off of each other.

So, learn and do. Find something you really want to work on, and try to build it. When you run up against a wall, which you most definitely will, it's time to learn. Once you're ready to give it a shot, do it. When things start getting too complicated, you're probably doing it wrong. Start over, make things "cleaner" (this becomes a 6th sense after awhile), and you'll find yourself naturally creating patterns that you become comfortable with. Like any other skill, it's really a pleasure to see your abilities progress.

Have fun.
If I had a dollar for every time a friend clicked a .exe email attachment, I'd be a very wealthy man. I damn sure don't trust my friends to verify the security of a cert.
http://github.com/corbanbrook/dsp.js/ looks promising.
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Ah, but the naysaying is not coming from people trying to start startups. It's coming from people happy in their jobs who don't want us trying to convince them they're doing it wrong. Why should it matter if they're negative about entrepreneurial stuff?

To the startup side of HN, this article is just another "me too" piled on top of dozens of copies of itself every month. There's nothing particularly insightful about it, so there's no need to jump into the comments and dump a ton of praise onto it. A simple upvote will suffice, which explains why it has 120 of them.
Your mistake here is thinking that if something is not against the shariah then it must be 'promoting' shariah. That's incorrect.
In Islam, everything is allowed (halal) unless it is clearly disallowed (haram), so someone administering a shariah compliant loan only needs to establish that it is not for the purposes of e.g. gambling, prostitution, the alcohol industry etc. If your business is to sell pet food then there would be no problem with that. You don't have to 'promote' shariah to get a loan.
Frankly, it's bordering on the absurd to say that shariah-compliant banking (if you find any that really is genuinely compliant, let me know by the way, I can't find one to buy a house) is 'stealth jihad' but again that reinforces my point that the lack of knowledge the west (particularly Americans) has about Islam is scary and makes it so easy for those with a vested interest in war to keep the ball rolling.
But you have to provide a mechanism for people to remain anonymous. Otherwise there is no way to speak out against corrupt people in power.
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it's like this in all the big cities, and densely populated areas. the only place I know where its easy to spend time with your family is New Zealand, but the work is nowhere as interesting as is available in the bigger economies.
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You and me both are ignorant about so much of world, but when we see how what we do know about it is so mistakenly represented in the media, it's a big concern. After the world trade center bombings the BBC news on the TV ran a piece in a classroom in the US and the teacher told the kids that the bombings happened because "they don't like our way of life". Frighteningly I think a lot of Americans still believe that.
Each language tends to have particular problems it's most used to solve. They may not even be what the language is most suited for. Figure out what sort of programs you want to write, then search on that to see what others use. There'll be overlap, so look at the resources, figure out which seem to make the most sense to you, then pick the language that matches.

At first, your choice of language isn't all that critical so long as you start out with some resources you've turned up that'll let you get some of those first projects completed. Then you'll be good enough at formulating ideas then implementing them to make a more informed choice. Either you'll be comfortable enough with your chosen language's idiom to solve problems even if they don't necessarily align with the language's strengths, or you'll have a better basis to pick a new language that addresses your problems with the first language. After some initial discomfort, if you've picked well the new language will start to feel handy and expressive in a short while.

Any of the major languages can be taken on by the new programmer, I usually recommend one of Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, or Groovy. The resources for beginners are good, the user communities are supportive, and they're all expressive enough to create powerful programs.

There are lots of other good languages--no knocks on them--these are just my favorites presently. I teach programming to non-programmers, BTW.

Once you pick a language, come back and ask for resources for that language. ;)
Yes, yes, yes! This is exactly it. Reading through programming books and tutorials gets really dull. You need a reason, a cause, a mission. Come up with a project that excites you and learn around that. This makes the tough slog worth it and drives you toward interesting challenges you might not otherwise pick up.
Key quotes:

"The point of forecasting is not to attempt illusory certainty, but to identify the full range of possible outcomes."

"I will force myself to make a tentative forecast based on the information available, and then systematically tear it apart, using the insights gained to guide my search for further indicators and information. Iterate the process a few times, and it is surprising how quickly one can get to a useful forecast. Since the mid-1980s, my mantra for this process is 'strong opinions, weakly held.'"

"It sensitizes one to the weak signals of changes coming over the horizon and keeps the hapless forecaster from becoming so attached to their model that reality intrudes too late to make a difference."
Incompetence isn't great, but it's the best guard against competent evil.
I know there were extensive plans for an invasion of the Japanese mainland, real plans not just hypothetical ones, because at the time no one was sure what the effects and consequences of the atomic bomb would be, even after its tests in the US southwest and South Pacific.

My apartment mate is Army officer whose job is to plan for literally every eventuality - it's what the military does, or tries to. In the case of WWII, not planning a detailed invasion of Japan would have been unfathomable, even if they fully knew the military and political effects and consequences of the atomic bombs.

Which they didn't. I'm pretty sure a few did - the inventors of the thing for one - but it was still too unprecedented and game-changing at the time to be able to annihilate an entire modern city with a single bomb, and no general was going to risk the war and his career throwing all his eggs into the nuke basket when it was only marginally more difficult to have his staff draw up plans for a full scale invasion as well. Why do one when you can do both? Hence all the standard invasion plans and expectations.

But I'm also pretty sure that Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly invalidated those plans, because they were based on a prior understanding of the world and of wars that had also become invalidated by the atomic bomb. Had Japan not surrendered after the first two, I'd bet anything that the US would have simply continued to drop nukes on the island until they finally cried Uncle, instead of actually invading, after realizing how easy it was to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Japanese with next to zero risk for US forces.

My point is, the nukes changed the entire calculus of warfare, and did so at the last minute in late 1944 and 1945, and though extensive, documented, official plans had been drawn up to invade Japan, they were invalided by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's no way the US would have invaded Japan once they saw how easy it was to simply annihilate the place with a single plane and bomb.

Try this thought experiment: In the history that actually happened, two things occured - the Soviets defeated the Japanese Manchurian Army and at roughly the same time the US nuked Japanese mainland, and shortly afterward Japan unconditionally surrendered. Now imagine two alternate histories:

1) The US fails to invent the atomic bomb, and moves to stage a full scale invasion of the Japanese mainland, while the Soviets still defeat the Japanese Manchurian Army as actually happened.

...and...

2) The US invents the atomic bomb and drops it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as actually happened, but Soviet military failed to organize on their Eastern border, never attacked much less defeated the Japanese military there, and never threatened their hold on Manchuria.

Which of those two do you think would more likely have led to Japan surrendering as it did in our actual history?
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Good luck on your quest!

You get 50 promo codes for each version of your app. Share them with everyone! Number of daily downloads for your app affects the ranking (as may other factors). Then, update your app often to get more promo codes.

There are forums on MacRumors and TouchArcade where you can post promo codes of your app -- they'll be downloaded very quickly. You can ask people to leave an honest review/stars (although most people don't tend to leave reviews after downloading.) FWIW, on MacRumors you'll need to create an account and log in to see the "Code sharing" forum. (http://forums.macrumors.com/forumdisplay.php?f=136)

To get reviews you should do what aaronbrethorst wrote and make a popup after N launches. The top apps (say, Angry Birds or Doodle Jump) also employ this technique.
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I'd advise java as a first language, this language really forces you to grasp the concept of object-oriented programming. python and ruby make it to easy to ignore objects, while objects are a concept that once grasped is going to make programming in any language a lot easier.

The thing about programming is that it's a creative process where you apply ideas in order to create a solution, the more clearly you understand these ideas the better you will be at programming(which is just writing down a solution so that a compiler can understand it).
Thanks for so many replies! I'm going to spend the next few hours dissecting all of this information and then dive into research.

The take away message I got from seemingly everyone was to first decide WHAT I want to build, then find the best language. Teach myself using fun, interesting examples, and keep plugging away no matter the difficulty. Also, I should take full advantage of the wealth of information that can be found online. Lastly, since I'm already in the web-design field (for the one person that asked I own my own small web/graphic design firm), I might wanna stick with PHP or Java (or Python / Ruby).

Again, thank you.
If one is dedicated enough, I think the best way to go about it is picking up textbooks (make sure to pick the good ones - reading reviews on Amazon) and powering through them.

There are quite a few resources out there though to supplement the textbooks, like course websites, old exams and opencourseware (MIT and Stanford have some amazing videos on iTunes U, Berkeley has a channel on YouTube)
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That's an advantage of the Chinese system - you can run the system as a collaboration between a committee of Bureaucrats, and leave all the baby-kissing or earthquake-rubble-trapped-person-cheering-up to the premier.

Such complexity is too much for a single person - a group of technocrats is a better way to run such a huge and complicated machine.
Computer science seems actually to be the exception. Yes, though the insight could have been had earlier, it somehow wasn't. And this is common in computer science. I now attempt to support this thesis.

Even the stereotypical "impractical" research algorithms (with efficient complexity but huge constants) are implemented. That's the magic of computer science, that you can breath life into abstract ideas.
But if you cannot implement it at all, there are millions of other cool ideas that you can implement, so you may gravitate towards them.
(another argument is that if you can't implement it, it's classed as pure maths. And if you can't prove it, or define it clearly as a conjecture, I'm not sure what it is or what you could do with it - perhaps futurism/science fiction, which has its place.)

The value of implementation is due to computer science ideas tending to be complex and abstract - but once you have an actual concrete working model that you can play with, they can become almost trivial to understand. And so, comparatively, more progress in research is made based on working code than on purely theoretical ideas. It's so much easier to find mistakes in an idea if you can build it. And once your theory is embodied in living, working code, it's tremendously easier to reason from that as a base; much as it is easier to see what is over the next hill after climbing it.

Hardware is closer to your idea of incentive: the inventor of the Wallace tree multiplier told me that it was a simple and obvious idea, but it wasted a lot of silicon; and no one entertained that kind of waste. It simply wasn't conceivable. Perhaps this is due to the incredible rate of improvement in silicon (Moore's Law), so that it's psychological difficult to appreciate (or even believe) that your iPhone will be 1000 times faster in 15 years; or what changes that even means for algorithms. Perhaps the most basic assumptions of the algorithm changes? When x10 quantitative improvement often translates into a qualitative improvement, what does a x1000 change mean? Too hard to predict.
You know CSS, so it seems logical to learn Javascript.

That opens up both server and front end web programming [jQuery/DOM and Node.js on the backend]

For books, try Crockfords 'Javascript the Good Parts' and mimic some of the nicer idioms as you see more jQuery code.
You just screwed me all up.

32 F + 32 F = 64 F

0 C + 0 C = 0 C

HOWEVER it should equal about 17.78 degrees Celsius. Now we 17.78/2 = 8.89 C = 282.04 kelvin. That is suspiciously close the to 0 C = 273.15 K- however it is also not that close. My whole understanding of temperature has been flip upside down.

Wait. This is why I am not an engineer. If we add a glass of liquid that is at 0C/32F/273K to another glass of liquid that is at 0C/32F/273K the temperature will still be 0C/32F/273K. A better way to measure this would be in energy/joules gained/lost- we would also need volume, properties, ect. In this case we are trying to lower 0C by adding 0C. Since the water is already at 0C then there is no energy needed. You about blew my mind; I've never thought of temperature as a number line.

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-185960.html

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/64505.html

http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/heat.html

My next project will definitely have to be a temperature/volume/energy converter
Gruber's cynical view on this: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/16/google-paid-apps
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