skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is solar shade so much hardrer to launch than retooling all the biology to live at 45C...It seems he bet everything on climate being out of control.

This was the very first (of several) objections that I had.

Stross is a pretty good writer (at least, he can be at times), but every time he turns his hand to futurism I think he fails miserably. He's got a worldview that I think he's invested in, and he's got a tone (deflating what he sees to be the overenthusiastic techno-nerds) that he likes, and both make him pretty bad at prediction. He sees Moore's law in his own life, but fails to apply it or similar principles to the world going forward. If he was practicing futurism in 1912 he'd be writing that cars are inherently a stunt because we can never build enough roads or find enough fuel for them, and in the year 2412 people will be living in mile high brick building surrounded by a wasteland of horse manure from the perpetually animal-clogged streets.

There are so many problems with the "ZOMG we're all going to be roasted by global warming". I'll leave aside the fact that there's been no increase in average temperatures in 15 years (to avoid the whole "climate change denier" fight that no one wants to have) and just accept as given for this discussion that, yes, average temperatures might rise 2 or 3 C. Given that space launch gets cheaper every year, given that robots get better every year, given that manufacturing gets cheaper every year, etc., it will be trivial in 50 years - let along 500 - to have robots build huge solar shields in orbit, or have robots build huge dikes around our coastal cities (we reclaimed thousand of acres of land from the oceans in the middle ages - we can't do that in the 21st century?), or have giant naval cannons fire explosive shells full of light block aerosols into the upper atmosphere, or, or, or ...

There are so many ideas that aren't 50 years out - let alone centuries out - that can solve these problems.

I think that it's a truism that different countries have different default outlooks. It can't be taken too far, but there are archetypes. Russians are darkly amused by the inevitability of defeat. Americans are gee-whiz let's change the world neophytes. Germans are prone to being a bit dour, etc.

Stross seems to be in the mainstream of British / Scottish cultural thought (at least as it's been revealed to be by fiction, both science fiction and mainstream). Stereotypical American apocalyptic fiction, I suggest, is about raging against the problem and striving to overcome it...and British apocalyptic fiction is more often than not about coming to terms with it.

tl;dr I find Stross' futurism uninteresting and wrong-headed because he seems to find reasons to justify his slightly depressive theres-nothing-we-can-do attitude.
An example of what they could use all that manpower for: a real, non-trivial problem that they need to solve for a better user experience is to squash spam. That is not a fight they are winning at the moment.
Had a similar experience at Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington, NY (Long Island) when I visited my mom for Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. The lady at the kiosk selling something similar gave me a sample and pestered me to buy a package. Don't remember the excuse I gave for not buying, maybe pointing out I was from out-of-town or just wasn't interested.

Haven't had any problems with other mall kiosks with such sales pitches, so it appears those selling "Dead Sea skin care" products may be in some network where vendors are given a consistent method of selling.
Premium services for merchants.

Essentially the basic chargeback resolution is free, but we charge merchants to access additional tools like exit surveys, the ability to configure questions on chargebacks for their business. Also we're working on a set of tools to help merchants reduce chargebacks in general - like domains to put on credit card receipts, that type of thing.

The value is that each chargeback is a lead to a business with a chargeback problem :)
Doesn't exactly instil confidence when "You can do it alone" is prefaced by "The Naive Optimist".

That said, upvoted!
I played with some of the effects tunned down and it was less chaotic. Great game.
There are two ways to look at this the way we do things now or the actual limits. For ideas based on now see: http://money.howstuffworks.com/question213.htm

For limits see some quick math, you can probably mine down about 20 miles without getting to fancy in 2512 esp relative to a space elevator. Texas is 20 miles * 268,800 sq miles = 10^16 cubic meters. Platinum has an average rarity ~5 millionth of a gram per kg. aka 5 parts per billion which works out to ~10,000,000 cubic meters in the top 20 miles of Texas granted your playing with density's etc but 10,000,000 tons is reasonable estimate compared to around ~100 tons mined each year. Now we might be better off mining asteroids than Texas, don't assuming we need to leave the planet any time soon.

PS: It may be a mainstay of sci-fi, but there is little actual evidence that asteroids are going to have particularly high levels of any of the really rare stuff. (other than H3)
Get paid to translate from home
Almost 80% of people know at least one 1 language except from their native one. It would be great to earn some extra money using this! And... now you can!!!
This was my disappointment with the auto and banking industry bail-outs in the US. We spent a lot of money and effort that just kept the status quo.
So then it's manslaughter, right?
Feynman is one of those writers who's voice comes clearly through the text. All of his writing carries a very specific rhythm with it. Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman is an absolutely fantastic read -- doubly so if you have any interest in the history of the Manhattan Project. It's usually painted as a completely serious affair, so reading feynman's account of goofing around with security and trying to sneak codes to his wife brought a very human side to the history. I highly recommend all of his writings.
Looks great - nice job!

I'm 13 and I've created a node.js command line app (http://gtmtg.github.com/view-test) and an iOS control (http://gtmtg.github.com/MGDrawingSlate) among other things, but none of them are nearly this advanced...

Again - looks really cool...
Two Brave Men Who Ate Nothing But Meat for an Entire Year
You can make anything sound bad if you really try hard. It's rapi as in rapid, not rapi as in rapist. Let's debate the technical merits of this device rather than devolve to the level of one of Reddit's make-fun-of-something threads.
Charlie's extended family is a great deal smaller than it would otherwise have been due to the Holocaust. He's aware it did more than suck but that's not the point of the article.

As far as contemporary Middle Eastern culture goes I don't see how a leftist would look positively on it even if everywhere was as secular as the most secular part thereof, Tunisia.
I'm sad that a link like this makes the frontpage of Hacker News.

It contains nothing we didn't know before, it's not interesting at all and there's no value in it. David just talks shit about another company.
It is a lot harder to work with these phone and tablet type chips. ARM have open sourced the Mali driver code but you still need the DDK, which requires a license. The reverse engineering efforts on GPU command streams are also a labour of love from Lima etc.

And it would be twice as good if it cost half as much.
I think that many founders won't be in the same position as you as having come from a successful business and be well known and respected in the industry.

I think either way is cool, I'm happy to share 50% with my co-founder because money isn't my primary goal and he's a fun and clever guy to work with which makes the journey even more enjoyable
Course Announcement: Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View
Maybe you want to live in a society not unlike the Gilded Age where billionaire robber barons controlled everything, where those who weren't part of this small elite group could barely get by.

This is how un-checked wealth accumulates. Remember, it is very easy to make money if you have lots of money to start with and can weather almost any risk no matter how severe. When the smaller players bust out, the wreckage of their companies and lives is bought for pennies on the dollar.

Would you want to live in a world where the Paris Hiltons could coast into billions of wealth without having to do a single hard day's work in their life? Where they'd have enough money to fund a hundred generations of that?

Society advances when there's an incentive to working hard. Making money is one such incentive. When you can make money without working hard, it starts to break down. The inheritance tax is a way of keeping an element of hard work in the equation.
Google Chrome kinda doesn't work. For almost 2 years now.
Somewhat off topic but I'd like to ask about this:

> We’ve grown from three people to 54, and $0 revenue to $3.4m+, all in just two years.

I'm completely naive about these things and I'm not involved in business, but isn't this very risky? That equals to only 63k/head revenue. I guess this is banking on future growth but is this a standard pattern for a growing startup?
This would never have been released Steve Jobs was still alive.
So my understanding is that this is not really peer-to-peer in the sense that connections are made with a server in the middle of two clients. Unless I got something wrong, connections are not handled stirctly from a client to another.

Or am I completely lost?
I think I speak for most young, yet-to-be-successful, founders when I say: I'd rather keep 15-30% of something that has a 5% chance of success than 70-100% of something that has a .01% chance of success.

I thoroughly believe doing it alone (even if you're REALLY good) is a .01% chance, and doing it with complementary talents that have skin, heart, reputation in the game brings that up a ton.

That being said, congrats on being in the 0.01% of that equation.
Bill Gates is new money, but his father has considerable wealth as well. If those two weren't as committed to philanthropy as your average billionaires are, then the children of Bill and Melinda Gates would inherit several enormous fortunes.

Have a look through the Forbes 400 (http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/) and see where their money came from.

The Koch Brothers inherited from their father, and the five Waltons on the list inherited from theirs. That means over half of the wealthiest individuals in America inherited a considerable fortune.

In forty years this list will no doubt the heirs of other fortunes.
Ugh...charge backs. I work in an industry that has high charge back rates and amounts, most of the time because people are disgruntled.

Most people don't realize how easy a charge back is.
The Real Reason Salesforce.com Pulled Its Splashy New Campus Plans
You're not completely lost at all - your description is correct. All connections are made with a server in the middle.
That seems a bit sketchy to me - black-mailing merchants into signing up for your "service" of not sending them chargebacks?! Maybe you should explain why it's not.
This is why I say the C preprocessor can act as Turing-complete, because the expression and machinery, while separate, is both in the language itself.

Unfortunately, "can act as Turing-complete" is not a well defined concept. It is clearly not the same thing, and the distinction is important. Consider, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, that we can always solve the halting problem for a C preprocessor program. We're in danger of violent agreement, though: I think we agree on the main points, just perhaps not on their relevance.

Since we've gone this far down the rabbit hole, I'd like to point out that C++ templates are Turing complete: http://netvor.sk/~umage/docs/3rdparty/C++%20Templates%20are%...
My First Recommendation to New Coders: Learn Visualization.
I'm an experimental physicist: We do fall in love with experiments.
The point I find to ring the truest with me is that of a single life goal. If your startup is the love of your life, your ultimate passion and purpose on Earth, it gets very hard to find someone to share in on that passion. And taking someone on board for half equity because they see it as an exit opportunity doesn't feel right.
I'm sure that's true but it's important to keep one thing in mind: not all binaries are the result of an Nvidiaesque attempt to keep from open-sourcing something. Loading updateable binary microcode to implement an ISA is often a beneficial processor design technique and it dates back to seventies.

There's some irony in the OpenBSD objection to handling binary blobs. A lot of the cool old systems OpenBSD supports are LOADED with microcode and ROM the user can never see or understand. It's hidden. To a degree this is even true in the case of the everyday AMD64 machine (which loads microcode updates and some of its boot logic from BIOS ROM/EFI, thank you).

OpenBSD's position, in conjunction with its support of these systems that load all that stuff from ROM at boot time and its lack of support for the ones without a proper ROM to store the stuff (raspberry pi, for example), keep it from having to handle these blobs personally. The principle involved here isn't "let's shun the use of binaries for which we don't have the source code." The principle is "binaries are yucky, don't get any on you." It's not hugely impressive.
If Java gets J3 and .NET gets N3, why doesn't OCaml get O3? It's also a cute name because it looks just like an optimization level :).
Show HN: Launching Next - Weekly newsletter highlighting promising startups
Using this distinction between language and machine, how peculiar that a Turing Complete thing can be expressed using a language which is not Turing Complete itself.

Ah, but that's the rub: we can't, and we didn't. You are imparting semantics on your macros that the C preprocessor has not. That is, the semantics that you imagine the macros to have are solely in your mind. They are not implied by the semantics of the C preprocessor.
It is better if charge backs are seen as somewhat of an inconvenience to do, so customers will think more about if they really want to chargeback. Lots of things can and do go wrong in ecommerce, if anyone slightly annoyed reached for a chargeback rather than trying to resolve an issue with the merchant it would be a big hit for merchants.
In 15 years of working in IT organizations at various companies I've seen hundreds of people run Solaris as their Desktop OS (mostly 1996-1998 at Netscape), various Macintosh System OS's and Irix as their desktop, at times everyone was running Linux as their Desktop OS, and nowadays OS X seems to be popular (obviously there has always been a lot of Windows Desktop Usage)

I have never, once, seen OpenBSD run as a Desktop OS. This despite working at several companies where OpenBSD was actually core to our entire infrastructure.

I'm not saying that nobody does (I expect the OpenBSD developers probably do), but I am strongly suggesting that OpenBSD needs no desktop presence whatsoever to be extraordinarily successful. I've never installed it on the desktop. I've never seen anybody install it on the desktop. Not once in 15 years. There is no rationale reason to run OpenBSD as a desktop, and I'll go further and say I will likely never see X-Windows run on OpenBSD.

And, as for a niche - I consider OpenBSD to be the pre-eminent platform for Firewalling, IPsec, IPv6. Their continual focus on consistency makes the system a joy to use - all of the lessons I learned in 2001/2002 are almost 100% (hell, they might be 100%) applicable to managing an OpenBSD system today.

They may be a niche but it's a pretty darn big one.

With regards to your argument regarding "upstream" support - most of the upstream support required is around elements that are not associated with the desktop, and, in many areas, openBSD has just decided to rewrite the upstream contribuions in their own "OpenBSDsh" way anyways.

I'm confident they will do fine even if upstream support for desktop, and associated applications, no longer considers BSD as a first-rate platform.
"Value", the irksome euphemism
Perhaps Google thought it was a good idea to insert a leap month to check how the kernel would behave.

Did anybody notice heavy CPU load?
You're a steaming pile of fallacies and non-arguments. You have an opinion, congrats. Here's a couple refutations of Caplan:

http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae6_3_4.pdf
http://www.mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae2_4_1.pdf

You're either incapable or unwilling to have a real discussion though, so that is just for anyone else who cares.
I was blown away by this:

A particularly inflexible conscience is a horrible condition. Feet to which no mass-produced shoes fit are merely inconvenient. A conscience incompatible with mass-produced social arrangements is a huge burden - not just on its owner, but on his friends and family.
Another hint, in case you're getting "400 Bad Request" errors: this is NOT a REST API, read the code again!
"I believe Paul and David are stressing the importance of co-founders because they’re talking about young founders with no previous business experience."

"I funded the business with cash from my previous business"

Ryan has thoroughly convinced me that if you've run some successful businesses in the past, it's probably better to go it alone your new one.

However, I don't think he convinced me that PG was wrong (and I'm not sure he was trying to), just that PG's advice doesn't necessarily apply to serially successful entrepreneurs. All of PG's cautions about the dangers of going it alone still seem completely valid. However, it's not like there aren't dangers to having a co-founder (the marriage analogy, though a little cliche, is cliche because it rings true).

I suppose, as with all things, the thing to do is take stock of your own particular situation and weigh the risks. But if you don't have direct experience overcoming at least some of challenges PG refers to, a co-founder still seems like the more sensible route.
Merchants don't need to sign up to resolve chargebacks. If we receive one, we'll send them links to resolve it before it gets sent to the banks. They can choose not too respond and it becomes a normal chargeback. Even if they do respond - all they have to do is acknowledge they're making a refund or change the customer's mind.

The basic resolution service is free for merchants. They only have to pay or even sign up if they want to use any of the premium features to help them reduce future chargebacks. Hopefully this isn't too dodgy :)

I definitely think we need to be more upfront about what we get out of it. A lot of people seem skeptical when they first see the site.
So according to your logic, if someone doesn't recognize something, therefore it must not exist?
Agreed. It's very hard to completely align.
I'm with ya - you just have be slightly crazier than any "normal" entrepreneur :)
It's like we're talking different languages.

You said: "Can you name a single instance of a harmful monopoly that didn't either form or persist because of government backing?"

One possible answer: Windows

You asked a question. You got a suitable answer. What more is there to say? What is this "goal post" you keep referring to?

I know you're eager to roll out the "copyright and patents are government-granted monopolies" line. But those don't work as monopolies in comparing governments to contracts in imaginary free market systems.

Remove government, and businesses would develop their own systems like copyright and patents, which they would privately enforce through contract, private prisons, and mercenaries. You still end up with a Windows monopoly because Bill Gates started life with a lawyer and banker for parents.

You replace one system with another that's almost identical, but small businesses lose any kind of recourse if a bigger business decides it owns a particular creation.
Ah, it's not just me. Chrome crashes several times a day, and 'goddammit, Chrome' has become a regular phrase in my vocabulary. I suppose I should remove all extensions and try to identify the problem by elimination, but I thought that was what chrome://crashes was for. Besides, the most common collapse seems flash related, and it doesn't make much difference whether I have Pepper or Adobe's Flash running.

This is why I switched from Firefox to Chrome int he first place - I didn't dislike Firefox, but it had just become slow and unrelaiable, and I have better things to do than becoming an expert in browser malfunctions :-/
Mark Suster agrees that you don't need the 'typical' co-founder split. Here's his take: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/09/the-co-founder...
Gravitational lens magnifies earliest galaxy yet seen
I wonder if there's been any movement on the dreadful performance of 4.2? It made me very aware that there is little to no support for Android/Nexus, and nowhere to take problems unless you know what a bug tracker is, which many will not.
Fantastic work. They should hire you to work at the highest levels of their marketing dept., stat.
> Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.

This one made me smile, thinking of the classic characterization of a development manager's primary task: herding cats.
You act as if I knew Treehouse was going to be a success. When we launched it I had no idea if we'd make it.
My solution is to use Firefox with FxChrome theme and Omnibar extension.
cstross didn't start this thread, actually, although he has posted his own blog posts on other occasions.
The Intersection of Logistics, eCommerce, and Technology
Apple gets patent for graphical page turn
The only way to survive is to be naively optimistic ;)
Simple Tornado Celery Integration with Unix Sockets
I believe that the criticism comes from the fact that Twitter is now trying to capture more value than they create[1]. And as Tim O'Reilly had put it:

Focusing on big goals rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring

[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...
Some people just have no dignity.
A big factor if you are trying to succeed while doing it alone is can you hire a great team to complement your skills. This usually costs more money in the beginning stages in salaries than having a co-founder. It means the founder must have some money behind them and usually means they must have succeeded in business before.
This is the online equivalent of "protection" money the mafia asks for when they say they're going to burn down your store if you don't pay them.

I applaud making it easier for people to file chargebacks but shame on your business model.

Edit: after reading the explanation given below perhaps the business model is not as bad as it first seems - if that's the case, you need to make it more clear! It looks like you are encouraging people to file chargebacks and then shaking down the merchants for money with the threat of the chargeback getting filed if they don't pay you.
> BSD is a place where developers can experiment with different approaches to kernel design, filesystems, packaging systems, and more.

that is most certainly true, but I am wondering, has any of the work done in BSDs in recent years influenced linux development in any way?
We're not profitable yet. That's the whole reason we raised $5m in Apr 2012: To increase head count faster than revenue growth.
Measure by what you do, not by your age
For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement?

But there are many paths. Like an architect or a slum-lord: both in the game of real-estate.

There is a difference between the hi road and the lo one. In terms of social standing.
> that point of view has resulted in OpenBSD being completely unavailable on Linode, prgrmr, EC2, Slicehost/Rackspace, etc.

However, it will probably work just fine on a cloud platform based on KVM.