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Apparently by local custom they were both two years old.

If you google "AppCoin" ~90% of results are decentralized crypto-currency related. That's also the context that Naval and Fred Wilson have used it in. It's a bit weird to see it used in another context.

I'm a huge believer in AppCoins via @naval + @FredWilson, including my own writings on the subject (https://gist.github.com/fractastical/6e4a6aff1dd329e0a204), but this is still a bit opaque to me.

Some questions I have right off the bat:

   How many AppCoins are there per app? 
   Is this established at the beginning or can more coins be minted along the way?
   How is this enforced? Is it distributed? Does it exist on the blockchain in some way?
   Is there a market for AppCoins? Are they tradable? Or are they only dispensed by the project creator?
   Do the holders of AppCoins have any particular rights besides a potential revenue share? 
   Is the revenue share enforced in some way? Legally? Programmatically?

The tenant in question had converted his living room and kitchen into multiple additional "bedrooms" so that he could handle more capacity via AirBnB

In some cases the distinction may be subtle; in this case, not really.

The first time I used AirBnB in SF, the renter invited me to use all the facilities of his apartment complex, including as much free coffee as I wanted, the gym, swimming pool, etc.

This struck me as not particularly sustainable. It also struck me as morally questionable. It was only a matter of time before the chickens eventually came home to roost...

Well, bravo to you. I'll break my virtual bottle on your virtual ship ;)

Has there ever been a point when Rilke would make the front page? The only comparable moment I remember was when Tarkovsky made the front page for a bit, but that was an extraordinary aberration.

From a startup's perspective (my own), it's not so easy to find Clojure folks. Ever since I founded it I have less time to go to meetups (esp. specialized FP meetups) to recruit people, and most people that I interact with when I mention Clojure just say "What's that?" That's to say, so far I regard it as somewhat of a net loss that our backend is in Clojure.

<<The community has designated a Nobel leaurate as its nemesis, solely because he asked some inevitable questions every thinking person in his profession ought to ask>>

If I'm not mistaken the Nobel leaurate [sic] in question wrote an article entitled "Bitcoin is evil." That seems to be slightly more than asking questions.

> ..Maybe it's just me.

No, I think the view you state is quite pervasive. In general, it seems that in the US the view of wealth is quite positive compared to the EU, with very rich folks in the EU forced to "hide" their wealth, whereas in the US they are comfortable celebrating it.

Why this is I think is probably a legacy of some historical issues (i.e. a landed aristocracy, inherited wealth, French revolution based on mass pluralism), but would take a longer post to discuss than I currently have time for.

Yes, I'm an American who worked on a startup in Berlin, with a similar and sad evaluation.

re: Easy access to funding -- absolutely, I think it is the risk adversity that kills everything, esp. at the angel stage.

re: a bootstrap entrepreneurial culture -- Most Europeans don't want to work long hours either and it's legally questionable to ask them to. that's a show stopper.

re: Building new stuff is actively discouraged here, nobody likes doing bold experiments: not customers, not investors, not even developers. -- Sadly have to agree with you based on my experience in Berlin. Even downloading a new app on a phone is regarded with a good deal of suspicion.

re: spirit of creativity and experimentalism -- I have a hard time knowing why this is, but I've written on it before. May interest you:

http://fractastical.com/2013/06/05/a-developers-introduction...

Overall, I also find that Europeans for the most part don't want to do billion dollar startups. They seem to think that there is something wrong with the large amounts of money involved, and saying that this is your goal is more likely to meet (in my experience) with criticism than encouragement.

This seems true across central Europe (France & Germany) while the big successes mostly come from foreigners (i.e. Skype, SAP).

But on the other hand, billion dollar startups create lots of fairly wealthy people that can then be angel investors and pump up the ecosystem. I don't see any other way for the system to evolve, but I was amazed by the degree to which there was a mental barrier against any sort of large scale success.

(1) Security for end consumer. Might seem weird that I highlight this first and foremost, but I think that security from a tech savvy standpoint is the inverse of that from a consumer standpoint. What? My Bitcoins just disappear? Someone can hack my computer and all my money is gone forever?

(2) Usability. Classic problem from Linux standpoint, hard to take something w/ current design to something that is both incredibly usable and secure for grandma to use.

(3) Stable long term demand. Right now we don't have that. If there is major adoption of Bitcoin (including merchants actually holding Bitcoin) in the developing world we may see that (watch Kenya this year, for example).

(4) Programability. This is what Ethereum (and, to a lesser extent, Mastercoin) are working on.

(5) Less transparency. Actually I don't want people to know how much money I have and what I spend it on.

(6) Price stability. I don't know how you get here with Bitcoin.

(7) Instant clearing time.

(8) Zero fees. I guess this exists in some alt coins (i.e. Doge) because there's a presumed lack of possibility of a double spend.

Tarkovsky is my favorite 20th century film director bar none. Here's are some reasons why and why you might also be interested in his films:

(1) He described his art as poetry applied to cinema or "sculpting in time," a fundamentally different conceptual idea of the cinematic art that he went to a great length to clarify (in a book of the same name, highly recommended).

(2) His use of color is incredible. Some films, especially stalker, are near black and white with incredibly vibrant and poignant uses of green. This is a bit like Bergman at his best, but even better.

(3) He was deeply religious in a "mystical" sense, with a lot of respect for past traditions, but not in a dogmatic sense and with appreciation for both Christian and pagan elements (see Andrei Rublev for both aspects)

(4) He knew other European traditions extremely well. Ivan's childhood is a meditation on the war with Germany, including shots of Duehrer's prints. Nostalgia involves his time in Italy traditions including Madonna cults and important artwork. Sacrifice has Shakespearean references, Rembrandt, Japanese samurai, and magical traditions. In general, his films are full of long shots of important pieces of Renaissance art with profound meaning.

(5) He spent a lot of time thinking about the integration of technology and the rest of life. Solaris is the futuristic spaceship version of this. Stalker is the apocalyptic version of this.

I think in a century Tarkovsky will rightly be credited as inventing a whole new type of cinema, his way of approaching it was fundamentally in tune with a "mystical" sense and integrated with other forms of visual art (i.e. the long gaze you have at a painting), and the punctuated, rhythmic reading of poetry.

While booking flights in Europe I frequently toggle through kayak.de, kayak.it, lastminute, and kayak.com. Doesn't require a VPN, it's just that Kayak works through partners and the partners are country specific. You can often get better deals on one site or another, depending on the partner selection.

I haven't used it that much in North America recently, but it seems to be the same dynamic.

Here are some cities I've lived in:

    Tokyo, Xi'an, Harbin, Rome, Assisi, Florence, Jerusalem, Berlin, Munich, Lyon, Palo Alto, DC, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia

My general assessment is that American cities feel more vibrant while European cities feel more sleepy. Cambridge is one locus of intellect for its own, perhaps the best left although I think American pragmatism chokes great thinking. For true intellectual engagement I think you have to poke around Europe and find the older generation of scholars and artists. As for Florence, pg should know folks like Pietro Annigoni that at least were keeping old traditions alive. Europe is in many ways like a very wonderful museum with a few old curators, but that old museum beats most new museums by a large margin.

I'm glad it that he doesn't go into depth about the core and controversial statement re: why 13 year old girls don't flock to programming in the way that nerdy 13 year old boys do.

I'm also glad YC is being proactive here. It's always clear that certain biases exist, and the only way to overcome them is by addressing them specifically. Deep cognitive biases (against young people for example) can only be overcome by amazing success stories.

I personally think of this as pg's site and us all as honored guests here. I'm not opposed to the idea of an open letter on principle, but I do have a little bit of an issue with a letter addressed to HN in general.

I also personally take issue with Aaron Swartz as a poster child for SOPA related activism. There are many of us who did what we could to prevent SOPA and who are opposed to illegal aspects of mass surveillance who nonetheless believe in a proper place for intellectual property.

Digital currency | Palo Alto | evr.gr

pg is a nerd who got rich without being any less of a nerd. He also helps other nerds get rich. Any clue why that would be popular?

Which market? You mean the worldwide market. If I had to guess, I'd say you are probably 60% EU + Russia, 10% Israel, 10% US, 20% other. Certain things might make sense in other places that don't make sense in the US.

That's basically what passed through my mind a year ago when I started working on my own project. It seems crossing the channel from "good idea" to secure, trusted payment mechanism is more difficult than I thought, but I'm still convinced it's the right way forward. Feel free to email me for more details if interested.

What additional properties do you think are necessary to have a "digital currency which makes it into use as a global exchange mechanism." ? (full disclosure: I work on such a project)

Would it be valuable to you to have a single base currency in which prices are set (i.e. with a rate derived from the composite of underlying currencies), which then automatically sets the prices in the other currencies? I ask you partially because we are developing something like that and I'm not super aware of how large e-commerce providers handle this problem.

Bluetooth guy won a couple of previous hackathons and was accused of favoritism even then.

Hacker pass was $99 list price and often given out for free.

We do something like this with Evergreen (www.evr.gr). It's a virtual currency that is partially backed by rainforest that we purchase when people exchange other currencies to ours. We are for-profit but have partnerships with a couple non-profits that manage the conservation efforts.

That's true but the platform has come a long way since inception and you get instant integration into the CRM data and SFDC customers. It's obviously not the platform of choice from the developer preference side, but there can be business logic that demands it (I've seen some fairly successful startups build native SFDC apps, even contributed some code).

I've won gift cards before by presenting at Dreamforce. They were for globalgiving.org, an awesome non-profit that allows you to donate to another non-profit of your choice.

So do you think that the US higher-ed system is inherently flawed also, with competition between high achievers (i.e. Harvard) and schools that anyone can get into? It's true that there are more resources associated with success, but doesn't that also incentivize people to work harder to end up in the higher bracket? I don't see the "Class-C" problem as necessarily a problem, so long as the person in "Class-C" has the opportunity to get back to Class-A by putting in the appropriate work.

My own feeling (having also observed higher ed in Europe and Asia and other places) is that the US system works better for cultivating high achievement, but less well at making sure that lower achievers maintain a certain level of quality. This means that there is more spread over the bell curve and less in the center. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to prefer more clustering in the center of the bell curve.

This is equally true for wealth acquisition, btw, with Europeans generally preferring not to have extremes (i.e. extremely high wage earners or extremely low wage earners).

I don't see why Americans should be able to discuss education policy in Polish. Seems a non sequitur. I don't think the author of the book claimed to be able to do such anyways.

As for technological over-reliance, I take that as given.

I'm surprised that you agree w/ the conclusion of the review that segregating talent into higher and lower achieving groups is bad. To me this is one of the strengths of the US system. Even if the high achieving groups are not stimulating enough for high achievers, it seems to provide some sort of positive stimulus that otherwise would be lacking in the system.