joeclark77

I'm not sure we disagree. When you say "conceptualize and build", you may be talking about a developer-in-the-role-of-designer or developer-in-the-role-of-entrepreneur. Certainly Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. were once developers, but they didn't get rich because they were employed as coders and got a bunch of merit pay raises.

So I was simply speculating that there may be a "ceiling" on developer salaries, that is, salaries received for writing code.

Supply and demand is one thing, but there are also "ceiling" effects. This is just a hunch (and I'd love to hear some feedback on this) but I would guess that there's more of a ceiling on developers than there is on designers. So maybe the average developer makes more than the average designer (again a hunch), but I'd bet there are a select few really great designers making MUCH MUCH more, and I don't think the same is true for developers.

I mean, what's a really stupendous developer going to do for you that makes it worth paying him the equivalent of a 5-man team? a 10-man team?

We could make an analogy to construction. The best construction company is no doubt going to build your building faster, more efficiently, with fewer problems, but that's not going to triple the value of the finished product. The architect by contrast can make the difference between a world-famous landmark and just another good-enough building.

3D printing, when it becomes possible to make things a little more sophisticated than a few plastic shapes. For example, imagine if you could set up a robotic wood shop in your garage, using ordinary tools, and you could download a piece of furniture. I think there'd be some very interesting business models that would come out of something like that. Perhaps you're buying the furniture, or perhaps you're selling it to your neighbors as a franchiser for some kind of virtual IKEA in the cloud. Metal shops and other kinds of fabrication, similarly, would be great.

Interesting. I'm almost certain there also used to be an "Explore" link at the top of the page you see when signed in (which is sort of a news feed and list of repositories). Now the link to "Explore" is in an almost-hidden menu (click on your profile icon). Or was it always like that?

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

My strategy is that I gaze longingly at the new model laptops I'd like to upgrade to, if I had a good excuse to treat myself. Then I don't fret too much about the possibility of the old one being lost or stolen.

For an alternative view, read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Antifragile" where he writes about iatrogenics.

This is excellent. I've been thinking about rolling my own blog software since Medium took away their marginal note feature (IIRC, you can now make notes but they're for yourself only, readers can't see them). Since reading Ed Tufte's books, I'm convinced that margin notes are infinitely better than footnotes or (egad) endnotes for sharing little "extras" with your readers.

"Open Data" is only as good as the quality and truthfulness of the data. I suppose the most likely outcome is that these politicians will get more sophisticated about data... so that they can fake it reliably.

Can someone explain this to me: if the data is encrypted, how does switching the operating system out enable one to read the data? I'm a layman in this area but I can only surmise that the data is stored unencrypted and it's the operating system itself that's somehow locked. If a change of operating system can open up encrypted data, then what's the point of encrypting hard drives or data sent over a network?

Python with the Flask framework is great, very easy to do the API endpoints. The whole app can fit in one .py file of about four lines plus 3 per endpoint, see the sample at http://flask.pocoo.org/.

You can host it on Heroku in their free tier of service if it's just for testing. That includes a PostgreSQL instance if you want one.

I don't know much Javascript but with the Flask framework, all HTML/JS/CSS files are static templates that sit in a folder with your app's code. You can deploy with Git or even with Dropbox if you want it on super easy mode.

Flying cars.

You misunderstand the problem. The problem is that in the public sector, "labor" and "management" are on the same side of the negotiating table, shaking hands and slapping backs about how much money they're going to bleed from the taxpayer. Our "public servants" generally stand to personally benefit from increasing spending and worsening performance. That's not a dynamic that exists in a for-profit business.

My first thought about this is that, if I had a guaranteed "floor", I wouldn't have to live in a big city but could move my family to a cabin in the woods. Perhaps what YC should experiment with is something like a new Homestead Act: you'll get an economic foundation to stand on, but only if you're willing to work the land, so to speak: you have to do something with it, whether that be starting a company, writing, farming, or something else creative.

I don't have any research published in a related field, but I'm tempted to send in a proposal. Would the researcher have to live in San Francisco for this?

I'm interested in "off the grid" living, so I'd like to see some technologies to support that. For example, some good solution to the Internet without depending on expensive telecom companies (e.g. some kind of meshnet, or perhaps land-line based grid that relies on personally-owned routers). Also, can we make home electricity generation cheap and simple enough so that non-experts can figure it out? How about home production of auto fuel, such as ethanol or biodiesel, based on something you can grow in your backyard?

I'd be focused on cheapness, ease of setup, and ease of use with these challenges. Making a windmill more efficient than oil, or ethanol more efficient than gasoline, is not realistic and not necessary to the value proposition of personal independence off the grid.

The vision I have is: being able to have electricity and water, Internet and telephone, without having any monthly bills from utility companies.

I don't know how you'd set the parameters for a contest, or how you'd measure when you've arrived. This kind of lifestyle may be (mostly) possible today, but you'd have to have engineering skills and a lot of free time to make it work.

But have they done anything about the RMT'ers in EVE-Online?

SQL is a declarative language, not imperative. IE you describe what you want, rather than a set of instructions for extracting it. Database engines have "query optimizers" that use relational algebra to find the most efficient ways to process a SQL query, and they make a huge difference when your databases get big.

What R brings to the table are numerous statistical methods packages and some good data visualization packages. With just a few lines you can apply some sophisticated techniques and produce beautiful visualizations.

SQL can indeed do some complex analytics, but they're very difficult, so R is the easier platform for statistics and machine learning. I did a Coursera class recently in which we had to do matrix multiplication with SQL and even that was a brain teaser of a puzzle. The advantages of doing analytics within a database are (a) leveraging the query optimizer to speed up your analysis and (b) you can make the analysis available to other users of the same system via a view or stored procedure, so they don't have to do the same work twice.

The parent, parent, parent comment (by victorhooi) is stating that Japan's problems stem from its reluctance both to have children and to allow immigration. Your answer -- that they should change their attitude toward immigration -- doesn't refute him or me, it agrees with us.

No, pretty much any Christian of any denomination understands Creation to mean "all that is created by God", i.e. the whole universe and all therein. The Catholic church, by far the largest "denomination", does not teach young-earth creationism, and I doubt that belief is shared by any more than a small minority even of Protestants.

Perhaps they join the concepts because they know that the opponents of their faith often try to falsely imply that theories of evolution are proofs of atheism.

It doesn't contain the word "Creationism". The word "Creation" simply means "the universe", i.e. that which is created.

Neither of those things could help Japan. Ultimately old people are going to need nurses and other people to provide services for them. If there are not enough young people willing to do those jobs, then all the money in the world is useless.

Yes!!! A thousand times yes.

They made a new version called Civilization IV: Colonization around 2008, but it wasn't as good. The independence clock ran out too fast for you to really get anything built before the endgame.

Nevermind the critics. I upvoted you.

The original Civilization game, pretty much blew my mind.

Also gains you nothing, if your civilization is extinct in a few generations.

If your opening sentence is true, then living "financially smartly" is deeply unwise. Children represent true wealth; dollars do not.

I think the societies that are culturally willing to embrace self-driving cars are the ones that already have better solutions. I'm talking about the downtowns of major cities, Silicon Valley, university districts, etc. In most cases bicycles, light rail, or buses are already being used and are more efficient than a million people riding alone in self-driving cars. If anything, these are the places that might ban private car ownership as population density increases.

On the other hand, no self-respecting country boy is going to want to give up the freedom and independence that he gets from driving his own vehicle. Separating yourself from the herd is a value proposition, and self-driving cars can't compete with it.

What's left?

1. In some cases suburbanites might use self-driving cars to get from the suburbs to the edge of the car-free downtown zone. It's possible the technology would work for them, but, do any of them perceive an unmet need? Is there anybody out there really frustrated by having to look at the road during their commute? I would think there's a lot more incentive to find ways to shorten the commute, than to simply make it hands free.

2. Interstate trucking is a possible use case, if people would tolerate it. You'd need a plurality of states to get on board with the idea of a very potentially deadly machine going on autopilot, and you'd need to sort out who's liable when people are killed by it. And you need to figure out the "last mile" -- who drives the truck after it takes the exit off the highway. There's a real shortage of truck drivers in the world, so this is probably the one market where there's a commercial incentive to develop the tech, though.

Poor guy, he had to watch the fourth Indiana Jones movie as part of his research for the chapter.

ISIS isn't trying to goad us into war. They're waging war on us, and doing so effectively. The kind of probabilistic analysis proposed by the OP takes terrorist attacks as if they occur randomly at some rate we have little control over, like car accidents. That is not the case when you have an enemy actively killing you and you have to make a decision: fight back, or signal that you won't fight back. If the latter, the number of "micromorts" is going to increase exponentially.

I was thinking some kind of mortar but ultra-portable. Perhaps an iPhone attachment of some kind?