I got it for one account, not for another one. Must be kind of progressive.

To put it in perspective : there are less than 5 human births per seconds.

So if they want to keep their counter greater than that for a long time, they'll probably have to extend their market beyond humans.

You're right but that's still in a very small subset of possible hashing functions because you must produce a 4 bytes hash, which is then hashed again (to the length of the storage array). Of course you don't have as requirement to avoid collision, just to distribute as equally as possible.

Using chosen hash functions in your applications isn't so rare even outside cryptography field. For example I often use hash for storage addressing (ala git). For this kind of thing you need something fast and with practically no collision (which isn't a requirement for a common hash table).

I think the reasons they don't care more are

1) it mainly affects long time running applications on 32 bits machines. Fact is most production servers are (or should be) on 64 bits

2) most people (me for example) never observed such a phenomenon (and all my dev computers are 32 bits)

So, that's an important problem but far from a game stopper.

I'm surprised they're on HN but I have a (geeky) friend who do most of his work on an Android tablet so that his "computer" is always on and ready. That makes a difference when you run more than one time in more than on place and you spend a lot of time with your customers too.

It seems to me that if you can buy Fireworks + Illustrator + Photoshop, the difference of price between a Mac and a PC shouldn't be a problem.

Not working on graphics enough to buy those softwares, I'm happy on linux.

Third ?

I'm 40. My grandfather, when he was young, even if he did almost no programming, was a leader in the introduction of computing in press in US and later in France.

I'm 40 and I don't know exactly if I started at 9, 10 or 11.

If you want to play, just play with the toy that looks the most fun. Don't plan for the best route, take the most interesting one. There will be enough occasions in your coding life to be serious and not be given a choice...