I think the way out of this is a basic income guarantee. When a basic income is provided without requiring labor and this basic income meets the needs of an individual the cost of human labor will increase (the cost of everything will increase probably). This system assumes there is enough wealth around for the government to distribute enough to everyone.
Increasing the cost of human labour is an objective; it should encourage more automation and shorter working hours (which are probably more productive anyway, but people are irrational). And hopefully it will reduce the gap between good and bad jobs, giving people more choice of how they want to work.
Increasing the cost of everything is an unfortunate side-effect that will hopefully not be very big.
> Lots of people lost money. Maybe it was done on purpose? The models I mean. Cause I bet someone made a fortune. Someone short-selling the game?
The considerable amount of collusion required across fifa, the teams and players, multiple publishing industries, organizations, countries and cultures to have sports betting and publications like fivethirtyeight make shit up (to the point that they created a very detailed scoring system for their predictions, all for the purpose of lying about a lop sided 7-1 game) would have to be considerably large.
I think the the better, and frankly incredibly blindingly obvious, way to look at this is that this was just an unusual game that nobody expected and you can maybe take a break today from being suspicious about the whole world being manipulated by a nefarious few who conspire to create every fucking notable turn in history to screw you or someone else over.
"being suspicious about the whole world being manipulated by a nefarious few who conspire to create every fucking notable turn in history to screw you or someone else over."
I guess the major benefit is for people who do not actually have alzheimers being falsely diagnosed, but early detection doesn't help in any way for people who do have it, right? I'm not sure I'd want to know until it was unavoidable.
I have a hard time understanding why people wouldn't want to know what's in store for the future. Even if it's unavoidable, there's still lots you can do in terms of making best use of the time remaining to you.
The hope is that early detection will allow for prevention. Right now it's difficult to diagnose Alzheimer's until the brain is too damaged to function normally, but some treatments may be able to prevent it from getting worse at an early stage.
There's also a theory (not sure how scientifically valid) that Alzheimer's might be a form of Diabetes (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/bittman-is-a...). If that's the case, then it might be possible to prevent the disease by diet alone.
The need for early diagnosis is important for research purposes - by the time we can see the affects of alzheimers, the damage has already been done. If we can develop an earlier diagnostic test, we can do earlier intervention in clinical trials of treatments.
Yes, there's no treatment now, but progress like this will lead to an actual treatment.
At the very least, earlier diagnosis will help the ongoing research into the disease. Even if it doesn't directly benefit this generation of patients, their study may lead to new treatments for the next generation.
These may be reasons why you cannot sell lower than $99 but they are not reasons why someone should pay so much. The stated plan to keep updating the app reveals a fear that they are not creating enough value despite the cost to develop. The plan to update is also a shitty thing to say as this is no guarantee and light on specifics about what the updates will feature. $100 for an opaque primise that more is to come is a shit sandwhich usually served with a nice heap of disappointment. xscope 4's price of $50 is another one of these niche narrow doodads that while clearly provide value do so at questionable prices and the user has no idea when they will have to pay for a new version. Apple's lack of an upgrade price sucks but that's not the users fault but they are the ones that get the shit end of the deal with limited time price reductions that you have to know about.
I get what you're saying, and even kind of agree with you, but I think you're slowly disappearing for delivery. The blog post is the rationale behind why they chose to charge what they did - all of which is fine, and totally their prerogative. What they didn't do, and what i think you're trying to say, is that they failed to convince me on why it's worth it to me to spend the money. I've not heard of their app before, so maybe I'm not the target market, but I don't need to spend $100 to see an HTTP load visualizer on my iPhone. But even if I did, I don't know why I'd pay for this one over any other ones, if there are any.
They most definitely have the right reasons for why someone should pay what they're asking. The reason #1, "we need to make a profit", is the biggest reason for the price. In reason #4 they clarify that reason by having tested that out of $10, $20 and $100 prices they made the biggest profit with the highest price.
The flimflam about updating the app just means that they don't wish to fire everyone now that they have a selling app, but instead will keep developing it with the hopes that it would sell even better.
The right customers -- professional developers -- would want the tool to stick around for a while, but of course there is a free-loader problem.
Paying $100 a year, let alone $100 once off, for something that improves productivity ought to be below the level of even caring to do the cost-benefit analysis.
If your employer won't let you spend $100 on a productivity tool, he's very foolish. (NB: Most employers are foolish. I've always got hemming and hawing about spending that money; can't we just do without?)
I've only ever heard good things about C#. I believe C# has first class anonymous functions, makes async operations easy, and a combination of VisualStudio and JetBrains resharper you have a pretty amazing development environment. I haven't programmed much with C#, but like I said I've only heard good things.
C# is a fine option if your choices are C# or Java. On the other hand, F# is safer and 3 times more concise language that can do everything C# can It interops perfectly with any C#/VB.NET libraries. I'd think long and hard when writing any new C# code, and defend why you need to reduce your possible solutions to only those C# supports, when you could have the ability to do everything C# does and more with F#.
For me personally, conciseness of F#, it's tendency to use short words, cram things together and overload operators actually make it less readable. I like many of the features F# has and am happy to see how they are slowly migrating to C#.
If you want to get paid...use C#, if you want to get paid less...use vb.net, if you want to be right use F#. This is outside of the startup discussion here...but it is the general rule for MS developers. All three languages are comparable to the junior to mid level dev.
I like Wells Fargo ATM machines, the thing you insert the card into is a transparent green glowing device and all the ATMS look the same and have touch screens. It's easier to tell if someone put a skimmer on them. I do not use non-Wells Fargo ATM machines. I only wish I had the option to type the password on the big touch screen and not the number pad.
I though that a big green thing just makes it easier for criminals to install a skimmer - they smash the original one off and add their fake version. Being big it has plenty o room for electronics.
I image searched "wells fargo atm" to find an example of the big green thing. I saw lots of older style machines, but the first link to the newer machine with a green thig was to an article about skimmers.
Not just can they remove (or overlay) the big green thing to add on their own skimmer... once the presence of the big green anti-skimming device is normalised, you can add big green skimmers to all the ATMs that don't have them yet: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/03/green-skimmers-skimming-g...
I designed those glowing green skimmers because they make inserting your card seem so much more inviting ... and everyone knows that green means go!
On a more serious note, when I saw the translucent skimmer in the article I immediately thought of the glowing rim around the credit card slot at my bank's (not Wells-Fargo) ATMs and realized I'd assume it was unadulterated if that skimmer also glowed.
Eh, I don't think Techcrunch is so bad. They don't usually have link baity titles like wired, they genuinely try to do a good job reporting on new startups and many yc companies get an initial post on TC which gives them that first boost of users. A Techcrunch article and Techcrunch coverage is like one of the biggest boosts from getting into YC.
I quite like fish and have been using it painlessly for nearly 6 months now. I wish fish included an actual programming language that could replace bash scripts, but the sane advice from fish devs is to use a real programming language instead of bash or another shell script. Other than that I've become quite dependent on the nice autocomplete and suggestions from fish. It just works and I never have to deal with any problems once you get over the initial learning curve bump which isn't that big.
You can go a long way with bash; it's worth learning because it lets you glue tools written in different "real" languages together very easily, as long as they all talk text. There aren't many other languages specifically designed for process control, orchestration and piping.
I don't like fish because it has almost no features, compared with bash.
I've never understood why anyone would inflict oneself with bash scripting. If you really need something portable you should use standard /bin/sh anyway since bash is not installed by default everywhere (I believe many linux distros don't even ship with bash anymore, but a lightweight clone called "dash"?).
And if you don't care about portability out of the box, why not use... Well basically anything else? Perl, python, ruby, lua, scheme, whatever.
The only shell scripts I ever write are basically a list of command to execute sequentially. If I need something more complex (control flow, user input, proper error handling, nontrivial string manipulation) I switch to some other programming language, it's just not worth the pain.
Many Linux distros ship with /bin/sh being dash, but they also come with /bin/bash. A lot of scripts obviously depend on bash, so distro maintainers have had to either fix them to depend only on POSIXy "sh" or just put #!/bin/bash at the top.
The reason to use dash instead of bash is speed and to a lesser extent memory usage. The goal isn't to stop needing bash, it's to speed up boot times etc. Or at least it was five years ago when this transition was happening.
When I write scripts, I often need to execute programs written in different languages. Writing such scripts in a languages like Python and Ruby is very clumsy.
Whereas the scripts I write in Ruby tend to rely heavily on a bunch of gems that add enormously to startup time. These scripts also often end up as stages in a pipeline executed from bash.
Fork/join shared-nothing parallelism is also very easy to do in bash, and is how I normally use more cores to get jobs done more quickly.
I don't know, I feel like POpen and friends in python just aren't as nice as doing 'thing-one | thing-two' kinda stuff, with some ifs, and some variables.
A big suggestion missing here is a CS degree. I like Steve Yegge's take on it[1]:
> The best tip is: go get a computer science degree. The more computer science you have, the better. You don't have to have a CS degree, but it helps. It doesn't have to be an advanced degree, but that helps too.
My own take on it is that most programming languages are like cars and the skill of driving computer science: if you can drive one car, you can learn to drive the other and with programming if you can program in one language you can probably program in the other. Knowing the fundamentals about computers, how information is represented as bits, how they store and process information, how they communicate over networks, how you can use them to solve problems like sorting, cache invalidation, etc is really important stuff that is orthogonal to learning a programming language. Personally if I am using programming language X at my job, and you have 0 experience with it, but are a good programmer, I may not give a shit and hire you anyways.
It's not the NSA_SUSPICIOUN_INT rising I worry about. I am certain that individual monitoring of the average hobo like your or me (I don't know maybe you're actually a TOR dev or something) isn't happing, BUT someday you may become an interest to the police for something and THEN they look at your posting history and THEN they will find your possibly less sensitive comments on how you hated such and such and put some horrible out of context quote in big print on a poster at your trial when the prosecutor makes his case for why you should be in jail for the rest of your life for something you may or may not have actually done.
And so I use anonymous accounts to post things other than nice happy words relevant to my job so they don't show up in search results. I create new accounts and stuff. I can be pretty opinionated and I don't want the average person googling my very googlable name and seeing my stupid uninformed opinions and using that to misinterpret me or something.
I would much rather post anti-government opinions with my name attached than anonymously. As much as we complain about the NSA, we do in fact still live in a free society with a right to habeas corpus. Should you ever find yourself at trial, where the prosecutors try to turn "anti-government sentiment" against you, would you rather it be written behind an anonymous pseudonym or your real name? If they're going to find it regardless, then at least with your real name attached, you have the credibility of your persona, which you should confidently feel is worth something to a jury.
It's much easier to argue a case for freedom of speech when it doesn't appear you're trying to hide something. After all, who would attach their name to an opinion he didn't want people to know he held?
Furthermore, I'm proud of my opinions. If I'm going to perpetuate them, I'm going to do it with my name attached. God willing, should I ever have to defend those opinions in court, I will proudly and defiantly do so. Hiding behind a pseudonym strikes me as needless cowardice in the face of yet manifest oppression.
This anti-government, anti-NSA, anti-1984 rhetoric is healthy and valuable, but let's keep our emotions in check and avoid overdramaticizing the situation. We don't live in a police state. Yet. If we ever get to that point, I would like to have my trail of opinions to fall back on and use to defend myself.
I have been on Reddit for eight years, and only came out with my name today. People should be encouraged to use aliases for any number of reasons. To name a few:
* You should be able to express an idea without that idea being attached to a known identity (partly because people may judge the idea based on the known identity)
* You should be allowed to "start over" (heck, I might want to start over soon)
* In the face of an Orwellian government or an unaccepting society, you should be able to safely express your true opinions
While I can admire your stance, I think it is naive and doesn't reflect reality. Look at how weev's statements on reddit were used against him at his trial. Also if you look at the people involved in NinjaVideo, an illicit online streaming site, you will find that prosecutors also used their online statements against them. Employers will use your online statements to create a profile of you that influences their decision to hire you or not. There's no way I'm using my real name to say I like the idea of a guaranteed basic income or that I like Hillary Clinton for office, because America is polarized. We do not live in a police state, but your statements can haunt you in many ways. They can hurt you at criminal trials, civil trials (like a divorce), they can hurt you with employers and potential employers, they can hurt your academic career (finding a school), they can hurt your family.
I am not proud of my opinions, I think I'm probably mistaken about most of the opinions I have, and I think this because of past experience and bad opinions that I now regret expressing.
If you're already the victim of intimidation, there are only two viable options: give up, stop making waves (not my recommendation, but I won't fault anyone for prioritizing their income/economic security/family) -- or be more vocal and outspoken. That's how such things have been stopped, and brought to light before.
Eg, see: "Pete Seeger - Black List" for some historical context and inspiration. This abuse of power isn't new, not in the US and not in Europe.
OT/ I'd really like to hear your story, even if you were to leave out identifying details. Were you using a pseudonym? What political area were you being "overly vocal"? How did they intimidate you?
This is Paul Krugman's take on it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-f...