Um. Yeah. I was not talking about human biology here. The quality of life of the lady mentioned is not that different from an 1800s American middle class person.
If that's true, which is doubtful, then their problems should become a 2nd priority, since our 1st priorities should be improving the happiness of the least happy.
Well, pretty soon the U.S. military will consist of even more poorly-paid drones who care less about family and community than they do about abstract bits of information coming from the command center.
How about using statistics/machine learning and showing these spam warnings only when people want them? Yes, it is hard, but this is not an excuse!
Besides, fixing spammy warnings shouldn't be more difficult than fixing actual spam! I mean, common, with spam you have intelligent adversaries and compilers haven't reached that level. Not yet, anyway...
Following your logic: "You'd have to be crazy to give away stock as part of an investment round. Even it were possible I can't imagine many project creators making that choice. The numbers just don't make sense. Especially given how successful kickstarter has been without it."
Let's say your a 2-4 man startup of industry professionals with a game prototype and a great trailer. You have the potential to bring in upwards of $1,000,000 on Kickstarter. That money is pretty much equivalent to pre-orders plus varying levels of "special edition" perks and physical goods.
How much equity would you put on the table and how much money would you want for it? Keep in mind that if you have a good pitch you can bring in $1,000,000 for no equity and if your game is successful it could bring in another $3,000,000 to $10,000,000.
Those are some very generous numbers you have there! Of course, there are examples of successful KS campaigns but it's not exactly a sure thing.
Also, it requires that you have a (typically consumer) product that you can pre-sell. What if you are making a Saas that could turn into a profitable business but that cannot be launched on Kickstarter? It might still be a good investment opportunity so the other model could work.
YC funds $120k for 7%. But the majority of the value in being a YC startup isn't the cash. Cash is a much bigger portion of the Kickstarter value proposition but it also provides value as a marketing tool and in establishing a hardcore fan base.
I wonder what fair numbers would be. Hrm. Hard to say. A lot of 1-4 man small teams would do it on second thought. I think $100k for 10% is a pretty crap deal but creators would probably take that offer. Hard to know how Joe Public would respond. Definitely hard to predict after 5 years when people compile lists of games that even gave a break even return. Game companies and software startups don't exactly have a high success rate.
But if customers have the option to choose between investing or preordering, it will probably get a lot harder for preorder only kickstarters to raise money.
Unknown Internet Source: "Despite the fact the light water and heavy water are chemically identical, heavy water is mildly toxic. How can this be? Since heavy water is heavier than normal water, the speed of chemical reactions involving it is altered somewhat, as is the strength of some types of bonds it forms. This affects certain cellular processes, notably mitosis, or cell division, due to the difference in binding energy in the hydrogen bonds needed to make certain proteins. Mouse studies have shown that drinking only heavy water along with normal feed eventually causes degeneration of tissues that need to replenish themselves frequently, and leads to cumulative damage from injuries that don't heal as quickly. One study likens the effects to those suffered by chemotherapy patients. Heavy water toxicity manifests itself when about 50% of the water in the body has been replaced by D2O. Prolonged heavy water consumption can cause death."
Hey! This is great! I can fill my C++ code with statefull functors and lazy evaluation. The enemy shall not pass. No one will ever be able to debug it. Instant job security.
Seriously. I like experiments, but just keep this away from production code.
Sorry about being an asshole here, but really. The problem with articles like that, is that a novice developer, with some 5-10 years of experience can pick up an article similar to that one and use such techniques without any need. With disastrous consequences. How do I know it? I've seen it happen. Again and again. Hell, it had happened to myself, years back.
An article like that should start with: "unless you really really know what you are doing and are an adult (20+ years of coding) you should probably avoid using techniques like that in the production code."
I'm pretty sure C++ (and any language for that matter) has more than enough quirky features to obfuscate any piece of code. No need to read this article for that. But if 20 years of experience makes lazy streams seem unfit for production, then someone has spent 10 years burying their head so deep in the sand that their feet are barely showing. Java's iterators, Python's generators, you work with them even in C. And is it not obvious that one needs to really know what they are doing if they are working as a professional developer?
The example of the article was simple of course. But solving the problem of printing Pythagorean triples was not the aim of the article. The aim was to show what makes lazy streams tick, to show that they can be implemented in C++ and that an uniform interface can be provided with functor, monoid and monad. Finally, the simple problem was solved with the new tool to show the inversion of control.
Don't get me wrong. I like functional approach. I am developing in functional languages as well as in C/C++. I think these techniques actually do have a place in the production level code.
But, the mail point of the post was, that if you write an article like that, it should start from a warning to novices. This point of view is based on the experience of having to deal with fuckups from novice developers, who were trying to use and abuse the language to the full extends of their abilities. Including fuckups of my own.
Hah... "novice... with some 5-10 years of experience". Actually you're not too off the mark. And in any case, with c++11, pretty much everyone who's not been following the c++0x/c++1x process assiduously, counts as a novice.
Although having over 7 years experience as a c++ programmer, since I'm not using it so much now I haven't managed to keep up so much with the changes in c++11 and feel a bit noviced overnight.
Still, move constructors are pretty handy so that's one change I use whenever I can.
In this case I think 20 years of C++ experience doesn't help much. At least it doesn't help me. This is a challenge for procedural programmers to really think through what functional primitives are all about by implementing them in a procedural language. It's not the usual template metaprogramming brain teaser.
I very much agree. I should have stated more clearly that "20 years of coding" requirement in my post should include software (and hardware development) in a variety of languages, including functional languages. Or even domain specific languages like SQL, Matlab or VHDL/Verilog.
Years of experience is also hard to define. It's as precise a metric as lines of code are.
I've seen people saying 10 years of experience when they're closer to have 10 times one year of experience since they continuously do the same thing over and over. I've also seen people with barely a year or two of experience already coding circles around people with 10+ years.
I have a question. I just went to a source of physical (quantum) randomness http://www.randomnumbers.info/ and I'm giving you a random number between 0 and 10,000 which I've just generated there. Here it goes: 6296.
Ok. Now that light cone had finally reached you. And you (neurons in your brain to be precise) are thoughtfully entangled with that random event (outcome), now in your past.
Now imagine the following. A few days passes. And you forget that number. A few years passes. Connections between the neurons which were storing this information are now gone. Molecules and atoms which were part of these neurons are gone from your body. There are no entanglements any more which link you to that event. Is that event in your future now? Again?
> There are no entanglements any more which link you to that event.
Not directly, but the information has spread out from your neurons into the surrounding matter ad nauseum. It's just we can't interpret the information anymore.
The event still happened in your past, you just can't see it through your limited human view of reality.
And what if you would move away from that surrounding matter? Or, say launch it away with near light speed, so it would get behind the horizon at some point. How is that situation different from the one in which I've just generated the number and the light cone haven't reached you yet?
Can't I? What if the state of these poor remaining neurons and the body is scanned, encoded as polarization of a bunch of photons and sent to a receiver far far away? In that case good old environment would definitely end up behind the cosmic horizon.
Just replace a person [that gets entangled with a particular outcome of a random event (have measured it)] with a simpler organism, say a dog. Or a hamster. Or with a roomba vacuum cleaner ;). Or even with a computer. And we definitely know that a state of a computer can be represented as a bit string encoded on any media. Including polarization of a bunch of photons.
1. When you tell me the result 6296, my brain becomes only classically correlated with it, not entangled. The source of randomness (whether you got it through a quantum experiment or not) does not matter here, as I am only receiving the classical information.
2. After I forget it completely, all I can say is that I (my current body) am not correlated with the event --- but there is no reason to think of the event as being in my future. It's simply not correlated to me any longer. The process of forgetting means dumping all correlations with an event in the environment. For instance, neurons interact with blood stream that interacts with lungs, passing along those correlations to some air particles. So for my current body, the event never happened, although you might have written the number down and will always remember it. In other words, the past is relative.
> So for my current body, the event never happened, although you might have written the number down and will always remember it. In other words, the past is relative.
So where this event would be for you? In the future? Again?
Yes. Past is definitely relative. Special relativity is very specific about that ;)
The event is neither in my causal past (it has no influence over the current state of my body) nor in my causal future (I have no influence on it). It's simply uncorrelated with me. If now you remind me of the number again, it becomes part of the causal past of my (new) body. Analogy: if a dwarf dies in a fortress far far away and you don't hear about it, her death is neither in your past nor in your future. You know nothing about her state: in QM, you would say that your brain and her are in an uncorrelated, product state, something like |dunno><dunno| x (|dead><dead| + |alive><alive|)/2 .
The x stands for \otimes, tensor product.
When you say you receive classical information as the outcome of that experiment, what's an example situation in real life when you receive quantum information and do indeed get entangled with it (I mean if at all such a situation ever arises)?
"real life" as in "they can do it for real in a lab": Alice has two photons, applies a quantum operation to them so that they become entangled, and gives one to Bob. Bob received "quantum information" from Alice. They can use this resource (entanglement between the photons they own) to perform several tasks now, like "teleportation" of the state of a particle, or secure key distribution.
According to Wozniak, Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.[65] Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[66]
---
End of story. Before continuing celebrating Jobs, ask yourself a question, do you want to promote that kind of behavior in the Valley?
I agree with you on principle, however, the story does not end here. Woz himself said the following:
"What Steve does on the good side — like the music scenario [in which] we didn't bring just a music device called the iPod, we brought a whole music system: a store that sells it, a computer that manages and organizes it. And an iPod is just a satellite to your computer. Plug it in and it works. You don't have to do anything. You've got to admire Steve for that kind of thinking. Nobody's perfect. [Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
Specifically:
"[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
I agree with you absolutely. If you are yourself encountering lies and nastiness from your partners, an enlightened way would be trying to understand them. And forgive.
But my point was different. We just can't afford to celebrate lies. It is very very very harmful.
I don't believe I have seen anyone, now or previously, saying anything like "Oh, and talk about business acumen -- look at the way Jobs soaked his old buddy Wozniak out of four and a half grand that one time!"
There's a vast difference between what you call "celebrating lies", and celebrating the life and work of a man who, while every bit as human as anyone else and with feet of clay to match, was nevertheless possessed of the sort of visionary genius which comes along perhaps half a dozen times in a generation. Certainly Steve Jobs could be, and was, a real revolving bastard from time to time. But so can everyone; people are complicated and they don't always behave in ways which others regard as preferable, sensible, or nice. If you're going to require sainthood as a prerequisite for honoring the accomplishments of a historical figure, I suppose that's your prerogative, but I suspect you'll find it a lonely stance to take, and I think it's strange you should utter it in the same breath as a word like "enlightened". Have you heard the one about the blind men and the elephant?
If you think Steve is the only person in the Valley to have lied to a business partner...I have a bridge that might interest you.
As for the specific event in question (the Atari money), do we know what Steve did with the extra money? Seems to me, maybe he really did need it (for rent/food/etc.) and was too ashamed to ask Woz for the extra. Maybe he figured he would re-invest it, and that it was easier to do behind Woz's back than to try and explain his plans.
Steve was no saint, but in my experience he was generally a nice guy. He also thought he knew better than everyone else, and so it would not be unusual for him to leave out explanations, make snap judgements, and be rather brusque in general (when dealing with business decisions). Why should he have to explain himself when he was obviously right?
I'm sure it didn't help that the world so often (especially toward the end) only reinforced the notion that he knew better than everyone else...
Fair point, but I generally seem to hear a lot of negative stuff about Steves personality. Sure give someone a second chance, but by the time they are on their tenth chance you have to start thinking differently.
> "[Everybody is] going to have cases where they did something bad to somebody, said something nasty to them and maybe regret it later."
> I think that's a more enlightened point of view.
This kind of argument is weak. It's just a bland kind of truism that everyone can agree with that is unrelated to the original argument - when someone says that some one is a bad person, there is an implicit comparison to most people, ie the "badness" of a person is a relative one. Then bringing up some kind of absolute quality - perfection - is just trying to distract from the original argument.
But you can’t just name one bad thing a person did and say they are a bad person, no more discussion about it. That just makes no sense at all. It’s such a minor thing, too. His wage fixing together with Google and other companies is much more recent, relevant and much worse.
At the very least Steve Jobs was an intensely interesting person. I don’t think characterising him as a bad person makes much sense. This is such a simple-minded worldview.
I still don't see the big deal with iTunes and iPod's. ipod is a great product, but there is no real killer feature; "plug it in and it just works", yes, if you have iTunes. Meanwhile, plug in any decent mp3 player of that time\* and it Just Works, assuming you just have a file system - drog and drop the files you want into the mp3 player.
Maybe you could say that ipods with itunes is simpler than dragging and dropping like that. Though I don't see much of a diffrerence; drag and drop is a common action in Windows and the like. In order to selectively add files to your ipod you'd need to learn to drag and drop... in iTunes.
iTunes is an okay-to-annoying program, at least on Windows. I've bought music on itunes that I have to "enable" on every new PC I might use. The last time I tried it dodn't even work. I
ve bought an audio book that I have never been allowed to even play! iTunes can't (or couldn't) even compete with pirated media, not by a long shot.
\* let's say when mp3 players had a capacity that actually made them worthile, maybe as small a capacity as 256MB, or 512 and more.
Long before the music store existed, the iPod was entirely different than other MP3 players of the time.
When I got the first iPod, I also had a Creative Nomad player that had a little more storage and a search function. However, the iPod on the other hand had Firewire rather than USB 1.1, making it a painless process to add and remove songs right before you go somewhere, rather than a hours long process you had to plan in advance. Even more importantly the scroll wheel on ball bearings with made it feasible to fly through a tree of artists and albums with thousands of audio tracks.
The shift in convenience was on the level of shifting from a phonograph to a cassette tape, except that records are more convenient in some situations.
It wasn't the case of any individual feature of iTunes or the iPod, it was that iTunes and the iPod were the killer feature. If you were to have looked at the landscape at that time for MP3 players, there was nothing even remotely like the iTunes+iPod experience. Even the tagline of the very first commercial was ridiculous at the time: "iPod, a thousand songs, in your pocket." That was equivalent to Google giving people 1GB of storage with their GMail account.
It doesn't seem like a big deal now, but in 2001 it was a very big deal.
You're oblivious to user experience not your own user experience. A good usability person can put him/her-self in someone else's shoes, rather than assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since software engineers think very differently from most people good usability people are rare. (Steve Jobs was actually such a person. People forget he knew enough programming and electronics to be dangerous.)
The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
> You're oblivious to user experience not your own user experience. A good usability person can put him/her-self in someone else's shoes, rather than assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since software engineers think very differently from most people good usability people are rare. (Steve Jobs was actually such a person. People forget he knew enough programming and electronics to be dangerous.)
I'm not a usability person, never claimed to be. I am a user who is sharing his experience with using ipods. In order to empathize with other people's experience I need to hear them first.
I feel like I'm being painted like "oh look, another tasteless nerd who doesn't _get_ the benefit of UX that comes in another flavour than a virtual terminal". I have never, ever touched a terminal unless I absolutely have to, right up until about my second year as a programmer, which learnt as an adult. I still think that things like terminals are overrated as far as streamlined work flow goes.
> The thing Apple did with the iPod was offer a seamless end-to-end user experience, to allow "normal" people to buy a song and have it appear on their devices legally, simply, and at a reasonable price. This involved software, UI design, hardware design, negotiating compromises with the RIAA (e.g. iPods did not simply act as a file system to prevent casual piracy while not seriously inconveniencing users). This combination of software, hardware, design, and legal wrangling was not replicated by anyone, even approximately, for several years (Sony and Microsoft eventually managed to get something vaguely comparable, but it was too little too late.)
I haven't had the impression that ipods were such a revolution. Maybe it has to do with where I live.
I'll concede that the ipod was clearly simpler for people who thought dragging and dropping to a USB like thing was intimidating, and at the same time couldn't/wouldn't/had moral qualms about pirating music. I reckon ripping CDs was not a viable option for most people. I think I've only tried to do that once or twice myself.
I don't know where you live, but I think it's pretty well accepted that the iPod was a revolution. It swiftly and thoroughly dominated and expanded the MP3 player market, and set the bar for others to copy. Much like the iPhone did later. And the iPod came at the front end of the Apple renaissance, before they had the consumer mindshare and perception that they do now (in fact the iPod deserves most of the credit for vaulting Apple into that position).
I'm actually traditionally a Windows guy and scoff/roll my eyes at a lot of Apple stuff, but it's pretty undeniable that they've created some amazing, bar-raising products. They've done this by enforcing an uncompromising UX-first philosophy that covers all aspects of product design.
If anything I'm less technical than most HN users. I certainly was back when the ipod was new-ish. I was probably more technical than the average user at the time, though.
I gave concrete examples of the usability of the ipod. I would like it if people argued against those points, rather than some smartass, sarcastic response like the grandparent.
"You don't _get_ user experience, twenty years after even Microsoft got it."
Just as terse, no sarcasm.
I don't see how it saves time when it necessitates you to follow up with a wordy response - if you were after saving time, you wouldn't even have responded to my response. But I guess this is yet another case of me not _getting_ something.
Spend less time at your own computer and more time helping other people out with theirs. You'll "get" the reasons for Apple's success, soon enough.
You won't necessarily agree with those reasons -- I certainly wouldn't want everything to work like iTunes or my iPhone in general -- but you will understand why your limited perspective on UX doesn't catch on like Jobs's philosophy did.
You can admire Jobs for the good things he did while acknowledging the bad things. We are all human, all fallible, even our heroes. Sometimes, it's our bad deeds of the past that propel us towards the good deeds of later. Does that moment fully describe Jobs' life? Does his initial denial of his daughter Lisa describe his later relationship with her? I am sure not. Humans are not simple creatures.
It's good to remember this story too, because it shows that he was also a ruthless businessman, no matter how much effort he put into convincing everyone that this part was not "the real him".
And it's not a bad thing, it's part of the "whole truth" about someone and about how you need to be in order to succeed. And the fact that you need to be like that is not something that one should "sweep under the rug" or present as a "minor part of an otherwise great personality", because it does show you something: that at some level something is very wrong with the system and as much as we like to believe otherwise, fairness and success are a bit like having the cake and eating it too ...something that rarely happens.
So to be a great businessman, I just have to lie to people that help me, right?
I suppose it would revolve around what people think "success" is - if it means lying to others and abandonment of morals for personal gain, then that's a very sad definition of "success".
Well, he did say the truth about getting paid by Atari, and gave him "his half", which Woz regarded as "good enough compensation", otherwise he wouldn't have considered working with him in the future. It's kind of the same game played when a middle manager that brings no value to the company gets paid 3x the engineers salary, or when the CEO gets the golden parachute while the shareholders are loosing money and the employees are getting salary cuts or the company is getting downsized... but you don't go around calling people "liars" for playing this game as the corporate level, do you? Yeah, it's no longer "lying" because the information is theoretically available to all players, or at least to the IRS, but it's kind of the same game.
Woz probably didn't became upset about it because by the time he found out about that little incident, he was in some kind of "managing" position himself, and "playing the same game" but in his advantage now, and he was there because of the other decisions that Jobs made, so...
Basically what at the small "garage business" is called "being a liar" is what at the bigger levels is called "the rules of the game". And yes, you're no longer a "liar" and no longer breaking the rules, but simply because the rules are bent the way you need them to be bent.
The only alternative would be to have only fully transparent employee owned companies... and we all know this is not how our current flavor of capitalism works :)
EDIT - TL;DR: it's basically the same "bad" deal one gets in any employee <-> employer relationship, just that they didn't have this explicit relationship
I think also too a lot of people don't realize when they parrot out this story is that Jobs and Apple never abandoned Woz, Woz just chose at some point not to work there anymore and move on with his life. On his Wikipedia page it states that even though he no longer works there, he's still on the books as an employee and receives a stipend from Apple estimated at $120K.
I'm not sure how those two conclusions can be gleaned from this story.
It is pretty safe to assume that Steve Wozniak was not pulling the same types of shenanigans. And, it's really too bad if the story serves to normalize such behavior.
Second, it isn't a story about managers providing no value compared to less well paid engineers, it is a brilliant engineer letting something despicable pass because his partner brought so many non engineering assets to the table.
I think people should flee any company where there are dishonest managers who provide no value. It isn't uncommon to see companies that start out with comparable products, design and engineering talent diverge because one has a terrible management team.
The "stuff" is still there, in the company, allowing people to be employed for doing stuff they really like doing and to create more stuff... it's not as if he sold all his shares, converted it to gold and buried half of it in his tomb under a pyramid and left the other half of the gold to his children.
At least in 2000+ years we got to the level of social/human evolution where "the stuff" keeps flowing :)
