So as long as the charity compartmentalizes their income into different groups (depending on source) and pay the Porches from one group you're OK with it?
Your line between OK/!OK seems really arbitrary to me.
1,398 karma · joined October 2, 2008
Your line between OK/!OK seems really arbitrary to me.
Often charities have billions (?) of capital. If they hire a local private bank to look after the money they will have to pay for it, and the bankers will be driving porches. But if they manage the capital in house they suddenly can't compensate people for it similarly, because they're still a charity?
Charity.
Raise money: OK
Spend money: OK
Save money, use part of savings as bonus: Evil?
I haven't really thought this through, so my logic could be flawed. Still, I think that most charities should become more business-like. (Good) Businesses are, after all, all about creating value.
Is his reasoning really something like this? Biz dudes needs rails to be popular so that they can pitch ideas while being clueless, but Zed has made rails less magic, so now the Biz dudes hate Zed because now they have to have real ideas instead of buzzwords.
Really an elaborate explanation for simple name-calling. Perhaps the rude guys are just that - rude guys. To over-think it is nothing but paranoia.
She was probably just nervous and didn't know what to say. So she said the first thing that came to mind...
"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"
The question was "If they did have the same syntax, would they be different languages?"
I replied: "Yes, they would be different because their semantics would be different"
I never said it would be a good thing. And by stretching your analogy to the territory of food it only becomes weaker (with food diversity is a goal by itself). Also it can be argued that using the same operating system for the vast majority of tasks is desirable.
The C++ bindings aren't so great, last time I checked. The documentation is not of a consistently high quality, but it doesn't matter much because, once again, the language isn't very complex.
I prefer lua to any other embeddable language, including Python.
Like the concept though.
The opening paragraph is great though, and the the description of the millennials ("shamelessly narcissistic, apathetic and lacking in social skills") is spot on. But how can the author say in one sentence we millennials are apathetic, and the in the next that we "care strongly about justice and the problems faced by [our] society"? Doesn't that just jump out of the text when proofreading it? Or is there a meaningful difference between apathetic caring and active not caring?
My knee-jerk (and naturally completely unfounded) opinion is that the author likes the book because it makes a bunch of statements the author wishes to be true (for obvious reasons). The author seems to be absolutely uncritical about the contents of the book. How can he not cover the quality of the research/argumentation and still recommend it without hesitation? And if the author doesn't have the background to review the book on a more fundamental level - should he really be the one to label it an educational must-read?
I haven't read the other replies, so somebody else may have pointed this out already but Java is a by-copy language, like C and C++. Not by-reference like you claim.
But in a presentation about the dodo every picture is both relevant and interesting. The 60th picture is as engaging as the 3rd.
In other words, with web programming pictures are used because text is boring and the presenter wants the audience to know he doesn't work at IBM.
The whole "less words more pictures" philosophy has become really popular lately, and it seems this has taken it to a new level.
Bonus points for style and execution.
x = 365; ((x + 1) * x) / 2 # 66795
Your claim is that ideas are worthless. And yet, not all ideas have the same value. If an idea seems good, really good, then people are tempted to spend 2 years of their life pursuing it. Even when the idea is bad for obvious reasons that the founders never thought about. So even if I'm willing to accept that good ideas are worthless, BAD ideas definitely have NEGATIVE worth.
If a YC service can keep people from wasting their time on bad ideas that would be incredibly valuable. The founders are always too close to their own company to see if it's really viable. Either success hits you out of nowhere ("I can't believe people are paying for this!") or you're left quietly wondering what's wrong ("OK - no people are ordering dogfood over the internet yet, but any time now. We just need to increase our marketing budget...").
Here, the startup is suddenly in charge of the behemoth. So there's no real reason to assume everything is going to change for the worse.
Whatever you do, don't look internally. Your estimate of what it's worth is always awful. Why? Because prices aren't measured on a linear scale. Just to take an example from every day life: books. A lot of people make impulse purchases of books in the $10-$20 dollar range. Let's call one of those people Bob. It doesn't matter much if Bob is short on cash, a $10 book is easily bought. Often, Bob won't read the book, or won't finish it because it may not turn out to be very good. And curiously, Bob will not save to buy a $30 book, that he's sure he's going to like, because it's simply priced outside of the arbitrary range. In our minds, good books are not allowed to cost more than bad books. If we see two John Grisham titles laying next to each other in the bookstore, and if they're priced differently, what do we assume?
a) one book is much better/enjoyable/exciting than the other book
b) one book is newer/more popular/hardcover/etc
Think about this. It makes no sense that (b) is the right answer. And yet it is.
Mostly, I think, you have to find the right price point by experimentation. Don't be afraid to raise the price when you release a new version, and don't be afraid to lower the price with holiday certificates. Then measure and refine. A lot of people are afraid of raising prices because they might lose customers that way, but compare that to all the money lost by giving away your product too cheaply.
Tennis.
So, did you see a racket, people playing tennis or something else as you read the word? And if not, what did happen as you skimmed from paragraph to paragraph?
edit:
Hmm. I just realized that when I read a list of words [ball, car, frisbee] I don't visualize anything, but when I think of any of the words individually I do visualize. Even when just writing down a simple list. That's peculiar.
edit 2:
It can only mean one thing - that when reading you don't think at all about the nouns. Obvious in retrospect. This also explains why you immediately forget a list when just reading over it, but recall perfectly when you visualize each item for an instant.
edit 3:
> Just go through a list of interconnected things
For most people this should be really difficult when listening to music with lyrics, and really easy in a quiet environment. "proving" that you're still using the linguistic part of your brain, even when you're painting a mental picture.
It can be really annoying at times. I constantly mix up proverbs and language constructs when I'm context switching, I often know a word in only one of the two languages and can't think of a good translation, and so forth. And more often than not there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between English and Dutch words, so it's easy to get frustrated knowing exactly what you want to say, but being unable to say it because the words don't exist in your native language.
I don't think it matters much whether you think only in English, in several languages, or in pictures/emotions. A game I sometimes played as a kid was to take a concept and repeatedly think of more succinct definitions for it with a friend. And the cool thing is that despite getting the original definition wrong, in the end you always end up with a definition both parties agree on. People rarely think about the exact definition of any every-day word, and yet people are capable of intuitively picking the "right" definition from a list.
To completely derail this thread I'll challenge you to define the word "chair". It's not "something you sit on", because you can side on a couch and a couch is not a chair. Nor is it "something you sit on with legs", because then it could be either a stool or a bench.
The point is, when you think of the word "chair", you're not thinking in English. You're thinking about the concept chair, and that's one you can't define without some effort. And defining it in words is completely unnecessary because you know what a chair is. It's no different for the word "empathy".
ps: Your definition empathy doesn't pass the sociopath test. A sociopath notices somebody else is hurting, and knows what pain feels like, which is for your definition sufficient. But textbook sociopaths lack empathy. So empathy must be more than mere recognition of an emotion. Yes, this is nitpicking, but that's kind of the point.
A design pattern is simply a name given to the obvious solution given to a common problem. By giving it a name it becomes much easier to talk about / understand the code. Once you know that a class is a proxy class, you don't really care what the methods do anymore, you just dive in and see to which classes the real work is delegated. So one word "proxy" tells you exactly what 400 lines of boilerplate does.
A language idiom is different. The purpose of language idioms is to clearly and succinctly express common concepts. The language designers think of a "best" solution, and give it a name.
So, really, when you have a bunch of people writing the same code to solve the same class of problem, you give that code a name and call it a design pattern. Patterns emerge AFTER the language is used. Language idioms try to capture the essence of the problem, such that no patterns are necessary.
At least, that's how I look at it.
Is that even a requirement? Can't you just sync every 5 minutes or so? Or sync more often when the battery is full, and sync less often when the battery is starting to deplete - given enough users that should take care of the power issue. Because it doesn't take a lot of energy to download the congestion information, so like with Bittorrent you only need a couple of seeders.
Bear in mind that you need only one data point to prove there is no congestion: a single car driving at 70 miles/hr rules out congestion at that road.
I expect it will work if all taxis are seeders, and all commuters are leeching. Considering taxis benefit a lot from such a service it's not unrealistic.
The auto-locking problem is another technical nuisance. A firmware update would fix that.
Also, I think the problem should be solved entirely without GPS. You don't want a machine to tell you that traffic is OK, what you really want is to receive a text message whenever there are traffic problems on your usual route on weekdays. "Traffic jam at intersection X" is all you need. When you get that message you just have to take a minute to figure out alternative route. The passive approach is much more appealing. After all, if traffic has been good all week you're not going to check your iPhone the next morning. Just not worth the trouble.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P785j15Tzk
( See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9NgXIkyiwk&feature=relat... - works every time. Ps: 1972 )
Still, I don't get why you would focus on preflop calculations. Knowing whether to shove preflop is pretty easy, isn't it? The tough decisions are often when you face an overbet on the turn or river, in my experience.
If so, what was going to be your edge?
If you make no estimate what kind of hand your opponent has you can only reason in three ways:
a) you assume he always has the best hand. So you throw away your hand.
b) you assume he always has the worst hand. So you put your chips in.
c) you bet big if you have good cards, and you throw your cards away when your cards are lousy.
Clearly (a) and (b) are bad strategies.
The last strategy is not as bad as the other two, but still terrible. More often than not your cards are bad. So your opponent will figure out you're not willing to make large bets with lousy cards, so every time you don't bet, he will, and every time you bet, he won't. You're going to lose your chips that way. Basic game theory.
So you need to figure out what cards he could have been dealt so that his actions make sense. Then, from that range of plausible cards, figure out how often he has a better hand than you do. If you like your odds, you put your chips in. Otherwise, you throw your cards away.
It's a lot more complex than this, of course. But the point is that "estimating your opponent's hands", as difficult as it may be, is absolutely crucial if you want to win.
There are always a million reasons to not go through with something. If you're excited about the idea, and if you're pretty sure you can turn it into something profitable there's no reason not to go ahead.