htaunay

After Glass, G+, Fiber and possibly Boston Dynamics, I'm failing to see any moonshots living up to the hype as well. At least up until now.

People are narcissists and generate demand for narcissistic products, and are willing to pay and/or invest time on them.

From a tech point of view, you can argue that a lot of these companies innovated in being able to scale their solutions to supply the "narcissistic demand" of billions of people in real-time.

From a product point of view, you can argue that a lot of these companies managed to figure out the most comfortable and intuitive ways for people to express their narcissism.

From an all market point of view, you can also argue that lots of non-tech companies also exist based on narcissism, e.g. cosmetics, fashion.

If silicon valley's next bubble does burst, it will probably have nothing to do with narcissism, and more to do will investment speculators not learning their lesson the first time.

You can test it by logging out of our account and attempting to access a private repo url you usually can access.

If this is technically feasible I can't say, but I don't imagine FB creating a precedent so that any state authority can require tracking of specific users. IMHO, this solution wouldn't take so long to start being exploited.

My point originally was intended at NOT blaming communism, or capitalism as well. IMHO this seems more like a problem involving a government spending all of it's USD100-a-barrel income like a lottery winner, and when the prices fall to less than half of that (which by the way, most countries would welcome happily the amount of petro Venezuela has even at USD40 a barrel) and no other significant investments were made in alternative sources of revenue, they act as if it was solely a natural disaster and absolve themselves of all responsibility.

Elections were won with ~70% of the votes, and I also recall various referendum-like votes which Chavez won easily as well. Another fact that surprised me was that every Sunday he would give these 4h long speeches, and a crowd would invariably go to the streets/TV to watch him speak.

Later on I am aware that this scenario changed drastically, but in my layman's eyes the first years of Chavismo seemed very democratic, and of course also very populist (e.g. housing for the poor), which only made the governments approval rates soar.

I'm not saying I'm pro-communism, but before pointing a finger at communism, maybe the democratically elected Venezuelan government's incompetence, especially regarding spending all the revenue from it's single main natural resource on unsustainable populist programs with little ROI, should be blamed.

[Edit] Typo

MS offers tools to build a bot within their framework using Node.js with first party library support[0], and for deploying your bot to third-party chat apps (e.g. Telegram, Slack and FB messenger[1]). The idea is to build a bot once, and their service routes the bot's API between different endpoints. All of this with no obligation of ever touching VisualStudio, Azure or dotnet.

This type of attitude would be unthinkable three years ago.

[0] http://docs.botframework.com/builder/node/overview/#navtitle [1] http://docs.botframework.com/connector/getstarted/#navtitle

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.

Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

Time passes, but some things don't change.

Maybe West could be replaced by West-of-the-Atlantic?

The team: Ok. Not what we expected, but we have some equity, its a tough market, and we have been working on this for a while. Let's hope it pays off in the future.

Three weeks - working from Sunday to Sunday - later...

The Team: Yes! I can't believe we delivered! We are more motivated than ever! Now let's celebrate!

CEO: Yeah, sorry, no time for that. Here's a $40 dollar check for each of you to go out and grab a bite. Oh, and by the look of our roadmap we might need to crunch some more next month.

The Team: [starts quitting one by one]

Its not like hunting or harvesting is longer an option, and all other legitimate alternatives are increasingly out of reach (e.g. cant get a job because you smell "funky", and can't get a bath because you don't have a job). The story about the stabbing in the homeless shelter only closes more doors.

And IMHO, this problem only really becomes a problem, when those who can solve the problem are affected: bums on touristic spots, bums in public bathrooms, mugging, drug-dealing, etc. So how is this scenario NOT an incentive for someone like Nate to purposely make himself a problem, either for direct benefit (e.g. stolen money) or the indirect one (e.g. better shelters to get bums out of the street)?

However, the rich still benefit from the system. Here's how it works:

1) Kids with money go to the best prep-schools and get in the public universities through hard entrance exams. 2) Kids that can't get in the public system, but still have money, can pay for medium-level education. 3) Kids with no money due to poor basic education can't get into a public university and can't afford a private alternative.