sharpercoder

simpler is not directly needed, as Facebook already reaches the minimum viable simplicity for many functionalities. More compelling certainly would help.

The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.

A relative traveled to African villages. Currently, farmers shame neighbors who do not have neat & clean fields after harvest. His organization tries to turn that around; yields are better when harvest waste "fertilizes" the field. They are now "shaming" the farmers that cleanup their fields to raise the yield of the field.

> Mushfiq Mobarak, an economist at Yale University who has researched sanitation decisions, suggests that better-off people may be more likely to copy poor people than the other way round. If a wealthy person has something, you do not necessarily feel ashamed not to have it.

So the key is in shaming all but the absolute poorest. Interesting insight!

This looks quite promising. However, I'm burned a few too many times buying and trying to use tablets for drawing.

I had the iliad, a Dutch tablet in the very early days of e-paper. Slow, unworkable latency in drawing, buggy software, low support for digital book formats. I tried a few other e-paper devices since then, but they didn't improve on a lot.

The Microsoft Surface 2 seriously improved on this space. But it was still not feeling well - still too much lag. And then there is the huge problem that Windows is not suitable for tablets - it's a nightmare to work with compared to Android.

Surface 3 got it right enough, the feel is good enough to do some serious drawing on it. Microsoft OneNote is pretty much ideal for many usecases but has its cases where it becomes unbearingly slow. I have not yet tried the Surface 4 or the iPad Pro.

The ideal of an android device with a OneNote version which supports plugins and an app-store on a color latencyless e-paper display is still a decade away it seems.

I was watching an interview of the most famous criminal lawyer of my country. He raised a family of four, they all became lawyer too. The lawyer, in his post-war lifetime, became wildly successful in defending criminals on the edge of society; Gypsies, high-profile criminals, et cetera.

In this interview, he was asked what a good justice system would look like. His reply was that real justice would involve a large factor of "making things right" for the victims. Not just pointless punishment (while punishment was certainly a factor he'd see in the system), but focused towards "making things right". If you steal, pay back the stolen goods manyfold. If you sexually abuse, do time in help centers to assist victims (obviously well-supervised). If you kill, help the family financially and do time in aftercare.

The whole focus on justice in his point of view should be to ease the burden of the act for the family/society afterwards. To me this is a really great view of fixing any wrongdoing. I hope Promise will focus on this facet as well; it would be beneficial too. Public support will definitely increase as well as the lives of victims.

-it is not possible to decrease scope

-tooling is hard e.g. to detect unused styles

-scope problems are a pain to debug

-some constructs are awkward (e.g. tooltips with :before and positioning styles)

-vertical text behaves unexpected wrt box model

-variables are suboptimal

There are probably a lot more.

You make a fair point. The same is observed in lowering quality of produce; this intuitively reasons that "the throwaway economy is bad". However, cheap produce with considerable lower product lifetime can be better as it may typically endure the intended lifetime, whereas overengineered products may last far longer, the invested energy does not pay itself back (the product may be thrown away much earlier).

The cost for newly produced items is almost always underappreciated in popular economics. That's because many factors such as environmental impact, logistics (and its side-effects), resource-mining are not included. Your LCD panel may cost $100 in store, but the government in the country it is produced may pay decades long to cleanup production sites. The government of the country producing minerals may pay years-long in healthcare for badly treated workers.

Maintaining state and mutating state is useful and neatly done in OO. That is, when done right, which is hard. I certainly agree that for processing data, good functional languages reign supreme. They are usually terser while more expressive.

It seems that solving problems need their own tool. Compilers typically fit a data processing pipeline. Yet, a use case such as editing an AST (e.g. a text editor showing incomplete syntax state) probably could better use OO as a tool.

Most current software then simply uses the wrong tool for the job; they do data processing with OO, and state representation and mutation using functional pure idioms. A problem that is not yet solved very well in the industry is interplay with these idioms. .NET with C# and F# comes to mind, which allows for easy workflows leveraging both OO and functional.

I have a job at a large US company. Although I have admin rights and I can install basically anything I want, there is a script that sets the default browser at startup. Every time I encounter it, I get annoyed and I remember to not use the default browser (It is Edge).

In Zero Days [0], people exert concern that US cyber attacks in Iran causes counter attacks, while the US infrastructure is not yet ready to defend these attacks. Furthermore, it is concluded that the Iranian cyber army is greatly expanded and funded since Stuxnet; the government wanted the ability to defend against similar attack in the future.

[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5446858/

I wonder more and more where the massive battery production increase will get their cobalt from. Production in the coming 5 years will be multiplied, maybe even towards a different magnitude! As such, the cobalt and lithium demand will scale in the same fold. Lithium is relatively widespread (compared to cobalt), so while it gets harder to get lithium (and more expensive), it will not be impossible.

Cobalt however is quite a different story. What are the producers planning to do? Dig up half Congo?

Sure, USA has a lot! That's not at discussion here. The discussion is about dominance. SV dominates the world as everyone uses Google, Facebook & Apple. The military industrial complex has no match, not one even close to that of the USA.

The economy has strong contenders with Europe and China. Yes, it's a strong economy, but the maker-industry has largely been moved to China, which now surely dominates it. Point 6 & 7 include economy.

Hollywood surely tops any other in the western world - don't underestimate the Chinese movie industry and Bollywood. They account for a significant userbase of the world population, combined ~1-2 billion. That's not far off Hollywood's.

The video game business I bundle with Silicon Valley.

What's left is a strong and influential USA but declining slowly but surely. For Silicon Valley as well: India and China have a large population now with more and more skilled workers. It won't be for long until SV will lose is leadership position.

There's a radio program in my country featuring two country-famous (war|geopolitical)-strategists. They discuss worldnews every week. Lately, China's dominance was the topic, and the phrase "USA only has two things: a nice weapons industry and Silicon Valley" stuck with me. As I thought about it the days after, I could not really find anything to beat the quote with. Only the dollar can maybe come in as a third; but even that has significant competition from the euro and increasingly the yuan.

> [...] include actual reasoning about why things are how they are in Rust and that they seem pretty open about drawbacks of the choices.

This trait of documentation (the "why" & openly discussing pros and cons) seems to be a property of great systems being well-documented.

I love the effect. Brings back times when I used ballpoints a lot and also had a lot of spare time (college, school...).

The website has horrible contrast though. Using blue heavily in the theme is nice and appropriate. Unfortunately, it uses too many shades and combines light blue tones with white. That accounts for the bad contrast.

How is such a business even remotely profitable? Such scooter will cost a few hundred bucks. They're easy to store and drag into the house. Even in a small room in a densely populated city, there is not much nuisance in owning one. Furthermore, these things get cheaper by the year; further calving off any rental market.

Genuinely interested in how such business is able to make a dime.

YMMV. Clearly :)

I am wondering if mass-scale manufacturing & construction can solve this problem. Imagine large greenhouse-alike setups which spur vaporization, siphoning fresh water off into a lake. The sun would passively vaporize incoming salty water. Reaching m³s/minute of freshwater throughput would without doubt require massive scale. Since freshwater demand is increasing and supply decreasing, the economics of such project become more interesting every month.

Will such plan work at all?

Flying cars or taxis will (IMHO) never take off for various reasons:

- they are inherently fuel inefficient compared to devices with wheels

- they are noisy, a problem which can probably never be solved unless breakthroughs are made in science-fiction fields like anti-gravity

- airspace is very limited. In my country, we have already serious planning problems with the current amount of air traffic

- it's not sustainable from nature-perspective. Current air traffic accounts for quite some insect & bird loss. Imagine a multitude of current airtraffic; it would be disastrous for the already dwindling quantity of airborne creatures

- flying is inherently weather-bound. Especially for relatively small aircrafts this is true. Taxis fit this property. This means service is limited to a subset of all weather conditions; YMMV depending on the area of flight.

- flying is heavily regulated, which poses barriers. Obviously, startups can overcome these barriers, but they don't help in solving the overall problem

- social opposition will always be a thing unless 100% security is neared and near-100% noiseness is reached. Until that time, there will be fierce opposition to add any type of aircraft for mass-use to the airspace

This being said, I really, really, really do like the idea of hopping in an airborne transportation device and go straight to any place in a +-(a few hundreds of KM) range.

I tried Vue a few months back and I could not be happier. The single-file components (html/css/js) make development a breeze. I now need to make changes in relatively complex components I created 2 months ago, and my learning curve is small. Most things in Vue are expressed as expected and just work.

I cannot wait for full ES6 support in vue - it will get massively better by then.

It seems that the most "developed" areas in combination with predictable weather gets roll-out first. This means that non-western countries will get them later; or, depending on the situation, maybe never at all at 100% area coverage. I can totally imagine robotic car software parking right after a the highway intersection and subsequentially handing over driving to a human. Traffic in lesser developed countries may be too complex to ever have self driving cars to ride on.

Recently I watched Louis Theroux' documentaries about violence in the US. It was mentioned that certain areas (in particular Milwaukee) shooting spiked right after the gun laws loosened.

VLC does not support certain formats. I haven't dug into it, but I don't think it supports transcoding video to a chromecast endpoint either.

I have always seen origami as childsplay to learn spatial understanding. It turns our that folding science is applicable in many fields! Proteins, buildings, airplanes and many more objects found in nature and human designs apply origami in surprising ways. The most interesting one I found was flowers; how they fold out when starting to blossom.

It is very uncommon to have a flag associated with a language. In my 35 years of life, I have never encountered it. Only when I googeled esperanto I saw a green with white star flag.

Agreed. But for a product like a car, it would be fair to comply much later after-the-fact; it's not like the car is driven straight into the junkyard ;). For products like food (packaging) it seems different though.

Should not the government require manufacturers to extensively document all the parts and materials that go into a product? In this age, we should demand that products are easily (re/up/down)cycle-able, and this means third parties should be able to efficiently dismantle products.

Any information on what current western car manufacturers are planning for battery production capacity? The story of Nissan and Tesla is known by now. But I don't read a lot about most other producers.

What's the story of Adyen?