unz

OK .... looks like someone's in a bad mood

They're the same thing, you'll only get paid if you solve real problems (though that's not really true, a lot of people get paid by stealing - most of the finance industry, many government employees, and much of senior management in industry).

His wife, the crowdfund backers, and the net loss to society by him taking himself out of productive business. Those are not 'dumb strawmans'.

And I wasn't talking about him in that comment, but the various starving artists who usually free ride on spouse/family/friends/welfare.

I'm not saying that entertainment doesn't have value. I said it's perfectly fine if you're earning an income from creating it and it's OK as a hobby to create. But otherwise, the market (the people that constitute the world) have told you it's not valuable.

Art for art's sake is great, but it doesn't mean artists should get a free pass to do whatever they want and the rest of us digging coal mines and waiting tables give them money for art we don't like.

Doesn't this guy realize that asking for money they way he did with flex funding defies logic. If you only raise some of the money, how were expecting to finish the project, and what about the people who gave you money - you just scammed them. He still hasn't paid them back yet, instead saying he owes them a game!

Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.

And another thing slightly disturbing about a lot of game devs - in your teens or early twenties I can understand the desire to make Indie games, you're young and retarded. But later on in life, late 20s and on - can you not find something more worthwhile to do?

Sure, a side hobby making games, or your main job working as a game dev to pay the bills, but for that be the focus of your life? Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

You could say the same about other artists like writers and musicians - and thankfully, almost all of them suffer financially for their insanity. As time progresses, Indie gamers will also realize that they are just the starving artists of modern times (minus the groupies that writers and musicians get).

So paper is the final frontier?

Hundreds of years old tech is the optimum and 21st century tech like tablet computers is a step backwards for humanity?

My point is - why is anyone printing anymore? Everyone can get their hands on a tablet these days

(you tamp down a little with your rudeness - why would multiple decades old tech be 'magical')

Prolog with clpfd and chr, Mozart/Oz, Sql, Clips. Libraries like gecode, java choco.

There aren't any new ways of programming that have been invented. There's basically the mathematical programming (constraint/logic/relational/linear), functional, procedural, oo, concurrent, stack. You're not going to come up with something new during a session of lisp hacking. You'll just reinvent the above multiple times.

But that's not the main style of programming. If you teach someone lisp he'll hack around with functions and macros and not realize that his problem could be elegantly written in constraint programming.

Most of the time the majority of code (written by good programmers) is in constraints or relations, so why encase that in a functional language with parenthesis everywhere (I've programmed a fair bit in lisp and don't mind parenthesis at all, but it get's annoying after you're used to the elegance of prolog syntax).

That's basically the consensus among professional academics on the matter. Also among well respected programmers in senior roles like Joshua Bloch and John Carmack.

(putting aside the rudenss and cluelessness of your comment ...)

Operations research type algorithms can be thought of as forward chaining compared to prolog's backward chaining. Prolog implementations usually integrate them in because they are more efficient in many cases.

Lisp's dangerousness was why ML was invented by Robin Milner.

Lisp is a dangerous language that shouldn't be taught or used these days. There are plenty of superior programming techniques.

Mathematical programming - linear programming, finite domain constraint programming, constraint logic programming, logic programming, relational programming

Static functional programming - ml, haskell

A good modern introduction to programming is Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, by Peter Van Roy and Saif Haridi. It's far superior to the commonly mentioned lisp book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Slightly off-topic, Pdf and Ps are just plain outdated for today. They're unreadable on small screens and for people with bad eyesight, and no one sane prints stuff out these days Html is better, but the real thing today is tablet apps. All docs should be published as interactive 10/7/5 inch apps. Books should also disappear and be replaced by that form factor. Scientific paper authors also need to realize this and replace latex with app programming and publish their work as apps.

Virtual Reality, no doubt about it. Having tried the Oculus dev kit, VR will blow everything else away. The limitations currently, screen resolution and sensors, will be chipped away because they align nicely with the troubles smartphone makers have (smartphone makers want people to keep buying newer models, but there wasn't a good reason to until now - higher screen resolutions that are needed for VR - retina is no-where near retina in VR).

People will spend most of their day in VR - work, entertainment, socializing - and new forms of entertainment will arise that are hybrid between movies and games.

Huge fortunes are about to be made

- how much are eyeballs worth in VR as opposed to tiny screens ? (a lot)

- how much is it worth to replace most physical products, including real estate? (software eating the world in turbo-drive)

The best web platform is haskell and postgres, or ocaml-java/yeti and mysql on appengine. Phpers and rubyers are missing out on the most delightful and least error-prone ways to use functional and relational programming.

This is a huge opportunity for startups.

Online dating is still not as successful it could be because all data is not used. Everyone has smartphones, partners could be matched up based on the generated sensor data. There's also the low cost gene sequencing services, daters could be matched up using it.

The friendship problem cannot be tackled the same way. Women might be more open to actively seeking new platonic friendships in dating service kind of fashion, but they are less likely to be lonely anyway.

To solve the male loneliness problem would require focusing men around an issue. Men build good friendships over shared forced activities (school, work, military, political meetups, dinners with their wives's friends husbands).

To solve the loney man issue requires more of the same. Greater efficiencies in organizing economic/volunteery groups.

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is the answer here. Sites like mechanical turk and kickstarter with better social networking features, and finding ways to physically get people meeting together. For example, a component of kickstarter campaign might require doing a thousand man march in the capital city. Part of a mechanical turk task would require holding a protest. Similar ideas to get people excited about a shared cause meeting up at the same place.

Also, governments should consider creating an army units for elderly or otherwise lonely men. If your old and you're wife/husband died, you should be able to join the army to help in some capacity, even sitting at a desk at the barracks and filling in mechanical turk tasks.

This is kind of silly. If Google launched it's own uber with the google brand on it, it would easily trump uber. Developing the the uber software would cost way way less than $250 million. These large companies are throwing a lot of money away on stupid acquisitions. (It makes sense in social networking, but not with something like uber which isn't a network effects company).

I don't want to say anything against Patrick or other consultancy oriented entrepreneurs, but I'd just put up a price on the saas app and be done with it and move on with the next thing. I'm functionality-oriented, create a lot of functions that automate work and let the product sell itself.

It might be a little foolish and leaving money on the table but I just think more and more code is better than more and more marketing. Software should eat the world, and as fast as possible.

Yes they provide value, but as consumer I'd like to see that 5% drop, and Kickstarter being a household name benefits them, giving them leverage to keep prices high, and a net loss for the consumer.

Kickstarter don't have full international coverage and they don't provide an api or a data feed, two things crowdfunding desperately needs.

The thing is, senior people don't eat their dogfood in anything. The CEO of Ford probably drives a Benz. What has worked in all industries is quality control. Government has always had a problem in doing this (the DMV) but that's where startups should step into to educate the politician that it's good for both public and for the politician's future elections (using said startup's product).

People like to blame the US government for this, though I think the real culprit is that often the dumber, more xenophobic members of society are usually hired for these kinds of positions. As in the case of police brutality, cameras need to be recording all encounters between travelers and airport security, and extensive quality control performed. This is an issue that is tarnishing the United States's reputation everywhere. Travelers are often the elite from their respective countries and the US is digging itself into a hole with this.

There's a big opportunity for startups to provide the backend for this quality control. A hosted webapp that allows teams of inspectors to seamlessly collaborate on monitoring the quality of TSA agents from anywhere.

Much more of this is needed, crowdfunding has a lot more potential to change business but kickstarter and cohorts are getting fees while offering little value.

The huge opportunity for startups currently is in planning, campaign analytics, and prediction markets for campaigns. Crowdfunding needs to be quantified like the financial markets so that information is more readily accessible to buyers and sellers to drive efficiencies (as a buyer it's hard to evaluate the trustworthiness of the seller, and as a seller it's hard to evaluate what the unexploited opportunities are).

Eventually crowdfunding might overtake the ownership industry and we can live in a real open source economy.

The cost issue is way overblown. $900 per officer is too much for the big cities - each officer in those big cities is paid at least $5000, and with pensions, vehicles, facilities costs, tco must be at least 20k. There's politics in those departments that's preventing camera introduction. A lot those cops in the big cities are the worst offenders in police brutality.

There's a lot of opportunity for startups to get into this game. Smartphones and tablets could be outfitted as cheap cams for the public to videotape their own encounters, fitted in cars, houses, and the side of buildings. Real time transmittal of video to cloud services so corrupt cops can't confiscate the footage.

There's also the huge opportunity in drone surveillance, sold to private individuals, police departments, and local neighborhood watchs.

Agree with that.

I'd say there's two types of software - better experience and novel functionality. You can in be a competitive business and win by offering superior service/design or go into non-competitive markets and offering functionality you can't get anywhere else.

Personally I prefer the noval functionality, being an engineering type, and slide a little on the design, but there's equally as much money in going the artistic route.

There's great technical risk in the functionality route, but there's great market risk in going the artistic route. Steve Blank talks about this in his writings.

The Lean Startup movement is about this market risk. To get a handle on technical risk you'd be better off listening to Elon Musk.

No thanks. Destroy enterprises, never negotiate with them. If their internal processes are so easily gamed, they're easy prey.

Looking at your posting history you appear to be a professional forum arguer/troll and would be in full agreement if you hadn't started off with the opposite stance, so I'll end it there.

By the way, very few of your comments have data backing them up, and often are just simple 'models' with some variables you wrote down mixed in with rudeness to other commenters.

Except in America only teachers unions (along with doctors/lawyers) have managed to raise the salary through (anti-consumer) unions, while the lumberjack/fisherman/roofer is thrown to the wolves. 'Unions for everyone' or 'unions for none' - the only fair way. 'Unions for the connected' and 'to hell with you' for everyone else is unfair, and the startup community should seek to destroy it.

You said 'rant' twice, not exactly polite disagreement.

The models are pretty simple - they are called supply and demand. They work for everything else in economics. Low pay for dangerous work is not so exceptional situation.

In poorer countries, there is even less pay for even more dangerous work, because education is even worse there. There's a few data points there.

And there's quite a lot of literature on the education system and teacher unions. To start off with their's Waiting For Superman (2010).

So the remaining roofers get higher pay, and the in-flood of designers leads to lower pay for designers.

Somehow they've educated the populace into not accepting low pay for dangerous work. Personally I'd prefer good privatised education, but good government education is OK alternative.