gvr

My takeaway was that he doesn't want to be in the crossfire in the ads war. I can imagine that being very stressful and unpleasant with lots of hate mail etc. Especially if you compare it to an app like Overcast that brings joy to everyone using it.

Neat project!

Last christmas in SF I wanted to create a "winter vibe" as we were celebrating with the family, and I was looking for videos showing cozy snowfall and winter landscapes. It was surprisingly hard to find something really good. I think it'd be cool if you could select what kind of "window" you want and had a few presets like "Tropical", "Winter landscape", etc.

I personally found the mix of soothing slow music and hyper lapse videos to not be relaxing, I think I'd prefer if the videos were running at normal speed or maybe even in slow motion depending on the video.

That is certainly one source for error. There are many. Another is that testing does not give you exhaustive coverage of the state space just because each branch of the code is visited.

The standard does mention "formal verification/methods/proof" but to my knowledge it's rarely been used extensively.

This times a thousand.

It also means "To support".

HEADS UP TO IOS DEVS: You may want to update your iPhone to iOS 8.2. You'll need to download the new XCode to deploy the app after that but it's not possible at the moment due to STATUS_CODE_ERROR.

I used it pretty much daily in Sweden back in the 80s and 90s to check news, broadcasting schedule, weather, etc. There were a few hundred "pages" and each page had a 3 digit number that you'd punch in to retrieve it.

During my 14 years in Silicon Valley I haven't met any successful founders that I'd characterize as mean. Lots of them have come across as sociopathic and ruthlessly egoistic, but that's something different. They've made their way to success by looking at the economics and optimizing for themselves. If this meant manipulating, lying and breaking promises to cofounders, employees, customers, investors, etc so be it. But... I'm not sure even Steve Jobs was mean; I think he was extremely hard on people because that was the best way he knew to get the results he wanted. I never met him.

Anyway, it seems to me that most people (at least here in the west) would vastly prefer a product created by people that operate with integrity, humanity and decency to one created by dicks all else equal. And that a slightly inferior product can beat a better one out by having a better more positive story behind it.

I think there are already economic incentives for founders to behave well and that this trend will continue. The employees and customers talk freely on secret, glassdoor, etc and I think it's critical to realize that if you don't operate with decency and good values people will a) know about it, b) make purchasing decisions based on that, c) take that into account when considering employment.

I think companies will increasingly make an active effort to (if nothing else for purely financial reasons): a) operate with decency and good human values b) protect and elevate the company and it's people by making this clear to the public

I wonder if Boosted Boards has tried putting the propulsion system on a regular skate deck instead of a longboard. Looking at the powered truck design it seems it should be doable. It seems the market would be bigger since most skaters don't ride longboards.

No matter how high taxes are, if you let people in a first world country work with whatever they want, you're not going to end up with university educated professionals in a shoe sweat shop. If they work in a sweatshop in Sweden, it will be one of clothing design, software engineering, or some other line of work producing many orders of magnitude more value per hour where they can make some solid money for themselves while paying a significant amount of taxes.

And yes, of course I believe that productivity and happiness are two different things and that they need to be balanced. I don't believe in trickle down economics, or that they are two different facets of the same variable on a linear axis that somehow move in unison as you slide left/right up/down.

You can probably quantify humanity (like the Gross National Happiness people are trying to do) somehow, but it's of course not going to resemble true science. I do think there are some basic markers of a civilized society that I have a hard time understanding how some people disagree with though. These include public access to nature and beaches, good education for everyone, good healthcare for everyone, etc. To me, this is a separate _economical_ issue from how much the government meddles in the work life of its citizens. If it's easy for you to think of these issues on one axis be my guest, but it is not a mental model that works well for me.

Cheers!

The way I think about economic systems is

- Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism.

- Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation.

I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates.

I grew up in Sweden and I second that. Stockholm imo is literally paradise on earth three months per year, especially the archipelagos. I've never seen a place like it, unbelievably beautiful, people are so full of life, you can wear a t-shirt at 5am, temperature is perfect, and so forth.

The problem is that the rest of the year it's pretty miserable weather wise. You notice a huge difference if you visit Swedish friends in the Winter and Summer, they're just totally different people.

I love snow and I don't mind the cold much. It's the darkness that is an issue. Some people go to hospitals to get "light therapy" and even if you live in Stockholm (which is rather far south) you'll probably have 15 minutes of sunlight per day - on your way to and from lunch. It will be dark when you go to work, and dark when you come home.