xixi77

weird that you bring milk up as an example, because this is an industry where regulations tend to make sure milk prices stay high and production stays low; really there are not many examples of food subsidies/regulations that aim to reduce prices and increase supply, at least not in the developed world

How is that different from say broadcast TV or any other media though? Or are you saying that ads are their product as well?

Actually looking at other things the woman making the "toxic wasteland" comment wrote, I certainly don't agree with her on everything, but I'd say she actually makes a lot of good points. Particularly about how delivery style matters.

And yet, her comment itself is clearly an exaggeration (let's be real, no one is going to take up the $10K challenge), and is just as toxic as anything she mentions. It just shows that it is always far easier to see problems and possible fixes in other people's behavior, than in your own.

What is particularly toxic about this comment though?

I would actually agree that there won't be many poor/minority people participating, but that has more to do with the challenge itself, not the fee. Poor people buy a lot of lottery tickets, particularly when the chance of winning is high. The issue here is that the chances of winning are not high, so the only reason someone would try and go after the prize would be to prove a point, and spending a lot of time and effort to prove a point like this one is a luxury many people don't have.

TBH, I find it difficult to see value in that particular line of research: it stands to reason that there would be a link between advertising and consumption in all age groups, so spending money to confirm that seems wasteful. Also, I haven't checked, but I'd be surprised if there hadn't already been some studies done on this.

Of course the reason some people are upset is because they would like to see restrictions on advertising, and were hoping another study would give them another argument in favor of such. But a positive result does not imply that such restrictions are necessary.

Sure, it might not be general purpose, but the "niche" is really quite large: there aren't too many websites written in Excel, but there aren't many written in C++ either :) I am really not a fan of Excel overuse, but it happens, so I think there must be something about it that makes its programming model attractive to people.

For one, constructs like loops that we have mostly internalized as natural, can look a bit intimidating to non-programmers (they are not found in regular language either though!). Even among fairly experienced coders, for example in statistical programming, people who come from general-purpose coding background sometimes find loops easier to read and write compared to "vectorized" code, and vice versa.

Thinking about it, the way say much Java code is written is not what I would call a linear language either, although that I suspect might be more a result of path dependence and optimizing for "large teams of replaceable programmers".

I'm much more of an emacs than vim user, but the "wrong IDE" part is not quite true. Most IDEs support the common languages that you've listed, but once you go a bit further into domain specific, it is not as common any more. Speaking of what I'm familiar with (statistics), even SAS is supported in a very spotty manner, or at least was last time I've checked, and this is a popular language that has been around longer than C. At best you would get some limited R support, which really pales in comparison to what you can get in Emacs (and surely vim). Sure, sometimes they have their own IDEs (RStudio is quite good, and so is Matlab's IDE), but they have their own issues. I'm sure the same is true for lots of other DSLs.

I think you are right, but: how about tools like Excel, which is very non-linear, and yet it seems to be easier to pick up, and less intimidating, for complete newcomers compared to traditional programming?

TBH I see a plenty of the arguments on the other side too, whenever a company does something people disagree with, there are calls for regulation. Even further, there are lots of people here who get annoyed when they see someone just skirting the rules without literally breaking them and always argue for the most expansive interpretation.

I think some people just naturally like rules and would prefer to live in a more orderly, rule based society, and some people don't like the idea of being constrained. Both groups act quite sanctimoniously though, as if their personal preference is somehow the holy truth.

Do we actually know what data has been leaked/illegitimately retained/whatever you call it?

A lot of the discussion revolves around friends data -- was all friends data accessible regardless of the friends' own privacy setting (this would be deeply troubling), or was it the data that friends shared with the app users (a bit less troubling, but still very questionable), or was it friends' data that was openly available on their public profiles open to any internet user?

Well maybe not to that extent, but to my knowledge things are not that bad in Japan yet :) Let's just not confuse market share with monopoly (in economic sense of course, which is what we are talking about here -- the Japanese legal definition may well be different, and it is that one that matters for Amazon.)

Of course; I know very little about Japan's antitrust laws, it's really beside the point whether they are democratically defined or not. It's on Amazon to argue about their interpretation through Japanese courts or by whatever is the mechanism of redress they have in this case, if any.

I was responding to the parent comment calling the arrangement as described in article unfair.

True, and definitely an argument to consider full numeric. I am sure they've thought about that already and decided against though, so I didn't want to go that far.

Also, in practice today there are not many people anywhere in the world who are not at least somewhat familiar with the Latin alphabet to the point they wouldn't be able to recognize/read/write the letters, and (possibly excepting a few old typewriters here and there) people would generally be able to enter letters of standard Latin alphabet into whatever devices they are dealing with.

After reading their evaluation document, I kinda see the use case. I personally find the mix of letters and numbers a little annoying though.

I think it would be better to use only letters for the first 8 symbols (perhaps after getting rid of some particularly confusing ones like "I"), and only numbers for the rest.

This way you don't need the plus, can use all 10 digits without a chance to confuse them with a letter, remove more potential letter-digit mixups such as 6/G or 7/F in some handwritings, and most importantly make the whole thing a lot easier to say (e.g. over the phone), write (on a phone keyboard you would need only one switch between numeric and alpha layouts, you do want this to be easily texted!), and remember (it's easier to remember a sequence of just letters followed by a sequence of just numbers, imo, even if it's one or two characters longer)