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StudyAnimal

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Apple Just Lost Me 4 months ago

If you can use a debit card to buy stuff online, then it’s probably a visa or Mastercard, which would qualify as a “credit card” for identity verification.

Before people in other countries started popularizing the term “debit card”, most of my visa and Mastercards were hooked up to take money direct from my bank account, but they were still called credit cards.

MacBASIC 2 years ago

They are all different though, depending on the hardware. Microsoft's BASIC on the C64 and on the mac and on all other platforms were different enough to count as different dialects, certainly more than just different implementations.

Edit: And the wikipedia page clusters them nicely in a separate group, what more could you ask for.

From my experience, it’s the individual. I always get paid more than the union members. I also notice that the non union members seem to have a bit more motivation and spirit and their own idea about their goals and where they want to go compared to the union members who seem to delegate the progress of their careers to their employers.

Clearly it’s not a case of one being better than the other. It’s great we have the choice. Unions are good for some types of people and job but terrible for others.

They call themselves a software company. The guys in India that develop the software know what they are doing but the managers in Germany have no clue what they are doing. Sitting all day in meetings planning strategies for beating Tesla. The guys in India are mostly fixing bugs in software released years ago.

To be fair my background is similar but the system isn’t really more opaque. I remember having the same books for the PC as (in this case my slightly older mentors) had for the C64. Undocumented PC and Undocumented DOS stand out. However you mentioned games , I too was distracted with such things (like the ABCs, alcohol, babes and cars). And had a nerd break until the web era. With maybe a little play around with VGA graphics and DJCPP or whatever it was called along the way.

Sql is fine as tweet sized selects. I developed my mental block deliberately after working for a company that had about a million lines of business logic implemented in thousand line sql stored procedures.

Now I put as many layers as possible between sql and myself.

Mainframes are general purpose machines optimized for high (IO) throughput of bulk business operations rather than number crunching. The answer to your question is probably marketing and avoiding confusion. You wouldn’t call a supercomputer a mainframe even though it could probably do the work.

People have been trying for years to undo this damage, Deming, Ohno etc. nowadays it’s probably mostly the agile community leading the way but I feel the curve is trending downwards. Most people here hate agile especially the fluffy cultural bits, and crave the pressure of a Silicon Valley startup.

Subscription Hell 8 years ago

Obviously (in these cases) there are market segments that favor all you can eat subscriptions and those that favor à la carte. It makes sense that for most things the heavy users get the sub and the light users get to pay for what they use. However I thought of a counter example. Spotify. I would normally be a light user of music. I had some CDs in the 90s but lost interest in the whole thing by the time I graduated Uni. However it’s still nice to listen to some music sometimes. However I couldn’t imagine being able to buy all the singles I listen to in a month for less than €9.

That’s the secret. Price your subs so it’s a better offer for the lightest of users. Not hard in the music business that was ripe for disruption.

And I think that’s the message in the article. Subs themselves are not the problem , but the way they are priced . (Although the fact that he spends so much money on subs kind of negates his argument. It seems like people like him are happy to pay which reinforces the soundness of the business case).

Incidentally I subscribe to ms office even though I would never have paid a one off fee for it. I think it’s cheap enough to justify its value. I also subscribe to Netflix but should really cancel. In europe there is not much content there. When I first got it i watched maybe 4 or 5 interesting documentaries now I never see anything there worth watching. I might unsubscribe after my daughter finishes binging gravity falls. (She’s not a big user either we both find YouTube more interesting and relevant than European Netflix)

Go away racist. Refugees need a safe place and germany needs fresh foreign blood to keep its society running. It's a win win. German children are going to take a long time before they start contributing and even then they will end up on Hartz IV before they accept a normal job.

Why encourage more population growth? To me it's natural that some more developed societies have less children, and other less developed societies have more, encouraging immigration is a win win without increasing the total population.

Where are you actually located? I don't think there is anything happening in Berlin on Friday. I suggest getting involved in your local startup community and heading to wherever the events are, when they are actually there. You wont have abny problem with investors if you actually get involved. What is your startup by the way?

I don’t think I will pledge until I see drastic improvements in two areas: Content (still lots of posts pushing a very orthodox agenda, lots of self-help fluff and too much start-up techy stuff. Not enough challenging or interesting general reads), and the Reading Experience: I can’t believe I have to export to Pocket (which is currently doing a better job providing me good content that Medium is) in order to get things like white on black or sepia themes, a choice of fonts with ligatures and full justification. Auto-scrolling would be nice too.