codeboost

You sound like a person who doesn't really know what he is talking about.

The data in this article shows some trend in two countries 10 years ago and then draws some grand conclusions on the business model, which is absurd.

If you look at the business fundamentals, the picture is a bit different.

Herbalife sells high quality products, used happily by millions of permanent customers worldwide.

They are leaders of one of the hottest industries - wellness. Looking at the amount of unhealthy food sold in supermarkets today (almost all of it), it's no wonder there are entire industries trying to fix people's health after consuming the food sold to them. The other industry is Health Care.

Now the MLM thing.

All the 'those on top earn everything and new people earn very little' is both true and fair. The fact is, no one has appointed anyone on 'top', everybody starts out as a simple distributor and builds his/her business from the ground up. It's a tough business and only the best (most motivated) move up and others move on with their life. Just like any other business.

I have been there when my sister started in Herbalife 20 years ago. She started from zero, as a simple distributor. Now she earns about $100k/month plus bonuses, drives a Porsche and lives in an incredible house on top of a mountain.

What's more, she made dozens of other people rich. I know them all personally, they started from owning one set of clothes to driving expensive cars and travelling all around the world.

And thousands upon thousands of customers who changed their lives after loosing a significant amount of weight. These are the customers that don't go away easily, not after they have been reborn. Anyone who has lost 20+ kilograms (like myself) knows what I'm talking about.

Bill Ackman is full of shit and a hypocrite when he states that he wants to help millions of low income people from loosing money with Herbalife.

It's a personal and emotional war he's engaged in and so far he has been loosing it, because his premises are wrong.

Bill Ackman was wrong about Herbalife. According to wikipedia, he lost between $400 million to $500 million by shorting Herbalife last year. What that means is that other investors disagree with his (and this article's) analysis of Herbalife.

How much depends on what day you sell it. At current prices I guess you would be a multi-millionaire.

Could you share a bit more information about how well it works for you ? Are you making an income comparable with a 'decent' corporate job (eg. 100K + a year) ?

So we meet the aliens, we communicate with them, we become friends, they share a bunch of technological discoveries with us.. Then what ? We travel some more ?

If we can travel parsecs to meet them, wouldn't we be supremely technologicall advanced ?

I mean, the human race is pretty technologically advanced today, too advanced actually and it's hurting us as much as it's helping.

Will we some day realise that it is of no use to pursue higher mountains or more distant stars, because at the end we're still stuck within ourselves ?

What if the supremely advanced aliens realised this a long time ago and renounced technology all together, because it ended up destroying them ?

I wonder..

But let's say what we really hope for is true. What if we somehow discover that a large number of these planets are teaming with life ? What then ? How would that help us ? Spiritually, economically ? Wouldn't that make us feel even less significant ?

I'm just wondering, why are we hoping there is life out there and what would we do if we find it ?

Most multiplayer games are quite playable over the network. The difference is that the graphics are rendered locally and the world state is streamed over the network.

A fast enough pipe (100Mbps fiber is quite common and cheap here in Europe) could deliver good results, even if the whole world is rendered and then streamed as video.

Here we go again. Let's enumerate the technologies which are shit: HTML is horrible CSS is an abomination HTTP is wasteful, slow and old C++ is a horrible language (Linus Trovalds) C is dangerous Java sucks ..

I'll stop there and let you expand the list if you want.

Turns out the whole computing world is built on top of this terrible tech which many people hate, yet somehow it's moving forward.

Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so

Oh but there is for those who seek it!

One kind of proof is called dimethyltryptamine. It lasts for 10 minutes, but when you come back, you might have a radically different view on these matters.

Other psychedelics, like LSD, also offer a different perspective on life and death and there are also different kinds of spiritual work one can do - meditation, holotropic breathing or living life in nature. They all help you realise just how fragile and transitory life is in nature and that that is a good thing.

Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death

Isn't science (or rather scientists) driven by the same fear ? Isn't the knowledge that we're going to die a factor in making us go out and do stuff to survive ?

Wouldn't immortality lead to a state where we'd have to invent a simluation of mortal life in order to actually feel alive ?

How can one tell that this life isn't such a simulation ?

What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ?

Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :).

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after.

The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One.

That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.

I've been using JUCE for various project for about 5 years. I really enjoy coding with it, once you understand the naming convention (which is different from everything I've used before), it's quite intuitive. If you use the API in a wrong way, it will assert somewhere inside the library, and the assert has a nice comment above it explaining what you did wrong.

The main benefit for me is the size of the executables - no other cross-platform GUI toolkit that I've used before can end up with such tiny executable files.

QT might be more powerful, but it's HUGE and that is a problem for most of the apps that I develop.

So great work Jules and do give it a try!

The reverse sounds nicer :

Detroit - the Perl of cities :)

So they are patenting the 'just my 2 cents' ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_two_cents

Although I didn't properly RTFA, there are may ways in which one can hook narcissistic gamblers in forums or news sites. The price of the comment can be set in a bid-like fashion with people raising their bids and paying more and more to keep their comment first. They can also pay to upvote or downvote comments or plain remove them. You can have comment wars with real money in no time :).

Bitcoin sounds like a perfect fit for such a system, allowing anonymous comments as well. But haven't I seen something like this somewhere already - reddit tips , for instance ?

Oh come on. Everyone is so fucking sensitive these days. We now have psychological terms for every little emotion and behavior, but come on, put these into perspective.

Our grandparents would slap you in the face for calling this an abuse. Try sitting in a trench with tanks rolling by and bombs falling from the sky during WW2, at 18.

I could go on with examples of what 'emotional abuse' is, but I think you get my point. The submitter fucked up and he got a slap on the wrist. And it was good for the entire community. The 'abused' submitter will probably triple check his commits and will be a better programmer as a result. Everyone wins.

I see many such articles lately and all of them have the same argument: bitcoin doesn't fit well with the current economic theory and hence it's a NO.

The fact is, Bitcoin doesn't and will not fit the theory. What it will eventually do is create a new theory, based on these new technological realities. In fact, I envision such tremendous changes in our society because of cryptocurrency in general that it's hard to even imagine what the consequence will eventually be.

My concern is not that Bitcoin will not work, but that it will work so well that it will totally transform the world, which, given human nature, can lead to big disasters, like famines, wars and so on.

First off, you are not a loser. It is a word that you decided to label yourself with, it's totally arbitrarily chosen and not based in reality if you really think about it.

Second , this is not your last chance. Life is a collection of tries and failures but it is important to distinguish between yourself as a human being trying to win at the game of life and your professional achievements (or failures). They are not the same thing! Like every living organism, you are part of this infinitely complex ecosystem, proliferating, processing and modifying the light from a star. You are the spearhead of thousands of generations of winners at this game of life, who managed to transmit their strong features into the future with the ultimage goal of achieving a form of immortality. If you look at yourself from this perspective, rather more important and deep then whatever number is associated with your bank acount in some SQL database on some server belonging to some bank, then the term 'sucess' or 'loser' is really unapplicable.

Likewise, success is a rather arbitrarily chosen label. Our society generally defines it as people who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and be born into the right parents and to have met the right people and to have been blessed with the right obsession (which we call talent) to become sucessful at increasing their financial and political score.

But this is just a small piece of the whole puzzle!

My sugestion is to really try to look at your spiritual side and try to realise what your other purposes (besides making money) really are.

Eventually, who you are is really what stories about yourself you believe in.

Oh, and your life is only just begining !

Depression is a long period of negative thought patterns. The person is locked in a loop of insatisfaction, disappointment, health concerns, feelings of wasting life (guilt), followed by feelings of worthlessness. It is a terrible place to be. And unfortunately a lot of smart people fall into this mental trap. I am emerging from such an episode myself and I can relate perfectly to the article. I was helped by the book "Feeling good: The New mood therapy" and I highly recommend it to anyone who seeks help.

I think Glass plus a smartwatch is the way to go.

This way the Glass can be controlled from the watch using touch and voice commands.

What he is saying is that it is in human nature to get high. And we better accept this and tailor our legislation accordingly, instead of trying in vain to deny it.

Legalizing would stop violence, increase taxes, allow for open research of the substances, would de-stigmatize use, which in turn would make users more willing to seek cure or support of others and would allow for better education of future potential users (aka children) on the caveats of drug use and abuse.

Drug use has produced a great deal of 'positive' outcomes for our society. They have drastically changed our culture, art, economy and technology.

Of course, their dark side is well known, but I think it would be a lot easier to deal with the dark effects of drugs if they were legal.

I'm glad there's lots of signs that this is about to happen all around the world pretty soon. Let's see what happens.

Looks very psychedelic. It's interesting how simulating a variable speed of light creates the same visual effect as that produced by ingesting psychedelic mushrooms or LSD. Not just the color spectrum, but also the distance/space distortions one reports while tripping. I guess those mushrooms in the game are not a coincidence. Wonder what the connection is there then.

I guess you're talking about node.js . That, of course is a hot topic today, but I'm confident that this problem is solvable. That's why I called it 'node.js-ish', meaning a backend that can do similar things as well as or better than node.js.

CoffeeScript and Backbone.js have nothing to do with scale, as they are used on the front end.

The author talked about how horrible it was to have the UI written in Java (having to wait 3 minutes for a recompile after a CSS change). These two tools (plus SASS and alternatives) on the front end makes Java->Javascript totally redundant, imho.

Agreed. Today's technology - CoffeeScript + Backbone.js + node.js-ish backend would make it a lot easier to develop something like Wave in a couple of months by one or two developers (plus maybe a designer).

Looking at the app I'm building (alone) with these tools, I could say that it's on par with Wave on the realtime UI and complexity, but the development experience is a really pleasurable one. These tools are crafted for exactly what I'm doing and it seems like they know what I want to do before I want it.

But then again, back then you didn't have these tools so I guess you had no choice but to go the 'academic' Java way.

But anyway, congratulations on this incredible achievement and also for the many lessons learned and shared with the world.

Facebook is a dangerous social experiment. It's not a 'virtual passport'. Rather, it is a 'virtual bank', except they don't store financial information about the users, but everything else. And that is an unimaginable amount of power.

Given that their intentions are different from their user's (they want profits, users want... to share photos), it is not hard to assume that Facebook does and will use the user data in order to maximize profits or grip on power.

I think that nothing good will come out of this marriage of Spotify and Facebook.

Facebook gains a lot of meta information about the Spotify users (and music taste tells a huge amount about a person), whereas Spotify is reduced to being a convenient and easily replace-able bit pipe.

Now they'll be able to run their social algorithms based on music habits and offer us the best, most relevant and unique crap for sale on the market.

Or one day the government decides to isolate the listeners of The Doors and deny login to every site that uses facebook as a virtual passport.