An ICO is an "Initial Coin Offering", it's supposed to be like an IPO except instead of offering shares, you're selling cryptocurrency coins. ICOs are usually framed as a way to fund a project or business, usually related to cryptocurrencies or blockchain technology in some way. The idea is that the project's success will increase the value of the coins you bought and you'll be able to sell them for more later.
The main difference is that the coin is just a coin, buying it won't make you a shareholder and you aren't subject to the regulation that IPOs and shareholders are. That regulation makes it difficult to scam investors by starting a dummy company, pretending it's a valuable operation, selling shares in an IPO, and then running away with the money. Doing this with an ICO is much easier, and there's a lot of concern about how many ICOs are frauds.
I’m not sure I get the point of an ICO. It seems like a company issuing monopoly money. It even seems like this would have been possible before crypto—literally just Monopoly money to people and let them trade amongst themselves.
I guess Monopoly money is easy to duplicate… but so is crypto in a way because you can just start your own currency that uses the same block chain to create more tokens.
Well, just remove the company, the product, and the regulation, and that's an ICO.
The issuer of the coins/tokens do not have to buy anything back. The idea is that they will increase in value and function, and others will want to buy them from you.
It goes like this:
1. "RichCoin" is created and the creators begin selling them at 5,000 Richcoins for 1 Bitcoin. Ads are pushed across social media platforms and web communities are seeded with information that encourages people to invest.
2. 50,000 people spend a total of 1000 Bitcoins buying the first 5,000,000 RichCoins.
3. After public launch, 5,000 people sell their RichCoins to late investors, netting ~20% profits.
4. The remaining 45,000 people "HODL", hoping that their $1 RichCoins will one day become $100 RichCoins so that they can move to a private island and never work again.
5. RichCoins fall to 10% or less of their ICO value as all official websites disappear.
6. The creators of RichCoin, who long ago converted their 1000 Bitcoins to $5,000,000 USD, move to a private island and never work again.
Shouldn't be a problem with coinbase or other large exchanges. Getting the cash out of bank might be actually harder, AML systems will flag huge transfers from known crypt-exchanges.
The "monopoly money" perspective isn't wrong, and in general an ICO for a coin that's, say, "bitcoin but a little different" doesn't make much sense. Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, so an ICO for something bitcoin-ish is like taking investments for a new kind of dollar. You have to get them into circulation somehow, and trading currencies like commodities is a real thing, but it doesn't really explain the current ICO hype.
It makes more sense if you look at most of the ICO tokens from the ethereum point of view, rather than bitcoin. Ethereum and its derivatives let you use tokens as components of distributed applications. Unlike a "pure" currency, which is useful only as a medium of exchange and has no intrinsic value, these tokens let you use the distributed application so they're worth whatever the application is. They aren't really currency, although you can usually buy and sell them and they're used to give the application some kind of market behavior.
Something like filecoin is a better example. The filecoin project intends to build a distributed storage system. If their project succeeds, the filecoin network will let you exchange coins for the network's storage, and storage is valuable so the coins are valuable too. Ideally, they'll use the funding from selling coins in an ICO to make the project so useful that a coin's worth of access will be worth more than what you paid for it during the ICO and the people who participated come out ahead.
Personally I'm still not very impressed with most ICO projects, but at least all of them aren't completely insane when you look at them this way.
You make an excellent point here that I don't see articulated very often. The Landscape of Popular Languages, let's say C/C++/Java/Python/Ruby/JavaScript, has a big gap in the middle. You have good choices between:
1. lower level "systems" oriented languages with static types, usually compiled, like C++. You get lots of flexibility and direct access to primitives. Static types help wrangle big codebases. Generally suited to large projects.
2. higher level "scripting" oriented languages with dynamic types, usually interpreted, like Python. Writing code for most tasks is easier. You give up some stuff you'd want for projects like operating systems or databases. Most projects aren't operating systems or databases, so that's usually a good tradeoff. Generally suited to small projects.
The problem is that lots of projects are medium-ish. You set out to build your web service backend or whatever, it would be a pain in the ass to write in C++, so you use Python. Getting it working is quick and easy. A few months later it's big, complex piece of software and working on it in Python is a pain in the ass. You can't win. What you really wanted was a language that's "easy to write" like Python, but with static or optional types, maybe better thread handling, and at this point the interpreter isn't doing much for you so it might as well be compiled. There are tons of cases where you just want a "better C" or "Python but faster and with static types", and for the longest time the Landscape of Popular Languages just had a giant hole there.
We needed that space filled and Go delivered. I'm usually very critical of Go, but I can't hate on it for being the wrong kind of language. It's definitely the right kind of language for these "goldilocks" problems that aren't too high or too low level, too big or too small. Part of being a good programmer is understanding that languages are tools, and you need to pick one that fits your problem. Go deserves all the success and praise it's gotten for being a language that fits actual problems.
>it's the feeling that could produce this response that they should be optimizing for
As near as I can tell, this is exactly how Apple got to be Apple and they already know how it's done. When people I know who have owned non-recent macs describe them, it's like they're having some kind of profound emotional experience. They don't even talk about it like it's a computer. I've never heard them say things like "having all the applications go to the blue 'Applications' icon on the dock is great," even though that's a useful feature they seem to understand and enjoy using, they say "it's so easy to find things" or "it just works". I know a longtime OSX user who is particularly detail-oriented and I asked him why he liked working with Sprinter vans[1] as opposed to trucks. He explained that they handled more like big cars than trucks, which is handy for maneuvering in cities and backing into cramped loading docks. He had no problem discussing his preference in detail without any prompting, the same way I'll tell anyone who asks that I like headset microphones to desktop ones because it's one fewer peripheral to manage and I have my desk laid out just right. When he talks about his Apple products being good, he just says they "work."
So clearly they've succeeded in the past at giving people things that they really really like. They like them so much that they don't even dwell on the specific things that make them so likeable. I've never made anyone like anything that much in my life, and if I had a process for it I can't imagine why I'd stop.
I'm a pretty die hard Apple guy starting from the mid 80s, and I find a lot resonates with your friend's "they work" example. Me, I love the fact that the machines are beautiful, but also functional in these subtle ways. Like the fact that you can open the laptops with a finger -- they're balanced correctly, the hinges are and the closing mechanism are calibrated s.t. you can lift the lid without the base coming up. Such a pointless bit of design, really, but it's so satisfying that somebody spent a bunch of time working on that. To say nothing of the trackpads, which were just an order of magnitude better than any trackpad on any other brand of laptop I've ever used. Maybe high end PCs have caught up by now, I don't know. Yet.
There's something about things made with such passion, such attention. They stir up the religious impulse. I really feel that, for the first time since the Jobs comeback, I'm on the verge of losing that religion, at least wrt the Mac line. (The iPhones still seem obsessed over in all the right ways, as far as I can see.)
>An interesting example would be Call of Duty: Infinity Warfare.
The differences between the market of people buying console-focused first-person shooters and the one for virtual reality headset systems make this comparison not really work.
Call of Duty was originally a much-beloved FPS series during a time when the genre was dominated by multiplayer games with high skill ceilings and "twitch" or reflex-based mechanics. They catered to the market available to them at the time, which was enthusiast gamers with the hardware required to run 3D video games (and to a lesser extend internet access that could play them online.) Consoles had existed for a while, but they weren't always in the position they are now. CoD 2 was released in late 2005, the Xbox 360 was released right around the same time, and the PS3 wouldn't come out until the next year. Internet multiplayer has been a reality on the PC since the 90's but Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network didn't even exist until the early 2000's. Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox famously didn't support internet multiplayer, but its PC version did.
By this point it's obvious that the numbers in gaming are shifting. The relatively low sticker price of a gaming console means you don't have to work with the segment of the population who have enthusiast-grade computers. Pretty much anyone can afford to buy an Xbox 360. Crucially, the expense of console gaming isn't frontloaded. The most expensive part of being in the PC gaming segment was (and still is) either buying a bunch of components and assembling yourself, or spending even more for a prebuilt. Assembling computer parts is actually not that hard, but not assembling computer parts is even easier, and you can walk out of any department store with a home console for a few hundred dollars. You'll spend more than that over time from subscriptions, peripherals, more expensive games, etc., but you won't have to spend a grand up front just to start playing.
Call of Duty's publisher, Activision, observed that this new pie is titanic compared to the old one and decided to focus on grabbing a slice of it. There's now a market available to them that's way bigger, will pay the same amount of money for the disk, and doesn't necessarily need things like a dedicated server with admin features. Their new approach of releasing titles on a more annual schedule for this market works because it's substantially larger.
On the VR side of things, an HTC Vive costs eight hundred dollars. The Oculus Rift, which is just the headset and has no hand controllers or "room scale" features like the Vive, will still run you $599. Its "Touch" hand controllers became available only recently and buying those will send you up to the same price point as the Vive. Keep your wallet out, because VR applications require high end GPUs with as much memory as possible, like the Nvidia GTX 1060, which is likely to run you $270 or more. Today's virtual reality options are restricted to dedicated enthusiasts with expendable income to a much greater extent than early Call of Duty games were. Aiming for a market other than "VR enthusiasts" is senseless, there is no other market.
There are VR products that aren't quite so ludicrously expensive, like the Gear VR that uses a phone, but my experience is that they have very little to offer and casual consumers aren't going to line up to buy games for them.
Fun fact: once you know to look, and provided they're close enough to the camera, you can sometimes see the view-ee's eyes making small side to side movements as they read lines of text from the prompter.
Sure, but the unstated assumption there is that stage won't also force-feed you the side of a tractor trailer through your windshield.
Currently Tesla's cars act as though they've satisfied that assumption even though they haven't, and someone died over it. Tesla absolutely should not be acting like they've created a self-driving car with safety features that let you ignore the road when in fact they are driving assists and you still have to maintain awareness.
I'm shocked they reacted to the complaints at all. Chrome is infamous for painful UX blunders that Google refuses to acknowledge, let alone fix. Mouse thumb buttons are permanently bound to forward and back, the only workaround is to use your mouse's driver or a third-party input mapper to bind them to something else. The Android version cannot re-order tabs (or use extensions. Seriously.) The Google product forums are a sad wasteland of people with simple problems shouting into the void. Here's a thread from 2010:
These advanced power users want the unfathomable ability to install Chrome in a different directory. The only solution involves downloading the Windows "Junction" utility and creating a symbolic link. Surprisingly, an actual employee (uh, "Googler," whatever that means) deigns to appear, but only to inform everyone that there is no solution except to download Chrome from Google Pack. The Pack version won't let you pick a location either, but its default is different, or at least it was until Google Pack was discontinued.
You know what, I think I'm just going to see how Firefox has been doing. I can't even remember why I switched.
Firefox on Android. Been using it for a few days with uBlock origin and it seems quite worthwhile.
In general I've found that FF have been proactively fixing their perf, memory and usability stories. With exception to the rare occurrence such as this, Chrome has been on a steady decline.
I was surprised to even see the article posted because I didn't think there was a lot of doubt about this. I have no special knowledge of or interest in cholera, Haiti, or the UN, but I've known since around this time last year that the most recent outbreak was likely caused by UN peacekeepers improperly handling sewage. I stumbled upon this knowledge by... reading about it on Wikipedia. I wasn't even studying Haiti or the relief mission, I was just bored. If there was a cover-up going on, it was apparently the worst cover-up in history. Personally, I would bet on some knee-jerk untruths on top of a heaping pile of incompetence rather than a real organized hush job, based on having skimmed Wikipedia again to refresh my memory[0]. For instance, the relief mission initially denied responsibility because they have sanitation standards. I personally would have checked to make sure those standards weren't being ignored before I used them as an excuse so a reporter couldn't find out for me, which is exactly what happened (Note: MINUSTAH is the acronym for the UN relief mission, it makes sense in French):
>MINUSTAH officials issued a press statement denying the possibility that the base could have caused the epidemic, citing stringent sanitation standards. The next day, October 27, reporter Jonathan M. Katz of the Associated Press visited the base and found gross inconsistencies between the statement and the base's actual conditions.
Later, they took groundwater samples ("despite UN assertions that it was not concerned about a possible link between its soldiers and the disease") and announced they tested negative. Lying about test results definitely sounds like something you'd do during a cover-up, except apparently the tests weren't even done right:
>However, an AP investigation showed that the tests were improperly done at a laboratory in the Dominican Republic with no experience of testing for cholera.
I poked around the article that quote cites[1], which claims the tests were conducted at a regular hospital (with a surprisingly spiffy website: [2]) by an obesity specialist. Apparently you'd want those tests run somewhere more specialized because cholera is tricky and you get false negatives all the time. I'm not sure how available those facilities are, maybe there legitimately wasn't a better option, or maybe there was and somebody is just really bad at their job. If there was a deliberate, coordinated deception involved, I'd hope the conspirators would at least find a medical facility that would give their story more credibility.
Attributions to malice or incompetence aside, it's definitely clear that the relief mission and friends have not handled this event very well. There were some amounts of stupefying incompetence and bald corruption, and they should be held accountable regardless of what the proportions were. This extends beyond the current cholera situation, we could just as easily be talking about something like Cité Soleil, a large shantytown outside Port-au-Prince with a history of extreme poverty and armed conflict. That said, the other side of the story is that Haiti is an incredibly troubled country with a history of natural disasters, unstable government, and terrible epidemics. Any country would struggle with one of those, but Haiti wrestles with all of them at once. An earthquake wipes out infrastructure, which allows disease to spread unchecked, which hamstrings the economy, and so on. The relief mission is there because Haiti sorely needs it, even if it sucks and Haitians deserve a better one.
There's some additional nuance to Sergeant Major Sixta and his enforcement of the grooming standard. His intention was not to psychologically trick his marines into being good soldiers by way of facial hair. The idea was to set himself up as a common annoyance that the marines shared without actually harming anybody, reducing combat effectiveness, or undermining his own authority. The marines are all comrades when it comes to Sixta. They all think he's an asshole together. That sense of camraderie is priceless in groups of soldiers, and it can't be bought. If they weren't all pissed at him, they would certainly be pissed at something else, and the likely targets are the other officers or each other. Sixta is a convenient lightning rod for the base level of resentment that's always going to be there. Nobody needs to like him all that much for him to do his job.
The whole concept sounds insane, and it is insane and probably a completely bad idea, but it's important to remember that marine recon units are not like most groups of workers. They have a lot of downtime, they get yelled at more, and other people are telling them what to do basically all of the time. My boss screaming about my chin hair would cripple my output, but that's probably not going to make a marine lose his next fight. Frankly, there's not a lot we can apply to normal office environments here. There are no conceivable workplace scenarios where you need to play negative head games with a group of armed twentysomethings in the desert.
> And hey, managers and leads reading this, you should always remember that every one of your people are volunteers.
That's, sadly, just the privilege of the growing industry like ours. Majority of population are not volunteers, they're little more than slaves and managers know that very well. The fact that you absolutely, positively need a job and that you won't find another one quickly is one of the strongest ways of keeping workers in line, and what lets many of the higher-ups be openly and freely abusive towards their employees.
I'm not complaining about IT here. We just need to remember that our industry is special right now, and that it won't last forever.
The difference is whether the decision is based on where the money is today or where the money's been historically.
The board game analogy is pretty apt. In The Settlers of Catan, players compete to reach 10 Victory Points by developing a robust and healthy colony. Settlements are worth one VP each, and upgrading one to a city makes it worth two. The city also pays out double resources, and it's relatively difficult to stop a player from building cities. I might observe that players who win tend build all their settlements and upgrade as many of them into cities as possible, so I decide going into this game that's what I'll do. I decided on that strategy without actually taking this game's state into account, and I will probably not do very well if this game is unlike games I've seen before.
Alternately, I might just build whatever seems appropriate given the resources I'm getting. This is "playing the board." The strategy for this game is based on the current game's state, not general knowledge of the game's rules in a vacuum or observations of prior games.
If someone studies historical trends and concludes that people with skills related to broadly applicable inventions will get paid a lot, like people who can make steam engines or program computers, they're using the first strategy. They didn't look at today's conditions at all, they noted that life in general seems to cause good salaries and specific types of skills to coexist. If they instead just show up to their first day of college, look up the average starting salaries for recent graduates in every department, and join one with the highest number that they feel confident they can graduate from, they're using the second strategy. The end result could be identical and they wind up writing software either way, but the strategies were formed using totally different methods.
Catan very much requires "playing to luck", and I wonder how that fits into the rest of the analogy. Sure, there's an optimal strategy, but because of the resource discard rules on rolled 7s (the most common roll, of course), you very often have to make the purchase that you can. It's either that or not make a purchase at all and lose out to the discard.
"Playing to luck" is different than "playing to the board" in my book because it requires making probabilistic decisions that have no place in, say, Chess.
The main difference is that the coin is just a coin, buying it won't make you a shareholder and you aren't subject to the regulation that IPOs and shareholders are. That regulation makes it difficult to scam investors by starting a dummy company, pretending it's a valuable operation, selling shares in an IPO, and then running away with the money. Doing this with an ICO is much easier, and there's a lot of concern about how many ICOs are frauds.