I co-organize a handful of Meetup groups, and we already pay a non-negligible annual fee. There's definitely money to be made.
Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that.
It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring" tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" offer (2-3x fee hike) more "reasonable".
So we started our meetup group before meetup.com existed and rely more on eventbrite. If I had been running our events through meetup only and on this fee structure, I'd be paying $400+/month vs the $15 I was ok with paying before to offer a secondary listing of my event. I think the ceiling of fees people are willing to pay is closer to the $15 though.
Ultra-marathons and ultra-endurance events are very much less of a young person sport, and we are still trying to figure out exactly why performance can keep increasing into the 40s and even early 50s. Marathoning is a considerably younger peak though, usually thought to be 20-35, so depends on whether you think that is "young" or not :)
Look at the following table that has been compiled about how much contribution from the body's aerobic and anaerobic systems are used for various race distances:
Certificated is definitely a valid word, though perhaps not in "layperson English". In (Commonwealth) legalese, share holdings are referred to as either uncertificated or certificated.
Even the median income comparison is probably too favourable - Wuhan and LA are apples to oranges. I'm sure LA is one of the higher-income cities in the US, and Wuhan is one of the lower.
LA actually isn't super high. Median income is only about 2/3rds of the real top cities (DC suburbs have a median of almost $100k, LA is more like $60)
It's pretty equal actually. Work -> Reward. If you then go on living a life on a boat, meditate in a monastery, or enjoy hipster life in San Francisco are your choices and you pay for them accordingly. Please explain to me how one person working 5 years in the valley and retiring for the rest of the life in Philippines got "equal pay" with someone working in the Philippines from the start until they are dead.
What if I'm working for a global company based in Malaysia?
Would I be happy to be paid the regular rate of a Malaysian developer while I live in Silicon Valley? Or would I demand a higher pay? Does that mean everyone in the Malaysian office gets paid more? Does the company go under?
GitLab is in a weird position because they have workers in both. We don't chastise a local Malaysian company for paying the local rates, but we do for GitLab?
It's an unfair reality, but not an unlivable one. A cheaper lifestyle isn't necessarily a degraded one.
That still doesn't make it fair. I personally believe these global companies could step up and try to change that. But that's if it weren't about profits - which is is.
I think that's great example of why this is a difficult conversation. Global commodities are typically fixed and can be prohibitive to some localities.
Who budges? Do the global companies lower their prices or do local economies step up and pay more? Or even are they able to pay more?
I think that's not entirely fair. While MS could definitely invest more resources in F#, I wouldn't say it's been neglected (or dying). Just to mention a few developments in recent years:
1) IDE support via Ionide in VS Code
2) Easy install with NuGet
3) cross-platform FSI supported via NET Core
4) some pretty cool updates recently around anonymous records, optional yields, nameof (just to mention a few)
5) no breaking changes (I'm aware of, anyway)
I'd say the future looks pretty bright for F#. It's really resonating with an audience that wants "functional where I want, but practical where I need".
I tend to agree with OP. I do see some improvements in F#, but a lot of effort porting those back into C#. I'm not sure if there's any pull away from F# for that effort, but there may be.
In all fairness, I haven't touched Visual Studio (for either F# or C# dev) in at least 18 months, so you're probably right.
That being said, UI isn't a strength on .NET to begin with, so I think it's unfair to point that criticism at F#. Uno seems to doing some great things though.
The F# SQL type provider, however, is great. For those who don't know, this generates design- and compile-time types based on your (live) DB schema, enabling auto-complete and compile-time type checking for SQL queries. I do agree that Ionide/VS Code support isn't quite there yet.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know what you're referring to by "application architecture design".
It's definitely not perfect - I never claimed otherwise. I'm just saying that everything points to MS increasing support for F#, not the opposite.
Sorry but remark only reveals lack of knowledge of what Forms, WPF and UWP are capable of, their related tooling and component libraries from the likes of Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, among others.
Practically most modern Windows applications are mix of .NET and C++ libraries accessed via C++/CLI, P/Invoke or COM/UWP.
Plain old Win32 is left for legacy, games and a couple of unicorns like Adobe's Photoshop.
Application architecture design are the tools available in Visual Studio Enterprise for end-to-end application development, and modeling mapping into code modules, also known as Application Lifecyle Management.
> Sorry but remark only reveals lack of knowledge of what Forms, WPF and UWP are capable of, their related tooling and component libraries from the likes of Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, among others.
I'm fully aware of WinForms, WPF, UWP, having built applications with all of them at one stage or another.
As far as UI frameworks go, they're serviceable - but no way am I recommending .NET just because of them (well, maybe WinForms if someone's writing that type of application).
Absolutely it is effective. Of course, it presupposes consultative decision making as a cultural norm.
The idea of a single person owning any decision cuts a lot of crap, blame-shifting, and responsibility-dodging. The idea that you are expected to gather input from those that have it, and synthesize that into the best decision you can, makes information flow up the organization where it does some good.
The “disagree and commit” works both ways. I once had an issue that I felt very strongly about and made a “disagree and commit” phone call to a VP 3 levels above me on an issue I had been intimately involved in. I stated a coherent case. He heard me out with respect. I executed a plan I disagreed with. Life went on.
Also, in cases where I was the decision-maker, when things went bad, I knew who to go to when creating Plan B. When you own the decision, you own the recovery plan.
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Edit to add: W.r.t. egos, the cultural norms play a role there, too. At the time I was there, people outside Intel viewed Intel people as arrogant — but inside the company that exact same behavior was not viewed that way at all. Being very direct and expecting clear thinking was just the way we interacted. It was kind of an inside joke that once you had absorbed Intel meeting culture, going to, say, a PTA or church board meeting would drive you nuts and you had to be careful not to seem abrasive when all you were trying to do is surface issues in a clear and cogent way.
That's fascinating, and exactly the type of working environment I'm looking to create.
Outside the US, I think we (rightly or wrongly) view American working culture as blunt and direct. From what you've said here, Intel seems like a very good case study to learn from.
I find the stroke anecdote fairly unconvincing. The man clearly still had the capacity for language - he was miming the action of a tennis racquet. Sign language is still language. Just because something went haywire between his brain and his mouth doesn't mean he lacked language.
I also don't think you can easily dismiss the conscious of animals by saying they lack language. Most animals (dogs, whales, birds, etc) seem to engage in limited communication via audible signals.
As with most philosophical questions, though, it all hangs on the definition of "consciousness". It may not even be a concept worth defining.
It is certainly communication, but I think there's a difference between communication and language. The latter requires more structure: perhaps grammar, a finite fixed set of predetermined words, etc.
You don't really need consciousness to communicate, since it's just transfer of information between different entities - for example, an organism could secrete chemicals that are detected by neighboring members of the species, as I think it's the case for some plants.
Structured communication might be different, as I think there has to be a something that composes the particular "phrase".
What I understood from reading Noam Chomsky is that language was reduced to being able to speak (collectively, not in a human by human case). That in this, we were a unique species.
Your second point is what came to mind when I read it, and found it rare that no one has pointed that out: dogs and cats can definitely express themselves to some degree of complexity, and we can say that they have language.
I mean, at 6 am, when my dog starts barking, he definitely means he's hungry, and we both know that: knowledge has been conveyed, and thus, it's a form of language.
Has anyone any insight on this? Have I misunderstood Chomsky?
See my other reply in this post why I thing he is wrong about universal grammer. I don't have any problem conceiting that humans are the only species with advanced language skills ;)
Fwiw, it appears you're saying "[human] sign language is complex; simple use of physical signalling is not language". But, your statement could be read as disparaging sign language as "not language", something I'd strongly refute.
I said that sign language has linguistic structure so it's language.
Proper language requires this structure, just making sings is not automatically language. Just the ability to signal using single atomic words, in some medium (signs, verbal, written, machine) is not a language.
The whole piece is fluff. It focuses on one or two minor, anecdotal observations regarding aspects of ideas about consciousness. The fact alone that in split-brain patients consciousness is often not preserved in the left hemisphere undermines all speculation involving cytological similarities between species.
I feel like this is a good place to recommend the Radiolab episode Words [1], though it's not so much about consciousness as about language, the development of language, and communication without a shared language. I found it a very intriguing listening experience, hope others will enjoy it as well. Part is about the man without words mentioned elsewhere in the comments as well (a person who learned language as an adult).
Most people seem happy shelling out $100-200 per year for a membership. $2 per attendee per event is simply exorbitant, noone will be able to afford that.
It's so bizarrely extreme, I can only assume it's a psychological "anchoring" tactic - a patently ludicrous number that makes the "real" offer (2-3x fee hike) more "reasonable".