xzion

The Nexus Trilogy, by Ramez Naam. Rereading it at the moment, my favourite modern sci-fi series by far.

There's a subreddit with the same name that calls out these kind of techniques if you're hungry for more examples.

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/

Easy onboarding, thanks! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/xzion

I just can't agree with the recommendation to read the comments before articles you find online.

Critical thinking is such an important skill for everyone, not just engineers, and this habit all but eliminates it. You go into an article with a framed opinion of what it's trying to convey, and spend the time reading the article looking for confirmation of that opinion rather than thinking critically for yourself.

This might be OK in some communities like HN where people are usually pretty reasonable and the site seems fair. But it becomes a habit and can be dangerous in other places where the top comment could be paid for or manipulated without you knowing, seeding opinions and confirming them as you view the content.

Definitely read the comments. The author is spot on about the gems and lessons to be found. But do it after you've read the article, and thought about what it meant for you.

Looking forward to a followup talk of him gloating now this bug has been reported

I don't understand how your suggestion enforces non-transferability. If the scalper pay $100 for a ticket and the ticket holder receives a $50 rebate at the event, the scalper just adds $50 to the price they resell at.

Like I said, I understand the problem exists because of the economics. But there's nothing to stop us from building a system that enforces non-transferability (through identification), and preventing resale of tickets at increased prices by third parties. It just doesn't add any value for event organisers to use this new system.

I understand that this is an economics problem; the ($5b?) market exists because there is significantly more demand than supply and ticket prices are not adjusted to accommodate this imbalance. Why that's the case I'm not sure. Perhaps that's another avenue to investigate for solving the problem but not what I had in mind (partly because I like affordable tickets).

Seeing scalpers as harmful is definitely an emotional response. Popular events go on sale at a set time and set price, with "equal" opportunity for any fan to get a ticket. Scalpers claim significant amounts of the tickets and resell them at 200-1000% of the face value. My friends and I often miss out on tickets only to see hundreds available on third party resale sites. It also enables ticket scammers which are a huge problem as well. Many music artists and sports teams are very outspoken about their disappointment with the industry, die hard fans waiting at the gate miss out while the person with the most cash gets in. While I can appreciate the scalpers are taking advantage of an economic opportunity, I can't help but view them as the scum of the earth and would have no issue with eliminating their practice.

Any tips/examples on trying to sell a product that provides ethical/moral benefits but very little/nothing financially?

Some friends and I were throwing around ideas on how to eliminate scalping, a practice we get bitten by. We came up with some solutions that might work, but they don't provide any financial gain for event organisers so I couldn't see them going for it.

Is the post title referring to "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, or something else?

Awesome, had been planning to make something like this myself to keep track of all the gigs I get to. Nice simple UI, does exactly what I want it to. Keep it up!

Edit: Ok, two minor annoyances. Firstly, if gig details aren't found or listed for an artist, I can't manually enter the date/venue myself. Secondly, I'd like to be able to click the heading on my gig list to sort it by date/artist. Also getting errors pretty much every time I add a new artist, presumably just from overload.

I work at a medical device consultancy, but we're mostly developing custom Class B/C devices at the bare metal level. It sounds like you'll be developing a Class A device and cost isn't a huge issue so I'd probably recommend going the Android route. Find a reputable supplier who's worked with medical devices before, and check their availability guarantee (since the production lifetime of most Android devices is short).

Class A basically means follow common sense, so as long as document your architecture/design, use source control and test critical parts of the code you should be right to use whichever Android development framework you want.

I was really hope they refresh the R-Pi compute module at a pricepoint like this.

Mouse doesn't seem to work correctly on win64, left click just selects the window and right click gives standard minimize/maximize/close options. Also there's two scroll bars on the right hand side, where there should be zero.

I was able to tab down to the login form and enter credentials, but just got served with the "Please try again later" page, same as I'm getting in the browser at the moment.

But thanks!

this was infuriating