Programming languages for non-programmers needs to be embedded in a vessel.
Excel is probably the quintessential vessel. When people are trying to solve a need they have, they will invest the effort to figure out the tools, including learning enough programming to solve their problems.
The Eve team emphatically, from day one, had this stance.
It is perhaps indicative of a key strategic error that the course of the public work on Eve did not involve as clear as picture of the target vessel as of the programming language, especially given the churning on the PL implementation that dominated the last phases of the public effort at Eve.
> Schemas: Schemaless does not mean no schema; instead, it means an implicit schema in the app (a particularly challenging misnomer for anyone outside our industry)
> That’s what everyone says but how many 100x’s are there really? I’ve been doing this a long time and there just aren’t that many.
> I don’t have the same pressures of a fund in liquidity, timing or the need for 100x returns. If I can consistently get 5x to 10x I’d take that all day long.
How many investors, angels, VCs or otherwise, focus on the 5x-10x return deals?
And are 5x-10x deals safer, meaning that more of a sure thing, than the 100x deals in terms of return? I.e. are VCs being rational by focusing on the 100x deals since 5x-10x deals aren't safer, or are they forgoing safer and better returns of the 5x-10x for the chance to become movers and shakers of the largest players?
I've asked a VC this question before. They said that in theory going after 5-10x returns sounds great but in practice no successful VC firms use this strategy. They all make their money from the few who "return the fund".
A friend of mine who graduated with honors from an Ivy econ program moved to Palo Alto and went into PE. I asked him why he didn't go into VC in the heart of venture capital.
He replied that PE was as close as you could get to formulaically printing money while seed-stage (and even later) VC was more like splattering paint at a wall and seeing what sticks, and that the former suited his personality better.
> We’ve had a few successes. One of our companies was acquired by an Accel backed company.
> The other is Saya, the first African company to pitch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Weeks before the event the founders didn’t even have passports!
It is very cool that there are already success stories.
Without ever being in Africa, I lack the knowledge and wonder if the current infrastructure is capable of supporting knowledge-based economy on a broad scale, but it's certainly good to see that high tech businesses could thrive there, and incubators are getting created.
Most of these countries are developing countries with low education levels so obviously it can't be broad, but of course in any country there will be a segment of the population who are well educated and/or affluent. Take China, most Chinese are dirt poor but because there are so many Chinese you can go to modern enclaves like Shanghai and never experience this poverty.
In general however return on investment tends to be high in developing countries because they lack so much. There are lots of businesses you can start with minimum competition. E.g. I've seen many stories about poorely educated Chinese getting rich in Africa. They start shops, facories and all sorts of stuff lacking
They can, and many do succeed. In the US right now, education is a proxy for class, so saying the uneducated Chinese can succeed is like saying the Chinese lower class can succeed, which isn't necessary true. It requires capital to start a business, not education.
> Obviously a manufacturer is not directly at fault when someone misuses their product, and they also are only selling what the consumer wants, but what level of responsibility do manufacturers have to help the consumer make good choices?
As much as I agree with the sentiment of responsible companies (with my upvote), IMHO the reality is that consumers are the ones calling the shots.
Demand is like a vacuum suction. When there is a demand there will be supply, even if some don't choose to provide on moral grounds, others will fill in. No demand, no supply.
The only responsibility that companies have is to make money, and that is done via making products consumers want. If consumers want to buy only from the responsible companies, all viable companies will be responsible.
They aren't all responsible because we don't all vote with our wallets that way.
Look at the demand for health food these days even causes McDonald's to offer salads. Change demand, and you change supply.
> We have an obesity epidemic. More people in this country are overweight than not overweight. It's becoming a national health crisis, and costing us a lot of money.
Each individual is responsible for his/her own health. We can't legislate unhealthy lifestyles away. We can only educate and motivate people to learn more and take control of their own health, starting from not visiting the highly popular junk food isles.
If you were using an email client that executes arbitrary HTML, you'd be owned since a long time anyway. That'd like using a browser that doesn't have any cross domain security boundary - it's just not a realistic attack vector, these things don't exist - or do you know an email client that actually interprets JS?
You don't need to execute JS in order to phish, as the original link alludes to with the html comment trick.
This particular comment thread was mostly about webmail clients. But to your specific question... take a look at the link for an incomplete list of email clients that runs JS
Excel is probably the quintessential vessel. When people are trying to solve a need they have, they will invest the effort to figure out the tools, including learning enough programming to solve their problems.