But, there are large-scale new things trundling down the pike. Global climate change, for one. I don't know if BH is involved with flood insurance damages, but large regions of the world are likely to be exposed to them that had not been before. There aren't any statistics to cover those changes. It's gonna be interesting.
As long as they have a granular understanding of the perceived vs actual risk profile across geographies over time, they'll be able to make huge sums of money by staying just adjacent to the high-risk areas.
Imagine three houses in a row. The risk of fire may be the same for all three. That changes as soon as the leftmost house catches fire. They would never insure that house; it's already on fire. The middle house has a statistically higher chance of catching fire than the rightmost house, yet the relative proximity to the fire drives fear up among both adjacent owners—actual risk vs perceived risk in a nutshell. Both are more likely to want to buy insurance, with the middle owner willing to pay more. The insurance provider can set premiums that take into account both the actual risk profile and the perceived risk profile.
It's reductive, but it illustrates a point: money is made when there is a delta between the perceived value and actual value. That usually happens when there's a fundamental transition that is unrecognized by the market. If you can spot the wave, you can ride it.
Climate change isn't a random event—it's an observable transition. And it's going to cause one hell of a wave.
Just launch a bunch of super-tiny, 1-AD regions so that you can have it on the map, and then rush to do region expansion within months of region launch. ;-)
Agree! My team all uses Clojure/ClojureScript for product development, and this has repeatedly been hailed as the most inviting book for getting started.
When Dart was released, I was curious to see if they'd position it as an alternative to Java on Android.
They hired kevmoo (a pretty well-respected Seattle area engineer and game dev) as a PM, which again led me to believe they were perhaps looking at game dev on Dart on Android. I fully expected them to start shipping Android with the Dart VM, open up a new set of Android packages for taking advantage of existing/native stuff, and boom: suddenly the Android ecosystem benefits from a new set of developers coming at it from the web angle. That's what Ludei and others have been trying to promote. This goes deeper into solving perf issues, however.
Now that Chrome tabs are represented as individual windows in Android 5.0, the line between "app" and "web app" on mobile is ever more blurry.
I think we place too much emphasis on visuals simply because they're more readily at-hand for the individual user, even when doing so forces those around that individual far outside their comfort zone. It creates a barrier, putting both sides on the defensive, at odds with each other.
Meanwhile, we drastically underestimate the potential utility of non-visual sensory augmentation. For instance, a hidden device providing vibrotactile information could provide far subtler, lower-level cues about the world around us, even to the point of widening the human experience to nearly limitless novel senses [0].
That's the direction I'd love to see us move wearables and technology in general: pervasive, yet unobtrusive.
1) The containing folder you're referring to is not part of the compiled artifact.
2) If you're feeling particularly adventurous, you could probably write a ClassLoader which knows how to resolve the full class identifier (including package) to its actual class, which needn't be in that directory structure, but at that point you're fighting 19 years of Java history.
3) Scala mitigates the crazy folder hierarchies by letting you structure the source more naturally (needn't be a 1:1 between package and folder structure, and even have multiple classes per file), and ensures the resulting class files are structured the way the JVM's default ClassLoader wants them. That said, many folks end up adopting the Java source style for consistency, especially in teams where they have to maintain legacy Java code anyhow.
I disagree. I'm employed by Amazon, and have gotten interviews with Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft without a degree of any kind. If you can prove you can keep up and have a body of work behind you, credentials matter much less.