1,720 karma · joined July 15, 2011
Across, I don't know, 20-25 languages at this point? Although I only actively use 3-5, depending on how you want to define actively.
Where "judge" is proxy for a nominally impartial third party who nominally has the experience to make an informed decision which reasonably protects the interests of both parties, the public interest, and our stated commitments to civil liberties. And we already make routine use of judges for this function in cases where the data or other artifacts are not possessed by the party who wants extraordinary permission to access them.
I ask because there are a few integrations like the DuckDuckGo bang search which should probably be updated, but only once a consistent domain & query profile are in place.
The asteroid was the root cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. The direct cause was ecological collapse.
To oversimplify things a bit, the impact event kicked up enough pollution to undercut the food chain by starving out anything that relied on photosynthesis, which starved out the herbivores, which starved out the carnivores and omnivores.
Typical asteroids are not large enough to wipe out all human life in one go. A large impact could kill billions between direct fatalities and follow-on deaths via starvation and plagues, but your survivor population would still easily exceed anything we can sustainably place on Mars (or any other extraterrestrial location) within the next few hundred years.
Even if it completely refactored modern civilization, you'd probably see some population capable of organizing and recovering a sustainable society. And that is with mass starvation, with plagues due to loss of sanitation infrastructure, with conventional farming being disrupted for years, and with the assumption that some idiot decides it's time for a preemptive nuclear war.
Furthermore, any sustainable Martian colony you could produce could equally well be isolated in a hardened bunker on Earth, if surviving a large asteroid impact were the only concern.
To wipe out all humanity with one impact, you would need to hit the Earth with something in a slightly larger class - say, the Moon.
If not...stop worrying about stuff that doesn't make that big a difference to your business!
Which of course continues to elude many people who would rather waste time arguing that $29 is too expensive. And this despite the fact that, as a business expense, $29 is quickly eclipsed by "at least one person in the business has to care about it at some point in a given month."
The problem comes in when you try to do things like "solve this for the thousand most common banks, while not making users enter their credentials every time, with adequate coordination with each bank to avoid being blocked for logging into numerous accounts, with adequate security to avoid mass-leaking online banking credentials."
http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/python3/#python3-support
http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode-in-2-and-3/
Which kind of sums up the whole Python 3 situation.
Pick an initial model & set of probabilistic priors. Evaluate it with a "goodness of fit" heuristic function, then iterate & keep measuring while keeping the best solution discovered.
As long as the initial parameters are sort of reasonable, it will give you pretty good results for many problems.
It obviously doesn't get rid of the need for a better understanding of the problem. Improvements to how well your features describe important attributes of the problem tend to be strictly superior to your choice of learning algorithm (i.e. your exact process of iteration).
But as long as the initial solution is more or less on target? You can solve many problems by picking a solution that you know is inadequate, then iterating.
Is it something you can easily and obviously do, in place, when you find links to spam & malware sites?
Or do you have to know a special URL?
Although it never hurts to involve a lawyer, instead of relying on your own amateur interpretation of the contract and the law.
But so what? You're enjoying it, and from the sounds of it you're probably making enough that nobody involved is going to starve or end up buried under a debt mountain. Managing the downside risk works out to "use a lawyer and don't sign anything with stupid terms."
As long as you're keeping your skills up, your failure mode is "quit, get a job somewhere playing code monkey for (floor $60k/yr, ceil ???)." You've got a safety net that is virtually unrivaled in history.
So go nuts, be young, spend a few years making mistakes and learning stuff. As career trajectories go, "failed startup" is far better for your resume than "agency seat filler" - at least for the next year or three, and assuming you do your due diligence with regard to skills maintenance, networking, and documenting your expertise (which would be equally important as an agency seat filler).
Yeah, there are better ways to optimize for career trajectory. If that's your sole priority, you should probably land a job at Googlesoft or in a field like finance, then spend the next year or three focused on networking your ass off.
But would you be happy with it, during or after? Probably less so.
Since neither option is exactly going to have you standing in the bread line, even if your choice of venture turns out to be a spectacular failure - you're free to choose based on personal fulfillment, not just socioeconomic leverage.
And, you know, it could work out. Which would be nice, but it's not something that's necessary for it to be worth your time.
If you're using a Fitbit anyway, an on-body sensor is going to be more accurate than not, and it's there.
You also want people who will (1) be happy paying you real money if you can reliably produce value, and (2) be more or less content to let you be the expert as long as you're on the ball about producing value and communicating effectively.
You do NOT want cases where people will complain that $20/mo is too expensive, or that a $3 business app doesn't have enough features.
Once you pick an area or two that you have interest in, your first steps should be trying to track down and connect with people. Can you do that? If not, it's probably a bad domain for you. Then, customer development interviews. Learn about them before you work with them.
Existing domain experience from previous stuff you've done in your career is a good starting point. Never worked around real estate agents but have intimate knowledge of how to sell construction companies? That should tell you something about where to look first.
It's a matter of applying conditional probabilities, really. Want to work with barber shops but find that's too general? Okay, what about hipster barber shop owners in their early 30s with a master's degree in English Lit? Now it's suddenly way too specific. Somewhere between the two, you become the ONE person in the city who is right for THEM.
Also, meetups are mainly good for random socialization and free beer. Sometimes networking, but often only incidentally. You need to get way more targeted than "tech people in my area who also want socialization and free beer." Scrounging at meetups is the last resort of people who don't know who their customer is yet.
Being able to find your customer is one of the first things you have to learn about them. And to start out, go about it like you would trying to find any other thing - just, be a lot more determined and creative about it than you would trying to find a local pizza joint to order from.
Say you want to land a heritage language school as a client. Where can you find these people? Where can you find their clients - who might be happy to talk to you at length about which schools in the area are best for people who are concerned about heritage language education?
* Get on Google, Google Maps, Yelp and search for heritage language schools my_city.
* Check forums and trade publications relevant to heritage language schools. If you don't know them, find out while you're learning the other stuff.
* Track down bloggers who write about heritage language education, see if they mention any specific schools / issues, research those. Connect with any users you find in e.g. comments, guest bloggers, etc.
* Guess that many people who are customers of heritage language schools are second or third generation immigrants. Where else can you find these people? Are there churches, community centers, or local shopping resources that also target them?
Find your customers - by way of their customers or competitors if necessary. All of the above probably have something useful to teach you about making your business succeed.
Are you building this for users or customers? If customers, why would you want to test and develop it against people who aren't your customer?
Use existing knowledge of some narrowly specific type of business to give you intimate knowledge of the unique concerns those people have, how they talk about it, and what boundary conditions are going to affect which solutions do and don't fit well (e.g. gourmet pizza joints near college campuses, or heritage language schools to steal a previous patio11 example).
If you don't have that sort of knowledge already, talk to people until you do. If you do have that sort of knowledge already, keep talking to people anyway because you still have plenty more to learn.
Use knowledge of this specific customer to find, approach, and pitch clients who are a good match for your target customer. If you don't know how to find them, you don't know them yet.
Then, pitch them:
"You can have me do X which will cause money to happen for you."
"I'm aware that you have concern_a and concern_b, which I will handle using specific_approach, whereas generic_person_235089 doesn't even have a clue about these important_issues."
LISTEN to what they say, then use it to refine your ability to select potential clients and to improve your future pitches. Easy, easy, easy hack: remember the words they use to describe things and use EXACTLY those words when pitching them.
Run 10 pitches, review, repeat with another 10 target customers. Make money.
Then, go read tptacek's guide to scaling your practice:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615
P.S. It's okay to be a generalist on the back end. It's not okay to be a generalist when you pitch. Address a clear, specific problem for a clear, specific target customer using clear, specific language which shows sensitivity to the issues as THEY see it and talk about it.
98% of people pitch by talking about things that are really their problems, not the client's problems. Actually, saying 2% of people clear that bar is probably being too generous. If you aren't sure, a good trick is to ONLY use language that you've heard come out of a customer's mouth.
Pitches are as personalized as reasonably possible (review their website, product reviews, recent news).
Use what you learn from each to improve targeting & approach.
It's primarily a matching failure between what you see and what your inner ear, proprioception, and sense of pressure are telling you is happening, as well as any other visual input if it's a mixed-vision system. Mostly inner ear, and vision if present.
Also it's mostly rotational motion that triggers it - but you'll easily hit that with just the small motions of your head and the looseness of the headset.
Which is ridiculously hard to compensate for since you have to get extremely precise, low-noise motion & environmental pose tracking, with extremely tight time limits - and then it has to be fed into the rendering engine, which has to react in time to fool the operator.
But the evolutionary rationale is also right. Your brain evolved to freak out in the event of persistent sensory mis-match because it's a pro-survival feature. The naturally occurring causes are things like severe food poisoning.
> I thought that I was going to have problems as a user of reading glasses, but that turned out to not be a problem.
IIRC, the reason is that VR stimuli are "focused at infinity." It also helps that you're trying to take in the image, not the pixels or other fine details.
Trying to read small text at a distance of ~ 20 cm requires relatively precise focus. A picture of a cat that's taking up your entire field of view does not.
This comes somewhere on the tech tree after "practical flying cars" and "solving world hunger." But eventually, sure, why not.
> That said, could you be more specific about the problems caused with our current VR technology, and the reason they happen?
The most common and superficial health issue with VR (and AR) would be simulator sickness. The visual cues don't match what the brain expects via other sense data, so you get sick. It happens to some people much more easily than others.
More direct hazards:
Safety issues, e.g. tripping on stuff you can't see while operating a VR headset, or being distracted due to virtual stimuli.
Vision impairment, primarily in children younger than 6-10 years, but potentially also in older users with compromised vision systems.
Temporary visual impairment, typically after sessions longer than 20 minutes. Pronounced eyestrain due to unnatural focal behavior, object tracking, display quality, and optical alignment.
Nice papers to read:
Costello, "Health and Safety Issues associated with Virtual Reality - A Review of Current Literature" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.3...
Viire, "Health and safety issues for VR". It gets cited around lots even though it's over 10 years old now, but I couldn't find a free copy. Look it up on ACM if you have access. You can preview the first page at the following URL. http://www.deepdyve.com/lp/association-for-computing-machine...
Stanney, "Realizing the full potential of virtual reality: human factors issues that could stand in the way." Starts on page 39 of the following PDF. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/232654060_Pen-based_...
You'll note that these are all late 90s. VR research was much better funded then. You can find more recent stuff though, at least with appropriate database access. More work did get done, but shoehorned under different keywords since "virtual reality" stopped being trendy.
> You are worried about supposed problems that came from 10+ year old tech. (from sibling's child)
Nope. The main difference between 10 year old VR headsets and the ones you can buy today is that the use of bulky CRT eyepieces vs. LED-based eyepieces. The middle ground being LEDs with gradually improving dot pitch.
The human issues remain more or less the same, seeing as nobody has re-engineered the human body in the last 10 years.
My grad advisor had been involved in VR & AR research going back - I forget, 20 or 30 years. So I did a fair amount of reading on the topic. You can make slightly better headsets today, particularly if money is no object - but the core limitations are really the human factors, and the timing constraints necessary to accommodate human senses and rate of motion.
The long ones, not so much. How popular are existing TLDs like .info or .name?
Given sufficient time, maybe the others will amount to more than an unabashed cash grab. But not this decade. Probably not the next, either. And at that point, you're talking about a situation where "remembering a domain name" is even more of a broken process than it is today.
How will we connect to computers on the global network of fifty years from now? Two hundred? I'm betting it's not going to look like http://blog.johnjohnson.photography or whatever new list ICANN releases next time they want to play.
"""
I'm not currently seeking a full-time W-2 role. However, I do provide consulting in that area and I would be happy to discuss how I can help you do {{ X }} and my upcoming availability.
link-to-supporting-content
link-to-supporting-content
Thanks,
Me, Foocorp
"""
If anything comes of it, good. If nothing else, you increase the surface are of people who know you as a consultant of {{ X }}.
1. Know some narrow segment of businesses well enough to have an idea what problems they're facing and how it translates to dollars, or do enough research to learn same.
2. Track down people matching that segment and pitch them. Use your existing connections if you have them, make connections or go cold if you don't. You will spend enormous effort making new connections either way, so having connections to start with isn't the long-term advantage it might seem.
Note: this requires sales skills. If that's a problem, consulting may not be for you - at least, not as an independent. One of the key selling points of an agency is having the principals deal with much of the lead generation, sales, reputation building, and so forth.
But seriously, if you want to start, start. Stop worrying that you'll be bad at it at first - because you will be, no longer how long you worry about it. And at the same time, they're hiring you because they expect to get value from it.
Go out, make a fool of yourself in front of a few prospective clients, learn stuff in so doing, then do a better job pitching the next few.
If you're half decent at public speaking, see posts by patio11 & bdunn re: throwing events related to the topic you consult on. Being the person in the front of the room at a professional event automatically positions you as an authority figure. If you're terrible at public speaking, this still mostly works if you run the event but invite other people to give the actual talks.
1. Decide to call yourself a consultant.
2. Make it stick by doing the job.
The "something" can be quite a lot of things, while "good enough" is more or less driven by "it would take one of our senior staff at least few weeks to get up to speed with it."
(For a more in-depth walkthrough, go read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4247615)