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minthd

686 karma · joined November 4, 2014

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minthd··on Subscription iPhones
Actually ,people in the end do pay more, but it's subtle.

Say you we're a customer that bought an iPhone every 2 years.

Now Apple's yearly plan looks like:

1. A new iPhone every year + Apple care

2. Same price

3. Don't have to deal with salesman at carrier store.

So more people will be tricked for new iPhone every year.

And once this becomes the standard , since Apple is a status symbol - suddenly buying a phone every 2 years carries less status.

minthd··on Why Is It So Difficult to Develop Drugs for Cancer? (2010)
You say that one key is experimenting on pets(which will have huge barriers in the west). In china, eating dogs is legal.So why haven't we seen such research coming from china, and especially successful drugs from there?
minthd··on Legendary Productivity and the Fear of Modern Programming
"Woz prototyped the guts of the Apple II, but needed a lot of help from people like Fernandez to turn it into reliable, repeatable hardware":

https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/3jyovw/woz_jobs_d...

minthd··on Computing 10,000x more efficiently (2010) [pdf]
The 10000x improvement is improvement in power * size. So you might be on the same ballpark.

What abut large scale neural networks - they aren't mentioned in your site . No plans for that ?

minthd··on Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Invests in SkyTran
In hong kong 90% of journeys are done using public transport.So the metaphor can be broken.
minthd··on Computing 10,000x more efficiently (2010) [pdf]
The bottleneck actually is arithmetic. "GPUs have much higher ALU throughput since the GPU chip area is almost entirely ALU"

http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/bidmach-machine-le...

Also on the horizon there is 3d chip manufacturing technology(3d-monolithic) ,with extremely large bandwidth between the two different layers of the chip,possibly being gpu + dram.

minthd··on Destroying Apple’s Legacy
>> Is Apple Radio really going to add that much to your bottom line?

They will try to use radio in 2 way:

1. Make it unqiue and hard to copy, to add one more reason for people to use their device.

2. When making content deals, it's hard to get good deals if you come without a large crowd of subscribers.So apple plan to to use your radio subscription as content negotiation tool, and than upsell you a tv service - and there's a lot of money there.

minthd··on Judge rules on taxi industry lawsuit: Compete with Uber or die
But still , that calls for something like UBER with democratic vote over it's decisions. And since most people will be consumers ,not employees of that service , the incentive towards how to manage it's drivers would be the same.
minthd··on Judge rules on taxi industry lawsuit: Compete with Uber or die
>> no worker protections

Worker protection should apply equally to everyone, not give preferential treatment to one group(taxi drivers) at the expense of most other groups who just have minimum wage laws and osha.

minthd··on Apple is a great copycat, but did they actually improve anything?
Android supports pressure sensitive touch at the API level since 2009, and There's a phone from 2015 that supports this from huawei. But they didn't create useful interactions with it.
minthd··on TvOS for Developers
But haven't things changed? Google can do good design today, unlike before.Do consumers not believe this ?
minthd··on Apache NiFi
There's nodered, an IOT dataflow engine. Seem to fit very well.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/node-red/

minthd··on An Introduction to Startups in Synthetic Biology
I'm not sure. With proterro working on making sugar at 1/3 of the cost(5 cents/pound) using synthetic bio, with solazyme selling specialized food components to the food industry, and with genomatica's technologies already running what seems like competitive BDO plants - it seems that SynBio can compete on cost.
minthd··on Apple's financial dependence on the smartphone is increasing
In general i agree - on the innovation front, Apple isn't so strong.But like it did with maps - through the sheer power of investment ,together with owning the platform/user and a bit of time ,now maps dominate IOS mapping apps. Maybe they could achieve some growth by continuing doing that ?

Also you mention opportunities being missed. Can you please expand ?

minthd··on Apple's financial dependence on the smartphone is increasing
20 years is a long time. What if virtual reality becomes the preferred entertainment method ? What if something other than phones becomes the new status symbol ? What if android manages to create an android status symbol phone or a unique android experiences ? What if due to some apps iMessage loses some of it's power ? what if itunes loses some of it's power ?
minthd··on The “Hitler at Home” stories of the pre-WWII American press
Not really. For example it was maybe possible to reliably warn other Jews. Or maybe help other Jews in countries that might in the future be aimed by Hitler find refuge.

Potentially they could have saved many.

minthd··on Notes on a tour of an Amazon distribution facility (2014)
How does the work for stowers is arranged ? do the computer give them specific sets of items to stow ? or is arranged according to the order the goods arrive ?

And what is this pallet land ? what's the benefit?

minthd··on The “Hitler at Home” stories of the pre-WWII American press
>> the horror of the concentration camps was not well known to the public during the war

But it was pretty well known for the british and american governments(since 1941 or at the latest 1942) , and even to this day, some details of said knowledge(the intelligence reports on decryptions on concentration camps communication) are not availble to historians.

One has to wonder why.

Actually when reading more about it, even if the American public would have known, it probably wouldn't have mattered much, judging by later genocides :

""no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence[genocide]. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060541644/metafilter...

Also another book shows how the holocaust was an open secret , known to millions since at least 1941:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805059849/metafilter...

minthd··on Notes on a tour of an Amazon distribution facility (2014)
I don't think it's really random.Since it's dictated by the computer, even though it looks random, i'm sure there are some patterns in the order(for example there are items that statistically sell together) ,But maybe they keep it as a trade secret , only to be known by a small group of developers and managers.
minthd··on Slow Ideas (2013)
>> yet it's hard to find good content regarding how company X got to know their users and build what they really wanted.

Isn't all the work by steve-blank and the lean-startup deals with it?

minthd··on Slow Ideas (2013)
I'm curious - since we know that a sales-like-process works for this kind of problems, didn't the private sector invent more scalable sales methods - and maybe they will be useful here ?
minthd··on Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business
And by effective you mean easy ?
minthd··on Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve
Because the advancements in the field are interesting and wide ranging: neural networks doing vision, speech, natural language understanding, reasoning and general learning over data.
minthd··on The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops
But driving from the outskirts of a city to the inside, is just a 1 hour journey.
minthd··on Ask HN: Does a brilliant engineer like Tony Stark exist in real life?
Elon musk has don a lot of myth building around himself,for example claiming to invent the hyperloop(which was invented in 1999 by ET3). And his employees are mad about him taking all the credit for all kinds of results.So i'm not sure you should count him.

We also see the same thing with Edison - claiming credit for other people's work.

The most impressive engineer i can think of is altschuler , which in the 1950's, in russia, even after/while being in a russian labor camp - invented a method of systematic invention(TRIZ) that is used to this day, and really enables every engineer to become an inventor.

So why am i mentioning him ? because to a certain extent - coming up with good inventive ideas may not be the hard part(to some extent). But refining the details,building prototypes,testing, etc is the filter that takes a bunch of good inventive ideas and comes with a great invention.

But usually this process takes an infinite amount of work, so it's beyond the capability of a single guy.

minthd··on Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and All Too Common
Even with such limitations to prevent violence, it's extremely easy and cheap, today, in the digital age, to enable communication between prisoners.
minthd··on The Future of Food on Urban Rooftops
What's wrong with growing vegetables and berries outside of cities in greenhouses?
minthd··on Ask HN: What are some good resources for learning Algorithms and Data Structures?
I think it depends on what you want to achieve.

If you want to design algorithms, and not just reuse an algorithm from a catalog:

"Introduction to Algorithms: A Creative Approach: Udi Manber" Is very good.

If on the other you;re interested in a an extensive srvey of algo's and data-sturcutres, see"Algorithms and theory of computation handbook", by atallah. It has 2 volumes.

minthd··on Virtual reality flopped in the 1990s – This time it’s different, apparently
Maybe a different question need to be asked - people who bought VR headset - how do they feel after months of ownership ?
minthd··on Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive? Analysis of Clinical Trial Design
Here's another example:

There's oragenics, which developed a vaccine against dental carries - a disease that affects 5 billion people. Something that i'm sure everybody would really like to have.

And this is why we don't have it ? In their own words:

" Regulatory Status:

We initiated our first Phase 1 clinical trial in April 2005, but we found it difficult to find subjects who fit the trial’s highly cautious inclusion and exclusion criteria, particularly with respect to the subjects’ lack of dentition. We concluded this trial early after enrolling only two of the 15 planned subjects. The FDA then recommended that we revise the protocol for the evaluation of ten healthy male subjects, ranging from 18 to 30 years old and with normal dentition, in an institutionalized setting. After we submitted additional information, the FDA issued a clinical hold letter in June 2007 for the proposed trial with the attenuated strain, citing the need for a plan with respect to serious adverse effects; a plan for the eradication of the attenuated strain in trial subjects’ offspring; and a required pregnancy test for female partners of subjects. We submitted additional protocols in response to the FDA’s concerns. In August 2007, the FDA issued a clinical hold letter with required revisions to the protocol for offspring of subjects. We submitted a response to the clinical hold letter in September 2007, and the FDA removed the clinical hold for our Phase 1 trial in the attenuated strain in October 2007.

While we commenced a Phase 1b clinical trial for SMaRT Replacement Therapy during the first quarter of 2011, the very restrictive study enrollment criteria required by the FDA made the enrollment of candidates meeting the restrictive criteria difficult. Due to the enrollment difficulty we encountered with our initial our Phase 1a clinical trial and now with our phase 1b clinical trial, we determined to discontinue pursuit of our Phase 1b clinical trial."

Such a shame.

http://www.oragenics.com/?q=cavity-prevention

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