swframe

In the big picture, extremely flawed military and political leaders ordered the killing of innocent people. Lower ranked military personnel found interesting ways to carry out those orders. Should we ignore the big picture?

In addition, there are two sides to this story. 1) A misguided US Military found ways to kill innocent people. 2) The Vietnam Military found a way to defend themselves without killing anyone. Which side should we communicate as being more clever?

Part of the stock's future price is based many features that are not in the dataset. In addition, a stock's current price is based on predictors which interact chaotically. Your predictor has to take into account that other predictors are watching in real-time and are trying to take advantage of it. It seems that attempts to predict the stock market make it random.

I don't know who is really doing this or what the impact will be but let's pretend for a moment that the chinese government is responsible. They are largely funding our government. We need each other.

I wonder if a serious problem with the world is due to secrets that allow some to have power over others. For example, a company with a patent on a drug that costs $80K has power over those who will die without it. If you can't afford it, have you seriously harmed the company if you violate the patent to manufacture it in a 3rd world country for people who could never pay for the drug. When is human life more important that a company's right to a patent (or information)?

The chinese have a serious problem in the form of several hundred million people who need to be moved out of poverty. To help them get there they seem to be mining a precious resource: information in 1st world countries. Is this different (or worse) than 1st world countries mining precious resources in the 3rd world?

What is the net result? China will use this information to make itself wealthy enough to buy more of our goods? China will acquire the ability to make our goods cheaper than we can make them and force us to work harder?

I'm not saying "stealing" is "right" but it seems to be an important way all 1st world countries became richer. The notion of "right" is suspect given that history is written by the winner.

I think there is an 'uncanny valley' aspect to the science. The movie seems serious in its attempts to portrait the science (the cgi is very well rendered) but also has so many things wrong that it is upsetting (what is rendered makes no sense). I want to suspend my disbelief so I could enjoy it but it is so hard to accept anything about it except that it looks nice.

Why wouldn't time move backwards for the entire universe? If it does, there can be no record of any future event and there is no way to determine that time is moving backwards. If time moved backwards in one spot, what about all the information connected to that spot. Why wouldn't that information rollback too?

I suspect a lot of the difficult world problems relate to poverty. The first job of "real" AI should be to better employ the under employed.

Google (along with other highly successful companies) should provide the work environment and training programs for people in the 3rd world that will allow them to earn enough to become customers of 1st world businesses; similar to the way china buys US bonds that enable the US to buy chinese products. I think the first job of the 3rd world worker should be to transform their environment to 1st world standards.

This will be extremely challenging. For example, there aren't enough resources to make the 3rd world into the 1st world. Those are the problems that google should hire 3rd world workers to solve.

Please backup your claim with a link that shows how.

This is an example of all the sites that I've found: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pr...

It says ...

One size that Apple does not offer is the actual native resolution of each display, no doubt because icons, text and other interface elements are too small for just about anyone to read.

In any event, the issue is customers should check if this product will actually render the full 5k resolution without hacking and if it is usable at the resolution. It is abusive to sell a product with a spec that you can't actually use. But Apple is all about form over function.

I wonder if apple will prevent rendering at full resolution like the retina macbook pros because the max font/icon size for many apps is too small. This would mean you are paying for a screen that can't render at the new fancy resolution because the resulting info would be too small to resolve by most people.

Many computer users suffer from eye strain because they have to stare to resolve the information; their eyes dry and then each blink causes tiny scratches which over time causes serious damage.

During your 9-to-5, you should probably take a break/exercise every 50 minutes for 10 minutes

I think a "corporate micro-city" might be the solution for poverty in the 3rd world. I think a joint venture with google, facebook, apple, and 1st world governments etc to build a "hong kong/singapore styled city" next to a 3rd world capital could be the catalyst for transforming the country. I don't think providing internet access is enough. You need to break the cycle of poverty from birth to college. And you need a vehicle/brand that the 1st world can invest in/trust. I think you can avoid the obvious pitfalls by creating multiple independent neighboring "corporate mirco-cities" so there is competition for residents.

At a minimum, we should quarantine travelers from that region when they arrive. We should require them wear a tracking device to be sure they are staying in place. It would be expensive but worth it if it catches a few infected people.

As a result of the spanish nurse's infection, I think health care workers need to be quarantined too just in case the protections don't work as we expected.

BTW, did you read the article about the Canadian experimental medicine that is available but not being shipped because the US exclusive distributor doesn't yet know how to handle the distribution. It is scary that a company that stands to make a huge profit, if the disease spreads to a first world country, is holding back the distribution of a cure.

I read a paper that studied why some marriages work. The author concluded that in those marriages, the couple worked to calm each other. I've used that in my relationships and it has worked well. I make an agreement with my partner upfront that we must make sure that one of us stays calm when the other is angry and the angry person can't harm/insult/embarrass/etc the calm person. The angry person should explain how they feel without resorting to name calling or abusing the other person. If both of us become angry then we must separate until one of us can be calm. With that algorithm, no one gets hurt in an argument and arguments don't escalate into destructive events.

My relationships are still limited by the fact that couples must "agree to disagree". This piles up and eventually there are too many disagreements to ignore.

1) Look at the problem a different way and try to find a way to make it more interesting, attractive and (most importantly) impressive. I had to find and fix a tedious problem so I wrote a visualization, defect detection and automatic correction tool. If you have the freedom, try solving it with a new language or technology that you've always wanted to learn.

2) Challenge yourself to finish the project as quickly as possible. If a realistic estimate is that the work will take 1 week then try to finish it in 1-2 days. If it is awful work, try to get it over as quickly as possible. It helps if you can find an existing solution that you can use as a starting point.

3) If you're paid hourly, you might consider outsourcing the problem to someone off of elance. You should reframe the problem so that it doesn't require you to share any info (source code etc) from your employer with the person you outsource to. Ideally, ask the person to create an open source project on github.

The 'up' part is the key. If the person makes more than you do, I think it should save you money. It does for the people I've dated anyway :).

1. Switch to technical sales (typically you get a bonus based on the sales quota; downside is you travel a lot)

2. Post your resume and ask for 15k more

3. If you're not in the SF Bay Area, move there but note your cost of living will probably go up by 20k so you need to ask for $35k more than you currently make.

4. If you're in the SF Bay Area, see if your company will let you work remotely, and move to a state that has no income tax.

5. Marry/Date up (lawyer, doctor, programmer, executive :-)

I moved out of the US a year ago to travel around the world but never left the first city I visited in asia. I work from home. My split level condo is on the 40th floor with a view of the sunset, ocean, and the city skyline. My office moves from living room to bedroom depending on houseguests. I have 2 27" apple cinema displays; each on its own aidata laptop desk that can be raised so I can stand or sit. I have a chair that can recline from sitting position to laying flat. I have a vibrating exercise machine that I stand on when I'm tired of sitting. I have a surround system and a projector so I can watch hd movies across from where I work. The projector screen is about 8 feet wide (I wish I had the space to project a larger image). The projector is hooked up to a macbook pro with a 4TB disk with about 1200 movies.

Despite all that, I think the best part is that my gf (who is half my age) hangs out on the couch next to me.

I've worked on image recognition and find OpenCV too simple. I don't like algorithms that work on the entire image without taking into account what is being recognized. For example, if you have a combination of thick and thin edges, you only want to erode the thick ones and you only want to erode the thick edges until they are thin and smooth. If you posterize an image, you don't want to cross regions separated by long smooth edges. You don't want to blur away noise in the image because when the noise is localized, you can use it to identify what the object is (similar to the way shazam uses high frequencies to identify songs).

OpenCV, simpleCV etc are very useful libraries for toying around with images. You can get interesting results without a lot of effort. But the more serious you get about image recognition, the more you find that you can't use them globally across the image. Finding the yellow car in the parking spot is a good example of the usefulness of the library and also its simplistic capabilities. It recognized a yellow patch in the image and it doesn't recognize a car in a general way. When you're ready to write code to recognize a car, you'll probably find you can't use openCV libraries.

What has worked amazingly well for me, is to create a model of the image areas and then apply transformations based on the model. If you have a sharp foreground and a blurry background, don't run the recognition algorithms that rely on sharp edges on the blurry background.

I've worked on this problem quite a bit. The hard thing to accept is that there can be large areas in an image where there isn't a significant difference between the foreground and background. In other words, the raw data doesn't contain enough information to detect an edge there and no segmentation algorithm will find what is not there in the data. Humans see edges "semantically". We know there should be one there and so we "imagine" one. I work on image segmentation and recognition and my code cycles between those two goals. I segment and look for noisy and smooth edges, then I postulate where there should be a smooth edge (for example, if you recognize a smooth edge "parallel" to a noisy edge, check if the noisy one could be smoothed "similar" to the other one). The end result is that I can separate the foreground from the background but I don't try or hope to recover the edge that a human would find. My segmented images have the uncanny valley problem. The edges are correct in some areas and slightly off in other areas. The image looks real and fake :)

The big thing I learned (at a company where all changes are code reviewed) is to rewrite the code until it seems obviously correct to someone who doesn't know what I know. I rename variables, methods and extract code into small methods until someone can read the code out loud and it sounds like a comment. for example: if (!thereIsEnoughSpace(user.getDataRequestSize()) { if (canAllocateAdditionalStorage()) { reserveStorageForUser(user, user.getDataRequestSize()); ...

I've found many bugs after I renamed variables like 'i', 'j', 'k', etc to something more meaningful. That made it easier to realized I was using them incorrectly.

This is basically why I think I'm an ok developer...

I pretend to be the smartest developer in my group (let's call him Bob). I look at a line of code and ask myself, why will Bob ask me the change this line of code? What will he prevent me from checking in? How would he solve this problem?

I do this even if I have a really difficult problem and Bob is the "go to" person. I pretend to be Bob and ask myself, What question will Bob ask me when I tell him about the problem? He will ask me if I've searched google, ok I will search first. He will ask me if I've checked for an upgrade to a library, I will do that. He will ask if I've set a break point here and checked for a memory corruption there. etc. 80% of the time, I find the problem myself and the rest of the time, Bob doesn't know the answer either. But at the end of the day co-workers are fooled into thinking that I'm as good as he is. But I have no doubt that Bob is better because it is important to him to learn everything he can about some key technology. I only approximate Bob when I need to interact with others. If you ask Bob a question, you get a quick and correct response. If you ask me, I will tell you I'm in the middle of something else and I will get back to you in a few minutes but really I have to figure out the answer first hahaha. I try my best to avoid getting help from Bob because, honestly, I don't think Bob respects people who aren't as passionate as he is (most people confuse passion with intelligence). The downside, is that it takes me a day to solve a problem that Bob can solve in a few minutes. Managers hate that but it is just too boring to learn technology to the degree that Bob knows it in my free time.

I lost my Mom to Fox News for a while but after talking with her, she has come back. I didn't actually expect her to return but it is so easy to point out the holes in the Fox News arguments. I'm atheist but I know the bible well enough to use it to refute any argument she has heard on Fox. The wonderful thing about the bible is that you can quote it to defend or defeat just about any point of view.

I was there at the time. It is not just that Google is good at certain things. It is also that the developers who built orkut were very very bright new developers (many just out of college) who lacked experience. The brazilians took over orkut and the developers were unable to make tough decisions; like starting fresh. They also made the friendster mistake; their first implementation couldn't scale and by the time the fixed it, it was too late. Furthermore, at the time, google had a policy of assigning managers to cover a very large number of developers and although the orkut manager was very sharp, he didn't have more than a few hours a week to provide leadership. The final issue, was that orkut had a huge usage rate and no other service (gmail, picasa, etc) would accept an integration with orkut because it meant having to handle the huge additional load. Google needed Larry to step in and tell people they had to make it work. This is a classic example of a failure of one of Google's core development philosophies: "Developers don't need management or experience; they can find the right solution using intelligence alone; you should never tell developers what to do." (full disclosure -- they kicked me out of the group so my opinion is biased; please take that into account).

Instead of wondering why he was paid that much, we should be discussing how to get from where we are, to where he is? What does it take? Why is it that so few of us are doing that?

Using bitcoin doesn't give you more rights; If you are doing something that the government wants to stop, then bitcoins gives you more rope to hang yourself.

we have a long history that shows how to change your fate and rock the boat without getting yourself killed/jailed. bitcoin doesn't seem to be capable of doing that.

given how easy it is for law enforcement to tap into our internet activities, I suspect bitcoin use is the perfect red flag for them; it is a different kind of bitcoin mining. it is kind of a joke actually; there is some dude trying to secretly buy something that he doesn't want the cops to know about but his use of technology to hide his transactions is the signal that alerts the police to take a closer look. even if he is just buying drugs, his use of bitcoin justifies increases to the law enforcement surveillance and budgets. and the funny part is that we are paying for it. bitcoin makes all of us more vulnerable to surveillance. If you are into bitcoin because you've found a way to get more out than you put in, then by all means continue to do so. If you're into it because you don't want to be tracked then you're lying to yourself.

try it again without overlapping the rects.

My bet is a device like google glasses (or contact lens) with a sleek headset that has mind controllable sensors. I don't want to type, or talk to control it. I just think of calling my friend and the phones dials, and I see her image. I am willing to carry the computing unit in my pocket so the glasses can remain light.

I bet that it is 5 years away. If it is like the cellphone, it won't be google that builds it because there is just too much technology that is not yet ready/affordable.

Surely, it will be built faster if it is open source.