swframe

Giving up usually doesn't help. Just taking time to identify the root causes often leads to a simple and better solution.

Unfortunately, I am rarely able to convince others to follow along.

My company is extremely successful and our spectacular failures (often discussed on HN) pales in comparison to our success. I worked for several groups that lost multi-billion dollar markets because they were unwilling to make simple and obvious changes. For example, don't focus on our success and claim victory; look at our failures and make corrective actions. Seems pretty simple but maybe due to the innovator's dilemma, no one seems to care.

The CuriousAi TAG and LADDER research looks interesting. They claim same accuracy with much fewer labeled data.

I've built similar platforms. Naturally, I think they are awesome. They are a core part of very valuable products like SAP, Salesforce, etc. You will get a lot of push back from high developers who prefer direct access to the native api or html. Please don't let them discourage you. My response to them is that they can build reusable components that are driven by your json layer (win-win). There are enough developers who will benefit. Try to get funding sooner than later. I waited too long. You can't keep up building this by yourself.

We focus on the mating but the real challenge is keeping relationships interesting when we're not mating.

What if large companies built on-campus employee housing on top of their parking lots and moved the parking lots below ground? They could make a "corporate" city by adding a mall, hospital, child care/schooling. Imagine being able to have lunch with your family everyday; having a 15 minute walk to work.

Is there a link to get the code?

I used to give Dune to my teenage relatives and it usually turned them into avid readers; they would thank me later. I noticed that it doesn't hold the interests of the recent teenagers in the family; it is hard to get them to start and even harder to get them to finish. I think competition from the internet, youtube and cellphone is just too strong. That is horrible because developing a passion for reading helps lot in highschool/college/life. I've offered to pay them $100 and they still won't read it!

Agreed, I made gross assumptions based on my crazy background and experiences. I grew up in public housing (80% welfare families) in East New York (Brooklyn) during the 80s when that tiny (crack infested) neighborhood had the highest murder rate in all of NYC. For the last 3 years, I currently fund the education, teach and mentor several people in the 3rd world who make less than $10/day. The poor people I grew with and I now try to help are ...

1. Smarter than me but don't know how to end the cycle of poverty (one had a baby recently at age of 19 and both parents are unemployed).

2. Are not lazy but work in dead-end 60-hour/week jobs where they are not learning the skills that allow them to make enough to escape poverty and have no time to learn new skills.

3. Are not criminals but have accepted their fate and are not working to change their neighborhoods to reduce the temptation of their kids to enter a life of crime.

4. Are not drug users but drug related crime and extreme violence surrounds them (they have seen dead bodies in the streets on their way to work).

Other kinds of poverty exists. My proposal should be adapted to work in the situations I've not experienced.

"Applied" education is the best path for the poor. Don't teach the 3-Rs. Teach them how to fix their problems: 1) fight the cycle of poverty 2) weaken gangs 3) reduce crime and drug usage 4) renovate local housing, schools, and infrastructure 5) create and run local businesses 6) employee all teenagers after school and during the summers, etc.

Once they have pass those classes, they can learn the other stuff.

And this is how we should pay for it. Sell treasury bonds like we would to raise funds to improve our national infrastructure. In other words, invest in poor people in such a way that you can repay the investment from their future taxes. Specifically, pay poor people to work their ass off to fight poverty. (No person should be paid to do nothing; that is a horrible idea.) Allow the wealthy who want to reduce their taxes to keep $x in taxes for every $y they invest in hiring poor people to fight the causes of poverty. In fact, we should create poverty fighting companies who complete and measure their success by the quality of life improvements they cause. The higher performing companies lower the taxes of their investors.

(This isn't even expensive. Paying a teenager to avoid a life of crime costs $1000s/year and putting them in jail costs $10,000s/year. Furthermore, providing teenagers with IUDs costs $100s and saves $1000s.)

The US has a horrible human rights history. The country started with genocide of native americans. It enslaved and murdered millions of africans. It still has very racist tendencies. It killed several million koreans, vietnamese and cambodians (indirectly). Then there is Iraq and Afghanistan. There are a lot of really horrible things the US did that is on par with the Nazis and the worse we've seen from many other countries. The US is good at hiding or ignoring its atrocities. I don't think China is better or worse. But I don't see why it should be vilified when the US (and many other 1st world countries) have done much worse things to each other and to the 3rd world. In fact, I think all 3rd world countries should grow their internal markets in a similar way until they can become 1st world countries.

Do you know of a human pose estimation from 2d images service/library? I've seen papers about it. I would like to try it out.

Can it see proteins, cell walls or viruses?

What an odd coincidence? I had a similar idea yesterday. Except, I think your solution should be more general; A site that lets anyone pay to talk to an expert on any topic. The user should post their question and the experts compete to be selected; it is important that only the experts that care about the question are selected. Kind of like uber for conversations. I don't think it should be a TaskRabbit clone. The experts only provide information; they don't do the work.

For example, I want to talk to someone about selecting an alibaba manufacturer for a specific niche. I also want to talk to someone about how to get products into retails stores. And so on.

There are many related services. For example, you can have translators connect people. I think there is also a need for translators for people with poorly formed ideas; the translators would communicate with the experts who don't want to deal with those people directly.

There is a thisamericanlife show (Crime Pays) about cops paying kids to give up (or avoid) a life of crime. It is quite amazing how little it takes to prevent someone from costing society $40K a year in jail. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/555/t...

Previously, Martin Shkreli shorted drug companies and tried to convince regulators to blocked their pending drugs. I wonder if he is shorting the drug stocks again but this time he is using a new technique to destabilize the market. So the steps would be:

1. Short stocks in a vital niche market

2. Buy an inexpensive producer of an important product, jack up prices to cause outrage and a strong government response

3. Wait for the market to sell off stocks in the niche market

4. Collect the profits from 1.

5. Dump the producer purchased in step 2.

As for perfect SAT test scores equating to a right to get into Harvard... It is pretty clear that SAT scores are not always indicative of merit. When I was a Harvard senior I tutored another Harvard senior in high school algebra. She mentioned she got a perfect SAT score because her elite high school had a really good test prep program. There are many stories of people paying others to take the test, or people taking the test and sharing the questions with others, or people spending a lot of money or time to get a good score. In a way, that high score doesn't show that some students are more worthy to get in as much as it shows that affirmative action students need more affirmative action if the cycle of poverty is to be broken.

If you strongly feel that affirmative action is wrong then the best way to end it is to end racial segregation in housing and K-12 education. When colleges see that all kids are getting the same opportunities they will end their programs to correct for that societal flaw. It seems very shortsighted to think that displacing affirmative action students is the best way to improve our society or that not getting into Harvard will take something from you that you deserve or need.

I went to harvard. In freshman orientation, we were told that harvard doesn't "admit" mistakes. But obviously they do; a small percentage of students are mentally ill for example. My freshman roommate was one of them.

Another interesting orientation tip mentioned was that harvard accepts the top 10% of high school students but 90% of them won't be in the top 10% at harvard. The take away is that students need to stop their obsession with ranking and figure out how to be successful anyway.

They are definitely "Harvard Type" students (and not just in terms of wealth) but I think 30% or so of the Harvard students don't fit that stereotype and I don't see why Ma wouldn't have done well. Harvard classes aren't any different from classes at any other good school. I understand the obsession with going to Harvard (it is a fashion statement) but you aren't missing anything. Having Harvard on your resume will move it to the top of the pile but you still need to be impressive and few schools teach that or any of the things that Jack mentioned in the interview.

I would love to see a puzzle solving game like Clark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dPVseD0Va8). I think the puzzles should be community-defined in some easy to create format (json, xml, etc) if possible.

At the end of the story, they mentioned that local Haitian organizations were building lots of homes. It was also mentioned that there is lots of money still unspent. It seems that the Red Cross (or the US Gov) just needs to fund those organizations with a proven track record.

Sometimes I think news organizations are (unintentionally) exacerbating the root cause of these problems. They report on incompetence but don't report on how the public can fix it. I don't think the Red Cross will fix it without public pressure. It leaves the audience with a sense of helplessness that leads to cynicism and apathy. It would be better to end the story with suggestions on how the average citizen can fix these issues.

Obviously trust, connectivity, infrastructure, etc are the major issues for investing in the 3rd world. It is very easy and tempting for a local to take your investment and run off. It helps to live there, get to know the workers, build a relationship etc. It is better to find a ngo or local company that is already recognized and running successfully and help them with their mission.

Look for your "catch 22". Sometimes the approach you want to use can never win and you've been ignoring that flaw. For example, you were building solutions to problems that customers didn't accept, trust or want.

Reanalyze your failures looking for a common cause. Maybe you didn't get customers soon enough or spent too much time perfecting features that customers didn't value. Maybe you were too early or late to the market.

Try a new prespective. Maybe you shouldn't code as much as you have. Maybe you should focus on marketing or sales.

Redefine success. You shouldn't think that building a business is the only thing that will make you successful. Think in terms of layers of success. There are layers for friendship, marriage, children, health, career, etc. Not all layers will be the best but there is a gestalt.

You need to amortize your happiness over your work life time. You have to work in a way that makes you happy as you go so if your work isn't successful, at least you had fun. For example, you can work in interesting places anywhere in the world. Or you can work on an interesting vertical (e.g. special effects for movies). Or you can work with interesting people, etc.

Like other serious business flaws (e.g. the GM key ignition bug), companies weigh the risks and can conclude that it is cheaper to respond the problem than to fix it proactively. As a result, should the government require businesses with sensitive data to implement bug bounties?

I wonder how much was used to build their ghost cities: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities-in-2014-2...

You might be interested in this story too: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/360/s...

Don't get married. Marriage is a very tight coupling that is too easy to get into and too hard to get out of. You don't need it.

Note there is a hell of lot you can do to make raising kids enormous fun. 1. Play with your kids as if you are a kid too. I mean take it extremely seriously. Leave the smartphone off and join in. Build the most amazing things (sand castles, robots, tree houses, paintings, drawings, etc). Your kids will see you and appear to ignore you and then one day you will see them doing the same thing. 2. Explore like mad. Visit every place you can think of hanging out. Bike all over. Visit every park in your area, every library, etc. Do it every weekend. Catch bugs. Watch the stars. Hike, camp, boat, etc. 3. If you code at home, try to code an interest AI problem that has great visuals and then explain it to your kids. 4. Make movies. Write the script with the kids. Get the kids to act the parts. I could go on but I think you get the point. I think you can see that if you stop trying to be an adult, you can have a lot of fun.

The biggest problem I have with kids is that they sometimes fight over silly things. I forbade my kids from playing with each other. Since it was against the rules, they played with each other much better and when they fought they knew they were breaking the rules.

After watching Monster Inc. I realized that you could tickle kids instead of spanking them to get them to behave. No one likes to be tickled. I can imagine my kids being kicked out of therapy when they explain how they were disciplined by being made to laugh.

There are so many tricks that reduce the irritation to a minimum. For me, it was a challenge to find them so I really enjoyed it. I wish I could do it again. My oldest daughter is taking comp sci at stanford.

We will build very smart machines before we build machines that think. Those very smart machines will probably change the world the way the internet did. Imagine having smart machines than can farm, build houses, clean up pollution, etc. Thinking machines are too far off to know what to expect. We need to first consider what an increasingly automated world would mean. In particular, what will it mean for employment and average income?

It would be interesting if they could stitch the video together so we could see the play from any angle. Kind of like using street view and microsoft photosynth to create something like the latest star-trek khan bombing photo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War "However, the major allied victors of World War II, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union, all agreed the area belonged to the French."

"On 6 March 1946, Ho signed an agreement allowing French forces to replace Nationalist Chinese forces, in exchange for French recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a "free" republic within the French Union, with the specifics of such recognition to be determined by future negotiation. The French landed in Hanoi by March 1946 and in November of that year they ousted the Viet Minh from the city. British forces departed on 26 March 1946, leaving Vietnam in the hands of the French."

Vietnam belongs to the vietnamese people. There would be no "South" if vietnam was allowed to rule itself.

To stop communism, misguided US leaders decided killing several million innocent people was justified. These leaders should be held responsible for the death of US soldiers in vietnam. It is tragic that these US leaders were not charged with war crimes like the Nazis.