vadimberman

> The hard, and scary, part is planning to bring enough supplies when you don't know when you'll see land.

That's today. Back then, they wouldn't know whether there is even land. Imagine what it means to sail without maps or equipment in time when what we considered basic general knowledge about physics was not even there.

It would take as much courage as sending a manned mission to the Outer Solar system today.

A layman's question: is it implied to be a universal cure, or for a specific type?

Very interesting, thanks. From the descriptions, the architecture looks kickass. Looks like an ultimate device driver toolkit.

Oh, is it a desktop-only OS? No embedded device / server capabilities? These two worked out for Linux...

> Also, the mountain of cash hidden in all the Dutch and Luxembourg trust funds coming from this tax structure is not being used to contribute back to society in a meaningful way like Gates and Buffett.

Not really an excuse, but at least since 1990s, that was very common among the European rich.

Psychologically, it's easy to justify: the state takes about half of your hard-earned cash, then passes it on to a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels who have not done a damn thing in their lives. On the other hand, before everything became computerised, stashing the money in Luxembourg was way too easy.

Is there any chance it'll go mainstream, in your opinion?

I'll join the chorus.

It's a tool. Its only fault is that it made it easy to visualise concepts, and was used by poor presenters to visualise poor concepts.

It's like blaming fire for poorly cooked food.

4) The tech is yet to achieve acceptable level of accuracy.

I agree with the central idea, but the "networking events" are not representative of the industry. They attract professional b*itters by definition.

There is nothing unique about running a startup, it's another business, but, as of today, with great expectations and generally more money and higher risk of quick failure than a mainstream business.

> If you aren’t aligned with a human need, you’re just going to build a very powerful system to address a very small — or perhaps nonexistent — problem.

If you have to "align with a human need" and that problem is not obvious, this sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

Is it organic and grass-fed though?

Anyway, I wonder if that's how the 1980s - 1990s viruses were replicating.

> How writers say it

> "Let's talk", "Oops! Something went wrong..."

> ...Because writers are good at grammar and punctuation...

Struggling for relevance and failing. If that's all they can offer, they offer no value. No, it's not because I have a blind spot as a developer, but because I know my users.

That is not to say that the technical / UI writers are redundant. It's just the level of most is ridiculously low. It's like with web design: lots of providers, but only a handful of those that know what they are doing.

Heck, I'd be happy to outsource many of my content writing chores but I am yet to find a combination of functional brain, ability to analyse the tech, and sensible rates!

I know a multinational where the technical documentation department was busy copying the documentation from an internal portal (Confluence) to an external customer-facing portal. They would ask the developers to write the documentation and what parts should be copied. Amazingly, they often couldn't do even that properly. They had nice-sounding titles like "manager", "director", "analyst", etc. To the company's merit, the idiocy was eventually discontinued, but it took years.

> The metro, which was named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

OK, I'm nitpicking, but it's not exactly true.

The construction was overseen by the ruthless Kaganovich and named after him. When Kaganovich was purged by the successor of Stalin (http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1934-2/the-moscow-metro/), it was changed to "Lenin's".

I'm curious, where does one get the nuclear fuel on Mars? Does it have to be flown all the way from the Earth?

I was about to say the same. The hand gesture control is the new "drag and drop" that was overhyped back in late 1990s.

While "drag and drop" has its uses today, it's nowhere as ubiquitous as its proponents back then wanted. Back then, it was forcefully pushed into spaces where it didn't belong.

Same for the gesture controls. Damn you, Minority Report, for putting this idea into the heads of the software business people. It's not all slick hand waving in the air.

And they had all the objective reasons to think so. I remember reading a sci-fi book from 1930s (Olaf Stapledon), otherwise well-researched, that pegged the invention of nuclear weapons 300 years from then and spaceflight millions of years from then (the interstellar space flight was never achieved, not even billions of years into the future when the humankind v18 moved to Neptune and achieved a lifespan of 250,000 years).

If that was the prevailing opinion, it's easy to see how the interstellar flight could be seen as around the corner after the conservative predictions were all put to shame.

Kinda makes one want to draw parallels with the 'singularity' and AI.

In addition to what the others pointed out:

* Worker training, $20 million

* Utility costs, $140 million

Does the state pay for that?

* U.S. Interstate 94 North-South project, $408 million

* Road improvements, $134 million

How is improving the infrastructure a bad thing? FoxConn is a great excuse but they should be doing that anyway, no?

Incredible!

Are there similar websites for other languages?

So... it recognizes text (OCR), detects style (bold, italic, etc.), maybe font face, and outputs the result? No pictures, nothing else, of course.

Props for the marketing though.

Sorry to be a bore, but does the brain of the flatworm have the same functions as that of the vertebrates? If an octopus, for example, has a "decentralised nervous system", I would not be surprised if it were the case with the worms.

Ping pong tables, follow your dreams, all that? The article is not about it at all.

It's about managerial advice, which is not only suitable for startups but for any resource-constrained company under pressure.

More examples of cetacean intelligence here in the last section: https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/31/reverse-engineering-the-un...

Apparently, dolphins have an equivalent of names and the entropy of their communication is similar to that of the human speech.

I believe that many animals have forms of communication close to what we call language - an infinitely productive communication system with displacement and abstraction.

Many animals are capable of working in large groups. To coordinate the actions, efficient and rich communication is required.

On the other hand, with billions of years of evolution yielding advances in locomotion, speed, protection from the environment, it seems improbable that the communication will not develop as much and go sharply from nearly zero to one in a blink of an eye with the great apes.

First and foremost, I applaud your integrity and levelheadedness.

It is rare in the startup world, and even more so among the less experienced people who often lose perspective at the sight of money.

The ideal solution is to engage in office politics, but there's not much time, and we techies generally suck at it. It won't be playing on your home turf.

> I plan to spend my all remaining days until the next meeting to prepare the hugest report ever written

I doubt that will get their attention.

It has to be:

1. Short

2. Convincing (read scary)

Focus on two messages only:

* you will go to jail *

* you are killing the future of the company when it's generally well-off *

Create examples. Cite business people (NOT techies!) calling it a fraud. While I said "short", the list of examples should be as long as possible.

Finally, ask the question: how many companies that ICO'd got acquired?

The answer is none. There are just speculations (https://www.coindesk.com/ico-ma-token-exits-get-messy/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6kfumc/what_happ...).

As the lawyers in the large organisations are paranoid, they will simply stay clear of it until someone else did it.

Very interesting.

Are any of these consistent aspects associated with the type of action or thought?

The big question for me at least is, are these signals uniform or have some kind of similarities for specific concepts or actions from person to person?

If every brain has its own language, the effort is magnitude higher.

> There was no loss.

And that's probably what determined the result. The courts are not run by stupid people, they don't like that the system is exploited.

You know, there is at least a dozen chatbot providers who can handle these nonstructured dialogues with multiple entry points, ESPECIALLY with pizza.

In fact, the pizza order is the No. 1 scenario looked at by the chatbot providers. In fact, it was exactly the scenario my old startup took as a case study and the first application we built with it. It could handle the different toppings, the sizes, and more. You could submit all your requests in one move, it would be parsed and sorted into its little slots.

The problem? There is only a handful of scenarios similar to the pizza. In most cases in the real world, you have to select from an external database, look at proprietary product names, and more. Another staple of chatbot demos, plane ticketing, only works well when limited to North America (in the English word). Good luck asking for a flight to Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, or even Wagga Wagga in Australia.

I am not even talking about the switchboards for multiple domains, like in Alexa. These ones only work with "leaky abstraction" (making the user learn magic keywords).

Another problem is really stupid. It's the availability of the datasets. The funny thing is, ye olde style semantic frameworks fare better than the machine learning ones, because there is not enough data for the machine learning chatbot frameworks, and without it, their mighty capabilities are pretty much the proverbial spherical cow in vacuum. But because the semantic paradigm is not kosher/kewl anymore, very few enterprises agree to deploy it.

None of that matters though because the users never liked typing a lot. Back in 1980s - 1990s the adventure type computer games switched from (mostly working) command line interface to point-and-click, and very few users objected.

My take is, the key is a conversational UI with strong visual feedback. For the pizza scenario above, I would draw icons of cheese and numbers, so that the user can be sure it worked.

True, but the article is not about the blockchain; moreover, I'd be shocked if CNBC were discussing inner works of software and technical concepts that the general public has no interest in.

Let alone the psychological damage to the society that any kind of speculation and a flood of "get-rich-fast" schemes incur.

Strict measures are not always bad. If China did not handle the SARS epidemic years ago the way they did, things could have been more similar to the Ebola epidemic.