lesingerouge

I am sorry, but this list does the exact same thing that a thousand Vogue or similar magazines do for whatever topic is trending. Substitute "successful" with "sexy" or "slim" or whatever and you get the same packaging.

It does feel like shoehorning people into fitting some particular "pattern" that the author believes to be the "secret" to obtain said goal.

I always find it surprising that such short (relatively) articles, choke full of relatively difficult to apply advice gain a mass following and plenty of readers.

It does remind me of the rather stupid advice that depressed people get every day: "pull yourself up!" Amazing how we do seem to forget the complexity that riddles our minds.

And if you're not American?

Also dot means attribute means less speed.

I do not think this is a rational response. I get that the "knee-jerk" reaction might be one of total disgust (I know because I also had it reading this), but there should be a bit of rational thought put into what would be the consequences of this. Because AI growing humans and the Matrix becoming reality is a little bit on the "surreal paranoid" side of life, given the current state of scientific knowledge. On that same train of thought, but with a more realistic outlook, we could just think of the many difficult pregnancy cases that women might face that this development might help solve. And by difficult cases I mean situations where women who want a child face complications during pregnancy. And generally (even though I'm a natural pessimist), I think it's best to have a positive outlook towards the products of our own curiosity. They might bring trouble, but there are very few other natural catalysts to progress other than curiosity. War comes to mind as an alternative, but I believe that is less than desired.

In my opinion it's much better than the live-action movie.

So, your counter-argument is to say that they are also as human as the rest of us?

For some companies, open-source projects or contributions to open-source projects are a pretty strong signal that you: a) are commited enough to work on a long term project; b) have had some experience in working on a team; c) have worked on a project that has real-life use.

Colour me biased (I'm romanian) but I think that Cluj is the perfect town to be based in if you have a well paying remote job.

Great internet (like everywhere in Romania btw), nice town, cheap living, nice places to hike to in the surrounding countryside, university town (aka lots of girls).

I suppose obesity could be considered a handicap.

English centric view to say the least. If the "speakularity" comes, given the current state of transcription and voice recognition software it is very probable that only english speaking people would be "affected".

I could think of an application in which there would be minimal disk interaction and just lots of network action and in-memory processing so hypothetically it all depends on how the CPU handles parallelization through its cores.

I will try to test if those "servers" would be good for task processing. Example: let's say I have a ton of websites to crawl (high IO, not much CPU, ideally parallel). I could use a couple of these to cheaply do the job.

I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.

TLDR: not very sick, just very short-sighted, panicky and greedy.

slightly off-topic: if you didn't watch it yet, you should rush to see this documentary about Alan Moore. They mind of this guy is a fascinating universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mindscape_of_Alan_Moore

The question that comes to my mind is: should an entrepreneur really "fake it till you make it"?

While the technical achievements are impressive, I am not convinced how "playable" this game will be in the end. Almost all the games in existence have at least 2 core elements: story and character purpose. I have not seen evidence of either in this game (no, "space exploration" is not exactly a purpose). A great addition to this graphical engine would be a scripting engine that would allow independent writers to create their own quests and method to submit them to the players.

I have a bit of a science fiction scenario. Bear with me for a little bit. Let's suppose for a bit this approximate series of events was the actual goal of Mr. Varoufakis and company.

Why would they want this and who would want to risk the fate of an entire country and their own reputation on a "gamble"?

Because they started the negotiation game with a huge disadvantage and there was no way that they could bring something new to the table. So Tsipras and Varoufakis chose to "play the dumb communist" scenario that everyone was painting, stretch the canvas a bit and get new offers on the table and start with a different negotiating position.

This hypothesis, which I will check the following days, proposes that the Tsipras government and Varoufakis knew and understood very well the nature of the political and economical forces that pushed on them from outside of Greece. Knowing those forces and playing on the predictions laid out by the other side (Germany was already unhappy after Syriza won, expecting to have a difficult time negotiating with them) they followed to the line the "predicted" course. Difficult negotiations, huge differences in views, big political declarations and discourse, etc. The goal in the end was simple enough: get a cleaner slate.

Both the turbulent negotiations, with Varoufakis playing the evil marxist scapegoat, and the referendum, after a week of bank closures, were used as a ruse to lead the European leaders through to a "clean slate" phase. It was a very risky move, but I believe that the various contradictory signals that Tsipras sent just before the referendum confirm that it was a game. Like poker player that accidentally reveals his weakness just before he pulls a full house. The resignation of Varoufakis today is the next piece in their scenario: just take out the nasty opinionated communist and all the european parties will clearly feel more relaxed. I believe that this move was planned from the beginning and Varoufakis was used to "stir up" the pot a bit, while apparently being discarded as "peace offering" after a while.

So what was gained by this daring gamble? First of all, the markets were calmed. The negotiations were so desperate from the start, given the position of the two parties that everybody was sure of the Greek default. Now, with the financial markets accepting the default event in itself, any new deals on the table will have to take this fact into consideration. It's not "looming" anymore, it is here and it is indisputable. Second, the situation now allows for a much needed debt haircut. Refinancing is all fine and dandy, but everybody agreed that the debt could not be sustainably repaid. So now everybody is suddenly ok with the debt reducing. Third, the Tsipras government kept its word with its electors. They "fought" valiantly for the good of the people. Actually with the cards they got dealt by the previous government, they played quite a good game until now. And their general appeal has definitely risen from 36.3% (plus affiliated parties) to a 61% (as shown by the referendum). Fourth, the european hard-liners were blind-sided and the rules for the negotiation were changed. The deal before this referendum was "behave or we will strangle you". Now, it's quite a useless threat given the actual default. So Tsipras most certainly will be able to have better terms.

Sorry for the long post, had a bit of thoughts to get out. :D

This guide is pretty good and gives you a comprehensive view of Elasticsearch, but to me it was a bit confusing when I first read it. If you are looking for a more "tutorial" style book, with some examples and use-cases, I would recommend "Elasticsearch in action"[0].

I might be biased towards Manning books, but I find their style and ELI5 wording to be very helpful as an introduction to a subject.

[0] http://www.manning.com/hinman/

I'm currently reading Martin Fowler's "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture"[0] and I think that one of the main points that stuck with me is his recommendation for separation between the various layers and functions of a software system.

Basically the whole system should be a layer cake of smaller modules/systems, as "opaque" as needed to one another, but interacting with each other solely through a well defined "internal API".

I think the approach proposed in the article is good when starting or prototyping projects, but the object oriented and layering approach, even if it's a bit more challenging to visualize correctly at the start of the development of an app, is worth its weight in gold as features start piling up.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Application-Architecture-Ad...

later edit: for clarity.

I wonder how will this impact the rare-metal industries around the world, especially the ones in China.

While I understand the author's case for expressive design, I think it's important to use the correct logic to make an evaluation.

And the base of that logic is in the premise, which in the author's case is that expressive design, using simulacra of real life, somehow gives a user a better understanding of the actual use of the digital object.

I believe that logic to be fundamentally flawed. As someone here already said, humans have been trained to look at symbols far less time than they were trained to look at real objects. As such, there exists a fundamental divide between perception of a symbol and the perception of an object (even if it's a simulacra, not a real one). Marshall McLuhan outlined it best in his Gutenberg Galaxy, by separating letters (cold medium) from drawings (hot medium). As he was saying, perception accuracy varies between this hot and cold mediums, with hot having the highest accuracy, and cold the lowest.

Now, given this perceptual situation, I contend that given the nature of the digital medium, any kind of symbol used within it will be perceived as intrinsically cold by a given generation/cohort of users. I willingly shift my attention from the symbols to the users because I believe that they should be the true focus of the discussion. And the reality is that the very nature of the digital world and the understanding of its functionality and laws is a very high barrier to consumption for a lot of users.

My argument is way longer, but for the sake of simplicity, let me say just this: I believe that design should focus on advancing the understanding of the object that one uses. As such, I do not believe that expressive interface design holds all the necessary keys to that advancement, being that, in its intrinsic nature what it does is to simplify matters by simulating objects that the user is already familiar with. There are only so many ways to use a hammer and the representation of a hammer is contextually limited.

Minimalism is a temporary finish line. As the author noted, painters and sculptors in modern art have trekked across a very large conceptual space before arriving at minimalistic design approaches. Did this temporary finish line stop development? No, it generated a diverse set of reactions, with some painters re-approaching realism from different directions and some others exploring the limits of minimalist symbols.

I believe that "flat" design is just a way-point, and that having reached this way-point, there are myriad avenues now open to explore more in depth the semantic interconnection between symbols and humans.

Somebody at MongoDB must have read the early Oracle story. Start with one consumer niche (in mongo's case I think it's the common building-cms-based-websites web developer), improve the product, market ruthlessly.

Granted, their product is not excellent and it has major flaws and lacks some common DB features, but they have the advantage of developer-ease-of-use and low barrier to use.

I think this product is simply not yet "DONE".

Interesting article. Nice analysis and formalization of two thought frameworks (Thiel and Graham). Good ideas and good research with the mix of anthropology and psychological included.

Framing this whole article as a hypothesis, the question is now whether this hypothesis can be proven (ie does it work in real life) and what are the limitations of this theoretical approach (ie maybe it will work only for software and IT opportunities).

Anyway it seems like an interesting avenue to explore (combining psychological and anthropological studies with investment research). Does anybody know of any VC/accelerators/incubators that apply this method?

Through some very strange twists of fate it seems to me that bot programming and starting a business ended up being "fashionable" things to do. And obviously as all fashionable things there's quite a lot of people that want to ride the hype train.

Statistics tell us that there will always be a certain percentage that are on the train just for the hype.

My 2 cents: getting on the train just for the hype is a clear indicator that you do not have a very good knowledge of yourself. Internal, time-tested, hard-earned kind of knowledge.

Having some slight experience in the publishing and content industry, any title that contains the word "killer" is for me a big fat sign for "bulls#$t". I will still pick trusted recommendations[1] over advertising any day.

[1] https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard

I think "bleak" is just another point of view. Thinking back at how the 50's saw science fiction and the future in general, we could easily conclude that what we have was quite a "bleak" version of that vision. The general cyberpunk point of view is just a radical departure from the established line of thought (and forecasting). The fun thing to do when reading a cyberpunk novel is to watch for things that stay similar. And there are quite a lot. Actually, if you start pulling apart the shockingly weird things that are depicted (like for example, the SF-Oakland bridge becoming a shantytown) you notice that in the end society still works by the same rules as it does now. Which I personally find quite funny, given that one would expect technology to bring some kind of impact to cultural and societal frameworks.

While I was listening to that particular part I had a very distinct feeling that he was reffering to what could be called "nation-hacking". While it's certainly not the only way to change the world, changing laws drastically it's still the most efficient way. And there is really not enough experimenting getting done in this area.

On a related note, I feel that some of the things that might be interesting to study/experiment with might be at the intersection between these three items: anthropology, information technology and law.

This is debatable. The universe is not an observer of our existence IF the universe is not a simulation. If the universe happens to be a simulation than there is some external entity or rather the universe in itself, that is some kind of observer. As such, if he does fancy a stroll inside my particular life, I can suddenly become a graph of relationships and influences that have "special" meaning. If the universe is not an observer, there is still the possibility that a certain miserable existence (think elementary particle) can affect a larger system (think Big Bang). Was the elementary particle special or not? Difficult to say.

I don't really understand how buying your own gun/rifle/whatever would be of any help in surviving a war. The last couple of recent wars (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc) were fought mostly with "big tech" (airplanes, bombs, tanks, etc) which is pretty deadly to low level mosquitoes like civilians and foot soldiers. And while talking about inequality, I am quite uncertain about how a gun/rifle would help you. You would shoot the guy going through your trash? Or the guy stealing your bike? I am quite skeptical that a proliferation of this kind of thing would help you much with your "problems".

Agreed. More data is needed to see clearly if on a larger scale this is economically feasible to do. From my little experience with hydroponics, water and land use are the two major wins. Electricity can be a deal breaker but that depends on a lot of factors (type of produce, electricity prices, closeness to city, production vs consumption quantities, etc).

From a personal point of view, I strongly support this type of growth for a couple of reasons: more food for less cost, cities gain food independence, natural land use and abuse gets curtailed dramatically. Now if we could only switch more people (me included) to a vegetarian diet.