Lots of comments on here about the software, but I'm really fascinated by the hardware. Where did you get the conveyor belts and how much did they cost?
For the belt that lifts item up out of the hopper, I notice there's a little white hook (or platform, not sure what to call that) jutting out that does the actual lifting of the legos. How did you get the size of that right? Did you install that jutting-out part, or did it come pre-attached to the belt?
What tools are you using to make a computer do the actual belt rotation? I'm wondering how low-level it is - are you spinning the steppers directly or did the conveyor belts come with some kind of API? I'm guessing the belts don't have a USB port for easy control.
News article title extraction. News article relevant thumbnail extraction. News article text body extraction. Generating publicly traded stock symbols from business news articles. Some Techmeme-style document clustering.
I studied a fair amount of NLP (a true passion of mine) at school and after I graduated I spent several months working on tech which did this (and other things). That was intended to be a startup, but sadly, at the time, my business sense sucked and I couldn't decide on a good product to fit the tech to (the fact that I was developing tech before I had a strong sense of my product is already telling).
I since have started a completely different (and profitable) company and the code has just been bit-rotting. I'm not sure what I should do with it. Keep it around in case I ever decide to do a business model like some of these companies (I probably don't have time for that)? Open source it (time-consuming to clean the code and what do I stand to gain from that)? I guess I could use the open-sourced stuff to help me find contracts for freelancing, but I just don't see a lot of NLP remote work being offered.
I found this article interesting, but I think the submission title might be guilty of "gratuitous editorial spin" as outlined in http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I wonder how frequently this will be updated. I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet (they only show the construction huts). So it's at least several months out of date.
This clearly has the most detail for zooming and browsing that I've seen, but for my day-to-day use I'll still be using map.sogou.com, which already has pretty good building and landmark decomposition, but has the best path-finder / location search of everyone in the market by far. I just made several queries on bj.o.cn that fell flat. For really hard-to-find places, I suspect I'll do my searching on sogou first, then pull up the closest landmark on o.cn and scroll over to where I want to be for a good visual description of where I'm going.
China has a huge public sector, a ton of money, and deplorable networking infrastructure. I think it has to do with the size of the country more than anything. Russia's probably not any better than the US either.
I run a b&m store and this is common behavior. A store re-arranges an existing product so that it looks a little different, puts it up as a premium product with a very high price and for limited-time only, then offers that item, and only that item, for a Groupon.
I'm struck by the enormous amount of agriculture. It's easy to forget how, not so long ago, the average human spent most of his time trying to generate food.
I'm sorry, my head is on wrong today. I totally agree with you. I meant to say, the first 2500 are the hardest by far. If you can make that much, scaling is pretty easy.
s/probably going to be easier/probably going to be harder
You're asking how to build a business. Getting a product to generate 2,500 USD a month is non-trivial. In fact, going from 0 to 2,500 is probably going to be easier than going from 2,500 to 7,500 or 10,000.
Start simpler. Ask yourself how to build a product that can bring you 20 USD a month. Think of something that you can realistically envision yourself selling a couples of copies of a month right away. Then figure out how to go from there.
By the way, running a business isn't going to reduce your stress. And whether or not you'll be able to make money from a certain product / service is really speculative. You'll eventually get something to work if you keep working at it, but it can take time to figure it out. Maybe you should just consult in the short term.
As someone who's been desperate for cash before, I don't think starting a product business in order to obtain fast money is a good idea, unless you have experience selling to your target demographic and are really confident about your idea. Or unless you don't have any opportunities to actively work for the money, but you say you can easily get a rails dev job.
Learning about the hukou system disturbed me at first, but the longer I live in Beijing, the more I approve of the system in some form. There are too many people here. Live with Beijing's traffic for a couple of years, or push more people than you can imagine can fit into a crowded subway train. There are not enough resources to go around. How would you deal with it?
I wouldn't go so far as to say that we still have many colonies, but a huge amount of spheres of influence across the planet? Yes.
When we are studied 500 years in the future, I suspect the US' historical role during this past century or so will be likened to the role of Britain at the peak of the British empire.
