This is a valid argument against open source operative systems running top clearance environments such as the military / police / government agencies. If this modifications had gone undetected for a few months, it's possible that the compromised code could have made it into a lot of critical systems.I am a Linux user, but I remember this being a Microsoft argument in the past for promoting their OS to run in government agencies.
How is patient's data public?
Health is such an interesting space- there is so much that can be done to make people's understanding of their health and their health costs better. The problem is the enormous amount of bureaucracy and the artificial barriers of entry (boards, professional organizations, other semi-public institutions). How do you go about dealing with that?
We would love to have some front-end superstars on board. But more than anything we look for smart, competitive people that can learn fast and have the ambition to build something meaningful and disruptive.
We, at FindTheBest, are trying to build awesome data applications and an awesome comparison engine. I figured a good way to share the site would be to show an application related to current events. I was also thinking about building a Y-combinator startups database- would anybody be interested in that?
"A truly intelligent person understands how little they actually know"
This is one of those statements that really bother me, almost as much as someone telling me I need to prove the non-existence of God if I want to be an atheist. Yes, intelligent people should have a good understanding of how big and complex the universe is and how little they know compared to the total amount of knowledge available. And given that they are aware of such, it wouldn't make sense for them to walk around claiming they are a big deal. However, people do not always act rationally, even geniuses. There is no negative-correlation between claiming to be smart and being smart, in spite of the obvious contradiction. Claiming to be smart and being cocky about it, it's just a personality trait. Think about this: you IQ is defined and practically unchangeable by the time you are a young teenager, but your personality continues to develop for many more years after that. So there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not.
I once met Roberto Padovani who is the CTO of Qualcomm. He is an alumni of my university, UMass Amherst, and he had come to give a talk.
We bombarded him with some really far fetched questions in information theory and signal optimization and he was able to give really good answers on the spot.
Here is a video of him:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-c6W0m_nEk
and his profile:
http://www.qualcomm.com/people/roberto-padovani
I don't think it's that simple. First of all, risk cannot be measured, so the fact that a person takes as much risk as they can bear is incorrect, it's all an illusion. I think it's easy to look back at let's say, Facebook, and say that they were a risky bet with a huge potential for growth. But the fact is that this kind of disruption cannot be predicted, in other words, no one in their right mind would have predicted Facebook to grow this big.
What I am trying to say, is that there is no point on investing in a company simply because they are risky/unpredictable and hope that they happen to be at the upper end of the tail and give back huge returns-- that would be a terrible strategy.
If you go to Home Depot with a hammer being a sucky screwdriver, they will replace it with a screwdriver--maybe the customer wasn't aware there was a better tool for that. Here google is home depot, not a hammer. Also, if your hammer is a sucky screwdriver and home depot doesn't have a screwdriver to exchange for your hammer, they better get some because otherwise the customer will go somewhere else. Finally, software is much more extensible than hardware, so the analogy is not exactly 1 to 1.
I agree. But does this actually follow the definition of lucky? A person could deem herself lucky without that actually being the case-- it might just be that she has personality traits that make her successful. Luck, by definition is not dependent of one's actions. I guess the article is saying that we can make ourselves feel lucky by working on certain personality traits-- but does that make us actually lucky? I am just being philosophical here.
I completely agree. I didn't mean to say that enterprise products do a good job at this. I was just trying to point a case where it is really important to adapt to all user groups.
I agree. You build a tool to solve a problem, not for the building sake. And if it turns out the consumers are using your tool for a different purpose, it is in your own interest to understand this new use and optimize your tool to fulfill that previously unnoticed problem.
I am no expert, but I have been working for a few months in a user experience team for enterprise collaboration software. In the enterprise sector we need to assure that our applications can be used as intended by a teenager as well as a 65 year old CEO. There are ways to make user interfaces intuitive. One is to copy things from the material world: folders, archives, tabs, etc. The other is to follow abstract paradigms that have been popularized by a few big applications: microblogging, my profile, my wall, etc. In my opinion, the use of paradigms that were created just a few years back, such as most of the interactions in social networks, cannot be assumed to be understood by everyone (stupid or smart) and should be made as intuitive as possible.
Luck is essentially a common interpretation of the stochastic nature of the world. I agree with the author of the article in that people could increase their luck by exposing themselves to random events. I disagree that counting all pictures rather than stopping when the note is found implies a "lucky" personality-- that is more like a rational/logical personality. Luck would be that in fact, the number of pictures was different than the number in the note, and the person's curiosity helped them discover this fact by continuing to count regardless of having seen the note.
I tried to describe this in one of my blog posts, but I am still missing the second part, if interested, take a look at: http://bit.ly/b0SjZq