JohnLBevan

Is there some way to say "ignore DNS results from this provider", such that were you to spot an issue you could block that provider's information (and anyone replicating their version of the truth) and thus find a valid path. If that were possible you wouldn't be reliant on a third party to resolve the issue to get your system working, and once your system worked, you could contact them to resolve the issues for all.

David Mitchell (British Comedian)'s view of Mensa: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMKqyaXtHI

My guess is he's a self employed guy without the contracts coming in, or employed PHP web developer who also works in the evenings & weekends for a fixed annual salary which is then taxed?

Nice design, but not sure about the concept: this doesn't calculate what you're worth or advise whether the figures you're stating are realistic; it just does what you could do in 10 seconds in excel. My test-self is worth infinity per hour just for being really lazy; not wanting to work any hours a week, take 52 weeks a year off, and earn a fortune for it. This could be improved by including the market rate which you dismissed to give an idea of how realistic this is, or by suggesting jobs and relevant qualifications/experience required to get to where you want to be.

How about adding context (e.g. similar to wordpress's category tags). People can then filter the streams they subscribe to. For example were YouTube to post an OStatus message when a new video were uploaded I could subscribe to GeekAndSundry@youtube.com's messages, then filter that subscription so that only those posts with categories TableTop and TheFlog came through, without seeing posts tagged DarkStarComics. Equally, if a user posts about their two hobbies, say Technology and Cycling, I could filter to only see their Technology posts, reducing a lot of the clutter in my feed.

Given the number of people on here who appreciate a good life hack, has anyone got any ideas for other solutions? My family's currently going through the to home or not to home question. Arguments for standard solutions are essentially:

- A care home offers full time protection, but displaces the person from their familiar environment. Some care homes also don't attend their patients but focus on making a profit; though we hope that by visiting often and looking at existing patients we can get an idea of which ones are suitable. It costs money, but the money in this case comes from my Nan's savings, and she's not going to be spending it on anything more than basic living costs anyway. My family don't need the money, so though in some cases inheritance is a concert (i.e. people save up through their lives to provide for their family even in death), that's not a concern for our situation.

- Leaving the person in their own home seems the nicest but least practical option. Having family members or carers visit frequently to keep an eye on the person adds in some security, but family can't be there all the time (we're talking a 90 minute drive there in good traffic; so 3 hours round trip) and carers aren't immediately recognised so can seem an intrusion to the sufferer, often leading to stressful confrontations.

- Having the person move in with their children gives full time protection by people who know and love them, but strips their children of freedom (their lives essentially becoming that of full time carers with the added depression of watching someone they love fade away).

On top of the above there are also internal family conflicts; for example my aunt is pushing for the state to fund any care solution (by not doing anything to help ourselves so the state acts as a catch statement) whilst my mum feels we should do all we can as well as taking what the state offers - but both working together (i.e. my mum & aunt have been given responsibility over my nan's care and assets on the condition they use those assets to my nan's best interest - trying to squeeze more out of the state isn't in her best interests, but may mean that my mum & aunt would lose their rights because by not using my nan's assets they're being irresponsible; the state could then take control of those assets and make all decisions without my mum or aunt's input).

Given all of these factors (and I'm sure you can all think of more), what other ideas can you come up with to improve the system to provide a solution which gives people security and dignity, whilst ensuring that families still maintain some freedom to experience their own lives?

We had an interesting experience at the start of the year where people were being "encouraged" by the project managers not to be negative on the project. It felt like being part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution where everyone was getting over excited but with a foreboding sense of dread hanging in the background. Myself and a few others continued to list cautions (normally I'm the optimistic one - but this had gone past my limit) but were ignored and treated as naysayers. It resulted in us putting a country live on a production system without having completed regression testing for existing countries, done any negative testing, or having done any testing with security and workflow configured in a production like way. The next couple of months were absolute hell, and only now are we beginning to recover from it. That said, to get the system stable everyone went out of their way, working overtime/weekends without break or compensation to keep the project on track (and losing one of the team from the project due to stress), which allowed the project managers to say "see, putting you under pressure meant you got it to work", without seeing the chaos they'd caused. People should be encouraged to do realistic thinking - aim for the optimistic, don't say no before you try something (so long as it's not clearly suicidal), but when you know things are going wrong take time to reflect and reassess your situation.

Awesome - thanks for the link :)

ps. for anyone interested there's some useful info on streaming in education here: http://www.teachingexpertise.com/articles/grouping-pupils-ab...

One option not mentioned there is getting the top pupils to assist in teaching the others; thus providing mutual benefit (since you learn where the gaps in your knowledge are when teaching, leading to you getting a much better understanding by plugging those gaps)

I had a similar experience in school - though no yelling. I often achieved A4s; A for academic grade, 4 for effort (1 being putting in all you've got, 4 being the opposite end of the scale). I took pride in this saying it showed I could deliver effortlessly. In some subjects which weren't in my skillsets (e.g. French & English) where I was getting Bs my parents said they wouldn't mind if they didn't think I could do better, but I was bright enough to get As were I to put in the effort; I decided that if I were less bright I wouldn't be expected to put in the effort, so aimed at making myself thicker (I still don't know how I'd hoped to achieve that, I just left it to lazyness and hoped that was enough). I also argued when it came to revising for exams, saying that revising was cheating as it doesn't show what you've learnt / retained, so anything you crammed in leading up to the exam was just temporary knowledge which you'd lose the moment the exam was over, so would give you false exam results grading you on a momentary peak rather than a general state for that phase of your life.

I blame myself for this, but feel education could be delivered differently to cater for people like us. I had a great education, attending the same school as Terry Pratchett and Heston Blumenthal had, with a lot of teachers who knew their subjects well and cared about their pupils' development, beyond just league table ratings. However, the reason I got A4s is because I never failed - I kept getting what I needed to without putting in effort; I needed a challenge to force me to push myself. In those days this may not have been possible; the internet was still in its infancy so you only competed with those in your year group. Streaming helps here, but with the numbers involved the top set may be the top 30 / 120 or so, so still a very mixed bag.

There are now a number of projects to provide education on-line. As this grows and the school/education models adapt to take advantage of this, I suspect we'll see competition between larger groups of people, encouraging those of a certain attitude to push themselves further to meet their full potential. That said, for those towards the bottom will this force them to up their game, or leave them feeling failures with no motivation? Hopefully the systems will evolve to aid those at both ends by selecting appropriate methods for the various personalities involved, allowing everyone to meet their potential.

My thoughts precisely. The code is still out there though - just waiting for someone to pick up where Google left off. . . http://incubator.apache.org/wave/about.html My plan is to try to rewrite this as a sharepoint add in, so that all those companies who install sharepoint as their "solution to everything" get something good with it; that could help grow the user base / promote belief in the technology. Then it could be openned out into allowing people to connect to hosted public services, and eventually get back to Google's original vision. ps. In honour of the subject matter, perhaps we should be calling it Google Duality?

The robot cheating isn't the interesting thing here. Implementing that would be a simple case statement. This is a demo of fast digital signal processing (DSP) combined with fast mechanics/electronics.

Was the IPO Hackathon his stag do?

This was also recently mentioned by YouTuber "CharlieIsSoCoolLike", who's taken to putting videos online every day for a week to overcome his perfectionism, but who's also been following the technique for a much longer time to keep himself learning.

That raises another good point - privacy. I take a pic of my girlfriend on the beach, and some random guy on the Turk gets a copy to distribute / use as they like. This means building this functionality into a standard camera would need an option to turn off the "auto-annotate" feature selectively if using the human method. My example's obviously quite tame, but there are a plethora of more serious ones (including people who'd want to use the service to keep electronic copies of legal documents and have the annotation feature provide a quick cataloguing system).

Agreed, the concept's great but really you're just taking a picture then asking someone to describe it & printing that; that tech's been around for a while.

A more practical approach may be to develop a camera with access to the web. When pictures have been taken and the camera can get a 3g/4g/wifi network connection it uploads the pics to the cloud (optionally removing or retaining to save space on the camera's local memory or allow the images to be accessed on the camera in offline mode). You can then put in some serious server power to run through all uploaded images to describe the contents (including tagging people in the photos and using GPS data to help identify content based on location context) and have this data automatically sent back to the camera (if desired) as well as stored against the image online. Randomly picked images, or those with a low accuracy rating (e.g. the algorithm has rated its description as tenuous) could be sent to a service such as mechanical turk so that the results can be verified / improved upon / to ensure the algorithm has feedback to learn from.

Readers who viewed this may also like. . .

http://www.brandongenerator.com

http://darkhorse.geekandsundry.com/

Sounds like an opening for an App.

Gabriel's put a lot of effort into creating his flashcards, but they'd be the same for everyone - so you could allow the community to generate the cards, and the part of the community for whom this is their native language could rate these cards, the best bubbling to preference.

The use of existing sites (Google Translate / Lang-8) to get/validate translations is good, but this could be baked into the same system as the flashcards, using that system's community, or having an API to connect that system with the external sites so that it's just one system from the user's perspective.

In terms of reading books / watching tv / etc, again a catalogue of links to e-books / youtube clips / etc., along with ratings of difficulty could be maintained by the community and presented through the app.

Build this on top of facebook / google plus / etc and tools such as hangouts are also available to help users from different countries / of different native languages talk to one another, taking it in turns of 30 min sessions in one another's languages.

Someone could start an App Approval business. Applications don't require approval to go on to an app store / market place, but if the developers submitted their code to one AppApproversLtd, those guys could review it for a small comission, then upload it to the app store as a trusted application. Though there's a slight conflict of interest (i.e. the person paying the approvers is also the person sending the code) I believe it's in the AppApproversLtd company's interest to do a good job since their business depends on them giving a reliable evaluation / building up a good reputation.

Using that business model keeps flexibility in place, where users decide if they want to risk trusting an unapproved app, or would rather go for an app that's been approved by one of these companies (potentially incurring additional cost if the developers passed the approval cost on to their users rather than offsetting against advertising).

AppApproversLtd could offer different levels of approval / ratings - i.e. just checking for malicious code vs. checking for polite error handling, efficiently written code, best practices, impact on battery life, etc.

How long until a YouTuber does a Google Glass / iOptiks on the battlefield parody. . .

Perhaps I'm a little over cautious (then again, perhaps not ;) ).

Agreed; I'm a believer ;)

Awesome effort. I'm a bit concerned that the reporter effectively says "to all naysayers, Will says it's true so it must be", and am slightly skeptical as Will hasn't put up information for others to build their own / sourcecode, which I'd expect unless he plans to sell the product himself. That said I think I believe this is genuine, and full kudos to the guy for his efforts if so.

I guess if you have a central SR processor which everyone's connecting with (as per proposed solution for issue 1) then you also have a huge amount of incoming data from all of your users. That means your system can evolve by taking feedback on errors its made, and can rapidly improve based on this new information, building larger dictionaries, taking info such as location data to improve context awareness, and using the vast volume of samples to improve SR where unusual accents are involved.

One thing that always surprises me is how many times companies reinvent the wheel and the need for it. In your post you mention an expenses system; something pretty much every company will have to implement. Since HMRC require this information you'd think they'd provide a tool that everyone could "plug into", giving them full visibility of the data they require in a standard format with little effort, and allowing businesses to also benefit by just downloading the relevant information from this service into their own systems for any internal needs. If all companies were using the same service this would also be one less thing for new employees to learn, since they'd be familiar with the expenses process from previous jobs.

On a persona note, I'm definitely in the automater category; on the few occasions when I've left a task unautomated because it was only supposed to be a one off it's come back to bite me repeatedly when month after month that same one off task pops up (admittedly after 2-3 repeats I then ignore the advise that it's a one off and automate anyway). These days if I can automate a task in slightly over the time it would take to perform that task, I automate by default. If there's a significant difference I weigh up the likelihood of repetition (by myself and/or others) against the extra time required to automate it.

Nice trick; though it's a once in a cache-time event.

If a few Asians don't tick Asian as their ethnicity when asked, that's going to reduce the stats for the number of Asians attending the university, effectively creating a negative feedback loop.

Interestingly I added Starbucks to my employment history (I was a part time barista whilst at university) and subsequently went down two points for it :S I guess the moral is only put down relevant experience to your domain. . .

I'm in some kind of middle ground here. I generally fall into the same category as Gabriel (the blog author), but try to compensate by using words like awesome and cool to the extent that I have polite tourettes. I buy a coffee and when the barista hands it to me I reply "that's amazing, thank you"; someone tells me their mum's died and in the desperate struggle to think of an appropriately empathetic response mumble the words "that's cool, nice". Hmm, not sure where I'm going with this comment - started out as giving an amusing anecdote / fishing to see if others fall into the same boat, but just realised I may have started using HN as some kind of therapy site, so will stop now. Replies are still welcome though. Awesome.