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noverloop

145 karma · joined July 18, 2009

http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/noverloop.html
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noverloop··on Are you sure you want to start a company? (A Letter to Y Combinator Applicants)
yes.

The way I see it, the only way to have sustained positive impact on the world is to allow humans to be more human and entangle it in the worlds economic system so it remains in place. That construction can only be achieved by a business.

noverloop··on Tell HN: Why I want to start a startup
Well, that explains your lousy high-school teacher... The only metric we employ in our schools to measure teachers' performance is a. do they fit in and b. can they keep their classes under control.
noverloop··on How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?
you're failing until other people suddenly start to refer to you as successful
noverloop··on Frenzy - The Dropbox powered social network
exactly. also, social norms don't blend well with market norms... nobody (sane) is going to pay to talk to their friends.
noverloop··on Milk: Machine Learning Toolkit for Python
What is the advantage of this library over MDP? (http://mdp-toolkit.sourceforge.net/index.html)
noverloop··on Work Less
Would it still be productive when the 5th day is a company-wide hackathon?
noverloop··on Life as a Second Class Citizen of the Web
start a corporate shell in the UK? (or some other cheap place)
noverloop··on StartupBootcamp, the First true Europen Startup Accelerator is out
finally! an accelerator that is friendly to graduating students...
noverloop··on Debunking The Startup Myth: Finding The Right Team
Groupthink is not a situation where all members agree. Groupthink is a situation where members of a group self-censor their (critical) opinions in fear of retribution or loss of esteem.
noverloop··on Register a Business Today
I would have done this a long time ago if my country wouldn't levy taxes on companies that aren't active (dormant).

I hadn't considered incorporating abroad seriously until now.

Are there any gotcha's with a company abroad? e.g. annual tax filing in my country (Belgium)? wages paid out by foreign corporation? ...

noverloop··on Germany Is Smart to Plan for Death of Euro
probably the same issue that Belgium has, banks with a lot of PIGS-bonds.
noverloop··on World Bank app competition
I'm surprised by the anti-world bank sentiment here. You should read 'The Bottom Billion', which was written by the director of the Development Research Group at the World bank (2003-2008)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion

noverloop··on Conflicting Advice from Entrepreneurs on Fundraising, Vision, Hiring, etc.
The person cited to support the 'ignore the competition' argument hasn't launched his product yet... Why should I even consider advice from such a person?
noverloop··on Why don't gazzilionaires start their own countries?
I heard Greece could use some money
noverloop··on Ask HN: Which speakers can inspire students?
yes, but these aspects are 'post-idea' Most don't have ideas yet, although there is an active effort from the university to match CS students without ideas with academics from non-CS departments (legal, economics,...) that have ideas.

It takes some effort to make startups a viable 'career'-choice.

noverloop··on Ask HN: What are you thankful for?
The internet, I wouldn't be who I am today without it.
noverloop··on I'm Everyone, a live, anonymous image/video site (potentially NSFW).
Allow people to flag submissions if you want a working 'adult filter'
noverloop··on $10,000 algorithm competition: predict commute times on a Sydney freeway
pseudocode will do as well
noverloop··on How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter.
Facebook groups solve this problem. However I don't think you want to manage your closest friends on one platform.

I communicate with the people I care about through all communication methods available, restricting this to one method would be a distraction.

noverloop··on Ask HN: What is Wealth?
The ability to satisfies ones needs.

The entire economy is built around providing individual humans with the means to satisfy their needs.

noverloop··on Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
I think it's more effective to train classifiers on users' voting logs and comments in order to maintain the quality and thoughtfulness of HN. This allows you to classify all your users into classes that resemble their characters. e.g. A genuine nice guy won't post mean comments and won't pick 'punish' a user he disagrees with. A person who downvotes when he disagrees can be classified as such. I'm sure a troll has a specific pattern too.

Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category. e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc...

A set of users can serve as a training set for each category. It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers.

Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.

noverloop··on What algorithm blows your mind? (Reddit compsci)
In heuristics, I like Asynchronous teams [ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/edrc-22/project/ateams/... ]

In multi-robot coordination I like the free market system [ http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/colony/architecture.shtml ]

And regarding machine learning I like neural nets (MLP), however the algorithms that currently blow my mind are convoluted neural networks (CNNs) and deep belief networks trained with auto-encoders. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M on the 21-minute mark to see it in action.

noverloop··on What We Look for in Founders
'Systems' is a very broad term. Every group of people that consistently does something has a system for it. while in programming a system is denoted by strict rules, in human interaction it's based on incentives (including social incentives). So, you can get somebody to do something if it strokes with his incentive or you can try to subvert the incentives.

It's not by definition an immoral thing to do. e.g. a real-estate broker wants to sell a house as quickly as possible, so they tend to sell houses slightly below market-value and then convince you it's the best you'll get. you can rig this incentive in your favor by telling the broker you've contacted two brokers and will accept the highest bid.

I actually applied this one recently as my sister was looking for a renter and had contacted only 1 broker. I convinced her to get a second opinion and she got a way better offer.

noverloop··on Ask HN: How do geniuses think? How do you think?
You should take a look at Charlie munger.

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6Cy7UwsRPQ

a more detailed overview of what you are looking for:

http://www.focusinvestor.com/FocusSeriesPart3.pdf (from charlie munger wiki)

noverloop··on Ask HN: What are you working on right now?
I'm working on a remote control for Google TV based on computer vision and gesture recognition.

This is my masters dissertation and I'm currently researching algorithms and techniques that enable real-time detection and tracking of hands or objects.

A prototype will be made for the Logitech revue if I succeed :)

noverloop··on [dead]
Ask his name, it's a common anti-corruption measure. This gives you two options

- he'll give his name, great! go report him for corruption.

- he refuses to give his name, great! tell his boss. (repeat until people get fired or your application gets approved)

noverloop··on Ask HN: Do we no longer support our members?
groupthink is a state where people self-censor in fear of rejection or repression. Only down-voting when disagreeing can cause groupthink since people who disagree with the consensus will stop posting disagreeing comments to preserve their karma.
noverloop··on Rate my app: Paprika Recipe Manager for iPad
This app looks like a good candidate for some idea I and my gf had a while ago, I'm not going to implement this so feel free to take it. There should be a feature to rate (or like) recipes, so you can then recommend recipes based on what other users liked. That makes it easy to discover new recipes that suits your tastes.

I don't have an iPad so I'm not able to review your app, good luck.

noverloop··on My list of ideas, if you're looking for inspiration
I meant that the bandwidths are available to give the remote DJ enough immersive experience to do his job well. A couple of hi-def video streams and a high quality sound stream. I'm not going to develop it, I just noted it might be in the realm of the doable now.
noverloop··on Ask HN: Considering quitting my day job to work on my startups
I would ask to start working part-time and quit if they won't let you.
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