.
Profile URL | https://www.quora.com/profile/Bill-Paseman |
Question | Answer | Date |
---|---|---|
What are some simple solutions to simple daily problems? | Check out Algorithms to Live By I like the “marriage problem” algorithm the best. | 5/6/2017 |
What are some smart ways for a junior software engineer to advance his career after age 40? | You don't mention your current age. Unlike many responding to this post, I'll assume that you are in your 20's. Generalizing on what others have said, you can work on your reputation, and reflect 18 years of "distance run" in your resume. (If— by Rudyard Kipling : The Poetry Foundation In more detail, at 40, you have enough career behind you to establish if you can take a project that is in trouble and fix it; or just sit there or just blame it on others. Keep in mind that it is easy for an employer to figure out if others want to work with you, or have no opinion at all. Few will come out and say bad things, so "no opinion" indicates that you may be difficult, or that you will only go as far as you are pushed. View your resume as an adventure novel that is yet to be written, one where every day is a new chance to add a few words of a new chapter. For example, if you are a backend guy and the frontend guy quits, and you are able to learn enough to help make the frontend successful, your resume ought say that. You will fail. Often. By age 40, this is expected. How many of these failures you recover from, or turn into successes will determine how interesting your "resume reader" will find you. If you start out of school at age 22, you have 18 yearly chances to suggest a new product direction or way to enhance revenue for whomever you work for. Few people do this. That's because it never occurs to them, or they view ideas as precious. An alternate view is that ideas are a commodity, and it is in your best interest to learn to manufacture them quickly, easily and well. Properly applied, these ideas are an admission ticket to a new set of adventures, a new chapter in your resume. At this point, it may seem that this requires that you to become an extraordinary person. It does! After all, who would hire an ordinary person when the alternative is an extraordinary one? It may also occur to you that this is the kind of person you would want to work for and with. That, in fact, is the test that your resume, your story, is going in the right direction. | 3/15/2016 |
What are some suggestions for PhD research topics on Stock market crashes? | In my experience, a big issue in a crash is the standard models don’t work anymore. Consider liquidity. You decide to get out and there are no buyers at your price. (E.g. You have a share priced at $100 the prior day and it gaps down at the open at $50, meaning that there are no buyers at $75). A price/volume/liquidity model during a crash (if there is one) would be interesting. One mathematical example of such breakdown behavior is in fluid flow. At low velocities, fluid flow is ‘laminar”. At higher velocities, it becomes ‘turbulent’, with a different set of mathematics inside of each regime. | 4/4/2018 |
What are some two inventions to distinguish science and meaningful science? | Consider an object or event observed by observers A and B. E.g. Trump falls on slippery ice. A says “good”. B says “bad”. Each observation is subjective. It depends on characteristics of the observer. The event itself is objective. It has characteristics that each observer cannot dispute (object- Trump, action - falls). If the characteristics are in dispute, then (traditionally) these characteristics are subjective, i.e. dependent on the subject, not the object. Meaning is an attribute ascribed by the observer. It can differ from observer to observer. It is subjective and so not a property of the object. Pure science (traditionally) ascribes value neutral properties to objects. “The object changed temperature from 50 to 100 degrees C after 3 seconds”. It does not ascribe meaning. “Boy, that was cool!” | 6/2/2018 |
What are some up and coming ideas that may be a good investment? | Not clear. Generally, any idea that counts on the world being unable to stop global warming. E.g. dealing with tropical insects/diseases migrating north. Water storage/desalination to deal with larger variations in rainfall. Raising homes in place to avoid floodwaters. etc. | 5/10/2018 |
What are some ways to build a mouse maze for a science project? | Check out Maze - Wikipedia and Maze solving algorithm - Wikipedia | 12/9/2017 |
What are systematic causes of late projects? | In my experience (software), it is poor scoping. That said, scoping is tough to do if you are creating something totally new. See Bill Paseman's answer to Every time I begin a personal project with an idea, I fail at continuing it. What can I do so I won't change ideas fast? If scoping is not the issue, TOC (e.g. Resource Optimization for Project-based Organizations) mitigates a lot of issues in a multi-member team. It essentially does this by applying MRP concepts to project management, identifying bottlenecks and creating pooled resource buffers to take out slack. Eliyahu M. Goldratt put together a large consulting practice centered on this stuff (Amazon.com: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement eBook: Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox, David Whitford: Kindle Store). | 7/2/2017 |
What are the applications of deep learning in quadcopters? | Not all applications are complex. Look for particular verticals that don't require very deep neural networks. E.g. (perhaps) distinguishing a crack in a bridge truss from a shadow, or reading an inspection plate on the top of a smokestack. Even if you can't do the identification, you might get enough detail to allow the drone to center and illuminate the picture for later (better) processing. | 5/6/2015 |
What are the applications of linked lists? | Older versions of Lisp (programming language) - Wikipedia (one of the first programming languages) were implemented using pairs of linked lists. The first element of the pair was called CAR (Contents of the address Register), the second element was called CDR (Contents of the decrement register). In early versions of LISP, both code and data were represented using the same data structure. By smearing the distinction, programs could rewrite themselves relatively easily. I have also found linked lists to be useful when I have variable sized blocks in a linear stream. In the 80’s there were used to thread through disk blocks on file systems. I used them in capturing the entire state of a discrete simulation at successive time points. I went backwards and forwards on these “sacks of state” by using a “doubly linked list”. Turns out that you can store both the backwards and forwards pointer in the space used by just one pointer by using an Xor (XOR Linked List - A Memory Efficient Doubly Linked List | Set 1 - GeeksforGeeks). This was important through the 80’s when memory was a relatively expensive resource. | 5/5/2018 |
What are the benefits of learning coding if you want to be an entrepreneur? | Adding to previous comments (Software engineering vs. coding; Getting from nothing to something in a day), and assuming your product is software, a software based business has low costs, parts can be outsourced easily and cheaply, marketing and product development ideas can be expressed in the same medium (code), you can start it with minimal (or no help). See also Bill Paseman's answer to If you could go back to when you started programming, what would you suggest to yourself? | 3/8/2016 |
What are the best books about mass manipulation? | Hoffer’s true believer Alinsky’s rules for radicals | 10/20/2017 |
What are the best books for learning calculus? | Try this out: MIT’s Vintage 1970 Calculus Courses Now Online … And Still Handy | 6/29/2017 |
What are the best books for learning startups and entrepreneurship for beginners? | 10/28/2017 | |
What are the best books on programming concepts similar to John C. Mitchell's Concepts in Programming Languages? | I like https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/d... Structure and interpretation of computer programs by Gerry Sussman | 5/28/2017 |
What are the best books out there for teen interested in computer studies? | Should I read the book "Structure Interpretation of Computer Programs"? if “yes” then https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/d... | 12/16/2017 |
What are the best online academic research pubblication platforms? | Depends on what you need it for. If you want to get unreviewed work out quickly, Home :: SSRN is not bad for finance or social science work. If you want peer-reviewed work out there, you’ve got a long process ahead, but the work will be more respected. | 3/18/2018 |
What are the best online resources to learn machine learning 'properly'? (For someone with a non statistics math background) | I took Ng’s coursera course. I believe it was ‘proper’. | 12/15/2016 |
What are the best resources to learn the concept of neural networks in the field of AI? | Andrew Ng’s course, listed here (Bill Paseman's answer to What are the most important deep learning algorithms? In which order should I learn them?) | 2/20/2017 |
What are the best resources to start learning math from zero level to university level, online? | Not clear what “zero” is, but for 6th grade onwards, check out Would Kumon lose its appeal with Khan Academy's assessment and mastery levels (Khan Academy)? | 10/29/2017 |
What are the best ways to be compensated for time spent on a company board, and what are examples of what board members do? | Options. Usually the same amount and vesting as a senior manager (one below VP level). You should spend -way- less time than a manager on a particular company, and you should be able to refer in business or talent, as well as advise them on on-going issues (presumably based on your prior experience). | 12/12/2014 |
What are the best websites to learn Arduino programming (AI neural networks)? | You’ll probably have to construct your own curriculum. For Arduino, I just downloaded the development environment and did the intro projects (Arduino - Blink, etc.). Here is one completed project: Arduino Neural Network If it were me, I’d train the network on the PC and download the weights onto the device.E.g. see Bill Paseman's answer to How do you implement Artificial Intelligence in an Arduino Project? | 5/10/2017 |
What are the biggest pain points associated with machine learning applications ? | In terms of creating them: Getting Clean Data. And if you are doing deep learning, getting enough clean data. In terms of using them, reliability, since they are all based on heuristics: which means that they work until they don’t, based on the vagueries of the input data. | 12/29/2016 |
What are the branches of computer science, and which are your favorite? | Given that my learning is primarily project based and my history started before there were many computer science degrees, I tend to have a pretty holistic view (like Natural philosophy - Wikipedia before science) and smear all the branches together(below). My philosophical favorite is computational complexity. P, NP, etc. Once i heard that if all atoms in the universe had played one complete chess game/nanosecond since the beginning of time, they still wouldn’t have played all chess games. And that even Gauss obviously didn’t understand algorithms, since many he mentioned were exponential time. I was hooked. I mean, imagine understanding something that even Gauss didn’t ‘get’. ←-No need to read further, unless you want a justification—-> In 1977, got my undergraduate degrees at Rice University - in Chemical Engineering. At the time, there were no degrees in Computer Science, only in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. But I was the Computer Graphics Lab Assistant (Rice ARTS 455) and together with Howie Johnston, figured out a way to connect a homemade 4 voice TTL music synthesizer to a Tektronix 4013 Terminal which was connected via 300 baud modem to an IBM 360 which ran music composition software written in APL and PL-I. To learn how to do this better, I took core EE classes as my elective. Note that I said EE, not CS. It was clear to the teachers at the time that to program a computer, you ought first understand how to build one. After all, a running computer also implemented an algorithm, just an algorithm implemented using chips as building blocks. And to understand chips, it was clear that you also had to understand how a transistor works; so you were required to take classes in semiconductor physics and analog (and digital) circuit design. (At the time, you could view digital logic gates as simply being analog amplifiers that were biased so that they would ‘clip’ their signals. Also, having learned about fluid flows as a ChE, I discovered that EE was MUCH easier to intuit since V=I*R is linear and most analysis could be done by hand. ChE’s P=Q*Q*R was quadratic and needed simulations to understand.) I then took courses in how to build a simulated computer together with a loader and assembler (The assembler was a 3 month project that I did in 72 hours straight). Operating Systems were not a big deal, since ‘obviously’ computers programs were run one after another (‘batch’ mode) by submitting card decks to an operator in the basement of a building. (Actually, APL was time-shared as was TSO, but I don’t recall the theory being taught). Digital semiconductor circuits were actually a relatively ‘new’ phenomena. I listened to a guest speaker say that he had originally started his career as an analog computer designer (One who connected up analog circuits to run algorithms). He explained that his career choice was straightforward to him. Analog building blocks were clearly superior to their digital counterparts, since they could do more things: integration, differentiation, parallel addition, etc. So Rice forced me to learn the whole 1977 stack. Semiconductor physics - analog circuit design - digital circuit design - software. In 1978, I went to grad school at MIT. They were one of the few schools who actually had a Computer Science degree. I took courses in Language Design, Algorithms, etc. I built more music synthesizers out of TTL, one on a chip using Mead and Conway’s rules. But my key interest was AI, so I read the theses of all the people who impressed me the most. Gerry Sussman, Carl Hewitt, etc. The key takeaway for me was that each thesis showed how the author thought about things. (e.g. Dr. Sussman’s ‘hacker’ described his thought processes to a ‘T’). And if I could internalize each of them, I could then ask how each author would analyze problems that interested me. I took courses in Algorithms from Rivest and Adleman (‘R’ and ‘A’ in RSA). Compiler courses from Steve Ward and AI from Patrick Winston with occasional ramblings from Marvin Minsky. I followed with interest David Levitt’s application of Guy Steele’s Constraint work to Jazz and applied it to my music composition efforts. So ‘Language Design’ was first applied at Daisy Systems where they mapped a graphic design language to simulator languages and layout tools. Later I would build a company around application of constraints used in music composition to hardware configuration. So. All cross disciplinary. Whatever tool was required for the task at hand. I came to find that that was where the money was. Hope that helps (somewhat). | 12/4/2017 |
What are the common elements/factors amongst successful startups? | My answer is at the end of the story…. The Accidental Start-Up, From White This is my favorite case study because an uneducated "Okie", who had a lot of common sense, innovation, and drive really built a company of value under horrible handicaps. It was the height of the great depression (the early 1930s) when an out-of-work oil field mechanic decided that it was ridiculous for oil companies to install permanent drilling derricks over each drill site. He conceived the concept of a portable drilling rig which revolutionized the oil industry. Now this out-of-work mechanic had a few handicaps that might lead you to believe that he would never make a successful entrepreneur. He could barely read and couldn't write. He had absolutely no experience in either management or finance and therefore developed some unique opinions that should have killed his company's chances. For example, he believed "No man who wears a necktie can be trusted." And, "Never put your money in a bank or do business with a banker or you'll lose it all." And, "Never plan beyond today. The Lord will take care of tomorrow regardless of how much you fret." He was a frugal man so that when he was laid-off, he had over $400 hidden in a sock (a small fortune in that era). He watched his savings dwindle to $325 in three months while he searched for "respectable" work and then he decided to risk $200 on his portable drilling rig concept. At this point the mechanic sold the International Harvester Truck dealer of Tulsa on his concept and borrowed a ten ton truck to demonstrate (the dealer couldn't move his inventory and agreed to the loan if he received payment-in-full when the mechanic sold his rig). He rented (at $10/month) a 50-ton draw-works from a hoist manufacturer (balance to be paid when the rig was sold). He purchased useable scrap steel ($30 down and $70 when the rig was sold) and spent all of his spare time (the hours when he wasn't standing in long lines looking for work) building his rig. It took him three months. On his first demonstration, the drilling manager immediately saw the advantages of the concept an immediately bought the demonstrator. Oddly enough, the mechanic was thinking of asking for $7,000 (taking price he hoped would be at least $5,000) but when the manager seemed so enthused, the mechanic raised his price to $10,000. When the manager didn't balk, he then added $3,500 for the truck. He left the demonstration rig at the site and hitchhiked home to await his $13,500 payment. He felt that the $8,500 profits would hold his sock in order until he found "respectable" work. However, when the check came, it was accompanied by an order for 10 more units at $13,500 each. This caused our mechanic a very real personal problem. One cannot build 10 drilling rigs in his spare time and still search for proper work. If he accepted the order, he might miss out on a safe job. While he debated as to whether to return the order or not, another oil company (whom he had never demonstrated to) sent him a purchase order for 15 rigs, and so the mechanic's company was born. Now, $8,500 doesn't go too far when you want to build 25 drilling rigs unless you use some sound money-leveraging principles. Here's how our Okie made his money stretch:
When the twenty-fifth drilling rig was delivered, his sock had dwindled down to $2,300. When he was finally paid, the company was in a cash-rich posture, a position which never changed until it was sold in the 1950s. There were some problems which might amuse you. The management organization consisted of just the mechanic for the first 15 months. When government auditors came in to inspect the books, they were unhappy to learn that there were no books. The record keeping system was very simple. In the top right hand drawer of the company's only desk, all unfilled orders were kept. In the upper left hand drawer, all unpaid bills were kept. When an order was filled or a bill paid, it was pulled from the drawer and thrown in the wastebasket. "That way, we could always open a drawer and know what was coming in and what was going out." All other records were kept in the mechanic's head. When they took more than what the president felt was fair, he hired a qualified accountant, told him to leave his neckties at home, and to protect him the "next time those bandits come." The new controller was also given the following instructions: "Don't put a penny in the banks. Put 10% of all cash into dimes so that we can melt them down for silver if we have to. Don't keep any bills larger than a $5 bill because counterfeiters never work that low." For months, this controller was developing ulcers concerning himself about the vast amounts of unprotected cash he had to carry. Then he started cutting out newspaper stories of holdups and left them on the president's desk. After several months and dozens of stories of how people had lost everything in holdups, the controller asked his president about the high risks they were taking with their bundles of cash. It was then that he learned that his president hadn't read the newspaper clippings because he could hardly read. So the controller read him the clippings aloud, scared the president, and was allowed to place half of the company's cash in five different banks. The other half had to remain in reachable cash. When the controller retired 20 years later, he handed his replacement in excess of $4,000,000 in dimes, ones and fives. The company had never been robbed. From a production and service standpoint, this company also had unique problems. For the first 250 units produced, the company never used anything but scrap steel. This forced unique production practices. Each rig was completely built by one master mechanic and three apprentices. Since the materials were scrap, each rig had to be engineered and built from supplies on hand. No records were ever kept and since serial number 131 was completely different from serial numbers 130 and 132, the field service people had to be extremely flexible and innovative. However, since he only hired the cream, this was never a real problem. When the Japanese government started buying all of the scrap steel that they could get their hands on, the prices rose so the Okie was finally forced to use new steel. In the late thirties, the oil companies' demands finally exceeded his master mechanics' engineering abilities and he was forced to hire a real engineer. When the poor man first showed up to work, there wasn't one blueprint or one written production instruction in the entire company (it now employed over 500 people: 1 accountant, 1 engineer, 1 woman who handled all the clerical jobs, 1 president, and 496 production mechanics). It took this engineer four years to convert the company to sound engineering control systems. The company continued to be unique in many operating modes. When the Second World War hit, the government asked them to quote on building barrage balloon launchers. They quoted $12,000 while the next lowest bidder quoted $62,000. The company made $8,000 per launcher in profits while their competitors made less than $6,000 per launcher. These uneducated people pioneered many of the innovative and sophisticated techniques used by today's most progressive companies. Let's come back to our Okie mechanic in later cameos to illustrate common sense solutions. (My Note)
| 5/19/2016 |
What are the different advantages of strategic alliances? | Ideally, you allay with a company with complementary capability. E.g. Siebel developed a product and Anderson Consulting deployed it. Siebel got product revenue, Anderson get consulting revenue. Siebel got a 16x P/E, Anderson would have gotten a 3x P/E if they were public (they weren’t). It makes the combination look bigger than the parts. | 1/10/2017 |
What are the disadvantages of doing research without a PhD in the field of computer science? | A lot of the advantages of going to a graduate school and getting a Phd are social. Meeting fellow grad students in both your university and conferences. You can keep contact with both after you have your degree. If you have the contacts and the education you can probably do ok without it. | 1/17/2017 |
What are the distinctions between philosophy, science, and metaphysics? | Well, metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, and I believe Science is distinguished from philosophy by the scientific method. When I was in graduate school, my advisor commented on the flow of philosophy majors into the field of AI by saying they wanted the ability to set up tests of their theories and were unable to do so in the philosophy department. (I don't know if that has changed, or even if it was valid, but being in AI, I really liked the story). One parable that helps one understand the importance of metaphysics is called the "Ship of Theseus" (see wikipedia). In this parable, a thief comes every night and steals a plank from Theseus' ship. Theseus then replaces every stolen plank with one made of aluminum. This continues until the ship is completely aluminum. The question is then "Is this still Theseus' Ship?" For those who answer yes, consider that the thief then reconstructed a ship, plank by plank, each plank in the equivalent position, using the stolen lumber. This reconstructed ship was set next to the aluminum ship. Which is the ship of Theseus? I would pose the following equivalent problem to my children. Suppose there is a pond with a series of vibrational paddles along its edge. I have a program that creates what appear to be faces in the pool by vibrating the paddles appropriately. The paddles then stop vibrating. What happened to the face? At the right age, they would all give the correct answer. There was no face to begin with. This is an argument against perceiving the world as containing objects or "objective reality". In it, the world consists of quarks, which create occasional patterns of interest. Like patterns in streambeds or in shifting sand, the patterns come and go but the quarks remain. So if reality is not objective, and does not consist of objects, what is it? The counter-argument would be that reality is subjective. It requires an observer to give it form. Just like the faces that emerge from wallpaper or martian sand dunes or on the glass screen of computers running video games, these faces require an observer (a subject) to be "real". | 10/19/2014 |
What are the five most important programming concepts? | In 1988, when L Peter Deutsch was on my technical Board, I asked what the single most import programming concept was. He said "indirection". Since he wrote one of the first Lisp implementations (in 1963 when he was 17), I assumed he was referring to that. "No", he said "the idea is that instead of doing something, go look somewhere else and do what is there". | 4/19/2016 |
What are the key differences between artificial neural nets and real neurons of the human brain? | Well, I'd argue the thing they have in common is that we don't understand either very well. That aside... starting with a few quotes from: The New York Times
Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University: “Theory is beautiful and internally consistent. Biology, not so much.” | 2/10/2015 |
What are the machine learning techniques that can be used to populate information from the text? | Many. Here’s one: Announcing SyntaxNet: The World’s Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source | 11/23/2016 |
What are the main problems or needs of people in the world right now? | Depends on the region. In Syria? Staying Alive. In the US (judging from Trump and Sanders resonance), recovering the standard of living from 10-20 years ago. This mainly means jobs with a wage that supports what was called a "middle class lifestyle" 20 years ago. In many parts of the 3rd world (including regions in the US) hunger. In Europe? COming up with a solution to the Syrian Refuge crisis. It kind of goes on like that...... | 5/2/2016 |
What are the most feasible ways to achieve artificial general intelligence nowadays (2017)? | The general inclination seems to be to work top down. Aggregate all known methods into a Watson. Build a big Neural Network, etc. Me? I’d first see if I could build a bee (Intelligence test shows bees can learn to solve tasks from other bees). “There’s little under a million neurons in a bee brain, which is approximately the number of neurons in one human retina.” If you want to look further into this, checkout http://www.cell.com/current-biol... | 3/9/2017 |
What are the most important deep learning algorithms? In which order should I learn them? | See Vivek Kumar's answer to How do I learn deep learning in 2 months? Quickly: If you only want to spend a few minutes, you can play with a neural network (a deeplearning building block) using Tensorflow — Neural Network Playground (described in: Unveiling the Hidden Layers of Deep Learning) Papers: If you want to just read papers, consider The 9 Deep Learning Papers You Need To Know About (Understanding CNNs Part 3). The latest book on the subject is Deep Learning. Why it works: 20160909 Physicists have discovered what makes neural networks so extraordinarily powerful is a take on why this model of computing works so well. Curricula: Otherwise, assuming you are starting from nothing, then having a grounding in machine learning would help. Ashkan Abbasi's links are good. Andrew Ng's Coursera course is simple and clear (Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning Tutorial is the "Cliff Notes" version of his course.). Geoffrey Hinton’s Coursera course focuses more on deep learning and is harder. Learning the material in that order is probably your best bet.
Applications Deep Learning’s sweet spot has been unstructured data (traditionally image processing and speech recognition). Image processing applications have extended to visual art (next section). Another Application is NLP (Deep Learning for Text Mining from Scratch and Richard Socher’s CS224d: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing). Recall that Deep Learning works best when there is a lot of data (in particular a lot of data that seems impenetrable). As such, Drug Discovery (Deep Learning in Drug Discovery and Large-Scale Machine Learning for Drug Discovery) is another application. Key Limitation: Debugging Michael Polanyi famously wrote that “We know more than we can tell.” This is particularly true of Deep Learning Networks. See “There's a dark secret at the heart of artificial intelligence: no one really understands how it works”. Avanti Shrikumar is working in the biological realm to add more explainability to Deep Learning networks (Learning Important Features Through Propagating Activation Differences), as is Tsvi Achler (Psychologist for your AI) Analogizing to the Human Brain: Although neural nets don't "see" the world the way that we do
there is support for researchers' claims that these systems mimic human visual processing at some level. In particular, the references below may lend insight into what humans see when experiencing Pareidolia or certain psychological disorders or are taking hallucinogens.
Another approach is to compare human and machine vision error rates: Computers Might Just 'See' Like Humans After All Additional Resources: 20160927 Nuts and Bolts of Applying Deep Learning (Andrew Ng) Additionally, these Quora posts (What are the most important research papers for deep learning that all machine learning students should definitely read? and What are some good books/papers for learning deep learning?) lists more material including:
Applications Other Resources
| 2/4/2018 |
What are the most interesting research topic in finance for bachelor level students? | Deep Learning has had exceptional success over the last 5 years when applied to regression and classification tasks in unstructured data (such as image and voice data) Where can DeepLearning be appropriately applied to finance? Check out Harris who reports results of the different Deep Learning approaches applied to training and Tefas who gives an overview without results. I’d like to read the paper if you chose to do this. | 2/1/2017 |
What are the programming languages in software development that have been deprecated after mainstream usage? | Less than you might think. "Mainstream use" means that large companies used it, and there are still a lot of COBOL programs around. Why is this so? Consider Windows. Microsoft's key selling point was that they maintained backwards compatibility across OS's in order to stay in the environments in which they were originally installed. The military keeps the development machines together with the deployed code after a contract ends. E.g. all the languages used to program ballistic missiles will be around until all the hardware is decommissioned. | 11/16/2014 |
What are the stake and share options for a startup with three founders who can contribute in different ways? | I used The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management: Richard M. White: 9780801964541: Amazon.com: Books to help solve this problem. In brief, it associates several prototypical classes of businesses with lists of tasks and assigns a capital allocation to each task. If everyone buys into the list, then each person receives the stock associated with the task once they complete it. This also addresses the issue of vesting and founders "dropping out" by essentially making everyone a consultant, compensated once a task is complete. | 11/6/2014 |
What are the step by step calculation of polynomial multiplication using FFT in Theta(nlogn) time? | This is -not- my area. However, Howie Johnson (Page on cnx.org,) did analysis on about 1 zillion special cases of FFT for his 1981 thesis at Rice university. Perhaps they can help. | 1/6/2015 |
What are the steps to be followed for creating a successful startup? | There are many ways. Using some of the sources at Paseman and Associates: Pitch Checklist, here's what I did:
| 12/14/2014 |
What are the stupidest decisions ever made in Silicon Valley? | Well, in the 80's, The then pre-eminent portable computer maker, Osborn Computer, pre-announced a product it did not have ready yet. As a result sales dried up since people waited for the new model, and so capital dried up and eventually Osborne went out of business. At the time, whenever someone suggested something similar in the board room, they were told that it would result in "Osbornizing" their business. This mistake, which was made with all information necessary available to Osborne execs, was so stupid that it became a verb. | 9/22/2014 |
What are the top 5 benefits that AI would give to humanity? | Simulated Compassion: Something that can give more personal care to those warehoused in retirement homes. (Sounds horrid doesn’t it? So call you mom and dad now if they are alive. They would love a call from you). High Fidelity Simulacrum : would enable the people who care about you to still have some form of interactive memory of you after you die. (Sounds horrid doesn’t it? So call you mom and dad now if they are alive. They would love a call from you). Wealth Creation: When we get it to work, those who know how to use the tech will make a little coin. Drug Creation and discovery. | 3/5/2017 |
What are the top self-taught skills which you can monetise for money? | Negotiation | 8/31/2016 |
What are things should I know before I start a business or an investment? | Re the business. Work for someone else first. Learn using their time and money, not yours. Ask everyone in all departments about their jobs. Put together a contact list of the best people you know. Realistically assess your own strengths and weaknesses and hire a team with complementary skills that that cover your weaknesses. If you are really good, get your existing company to back your play. | 12/6/2016 |
What are you going to do tomorrow to change the world for the better? | Working to cure cancer: Cancer Genomics Research Hackathon for Papillary Renal Cell Carcinoma Type 1. Why? What are you doing? | 5/8/2018 |
What are your thoughts of encryption as a STEM fair project? | Starting with RSA and moving through Charlie Mason ‘s points as well as bitcoin and how quantum computing may upend encryption would also be interesting. | 1/22/2018 |
What art projects can I make by melting candles? | Yankee Candle got started by melting crayons into candles. You could do the reverse. If this is your first time, you could fill in a coloring book picture with melted wax. You could create a jackson pollock style painting in hot wax. Sand castles are often made by dripping a sand/water suspension ontot the beach. You could do the same thing with hot wax. Some artists have tried to give their oil paintings more depth by “mounding” paint. YOu could do the same and more easily with candles. | 12/11/2016 |
What aspect of computer science is most important? | L Peter Deutsch - Wikipedia was on my tech board during 1986 and I asked him this question. He said “indirection”. I asked “you mean like LISP pointers?” He said “No, the idea that instead of doing something, you go somewhere else to see what to do”. | 1/9/2017 |
What books can people recommend me? I’m 14 and I'm into fantasy but not limited to it. I enjoy all books, really. | TTL Cookbook | 12/10/2017 |
What books do you recommend for aspiring entrepreneurs? | Get a used one from the 70’s if you can. | 10/7/2017 |
What books should a high school calculus student read to learn more about truly beautiful mathematics? | The Mathematical Experience: Phillip J. Davis, Reuben Hersh: 0046442929684: Amazon.com: Books. The staged discussions with mathematicians are really great (e.g. explaining math to the university PR person and explaining the purpose of proofs to a non-math major "don't be an idiot, no on actually does them"). The fragile boundary between genius and total insanity (e.g. Wronski). And only 19 bucks. | 3/22/2015 |
What books should entrepreneurs read? | The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management: Richard M. White: 9780801964541: Amazon.com: Books | 10/24/2014 |
What business could I start, being a mathematician tired of academia? | Become a consultant. Save your money. Make sure your engagement contract allows you to keep and exploit any work product you develop. Use your consulting position to discover a business/product that you can develop cheaply and sell dearly. Once you've discovered such a product, then transition to a product development business. Initially finance it using your saved money. I did this and did well. | 3/22/2016 |
What can a theory CS PhD do in addition to working in academy after graduation? | Yes, although they seem to like physicists better. At Stanford, lots seem to start companies based on their research. | 9/9/2016 |
What can I do in programming once I know Calculus? | A pretty challenging problem is to write a program that automatically integrates/differentiates an input equation. Eg d(x**2)/dx => 2*x No matter how far you get, you’ll understand both calculus and automated reasoning better. | 12/15/2017 |
What can I do to produce an original science fair project? I have brainstormed great project ideas but always find that they've already been invented. | http://cssf.usc.edu/History/2008... is an illustration of Linda Alviti’s point. Improving Non-Invasive Blood Analysis is an example of fact checking an existing paper. No awards, but it lead to an Intel semi-finalist paper: http://mazziotti.uchicago.edu/jo... Lesson being that if you get into an area, rummage around a bit and then pursue something of interest, it might lead somewhere. | 6/10/2017 |
What can I do to succeed in a project at the end of my studies? | I believe this process may help: Bill Paseman's answer to Every time I begin a personal project with an idea, I fail at continuing it. What can I do so I won't change ideas fast? | 4/11/2018 |
What can municipalities do today to embrace the inevitable rise of AI/Machines, and the potential loss of jobs? | Adopt the technology to raise revenue and decrease costs. | 12/27/2017 |
What can you do in the USA that you cannot do in Germany? | (Going to Silicon valley from Bielefeld/Paderborn) Have warm feet. See the sun. Get a decent hamburger. Eat pumpkin pie (or any pie for that matter). Eat Texas BarBQ brisket. (oh god, yes) Laugh loudly (outside a bar). Go to MIT Live in Silicon Valley (Sad, but that is actually the order I remember them. I do miss the pork though). | 4/21/2015 |
What certifications do I need in order to sell drinks, sunglasses, sunscreen etc from my own property? | The SBA indexes several resources by state: What State Licenses and Permits Does Your Business Need? | 7/11/2016 |
What companies would you invest in now? | A startup contains an inexhaustible well of problems waiting to happen. Funding can be the catalyst that unleashes them all at once. The list below is an outline of an idealized Angel pitch that shows you recognize the risks and are addressing them. I don't expect you to have this pitch, but the closer you can get, the better.
More checklist detail can be found on Sequoia's site. (Sequoia has consistently been one of the best VCs around, so why not learn from them?). | 12/11/2017 |
What could AI cure/discover/create before us? | In the 70s/80s, an ai program re discovered maximally divisible numbers Recent news Google's AI found an overlooked exoplanet Note that discoveries of this kind are influenced by a human aesthetic. Eg, we will never be able to visit the above planet, so who cares? It has no utility. Well, people care. What if I have the oldest birch tree in the world? How much is it ‘worth’? Not much. No one cares. Sequoias on the other hand….. | 12/19/2017 |
What could be some good research projects about Deep Learning for an undergraduate thesis? | Drug repositioning - Wikipedia Large-Scale Machine Learning for Drug Discovery Please post back once you’ve written it! | 3/6/2018 |
What could be some story ideas for my creative writing science project? | If you go backwards in time, you would see the oxygen level steadily decrease as plant life devolves. Similarly, if you go forward in time as mankind succeeds in killing off all plant life in the oceans and land, the source of oxygen generation on the planet will disappear. In this case, the “age of oxygen” will simply be one more transitory period in this planet’s evolution. | 10/16/2016 |
What could be the reasons why self assessed life expectancy of entrepreneurs are more than normal? | Speaking as an entrepreneur. unwarranted optimism bordering on delusion. (required for the job….) Any data on actual vs. expected? | 6/24/2016 |
What defensible assets will Google's large Machine Learning investments give them? | Pure speculation on my part; but many of google's patents and trade secrets involve how to best scale basic algorithms. E.g. "Page Rank", though clever, is not particularly defensible. Their ability to apply it at scale is. Deep learning is similar (see Bill Paseman's answer to What are the most important deep learning algorithms? In which order should I learn them?). It works best with lots of data and works quickly if you can do it in parallel. As such, google's tremendous infrastructure is actually what makes these two markets "defensible". | 3/29/2016 |
What do founders do for a day job while creating their startup? | I worked as a contractor. That helped me negotiate a service agreement that allowed me to keep my IP, provide initial capital and finally, do Market testing and verification for my idea. | 11/2/2015 |
What do mathematicians mean by "hand-waving" and why is it important? | THE classic Cartoon that illustrates handwaving. Not sure why it was collapsed. Blah Blah Blah. Maybe it is visible now. | 11/3/2015 |
What do you do after having a minimum viable product? | Not sure what the idea is, so I will give a general answer. Market test it. Since you seem to have something that more or less works, package it up as well as you can (days, not weeks of work) and track the manufacturing cost, create a pitch on why it is great (again, days not weeks of work) and try to sell it. Note that I do mean -sell-. At the end of the interaction with the customer, you have money and they have the product. The reason you do this, especially with friends, is that they want to please you. They will smile and tell you the idea is great. Once you discuss money, the atmosphere often changes. You need to see that change and see how much you can charge. Figure out a strategy to determine pricing. You may start high and then go low. You may start low and go high. Sandra Kurtzig (with whom I once had a meeting) would sit across from a sales prospect and when the question came up "How much does it cost" would say: "$10,000". If the guy didn't blink, she'd say "per module". If the guy didn't blink, she'd say "per year". If the guy didn't blink, she'd say "initially". But however you do it, you need to see what the product is worth to the customer. Record the close rate: People who buy/people you pitch to. Now you have the basis for a business. You know how much your product costs to make and what you can sell it for. If you can’t sell it for more than the manufacturing cost, you are done. The idea won’t work unless you can get the manufacturing cost down. If you can sell it for multiples of the manufacturing cost, you can sell it through channels (e.g. stores). If you can’t sell it for more than 2x the manufacturing cost, the business will be difficult. If you get investors, they will want to know the market size (How many people you can possibly sell to: E.g. “all 6 year olds”). They will multiply the size by the close rate by the penetration rate (how fast you get the word out). Since you have product, I would guesstimate the market size after I sell a few. More markets will occur to you as you sell it. | 8/11/2016 |
What do you need in a science fair project? | It depends on how you view it. It is generally intended as a vehicle for you to learn about scientific research. To choose a subject that fascinates you, to answer questions about the subject using the scientific method and to report results. The feeling of most organizers are if you do that honestly, sincerely and in good faith, you will find the experience rewarding. Even if no one stops by the booth. If you view it as a marketing tool, e.g. to get into college, you need to choose a topic that your audience (the judges) find interesting. Like any sales pitch, it helps to do market research on choice of topic. If you look at a novel question, you run the risk of producing an inexplicable result. So you have to come up with a good title to draw in an audience and present the problem and research in an interesting and clear way. If you pick a topical question, you will not only have to do that, but will also have a lot of competition, and so the result had better be pretty compelling. | 12/5/2017 |
What do you think about AI and diagnostic radiologists in the future? Would AI take over their job one day? | Check out A.I. Versus M.D.. In brief, He argues that the answer is “no”. | 9/4/2017 |
What do you think about my entrepreneurship website for my school project? | Very professional looking. I like the interview, although I’d ask different questions. The advice is not what I would give to businesses in which I’d I want to invest. E.g. (I believe) that it is critical for an entrepreneur to establish goals before starting. For example, if the goal is to raise capital and the market size is small, then the entrepreneur might spend years before trying to raise capital and then discover that there is no interest in funding a small business. P&A: Pitch Checklist lists some of the issues involved in starting up a general business. Sequoia famously used to just look at just one chart before deciding to interview B2C founders: User acquisition over time. I agree with Melvin’s point about adding articles. There are many. My favorites are listed on the above page. Of them all, the best is: The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management: Richard M. White: 9780801964541: Amazon.com: Books Good luck. | 6/8/2016 |
What do you think is the possible solution for power shortage? | The question is a little too open ended for me. What country? What season? What usage? E.g. a nice lighting system was created by a Brazilian mechanic creates light bulb using water, bleach, and a bottle . Solar can be used for passive heating as well as active energy systems. Wind can be harnessed on small and large scale. Another application specific usage: How a Solar-Powered Water Wheel Can Clean 50,000 Pounds of Trash Per Day From Baltimore's Inner Harbor Perhaps a common theme here is that adapting the power source to the task makes the most sense where power is not plentiful. | 5/7/2017 |
What do you think of AI? | I used ai techniques at mit to do music composition from 1978–1980. I then reapplied the same techniques to do computer/network/insurance/financial configuration in the 90s. I built a company around the technology, funded it, took it public and made 10s of millions of dollars. So I am rather fond of it actually. So the real question is what makes ai different from standard software. The answer is that by definition, ai is “cutting edge” And so (relatively) few understand it. One implication of this is that if you can characterize and effectively apply it, you have a competitive advantage until it becomes mainstream. Once it becomes mainstream, it is no longer considered ai. | 9/7/2017 |
What does "short selling" and "long selling" mean in the stock market? | In addition to the points made already, people who embrace the idea of Modern portfolio theory create portfolios (collections) of stocks, some of which are "bought long" and some of which are "sold short". The goal of the theory, which is based on statistical assumptions about the stock market, is to reduce the risk of losing money on the total position in exchange for also reducing some of the upside profit potential. An alternative to buying long or selling short is to not to own or borrow the stock at all, but rather buy a call or put Option (finance). Option are contracts, which give the holder the right (but not the obligation) to buy (call) or sell (put) a stock and so function similarly to commodity futures. | 12/19/2014 |
What factors are contributing to the stereotype that people in tech areas are arrogant and full of themselves? | You'd need to ask the people holding the stereotype. | 9/24/2014 |
What goes inside of a neuron in an artificial neural network? | Check out Tensorflow — Neural Network Playground | 11/23/2016 |
What I should do when my PhD supervisor doesn't keep his words? | Taking a slightly contrary viewpoint. Some profs are first class pricks. Maybe he is sending you a message. You need to figure out what it is. If it is “I’m bored with you, don’t bother me.”, and he has tenure, you might consider moving on. | 9/19/2016 |
What insights from neuroscience are most likely to have an impact in deep learning by 2020 or 2025? | “Deep learning” algorithms have traditionally been inspired by the structure of living vision systems, analogizing identified biological subsystems to layers of computational "neurons". Computational systems then try to "learn" simple features (e.g. "edges") in the lower "neural" layers and more complex features (e.g. "faces") in the higher layers. Speculating then, I see several areas where there could be an impact. 1) Better understanding of existing lower "hard coded" biological vision layers which could then better inform their emulation in Deep learning systems. 2) Better understanding of how higher hard coded biological layers interface into the brain's reasoning system. 3) Better understanding of how applicable this model is to other sensory input modalities, e.g. hearing, taste, smell and touch. Note that there are some rather old theories regarding this. Some posit that hearing temporal processing system (at some level) shares the same processing as vision's spatial system. Visual objects are understood the same way as sounds, with audio features "leveling up" to tonal phrases in the case of music (see McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT on output (not input)) and sentences in the case of language. See Richard Socher's BAMMF talk on one way to combine language and vision via deep learning. | 4/4/2015 |
What is a good book that fully covers geometry? Even if not fully, but does teach high school geometry. I’m struggling to learn geometry. | One of the most reprinted math book of all time is probably Euclid's Elements - Wikipedia. One abbreviated version is Byrne: Six Books of Euclid: Werner Oechslin: 9783836559386: Amazon.com: Books . This book is“very Taschenbuch”, i.e. if you are color blind, the book loses about 1/2 its explanatory power. Hope this helps | 2/21/2018 |
What is a good supplier of paraffin wax in order to make good candles? | Yankee candle started with old crayons | 2/12/2017 |
What is a great idea for a community project for grade 8 students? If there is, what to do and what are the steps/methods? | Tutor math/english at an orphanage. I did this in 10th grade. Many of those kids are looking for big brothers/sisters. Contact Social Services for a list of places, qualifications and procedures. Clean up a park or a vacant lot. Contact City Services for this. You could also raise money for new equipment at the park. | 11/6/2017 |
What is a intuitive explanation for the neural network parameters? | These guys do parameter tuning and have several presentations. SigOpt: Amplify Your Research | 2/13/2017 |
What is a simple good book about financial mathematics that is not too technical? | Is a pretty good exposition and is used as a introductory text in many places. However, as noted elsewhere, asking for a “math book that is not too technical” is a pretty big wall to climb. | 5/22/2018 |
What is a study that fits artificial intelligence, computer science or IT? | Bit puzzled by the question. All technical studies at least. It is a bit like asking what study fits reading/writing. As reading/writing was a fundamental skill that has enabled progress in every study for at least several 1,000 years, so computing is a fundamental skill that enables study in every engineering discipline I know of. | 12/26/2016 |
What is a unique science fair project if the theme is "A device that will help you survive on a stranded island"? | How about an Iridium satellite phone? Or a fully staffed, fully stocked, fully fueled 400 foot yacht? Do you have a few more constraints? | 5/4/2018 |
What is a very simple example of creating a basic program that uses two programming languages the way many companies like Google and Microsoft do for complex apps like Chrome? | Chrome (written in C++) contains a Javascript interpreter. The interpreter is used to run apps (written in javascript) local to the browser and also allows these apps to communicate with servers outside the browser (the servers are written in a variety of languages). (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) shows a simple example of what it is like to write an interpreter in one language (Python) that interprets programs written in another language (LISP). | 5/6/2015 |
What is an algorithm exactly? What qualifies as an algorithm? | Drew Henry's answer is spot-on, but an interesting facet is that the idea historically was an an outgrowth of mathematics and mathematical considerations. E.g. "Under what conditions can you determine if an algorithm will complete its task". Various models of computers were proposed on paper that were used to answer this and other questions. Post's Tag system, the Turing machine and the Von Neumann architecture, which is what modern computers are based upon. Once computers were actually built, it was then determined that even if the algorithm can theoretically stop, it may not be practical. This lead to the field of computational complexity, where you could make statements like the following "Suppose all atoms in the universe were computers, and each was able to evaluates a chess move in one nanosecond and all had been working since the beginning of time, then they would still not have finished evaluating all chess moves". Len Adleman once said that this idea was non-obvious even to Gauss, since all the algorithms he proposes in his Principia Mathematica are exponential time (i.e. take an impossible amount of time to solve). Through time, computer science became less mathematically and more practically focused (since there are more engineers and businessmen than mathematicians). This lead to layers of software abstraction being developed to make programming easier (assembly language -> Fortran/Lisp -> Object oriented Languages). Practice in turn lead to new theoretical questions: How is it best to run an algorithm in parallel? How is it best to structure data? How can one determine if an algorithm (e.g. Google search) actually returns the results you want? And there is even a lot more after this.... | 2/11/2015 |
What is an good topic that can relate to teens and give quantitative statistic positive and negative correlation? | Studying and gpa. unprotected sex and pregnancy. protected sex and pregnancy | 1/10/2017 |
What is an interesting experiment that I can perform for my science project on genetic modification? (It should be something that can be achieved in grade 10.) | Check out Biotechnology in the public interest | 8/8/2017 |
What is an outstanding science fair Idea that I can make as a 12th grader? | Use deepchem to repurpose a drug for a rare cancer listed in the cancer genome atlas. | 7/17/2017 |
What is an unusual side project you find particularly motivating? | trying to help create cancer treatments. | 4/30/2018 |
What is better, selling a company privately, or taking it public? | Well. Calico (the company I founded) had a buyout offer every year until we went public. Its valuation increased every year as well. So in my case, an IPO signified a more valuable company. So if "better" means "worth more", then for me, an IPO was "better". | 3/3/2016 |
What is difference between pixel and vector in machine learning? | Building on Jordan Fréry’s answer: vectors are the basic building blocks used in most machine leaning math. An example 3d vector might be [2,3,4]. But vectors can be 0,1,2,3,4… long (e.g. here is a 5 dimensional vector [1,2,4,3,5]). A pixel is a spot on a screen which has a color. So a complete pixel description would include the x,y co-ordinate (e.g. 511,510) and its color, which often represented as a 3D vector where each member is an integer between 0–255 or 0–65,535 depending on the color palette (Color Palettes) e.g. [0,119,181] represents “linked-In” blue. The members of this vector have an order. The leftmost member tells “how much” red is in the color, the rightmost tells “how much” blue. The middle one tells how much green. So a 2x2 screen with 4 pixels might be represented as a vector of “row” vectors, each row a vector of “pixel” vectors e.g. [ [ [0,119,181], [0,119,181]], [[0,119,181], [0,119,181]]] This “screen” is all “linked In” blue. Note that the pixel position is represented implicitly: i.e. the the first pixel in the first vector row corresponds to the first dot in the first screen row, etc. Now, suppose you want to build a “recognizer” that takes a screen as input and outputs whether it contains a reference to linkedIn. One particularly stupid way to do this would be to convert the screen to the above format and count the number of occurences of linkedIn blue pixels. If the number exceeds some threshold, then your recognizer would label the screen as a “linked in” screen. | 11/29/2017 |
What is it like to have sold most of your Facebook stock when it was around $20-$30 per share? | Better than selling google at 85 or Amazon at 10. | 9/23/2017 |
What is it like to study in the Rice University? | I was raised in Houston, went to Rice (in Houston) and then MIT (in Boston/Cambridge). Things may have changed, but 35 years ago, Rice was provincial, MIT was cosmopolitan (e.g. a popular Rice T shirt at the time was “I go to Rice, I must be smart”. I never saw a Rice Tshirt on Mass Ave. the street running between Harvard and MIT in Cambridge). This provincial focus extended inward, making Rice quite “political”. As an undergraduate, I was involved in several turf wars trying to do my computer music research and found the political atmosphere destructive. At MIT, the artifice was not there. People were absorbed in pursuing world class research. Work like mine was supported, not quashed. MIT students and professors would tell you straightforwardly what they were doing (if you asked.). In the CS department, the research was groundbreaking on a global scale (E.g. AI was getting off the ground. I took courses from Marvin Minsky. I took courses from Ron RIvest and Len Adleman (The “R” and “A” in RSA). I built ICs using the approach forwarded by Caltech’s Mead and Conway). Frankly, I found that a culture of “letting your work speak for itself” to be a hell of a lot more intimidating than than the atmosphere at Rice, and it pushed me to do my best. In addition, Cambridge is a college town, filled with people from Harvard, MIT and the surrounding universities. You could strike up a conversation with practically anyone in a coffee shop and hear about amazing things that they were working on. Houston, less so. On the plus side, if you are going to Rice, the population is large enough that you are sure to find friends and supporters if you look. In my case, Howie Johnson (an undergraduate who had built a digital music synthesizer on his own at age 14 in 1970; and easily one of the smartest people I have ever met. Either at Rice or MIT.) helped me build and interface my music synthesizers to the computer; and M. Stuart Lynn (then Editor of the ACM) and Ed Hayes (then VP of graduate studies) appreciated my work and wrote good enough letters of recommendation to get me into MIT. All made one helluva difference in my life, and they were at Rice too! | 6/9/2017 |
What is more valuable for an aspiring entrepreneur: A one-year Master's program in Strategic Management, or a year of full-time startup experience? | In line with Maximilian Batz's response, what I found most valuable was creating my own businesses. The process tends to make the success factors quite clear if you can be systematic about it. Dave's Way: R. David Thomas: 9780425135013: Amazon.com: Book says it quite well: Start by just trying to sell something to someone and make them happy with the the sale. | 4/23/2016 |
What is neural networking? Where should I start to know about it? | See if this helps. Bill Paseman's answer to What are the most important deep learning algorithms? In which order should I learn them? | 8/29/2017 |
What is so good about working for a startup? | Upshot If you have to ask, chances are good that a startup is a poor fit for you. I actually experienced both sides of this (mileage may vary for you of course) Alternative (not startup) When I left school, I took a job with an oil company. After a year, I did the best of any new hire in the division, and got a raise at the top of the range: 8%. In the prior year I had seen two men die, one made a paraplegic and another lose his leg on the rigs. After the funerals, nothing changed. Their lives had ultimately meant nothing. To me, it seemed like a poor thing to dedicate one's life to. I went to grad school and then worked at Nixdorf in Germany. Lights off at 5:00 and everyone partied. Another 8% raise. Alternative (startup) My father was an entrepreneur and I felt that I had more upside if I became one also. I was taught that the stock market was a place to maintain wealth you got, but if you wanted to create it, you needed to work for yourself. I felt I had learned most of what my father could teach, so I sought a place to apprentice. I traded off equity for risk and joined as the 16th employee at Daisy Systems (already funded by Fred Adler), where I had a chance to observe Vinod Khosla (then CFO, went to found Sun), Harvey Jones (then VP marketing, went off to found Synopsys), Areyeh Finegold (Mercury Interactive), Dave Stamm (Clarify), and Mike D'Amour (Quickturn). Franky, that part was pretty lucky. I developed my technical skills and using the business skills I learned at Daisy, founded two companies of my own. One that flopped and one that IPOed. So. That's what I learned. | 11/11/2014 |
What is something that not even billionaires can buy? | Immortality | 11/16/2014 |
What is strategy in business? | GOSPAPlanning.com UK, US, Europe Goal - A goal is something we aim to achieve, an end result. For example quality service, market leadership, number one sales person or employer of choice. Our goals are our motivation. Objective - An objective is a deliverable, it is measurable and within a timeframe. For example $23m by year end, 10 sales meetings per month or 90% staff utilization per month. Objectives support goals. Strategy - This is how we are going to achieve our goals, these are what we should do. For example implement a quality review process, add extra product functionality or increase product marketing in a specific vertical sector. Strategies support Objectives. Plans - Plans are specific elements of the strategy. They are what we are going to do in the short term (next 30 days) to move the strategy on. For example select a marketing agency by the end of October or complete the product specification by October. Plans support Strategies. Actions - Actions are day to day activities and are specific details of a plan. For example ring Bill at Alpha Marketing Services. Actions support Plans. | 2/8/2018 |
What is the 'one thing' that I can do daily to be more wealthy? | Spend less | 1/26/2015 |