marc0's comments

yes but what if my location is not determined correctly by the browser (eg when connected via a VPN with entry point in another city/country)? I must be able to specify my location manually.

It seems that the site requires location information and cannot cope with location blocking. Also, I get an error "Location information is unavailable."

Sorry, but that's a total overshoot. I definitivly won't sit next to my pan, monitoring its temperature on my smartphone to find the "perfect" moment when to stir the chopped onions. I would, maybe, if I did some extremely temperature sensitive chemical experiment. But not in my kitchen.

And WFT: there are batteries in the handle? It's a joke, yes? A pan should be the perfect thing for energy harvesting, which would be at least to some extent innovative.

Lucky guy who got a baby who respects schedules.

I admit it's really tempting: carry around a sleeping baby while doing some programming work. From my own experience, it IS possible, but one must be very flexible. I.e.: work whenever the baby lets you (you must be able to get focused very fast after interruptions); learn typing fast with one hand (in the other one you will hold the baby); find positions which the baby likes and which allow you to work, e.g. carry it standing in a scarf in front of you or on your back or -- what worked for me -- work with the laptop half lying on the couch while the baby is sleeping on your belly ;-)

I'm a customer of a local bank in the village where I grew up (in Germany). They offer of course online banking etc like any decent bank, but the really good thing is: they know me and my familiy quite well and vice versa. So, when travelling, and when Internet and everything fails, it's easy to get the right people on the phone to find a solution. Also, it's easier to negotiate with them if you know them on a personal level (e.g. for reductions on all kind of fees etc). It's funny, but I found my village's bank a reliable fallback, no matter in which country or city I had lived.

Keep it simple!

Moving from academics to industry can be difficult. My experience: several of my applications were rejected even though I considered me as a perfect match. I analyzed my resume and suspected, there was too much academical stuff in it. I deleted most of my research work from the resume and kept only "down-to-earth-stuff". Same strategy in the interviews. And voila, within no time got a bunch of offers for really great industry jobs.

and where's UberROCKETS where I can offer rides on my private space ship??

hmmm ... I'd say: have something to show

My personal experience in the Middle East: expect everyone to be at least half an hour late (you're stuck in a huge traffic jam anyway), don't be surprised if someone is 2 hours late, and don't view 11pm as an unusual time for a meeting (joking: there exists a time zone in which the meeting starts in time). I would classify it as "multi-active".

Personally, I like it that people are not angry with you when you're really late (again, traffic jam). I experience this as relieving.

Wonderful article, and quite insightful. While reading I was asking myself if it wouldn't be a good idea to provide tools to enlarge our possibilities of time perception:

The dominant time perception in North-America / EU is linear: the work day is segmented and tasks and appointments are scheduled. Calendar apps and project management tools help us with this. But what if I wanted to take, say, the circular time persepctive? I'm not aware of any tools or apps that would support such a perspective.

Maybe one should think of ways to open our management culture to other time perspectives, maybe even enabling us to shift between the perpectives and unify them. Something like a 'multi-cultural project management tool.' I can imagine that this could have quite some impact in globalized economy, and maybe even could be the basis for a new management philosophy

... and I did think SF is expensive ... average semidetached house with small garden in a suburb of Munich, Germany (1h commuting): 950k USD, quite an average price here. And the salaries are lower than in SF while cost of living is higher. 770k USD in SF looks like a bargain :-)

Scientist here who managed to get out of the science trap:

Prof Katz is totally right. I started a great career as string theorist, postoc at several elite universities, international lectures and talks, wrote a book, appeared on TV etc etc ... and then didn't get a professorship (at least not on a reasonable time scale). Tried scientific management for a while, but that was too depressing. So, in my late thirties (!) I went into automotive industry, working on self-driving cars, having a fantastic and cool job with a salary I could only dream of a few years ago.

I wouldn't have wanted to miss large parts of my scientific career. But I really regret my excursion into scientific management. I should have switched careers five years earlier.

My advise to young scientists: define some aims and a time scale, and if you don't meet them (i.e. get a tenured job), say good-bye. There is nothing to regret. Don't believe those professors, friends of yours, who promise you a position next year or in two or in three ...

When I was still working in science I got into this state regularly (I called it "the Flow" since I felt like surfing on some kind of mental wave). When I joined a company I lost that experience at first, until I got to work on some sophsticated problems, and until I learned to decouple me from the environment. At university that was no problem, but at a company there are more restrictions in place (more or less fixed working hours, working environment, telephone, internal chat, meetings etc).

My strategy is to create a temporary environment which isolates you -- not necessarily in a physical way. No emails, no meetings, no talking (earphones and loud music help me much, maybe also a sign like "genius at work" -- it's funny but makes people understand you need to concentrate). And then there is only you and the code, and that's your portal into the "zone" or "flow" or whatever you want to call this meditative state.

We live in a globalized world, and especially for internet aficionados there seem to exist no borders. But one should always remember that the world is not homogeneous mass of minds. Quite the opposite is true: if you deal with a customer base in the millions, you also have to (or should) deal with a multitude of cultural backgrounds. Thinking like this, I would say, opens up many opportunities and niches which could be your next target group.

The International Mother Language Day reminds me of this. Hence, in my own language: I winsh aikh an shehna Muaddashprakhladog

I consider it an enormously antiquated idea to bind nations to a piece of land. We should try to arrive at a more abstract definition. And yes, of such nations we need many more.

The "art of summing up divergent series" is a well established technique in quantum field theory (not only in string theory). Briefly, the underlying mathematical description of quantum field theory produces singularities. The latter are not physical (so their existence is due to our poor mathematical abilities) but they still contain useful physical information. This information can be extracted by "correctly" performing divergent sums. And its results are verified by experiment, e.g. in higher order corrections to particle masses.

I see quite some discussion about UIs and whether they should be audio based or rather visually oriented etc. For a really futuristic intelligent device (call it OS, robot ...) I would drop the idea of "the UI" at all. Rather I would imagine such a system to be intelligent enough to provide a suitable way to exchange data depending on the situation and the task.

There are times when "it" listens to my words and answers verbally. At other times I just want "it" to read what I wrote on my sheet of paper and interpret it. Or I want it to follow my eye movements, or read command off my lips. And it's not just a collection of UIs, but it's a flexible UI that adapts its protocols permanently (sometimes twinkling of an eye has huge information content, sometimes not).

I'd say most of the predictions are sound. No 10 goes a bit too far though. Anyway, what I can't understand is why this rumor of bitcoin being anonymous (No 4) is so persistent (maybe wishful thinking?). What's necessary here is not a further technical development but rather some PR work (outside and unfortunately also inside the community of bitcoin users).

I must say I find this fascinating, esp two aspects: First, great idea to train on number sequences instead of single characters. That's certainly a lesson which is applicable in many other situation, too. Second, 11 levels and deep learning -- a bold approach, since (from what I know) the paradigm is that deep networks are generally not working well. They even found that performance improves with the levels (they just stopped at 11, probably because of resource limitations). As mentioned in the paper, this is probably due to the fact that the network ist trained with a huge dataset, so the size of the dataset really is the relevant factor.

http://www.yandex.com is a real competitor