131–140 of 203 posts
http://www.gladwell.com/2008/2008_10_20_a_latebloomers.html
An excellent quote from the article:
"The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition."
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The world will always need business process management software. If you provide something flexible, you can adapt to new technologies and opportunities. But the basic overview of business process management software hasn't really changed as much as we might want to think. Even mobile devices have been around this area for most, possibly even all, of the last twenty years though they used to be a lot simpler. As far a…
I just see that some billion dollar companies that got big through the web or computing are already going downhill again. For example Yahoo and Nokia (not sure about Microsoft). For business management, off the top of the head I would ask: what devices will be used to run it in the future? Will desktop software still exist? Will everything be in the cloud? How will data enter the system? One scary thing about the int…
It has only really been about five years ago that we could get rid of terminal-based access (as in a virtual tty) to point of sales. A lot of people demanded something simple, and highly optimised for rapid data entry. The nice thing about a text-mode display is there is no temptation to take your hands off the kb and move to a mouse. KB and barcode scanner are all you need.
Now we have a web-based interface with a fair bit of automation, but we have to have a trackball in retail environments. However we make sure there are keyboard shortcuts to all the right things and that people are trained on these.
Of other businesses I know of, the last ones moved from text-only POS programs to graphical ones really only two to three years ago.
So things change remarkably slowly. The challenge is to accommodate a flexible workplace.
The web works for many things but for POS software, it is rather sub-optimal. Controlling serial port pole displays from a web page is a bit kludgy....
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People have been arguing the same thing about investing for a long time: is it a game of luck or skill? On one hand, there are academics saying it's always mostly luck, and their typical argument goes roughly like this: Say 100,000 orangutans enter a coin-flipping contest in which 'heads' wins and 'tails' loses; so around 50,000 orangutans will win on the first throw; of those orangutans, around 25,000 will also win…
I've worked in game design. I once built a card game (Ambition) with the express purpose of taking card-luck out of the game as much as possible. (To make a long story short, I was in Budapest and left all my German board games at home, so I had to make do with a deck of cards.) Bridge solves this problem by duplication. (Bridge is an immensely deep and skillful game, but there's a lot of card-luck when the players a…
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Absolutely true. I find the same effect on HN to be even worse. HN now has over 100k uniques/day[1] . That means that on any topic you'd ever like to comment on, odds are good there are many HN visitors who are better at that you are. [1] traffic from last year: http://ycombinator.com/images/hntraffic-9feb11.png )
I still have somehow trouble with these high numbers. By looking at the front page, the points for top stories are still staying relatively at the same level. These relatively low numbers of votes makes it still seem to be a relatively close community but maybe just many of the new visitors can't be bothered to participate.
"Stuck due to “knowing too much”" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4037794), 68 votes, about 15,000 visitors
"What's The Best Language For Safety Critical Software?" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3943556), 108 votes, about 25,000 visitors
(there was another one with about 200 votes, but I didn't find it!)
Compare these to submissions like this one, that has 350+ upvotes already, and I think it's realistic to assume at least 60 or 70 thousand unique users (I mean users in the sense that they know HN and visit it consciously) visit HN every day.
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I've worked in game design. I once built a card game (Ambition) with the express purpose of taking card-luck out of the game as much as possible. (To make a long story short, I was in Budapest and left all my German board games at home, so I had to make do with a deck of cards.) Bridge solves this problem by duplication. (Bridge is an immensely deep and skillful game, but there's a lot of card-luck when the players a…
Is it this Ambition: http://www.pagat.com/invented/Ambition221.pdf ? [PDF]
Unfortunately, I get so little time to play games these days that perfecting it isn't something I've had time to do.
I've come to the conclusion that success in business is like the game Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors). People will argue to death whether it's a game of luck or skill, and often it gets very emotional, with people who've had success attributing it to skill and the rest attributing their lack of success to bad luck. In reality, it's neither. It's a game of strategy in the academic, game-design sense (interaction ra…