181–190 of 231 posts
One area especially is customer reviews and feedbacks. I don't want to read a review by anyone who buys the products.. that doesn't help me. I want to know if that someone is like me. has the same taste in music, or food or whatever variable that is closest to my interests.
This will help me speed up the decision making on the purchase in question.
A better way to communicate between cars -- honking a horn seems kind of stone age at this point.
This is interesting, what sort of thing did you have in mind? I think a horn is more about communicating between drivers, not cars, and seems like an good solution for this.. In the "hey, im here!" sense, rather than "hey, fuck you buddy!". It provides an alert and rough location that doesn't require much processing by the driver.
Job search is very broken. Monster/Dice/Craigslist &c are broken. Not sexy, I know, but I imagine the people who solve that problem will become quite rich.
i had an idea of semi-fixing that, or rather rerouting around the problem by shifting the job-finding and -posting from the HR dept. to the individual employees. Let's say you're a web programmer living in City A, and commuting to City B, a commute of 2 hours. Unbeknown to you, there's a web programmer in City B, commuting to City A every day. My idea would be to put these two in touch with each other, and eventually…
A job is not just a location, but a combination of lot of things like salary compensation, work culture. So it will be difficult for two people to agree on something like this. One would always think, that he's losing out on the deal. It might still work!, but maybe it's just a little too radical.
I was toying with a similar approach, but i think the social angle on job search is still missing. Eg. recommending jobs for your friends, voting on which companies are good to work for etc. There are a lot of small companies that don't get a lot of good talent, just cos they're not Google/Facebook.
I would love to get a chance to discuss, brainstorm with you on this, since i've been seriously thinking of jumping into job search with the hope of doing it right.
A better way to meet co-founders. Almost like a dating website but instead of going on a date you work on an Open Source project together with someone who would be a good match.
A better way to communicate between cars -- honking a horn seems kind of stone age at this point.
This is interesting, what sort of thing did you have in mind? I think a horn is more about communicating between drivers, not cars, and seems like an good solution for this.. In the "hey, im here!" sense, rather than "hey, fuck you buddy!". It provides an alert and rough location that doesn't require much processing by the driver.
But at the same time, any new method can't be too complicated, as it would just be an additional distraction and encourage worse driving.
Then again, people are already operating GPS and talking on cell phones while driving, so if something could be designed to be only marginally more complicated than a car horn, but substantially less complicated than a GPS, I think it would be a fantastic improvement.
A better way to communicate between cars -- honking a horn seems kind of stone age at this point.
A catalogue of charities giving information about their goals and their financials. Help me to help others most efficiently with my money.
Something like http://www.charitynavigator.org/ ? Lists charitable organizations, including their mission statements and financials, and rates them within their specific fields. (A financially healthy museum will look very different from a financially healthy feed-the-children program, which is why it rates by category.)
Thanks for the plug.
Digital receipts - I hardly need to carry cash anymore, pretty much everywhere I shop takes chip-n-pin cards so I use my debit card to pay for most things. However, what you end up with is silly bits of paper that I end up carrying round in my wallet or stuffed into folders at work or at home. Why can't my payment card contain an identifier that allows the bank to send me a digitally signed receipt - I could get noti…
Making the publishing of negative data as prestigious and scientifically rigorous as positive data.
1. Negative means data that contradicts the popular hypothesis. This is frequently reported very prestigiously, though sometimes care has to be taken depending on just how deeply held the refuted belief is.
2. Negative means data that is highly inconclusive. This data is often non-reported since people continue experiments until they have a story or just drop inquiry. It should still (in some cases) be reported along with the final, telling data but probably isn't.
3. Negative means data that supports already "known" beliefs. Totally "uninteresting" results which just serve to give us the tiniest greater justification to believe what we do. Rarely reported.
I can see (2) but mostly (3) being suitable targets, but you might have a different idea in mind for what negative data is. In the end it sounds like a need to make big advances in meta-analysis in order to have data reported against a more quantified context.
Global, public, and automatic meta-analysis of the state of scientific belief is a hard problem I would love to see solved.