arunaugustine

I own one of these! Looks like it will be bricked!? So much for supporting startups on kickstarter.

Its better if they accept remote companies.

I left a big corp job in Silicon Valley and returned to India to work on a startup. I must say that even though I am poorer in terms of $ earned or net-worth, I can honestly say I am happier.

I wrote an article recently about my leap of faith and four pivots. The link is in my bio.

I was soo looking for a tool like this. I considered Zotero which is much too research-focussed for me. I really appreciate the annotation support and Anki integration! Thank you :)

Does GAE support websockets?

I didn't know Ryan Hoover built product hunt as a side hustle. I always thought he worked on it full-time, blogging and sending email newsletters to organically build his audience.

Making a rough outline, _any_ outline of a series of steps over a period of time that you would take, to fix your biggest concern (source of income after one year) will take your sub-conscious problem-solver/worrier off the case. This will give you more presence of mind in the present moment. Which in-turn will help you to dig deep, really listen to your heart about the next journey in life you really want to undertake.

Perhaps, begin again.

IMO Sometimes finding the goal is part of the fun. Minecraft similarly has no end goal for the game, at least initially. The goal driven storyline was added later I believe.

For me recognizing that the count on the left is simply new items I discover out of possible 560 was part of the fun aspect of this surprisingly simple but engaging game

The love2d source code is in C++. I believe Lua interpreter was embedded as a scripting mechanism

https://bitbucket.org/rude/love/src

Also may I suggest you word your goal as "finishing most things I start, rather than finishing everything I start" as this setups you up better for success than an all or nothing approach.

Amen. I got better at finishing by starting really small. Like putting together a small puzzle (and finishing it), then moving onto a paint job for my library shelf (and finishing it), then moving onto building a roof top garden. In my experience, this skill of finishing does carry over into technology projects/work, even though the first attempted projects are distinctly non-tech or non programming oriented.

And instruments are designed in iterations. An instrument to fix problems of a 1B large democracy will inevitably take some time to perfect.

On the meta level, I came to think of the relationship between OO and FP as similar to being and doing.

Does a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, because it is a duck (being) ?

OR

Is a duck, a duck because it walks like a duck and talks like a duck (doing) ?

Sometimes, the devaluation might be just due to a wider market correction and not specific to the company itself (which in this case appears not to be if its having the problems described). But if that's the case, then it would be an opportunity to invest, wouldn't it be? That is if the fundamentals of the business are on a strong base?

May I also add "The Road Less Travelled" by Scott Peck to books on Psychotherapy. Excellent read.

I had the same experience when I read it for the first time, I was skipping over the "philosophy" part to just read about the motorcycle trip.

Then I read it the second time.

And the "chautauqua" (what the author calls the philosophical discussions) blew my mind!

I have read the book 3x so far, and the insights keep deepening.

As the difference engine computes result of polynomial equations (upto x to the power 7, if I remember the demo correctly) , I don't think its turing complete enough to drive a 3d-printer completely. It can, perhaps, drive the generative design of a 3d printed art based on the result of a polynomial equation.

What if it's an app that I purchased from websites like flippa.com? If the app has continuing revenue, will it be treated as an investment rather than productive work?

I can relate to your situation. While I have not completely figured it out, one thing I realized is that, even though I shelve many of my side projects, occasionally I come back to some of them, with fresh enthusiasm and move it forward another step or two (before loosing enthusiasm again). I realized that given enough "cycles" at least some of them are bound to be completed.

So a new approach I am trying is the "GPU Pipeline of side projects". First, I choose to trim my list of side projects to a few important ones (4 is a number I like, so four). I work on them in a parallel pipelined fashion. So I have one that's more advanced, one that is being setup, one that is being fleshed out, one still in ideation phase (you get the idea).

Secondly, I realize that when building things, the novelty can come from "recursing down to the details". For example, setup a AWS pipeline for code deployment would mean, learning how to setup an Ec2 deployment, then a Chef or Puppet instance, then easy config management of them, best way to document our setup (gitbook etc) and so on.... So if we use our boundless curiosity, which is both a strength and a weakness, to look a little deeper, we will find enough novelty to keep going even in a "single" project.

What I realized is that one single project is like a LISP S-Expression. (project). You (eval project), and it returns (list sub-project1 sub-project2 interesting-research3 wonderful-idea4) All you have to do is keep eval'uating the sub-expressions till you hit an "atom" of truth to share with the world.

Adding to this, from what I understand, ninja was designed to be generated by another more feature-full build tools. For example in chromium, its generated from gyp (generate your projects) files. The fact that its human readable is just a plus.

Makefiles I presume, will be hard to write by hand when:

1. Your project code base is large 2. It take large amount of time or very powerful machines to build sub-modules (V8 for e.g in chromium) so, you don't want to do it all the time 3. Conditional inclusion of sub-modules (for iOS vs Android if you have two separate set of files etc) 4. Sub-modules are pulled in from 3rd parties into your code base

Thanks for your comment :), some good advice like this sometimes makes me wonder why I never thought about it in that way.

Not attempting greatness, because of risk of disappointment?...I feel something is missing there. I don't have any answers yet though. There must be a third way.

Just to brainstorm with you on this, so if not phone, what would it be? Suppose we could build any hardware, any form factor, with any sort of input to convey your wishes to it, and any sort of output to feed back the output of the "eval" loop of it (riffing off REPL) into any of the five senses (yes, let's include smell to...just for the purposes of an unconstrained brainstorming), how would you envision that? I have been thinking about a "hands-free headset" that just talks to you and you talk back. And I wonder how would "apps" look or function in an ecosystem if the only API available was to speech-recognition engine and a text to speech engine?

Is seeding strictly necessary? Borrowing from Diaspora, can't it be pods (now acting as data routers) that each node first connects to for establishing a peer-to-peer connection? Note, that this is just during the connection establishment phase (assuming TCP or higher level SPDY/QUIC), i.e the control plane and during the actual data transfer, the data can flow directly to the peer via a potentially secured connection (like a VPN?)

Of course, that would introduce some privileged nodes, but if anyone can create such a node, as part of protocol and be part of this data routing network, isn't that still a distributed egalitarian network?

I don't think a single blogpost or video won't be able to capture it. Audience in general may be pre-disposed to think and reason about it in terms of the existing underlying abstraction layer. (This is an unqualified personal judgement).

This problem and the proposed solution involves new ideas and changes across the boundaries of that layers of abstraction, so it would be hard to digest in a single sitting. Unless of course all this was synthesized in your own head :)

My guess is you would need need a more agile version of the Douglas Engelbart's "Mother Of All Demos", a functional prototype that shows everything works together in synergy to create more than a sum of the parts.

The best case would be if all the components of the puzzle are independently valuable, like Musk's SpaceX model.

So would this be a startup or a non-profit org? The problem this project is trying to solve is bigger that you or me or any small group of people in an org, not in the technical ability per-say, but along the lines of "absolute power corrupts absolutely". If a single person or entity is the primary creator, what are your thoughts on, how to remain true to the original vision of a truly distributed, participatory network? The linux model perhaps?

Speech recognition is an important problem, but if the problem solver does not have an angle of attack, it does not make sense to try and solve it just yet. To quote Richard Hamming from his lecture "You and your research", "It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack."

To the author: Could you dig a little more into why you did not find product/market fit? (Perhaps use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys). That would make this post more valuable as a lesson learnt and a sign post to others. Now it reads more like an anecdote which nevertheless is a good read.

Similarly for the startup lessons. A deeper (albeit painful) introspection into the mistakes made would make this a valuable post for others.

Yes, compared to formal verification etc handcrafting seems much easier to do for most algorithm implementations.

Yes!, these strategies make sense: - I could for example, run a tic-tac-toe game against the game tree algorithms and test it instead of nine-men morris game which is more complicated. I never thought of that!

- I wonder if there is a systematic procedure than can enumerate the fixed properties for algorithms. I guess this is the hard part in formal verification theory.