simondlr

23. My foray into coding started by playing with game's level editors (such as Tomb Raider, Elder Scrolls and Warcraft 3). There was a lot of visual abstraction, but you could go deeper down if you wanted to. Then onto Game Maker. It was actually cool to see all my 'code' going from visual blocks in it, to just using the built-in script (over a series of games). Learned a lot from it!

My money is on Bitcoin remaining the winner in the cryptocurrency market. It's got enough network effect now for people to keep it a success. The economy is growing, and people have too much vested interest already. Flaws will be fixed, improvements will be made, etc.

Had a similar idea a while back. Allow people to sign up, create a profile, etc. Then have matchmakers. People browsing profiles and matching people up. If they start dating, you get rep for being a good matchmaker.

Good question. I know that any transactions in forked chains that have been orphaned are included as transaction if it hasn't been double spent on the other chain.

But what happens to the mining reward, I don't know. Anyone?

I'd like to add to this. One thing Jack Dorsey said (paraphrasing here) in his interview with Kevin Rose (in Foundation series), is that he wishes he is fortunate to realise an opportunity when it presents itself.

To me that means 2 things: seeking out and creating opportunities. Build stuff, meet people, take risks and chances. This increases the chances of opportunities (luck) happening: Meeting that perfect co-founder, stumbling onto a brilliant idea, finding the right investors, etc.

Then secondly, you have to practice to be open-minded enough to realise that when an opportunity actually arrives, you know it is one! You might seek and create opportunities as much you want, as most of it ends up being luck, but if you don't realise that luck, you've missed the boat.

My speculations of the current growth:

1) Halving of supply. Block rewards halved end of 2012. 2) SatoshiDice continues to become more popular. 3) Big names supporting it: Reddit, Mega, Namecheap. 4) Along with the above that would bring about a general rise in prices, is the speculators that will try to game it.

My bet is there will be a correction again soon.

The whole program along with the partners probably pushed it above 150. As is the case with many groups going past 150, you'll have to start implementing other social structures besides relying on personal relationships to keep it going at the same pace.

Going to be interesting to see what happens, especially due to Y-Combinator being rather a unique case in this regard.

Same thing happened at my university. Chair of the student's committee accidentally included the list as a cc instead of bcc. My brother managed to rickroll the whole campus.

Soon after the security of the listserv was fixed.

In terms of this, I've thought of a joke to get people more aware of global warming.

Sell a piece of land a few kilometres in for a lot of money, citing it's major benefit as future beachfront property (put ads in local paper, etc). If anyone actually decides to buy it at that price, cover your losses and donate the rest to WWF or Charity:Water.

Another point to mention is that it is also solar-powered.

Great point. As G+ allows people to choose the filter settings for each circle. Just add all musicians/artists into such a circle.

Given he so eloquently puts the arguments, it baffles me to think that we might just be an extremely lucky and rare occurrence in the universe. To me, it is more terrifying to think we are the only ones, than to think there are aliens. The vastness of spaces suddenly seems so claustrophobic.

That seems more than I expected? Then again, don't quite know what the going for streaming revenue is.

The talks are being recorded. They should be online later. Great talk from Armin!

Facebook is probably showing you updates of probably around 120 - 150 of active people, with about 7-20 very active close friends. And as someone has already mentioned, this has been proven against Dunbar's Number, and in other studies.

What are examples of this? Working around social systems? ie, as an example, the white South African student that applied for a bursary for African Americans in America?

You didn't read the next sentence. It is not inherently ads that are the problem, it is the fact from a company's perspective you have to cater to a) the advertisers who are paying you money vs b) your users who aren't.

Currently, I'm okay in paying $50 to get access to a great community of early adopters (lets admit, it is mostly tech people). I'm not naive to expect it won't change, but once killer apps start popping up on the ecosystem, more users will join which will bring back the value that the older social networks provided.

The biggest reason why non-developers would join is because of no ads. The result is, as Dalton mentioned that they HAVE to cater for their users who are the same people who pay them. If your users are your customers, you've got an easier game to play.

As a developer, I'm a lot more excited about it. I backed mainly because I was so excited about an API that could've been what Twitter promised. I'm especially excited to see what annotations is going to emerge through it. To explain it in short: Any app can now embed any information in a post. This is big. To give a small example: Say people who allow IFTTT to post their music to app.net. IFTTT can decided to add meta information to it (adding song titles, artists, etc). Now anyone else can easily extract this information.

There is a whole underlying network waiting to be discovered. Anything can now live within in it. What if you wanted to do an instagram type app? Ask users with app.net accounts to log in. When they post a photo, add your own information to it (photo title, photo url, etc).

In the normal app.net (alpha) interface, you won't miss anything. You'll just see someone posting a photo. However, now this new instagram type app can extract this information from a user's feed, using app.net's infrastructure as their social backbone! Any social service can live on app.net's infrastructure now.

Didn't expect that! What's Dalton going to do if it doesn't pass? Are they still pushing the idea, or are they going to move on?

I think one of the best ways to do this, is to keep the social system smaller once it reaches critical mass. It sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out.

New users that join once critical mass has been reached, will be able to create their own graph and enjoy the social network in question equally to when a person joined it 4 years ago (given the site is still the same in terms of functionality). However, the person that joined 4 years will become bogged by an ever increasing graph of connections to pages, friends, groups, history etc that eventually undermine what made the site relevant to them in the first place (ie Dalton's experience with Orkut).

So, just as in the real life, social relationships come and ago, a natural decay has to happen that allows a person's graph to remain relavent. Currently Facebook (and to a certain Google+) are doing it right. They filter. Heavily. If you don't interact with the people from 4 years ago, you just don't see them anymore on it.

App.net's approach won't solve the problems that Dalton here talks about. Does he have plans that will solve this?

While an interesting approach, the interface way too distracting. And like using cellphones in conversation is considered rude, so will these things be. For example, how would the girl know he is using a dating app? She won't, so its more acceptable to somehow "disable" it?

I liked juxtaposition between the room being overwhelmed with virtual items, but in real life actually being rather empty and dull.

The most interesting challenge about these interfaces is the question of UX and norms. For mainstream adoption, the interface is going to be the most interesting facet.

I have been following this on and off. Is there anywhere where it's been mentioned what the underlying network will look like? Is it actually a Twitter-like social site?

"Ms. Mayer resigned from Google on Monday afternoon by telephone. She starts at Yahoo on Tuesday." - That's quick.

Ah okay. I understand. Looking forward to how you expand it! Will be watching the project.

How are you dealing with the difference between scan and query? DynamoDB acts quite differently to other nosql databases. It seems in the find method, you are using scan? The reason why I'm asking, is that I've run into problems with DynamoDB for a small side-project. Stuff that I took for granted from a database system that I couldn't do or change!

ie, with scan, although more resource expensive than query, you can add filters on any keys, but you can't sort any of the data. With query you can, but only on the range key you specify, which is 1 per table. Also: it can't be changed after the table is created.

Seems like difficult problems to sort out for an ORM wrapper.

Have you looked at Macvim? http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

Wow.Straight from Game Maker to C? Sort of happened the same to me. Up until uni I only knew Java, Game Maker and basic PHP/MySQL then started with C in freshman year. Although I mostly do web development these days, I liked working with pointers and memory management in C (once again delving down deeper).

I remember learning to code in Game Maker a while back, so each time I had an end goal in mind: the game I want make. In that time, I made 8-10 crap games, but each time I would code, I would more and more swap out the pre-build code actions with actual code as the complexity of the games increased. Besides the fun of making games, it was great discovering the underlying code, even if it is something as rudimentary as Game Maker's scripting language.

In regards to already accepted 'prosthetics' such as spikes and suits in swimming, perhaps it should go back to the way the olympics started? I'm not being facetious, but it is going to start cropping up more and more. They don't have to be completely naked, but just covered up so that nothing a person wears affects their performance.