tangled_zans

You need to make an app that re-names shitty click bait headlines in such way!

Yeah that makes sense!

Obvious question, but which one of you here actually uses facebook groups and what for?

I'm sure I'm a member of a whole bunch, but aside from using them to coordinate society activities back at uni, I haven't really used them in years. I always found the interface to be ugly as hell, and if I want to join a large thriving community on topic X then I just go on /r/topicX.

Your last sentence is interesting. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "speaking the right language"?

Yeah, good idea! My e-mail is zans.lancs at gmail dot com

I don't really see the appeal, if I'm honest.

Tbf, that's what Diaspora tried and it never took off.

While I agree with the spirit of the idea, most people don't seem to care about the benefits that self-hosting would provide, and even for the ones that do, well, it's just such a hassle. And for the majority of the world that isn't particularly clued up on how tech works? Yeah forget about it.

Maybe that's where the web will go eventually, and I would see it as an improvement over what we have now. But the current reality is that mainstream adoption is centred around large, monolithic services and personally I am more interested in figuring out what is it that these services provide and how I can improve on that in the way that people already want, rather than trying to convince them why they should care about being in control of their own data.

So when I think about "decentralized infrastructure", I don't think about self-hosted servers, what I'm imagining is closer to, say, google app store. Sure, it's still owned by a single corporation, but anyone can develop almost anything for it that then can be used by anyone else.

Imagine what a hybrid between twitter and an app store could look like. Giving people new tools to integrate social apps around the web in totally new ways. Developing new ways of interacting with each other, rather than every news and blog site having the same facebook like button and the same "twitter feed" box and the same comment section.

That's what I want to see. Not "it's like twitter but YOU control your data". Having ownership of your own data is important to have alongside any product that you develop, but (as far as we can see empirically) you can't make that your sole "killer feature" and expect mass adoption.

I would say that even if the developer-friendly stage was behind them (and given how rapidly the web evolves, I don't think that any social-media company should ever consider itself past that stage), the fair thing to do - in my eyes - is to at the very least show some gratitude for the people who helped you get where you are today.

Twitter and Facebook may be Big Corp today, but that wasn't always the case, and a lot of the initial growth that helped them get into the mainstream was due to hobbyists and independent devs that made cool little apps like EmojiTracker that would catch the attention of early adopters that then became the initial users of the platform.

The sad thing is that while Facebook became the generic one-size-fits-all "mom and dad" network (I can't even remember the last time I even used one of their 'apps' or whatever), Twitter really had the potential to evolve into something beyond that, if only it cultivated better relationships with their devs and encouraged people to build on and experiment with the platform.

Oh well. Lets keep an eye out for the next thing, I suppose!

Way to blame the victim, man.

This is just... wow. The guy spends three years developing a product on Twitter's platform and they just kill it off with one e-mail? It's fair enough if they need to change their API policy, but at the very least they could have acknowledged all the work that he's done and found a way to help him and the other developers in the same position to make the transition as painlessly as possible. Not... whatever corporate BS this was.

Given how much Twitter is struggling already, is this really the time to be alienating more of its community?

Personally, I've had a really nifty side project that I've been working on since last year that I wanted to launch on Twitter's platform, but as of a month ago I've all but given up on actively developing it. All the people that I know on Twitter with whom I wanted to share it have either left already, or are only sticking around because as-of-yet there's nowhere else to go that does what Twitter does.

So I'm curious to hear some perspectives on this: clearly the direction that Twitter has taken is making a lot of devs unhappy, but what would be the right thing to do? What sort of API access would people ideally want to see it provide? What would be the ideal best-case scenario necessary for the devs to want to start coming back and putting their time into building the ecosystem?

Hmm, do YOU understand Twitter's platform and users? If you have some cool insights into those things then I'd love to hear them!

That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became.

I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine).

I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible?

You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

Hey, thanks for the reply, your insights are amazing. Totally with you on the whole "being an introvert who learned the traits of extroversion" thing too.

I've played around with the Big Five model ages ago and found it to be a really good way to look at personality. I especially liked its usefulness for self-assessment - like you say it's easy to self-deceive yourself into thinking that you're much more open and non-neurotic than you really are, but so long as you are honest with yourself it can be a good tool in understanding your own strengths and weaknesses. I hadn't really tried practising it on strangers, though, that would definitely be a useful exercise!

I'm actually in the process of setting up a crowdfunding campaign for a personal project that I'm working on, and if that goes well then I'll be thinking about bringing in more people on board - hence why I asked you about this.

I have to say, the way you're going about this is really impressive in terms of methodology. Most high-level advice in this area that I've seen is full of hand-waving and vagueness, but you've got the whole thing down to a science. Especially the part where you talk about counterfactuals! So many people overlook that.

If you don't mind answering another question, I would appreciate more of your thoughts on this. You've said that you look for particular combinations of traits to fill in particular roles (hacker, inventor, finisher, watchdog, etc.) - what are the traits that you look for in each of them and how exactly do you envision each role's responsibilities within the company? (Is there a set number of such roles that you discovered or do you find yourself inventing new ones as the company evolves?)

Also, it sounds like you've been doing this for a while and probably have quite a few people on board, which would make the dynamic of hiring someone a bit different than if you were just starting out. If you were back to square one and had to consider hiring your first employee or even finding a potential co-founder, how would you approach that?

Can you elaborate more on your middle paragraph? It sounds very interesting.

Thanks for your follow up!

Yes, it does look like I misunderstood your position a bit. It wasn't that I took offence as an "eastern european" (I moved out a decade ago and prefer to have as little to do with the place as I can), but more so as a computer scientist it's ingrained in me to respond to a claim of knowing something from "first principles" by asking what those principles are.

I agree with you that the two that you've mentioned are excellent starting points. In that light, yes, those are not the kind of things that the people I grew up around tended to do. (Or like you say, not a thing that a lot of people anywhere tend to do).

I guess like you, I've spent a lot of time looking at all the sides of an issue that I can find, but I guess I reached a point where I'm just like "so what now?" For all that analysis, I never really figured out what to do with it.

That's kind of vague, though, and is laden with the assumption that YOU understand the world "from first principles" and the ones disagreeing with you don't.

Especially your second comment strikes me as quite arrogant. "I know what I'm talking about because I can do lateral thinking, and the brainwashed masses clearly do not".

The way I see it, anyone with a university-or-equivalent education tends to believe that what-they-know is some absolute truth of the world and "the other side" is somehow brainwashed by their respective media or government, whether "capitalist" or "communist".

Can you tell me what these "first principles" are that you use to understand geopolitics? Can you justify to me that this set of first principles is necessary and sufficient for a complete understanding of the topic in question? That there exists no other principle that you've ignored without which your understanding is incomplete?

Or.. are you just using your world-view to make yourself feel good about how clever you are?

That's an interesting comment for me to read as someone born in Eastern Europe. I can sort-of see what you mean from my own experiences, but I'm not entirely sure if I'm guilty of that as well.

What would it mean for you to "look at political issues from a neutral perspective"?

Hey, I appreciate your erm, apology, I guess. You're right, you shouldn't be rude to people, or they will stop talking to you.

I don't know what you expect me to say to your second paragraph though. The guy making those "accusations" has already left the conversation, and I don't really feel like having this discussion with you either.

Anyway, good luck getting to the bottom of this!

But are you SURE you don't want to spend hours justifying your opinion to some random passive aggressive stranger?

Clearly you're not allowed to share your views without being ridiculed unless you cite extensive sources and make some flow charts or something.

[/sarcasm]

I enjoyed reading your insight so thanks for sharing that.

13thLetter: Do you think it's possible to tell someone to elaborate on why they believe something without being an asshole. I mean, if you ask nicely then he could've written something interesting about his experiences. If you act like a passive aggressive douche then you'll just get people defensive and they won't write anything. The whole community loses.

Besides, I think it's pretty pretentious to hold someone's views shared at a messaging forum to uphold to the same standard that they would need to get into a peer-reviewed journal disputing gravity. Do you even THINK before you write?

Does that mean we can use Haskell with datomic?

No cryonics company has yet claimed that it "works".

They're quite up front about the fact that they have no idea how to bring anyone back. People choose to get cryo-preserved despite that because, as far as some people see it, it beats being buried underground or burned to ash.

Marvin Minsky who passed away recently was on the board of Alcor (one of the main cryonics companies in the US). Does he seem like a scammer to you?

Please research your claims before accusing people of "scams" left and right.

You make some very good points. Question is, is there any way to know if such a malicious program is on your machine?

A very excellent read, thank you for sharing. I've experienced a very similar thing about a year and a half ago, so it's always comforting to read about someone else's experience!

I still remember it vividly now, I took exhausting notes during the process - notes that I thought were full of pure spiritual brilliance - and which turned out to be mostly mad gibberish in the end.

Among other things there were a few days that I spent convinced that I was a character in a video game and I had to make sure that the game was "entertaining" or else the "player" would "switch it off".

Some things were downright Lovecraftian in nature. Reading his stuff now, I'm pretty sure that a lot of his stories were inspired by his own mental trips. ie, one of my favorites: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/hy.aspx

But mostly it was full of that exhilarating rush of being connected to some hidden truth that no one else has access to. I can see why it's hard for people to just walk away from that when those visions feel so meaningful at the time.

Anyway, well done for recovering! I guess a lot of people don't, which is quite a disturbing thought - being stuck in that mental state forever - so that makes us quite lucky.

If I had a dollar for every time I saw a native english speaker complain about how "hard" English is. . .

I think those that were born speaking English and never had to learn a second language start to feel insecure around literally everyone else who speaks both their own language and English.

So they make up this meme about how "English is the most irregular and complicated language in the world", and hey, now it's okay that they don't know any other language, they've gotten the hardest one down! Yay!

It's the most pretentious linguistic meme I've seen.

Snapchat is what Edsger Dijkstra describes as a "radical novelty".

This is bizzare for me since I was messing around with the XKCD-substitutions plugin a few weeks ago, and replacing "Russia" with "Mordor" was one of the changes that I made.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...

excellent, thank you for the insight

Damn, that's great news!

Cheers for the share!

Clever.

I don't get why people can't just label their ads with random letters though?