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Could you explain why this is strange? To me it just looks like a fractal algorithm.

I don't think you need to learn really hard core math to do CS. In my experience, the one most important "genre" of math was discrete mathematics. My textbook was Elements of Discrete Mathematics, and I think it was a really great intro: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Discrete-Mathematics-Computer...

Dejavu! :)

Wow this app doesn't just overlay a moustache image but the moustache actually follows you around in realtime. Never seen this technology before. Awesome!

Yeah I agree that privacy is a valid issue. I will think about it some more. Thank you for the feedback!

Just fixed the www problem. Turns out I erased aname record and that was causing the problem (I was just following the tutorial by Heroku guys!!)

Thanks for the feedback! And that totally makes sense. I will add that header message.

Yes that would not be difficult, it will be added soon.

Oh cool man. This was originally Talk To The Future. I just refined the UI and got a new domain.

Thanks for asking.

I think it's more about the message than the alarm itself. The problem I saw with alarms is not that I never hear them, but most of the times I do hear them but just turn it off because that's the only thing you can do with an alarm, right?

But if I can hear a message containing meaningful content, I will listen to it, because that's the intended action. And if that content tells me my todo list for today and helps me realize how busy I am and gives me the sense of urgency, it would be easier to wake up. Because as I mentioned, there are countless times where I regret not waking up and think "Damn if I was able to think rationally while I was sleeping, I would have totally waken up."

Great to hear that! Can you elaborate on how it being a timer rather than a clock makes it easy to think about? That might be very useful feedback for me. Thanks!

Yes. By the way XHack hackathon was really awesome. Best host ever.

Thanks! Well I think the whole point of WakeMyself is it functions both as an alarm AND as a dream capturing tool, which means, you do know when you wake up--it's the time you set the alarm at. It's quite tricky, but I think there's a subtle but crucial difference between synchronous capturing (phone call) and asynchronous capturing (sms) and that's what makes it work. But maybe it's just me, so please try it out tonight :)

Thank you. Yeah the reason that I've made this available for free currently is because I thought if I started out charging I would be fixed with that business model, and I don't even yet know what this can be used for other than my own cases. So I just decided to release it as beta and learn from people. Please do try out and let me know if you have any feedback :)

And about translation, did you mean transcription? or translation as in language translation?

Exactly! I actually had these two separate ideas, and they came together while I was trying to build the first idea. What was awesome was I was actually able to capture my dream on my first usage. You should try too! Would love feedback :)

Have you ever tried something that tells you what to do? I've tried things that wakes me up with music or all kinds of things, but the key here I think is the message you can write to yourself. If you could tell yourself all the things you need to do for the day, that would be a really good way to start the day. Because I find that even when I do wake up most of the times I just do nothing productive. I think it's great to hear a todo list when waking up.

Yeah I kind of struggled with time zone thing for about an hour and decided not to bother with it, just to build the minimal version. But I think for the sake of usability, I should add it in the future.

How does your app do text-to-speech, if you don't mind me asking?

The reason for building this as a service is because I thought there's more to this than just a single player alarm system if enough people want to use this. I just wanted to test it out and see enough people will like this. Hope this makes sense? :)

Yeah, I think in my case the "calling" part is the most important part. It's not even about the calling itself but more about the message. If I get a call from myself and it says "Hey man you have a test today in 3 hours, you can't be sleeping! Snap out of it!" that's pretty effective for me :)

Plus my favorite part is you can respond to yourself and it will be recorded--the dream capturing part. Please try it, would love to hear your feedback on these. Thanks!

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback! Yes I used Twilio API. I went to a hackathon last weekend and built this using Twilio API, and it was cool so I decided to refine it some more and release it.

1. Yeah currently it's alarm for hours and minutes "from now" rather than actual time, because you know, time zone conversion thing is really annoying and takes up too much time. But you're right I gotta make that more clear.

2. Yeah I'm concerned about that too. I think I might actually think about doing it that way too. Thanks for the idea!

Does it call you?

I'm sorry about that. That's weird. Is it just that page? How about other ones? Also I would appreciate it if you could tell me your browser and computer environment. That would help in debugging. Thanks!

Oh it's actually an animated gif I just found on the web. I don't know where it is :)

By the way can you hear the sound? Just asking since you only mentioned the picture.

Thanks for the feedback!

regarding #1: how about hiding them when you're idle? Would this work? (Just pushed an update, please check it)

regarding #2: Is it still not playing? I visited that url http://daydream.fm/places/6a14bd5c7 and it seems to be playing. By the way, is it still not playing? It seems to work on mine. Also, the two youtube links you mentioned seem to be the same, aren't they?

regarding #3: Yeah currently there is no edit currently. I had it before but removed it because things started becoming cluttered with all the buttons, I guess I should add it back. In the meantime, you can "remix" to inherit existing properties from the current one, and delete the old one.

Thanks, the cool thing about this is that it's meant to be published (therefore reused by anyone else). For example, this rainy might be of interest to you: http://daydream.fm/places/a83101fc3 I've added a dozen tracks to it and will be adding more as I come across more. Just click next to check out the other tracks I added to the rainy night. Hope you enjoy :)

clickable link: http://daydream.fm

My experience with topical subscription service is most mainstream people don't care much about realtime subscription. They come back time to time to read through stuff they are interested in. Of course, if your target is journalists or financial analysts, it's a different story.

I know realtime technology is cool and all, but I don't think realtime is what you should be doing. People are increasingly accessing RSS readers through mobile devices such as phones and tablets, and that's where opportunity is at. And this audience doesn't require realtime updates. If you just build what you think is the best experience for desktop consumption, you're fighting against google reader. not an efficient battle. My two cents.

First, NO. Amazon is arguably the MOST innovative company of our time.

Second, Kindle is a product, and RIM is a company. You're comparing two different things not comparable.

Third, I think Amazon's rationale in not innovating the hardware that much is that it's not really worth it to move too fast. They own the mindshare for online bookstore so they don't really need to iterate very fast. All they need to do is make apps for different devices, and look at the trend. Probably they will come up with an entirely different type of reading device based on what they learned by building apps on different platforms. The bottom line is, they don't look like they're innovating on the hardware side because they are not, and I think that's a wise thing, when everyone's still trying to figure out where this is going.

If you read the post, he mentions examples where people buy someone else who can't afford coffee. That was what he encouraged from the initial post as well. Also I've seen many of my friends actually do something like that.