markerdmann

isn't "delve" a classic tell of gpt-generated output? i'm pretty sure simianparrot is just trolling us. :-)

By design, a public blockchain is an immutable record maintained by a decentralized network where no central authority has the power to go back and remove something from the record. This makes the blockchain an exciting technology for resisting censorship, but it also means that if someone adds your personal data to the blockchain, your options for removing it are very limited. You would need to shut down all nodes in the network or convince all nodes in the network to agree to a hard fork. In the latter case, nodes that don't join the fork would continue to have the private data.

That's true for unencrypted information stored directly on the blockchain. For applications where you need the ability to delete data and don't need strong censorship resistance, one solution is to store private data off-chain and only store the location and hash of the data in the blockchain. This article discusses that idea in detail:

https://medium.com/wearetheledger/the-blockchain-gdpr-parado...

At the same time, it's possible for the NYT to hire a curator who doesn't act in your best interest. Jayson Blair is a good example of that problem.

If there were an economic incentive to challenge facts published by the NYT, would Blair's deception have persisted for several years? It's even possible that a subject in one of his stories would stake tokens to challenge the accuracy of the story. Blair could then respond by voting against the challenge with a large number of tokens, but would other parties join Blair or the challenger? They would probably investigate further and effectively join the challenge as neutral arbiters. The incentive on both sides is to provide persuasive information to win votes. The direct token incentive for the neutral parties is two-fold: vote with the winning side to gain tokens, and increase the value of the tokens they hold by helping the registry to become more popular so that demand for the tokens increases. If consumers of the registry value accuracy, that incentivizes the entire network to fiercely defend the accuracy of the data.

This looks terrific! I was looking for something exactly like this not too long ago. At that time my parents were about to embark on a round-the-world journey, and it was so difficult to find a simple travel blogging app or service for my mom. In the end I set her up with an account on Medium, but even Medium's carefully designed UX was still too awkward, and she never felt completely comfortable with it.

Note to UX designers: if you want to subject your designs to some serious blast testing, make sure to recruit a few 60 to 80 year olds for your user studies!

That would be better than nothing, but there's still a long road between here and there! This also sounds like more of a soft landing or "acqui-hire" for a company that was running out of money rather than a concerted effort by Dropbox to push hard into the reading app space. I hope it is, but so far Dropbox hasn't even issued a press release about the acquisition, have they?

And Readmill's design is just sexy as hell. It's sad to lose the experience of using their software.

This feels like a huge loss. Readmill stood head and shoulders above other reading apps like Kindle and iBooks in terms of design. It was also one of the few services that would let you upload ePub books to your account through the website and then sync your library to your mobile device.

"Now cracks a noble heart.—Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

I wish the team all the best at Dropbox, and I'm sure Dropbox will benefit immensely from their remarkable talent for building amazing software. At the same time, though, I wish they would have just started charging $10 a month for the service!

"Looking so dorky" is actually fairly low on the list of ways in which Google Glass fails to be a usable product. Dustin Curtis wrote an excellent review in which he discusses these more serious problems:

http://dcurt.is/glass

At least as of July 2013, the appreciation in the stock price was due to the increase in the value of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

"But Yahoo’s turnaround remains very much a work in progress. Although Yahoo’s stock price has soared by a whopping 73% since Mayer become CEO, that gain is almost entirely attributable to investments the company has in two Asian companies, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Yahoo’s core advertising business remains sluggish amid intense competition from rival Internet giants like Google and Facebook."

http://business.time.com/2013/07/16/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayers...

http://helios.io/ is an open-source backend framework.

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing as I was making the recipe. That brings up an interesting question: Is it fine to get 200% of your daily requirement for Vitamin A on one day and 0% the second day and let things average out, or will you be healthier if you get a steady stream of your daily requirements throughout the day? Maybe there are some nutrients that are easily stored in the body (like fat-soluble vitamins) and some that aren't?

Thanks, that's a great tip.

Sure, it's at:

http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

After reading the first Soylent post, I felt inspired to try and come up with a recipe for a "nutritionally complete" soup. I used an online tool that calculates the total nutrients for a recipe and came up with this:

3 potatoes 1 onion 500 grams of wild alaskan salmon 1/2 cup of mushrooms 3.5 tbsp of olive oil 30 grams of sunflower seeds 1 tbsp of dried parsley 2 tbsp of ground thyme 50 grams of parmesan cheese 3 cloves of garlic 20 grams of sesame seeds 1 medium oyster (from a can) 1 tbsp of ground mace 1 tsp of cod liver oil

To cook it I just added everything to boiling water in order of cooking time, starting with the potatoes and onions and ending with the salmon.

I tried making it last night and ate it for dinner and breakfast, and it was delicious! I also feel amazing. I guess I should track the effects of the recipe on quantified-mind.com. :-)

I was actually surprised by how hard it was to fit all of the daily nutrient requirements into a recipe with about 2000-2500 calories (while also avoiding nutrient overdoses). It would be great if someone would create a website for "nutritionally complete" recipes, especially recipes that are cheap and easy to make with a good blender or crockpot.

That Forbes article seems highly politicized and doesn't cite a source for that number.

This reminds of a good friend. He got a job making six figures at Google straight out of college, and then lived in his van--in the Google parking lot--while saving every penny he earned. He took showers on campus and only ate free Google food. After a few years, he went into a mini-retirement and devoted his time to traveling around the world and volunteering.

When people say Maps is a "huge step backwards", are they actually using the product? I mostly use my phone for driving directions, and the addition of turn-by-turn navigation has been a huge step forward. Maybe I'm the one iPhone user in the world who thinks Maps is awesome, but that seems unlikely. It seems more likely that this is just another case of the "vocal minority" being amplified by uncritical journalists. Remember what happened when Facebook first released the News Feed? :-)

Why are people calling it the "maps fiasco"? I just installed iOS 6, and the new Maps app is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used.

I would easily pay $500 a month for a service like this.

I just bought a mattress a few months ago, and I agree whole-heartedly with this post. My solution was to buy a foam mattress from bedinabox.com, which I would say is the Warby Parker for mattresses.

I think describing that linked product as "essentially equivalent" is a bit misleading. It takes 5 hours instead of 2 hours to charge, the top speed is 15mph instead of 20mph, and it weighs 37 lbs. instead of 12-15 lbs.

From the essay: "And since risk is usually proportionate to reward, if you can afford to take more risk you should."

I think I understand the intent of what you're saying here, but it could also be read to mean that you can increase your reward simply by taking on more risk. It might help to clarify that whenever a market isn't perfectly efficient (which is apparently always, unless P=NP), there will be investments that carry more risk without offering a higher return (i.e. that have a negative alpha). Perhaps it's better to state that as the potential reward (or return) of an investment increases, you can tolerate more risk.

Did Dropbox appear to be a bad idea at the time? I seem to recall that the market was pretty crowded when Dropbox launched, and that everyone was expecting Google to announce a "GDrive".

Or does PG mean that the idea can seem bad because the market is already very crowded? I remember talking to William Morgan about the early days of GitHub. He knew the founders from Powerset, and he told me that at the time he thought to himself, "Really? Another hosted version control startup? That seems like a bad idea."

I've been meaning to do some iOS tutoring for a while now, but unfortunately the site I was planning to use, TutorCloud, shut down recently. Is Tutorspree the best alternative? Does anyone have additional recommendations?

thestoicjester, this is one of the funniest blog posts I've ever read. This line is especially good:

"A 'co-founder of a mobile development startup in SF' was a humorous creature I’d read all about on the internet — I may as well have been replying to a hobbit."

What's the name of the company you're working at now?

This blog post presents some interesting criticisms of the book "Wheat Belly":

http://noglutennoproblem.blogspot.com/2012/03/wheat-belly-bu...

It sounds like the book often misrepresents the research that it cites.

One of my apps went into "In Review" status at midnight (19 hours ago) and still hasn't been rejected or approved. The rejection or approval has always happened in less than 12 hours for me, so it seems like Apple might be holding all approvals until they've resolved this issue. At least, I hope that's the case... I really feel for the developers who got a slew of one-star reviews because of this.

An order of magnitude? Do you really mean that you've seen iOS programmers spend 10x as long on something (e.g. 10 months vs. 1 month)?

Let's imagine a simple, specific example: you want to add a button that sends a message to the shared backend and displays an alert upon success. Let's walk through the code.

In your web app, you could add an HTML button, style it with CSS, and then use jQuery to send a request and define your success handler. Probably not more than 10 lines and a few minutes (depending on much time you spend with the CSS).

In your iOS app, you could add a button with Interface Builder, link it to a method on the relevant view controller that sends an NSUrlRequest, then add a delegate method that displays a UIAlertView when the response returns successfully. Again, not more than 10 lines. And no CSS, thank god. :-)

Where is the extra overhead that you're talking about coming from?

Jamie, what experience or research backs your claim that mobile development is an order of magnitude slower than web development?

I've been coding iOS apps for the past 6 months now (after coding web apps for years before that). If anything, I think iOS development is easier and faster than web development.

And it also favors incumbents over higher quality or more relevant results.

You can still add up to 100 characters of keywords when you submit a new binary, but because of the 100 character limit many people would also place keywords in the title. Going forward, you'll have to ensure that the keywords for a given search phrase are either in your title or in your keywords.