adim86

I am working on Sidequests HQ:

SideQuests HQ is a mobile app that turns real life into a series of small, optional quests.

The idea came from noticing that most productivity apps optimize for work, and most social media optimizes for consumption. There aren’t many tools that encourage you to actually do interesting things in the real world.

The app generates challenges across categories like meeting new people, exploring your city, learning something new, creating, or helping someone else. Complete a quest, skip it, or save it for later.You can also add your own quests. There’s no streak anxiety, no leaderboard. The app is just quests designed to make life a little less repetitive.

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sidequests-hq/id6751321255 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=inc.sidequests...

What my company does is the following:

1. We schedule payment up front before we do work (retainer), but we do not force payment due to emergency or cash flow issues of companies.

2. After 2 weeks we start charging compounding interest on the payment.

3. If 2 months go by and we have not been paid, we stop all services, and the outstanding invoices continue to accrue interest till paid

The customer/user can't tell the difference between a good working app and a poor working app.

Come on man, this is the whole reason Duolingo was people's favourite language learning app, or people claim they like iPhones over Android phones or Photoshop over Canva. These apps and devices all work, but which one is good or better is a debate. People have preferences; some apps in a category are easier to use than others, and some apps have branding that signals status. Now, those things become more important in differentiating your app than "It does what it is supposed to do". Until now, just getting an app to do what you wanted it to do was a competitive advantage, that's becoming a smaller advantage day by day

I find it shocking that a reputable resource such as this is still displaying the size of Greenland or Africa wrong (Mercator projection) in relation to other land masses in its marketing material and documentation, like here. It just brings doubt to the whole project, which is a shame considering all the time they must have put in. Why show the map that way when majority of its users will never use it for nautical navigation? https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/display-a-...

I was being sarcastic, but I get your point

I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories.

As a software engineer, I decided to build an app about side quests. Reading this article I realized I could not put a finger on what I was getting at either, but I just knew I hadd to add wholesome activities that were not part of my life into my life and I kinda built this app for myself (initially for a hackathon) and just shared it with friends.

Hopefully it's useful to someone else on here (nasty self promotion): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sidequests-hq/id6751321255

This is so nostalgic for me. In 1999, I watched a couple of movies, and I decided I wanted to be a hacker. I watched the movie Hackers, Swordfish and let's not forget The Matrix. These were all influntial to me, I went down a rabbit hole and found the Hacker Manifesto, which I resonated with. I slurped up all the information I could find (There wasn't much), and then came a realization that changed everything for me. Hacking was as hard as writing software to me, one was creating and inventing things and the other was tearing down what others had made...not to mention it was also illegal (White hat was not really big at the time). I was like, if I was gonna do one, I'd rather develop software and make things that made people's day and got praised for than ruin people's day and possibly go to jail. Hence my origin story as a software developer :)

The idea that criminals are not sophisticated is a weak excuse for this system.

Once the government starts mining data from iPhones, criminals will quickly adapt while every law-abiding citizen gets caught in the crossfire. It opens the door for abuse: officials could easily spy on their partners, dig up dirt on rivals, or target those they dislike without breaking any laws. Meanwhile, cybercriminals will have an easy target since every phone comes with this built-in vulnerability.

This system is likely to snag small-time offenders, not the real masterminds behind organized crime. This isn’t a smart solution for crime. It just sacrifices our privacy for a few token arrests.

I think its crazy that we find a discovery like this in our eco-system that we barely understand and the first thing people want to do is mine them for profit. Like the race to profit with the disregard for consequences is mind-blowing

I am surprised people are worried about 1Password getting this money and not caring about their users. How about at least they have money to be alive for the foreseeable future. I am worried about free password managers because they are broke and could sunset the app at any point and now I have to go find something else, or better yet, no financial incentive to do the best thing for the app. They do it for fun. My security is not for fun. LOL

I find the article disappointing. I would say this article itself is not what it says it is. Its title is written in click-bait fashion in that they are about to reveal something we don't know about blockchain technology and then the first paragraphs are written in the tone that they realize theoretically blockchain technology ideally runs a certain way but they want to tell us how it runs today and then proceeds to bash the implementation of the technology today even though they realize it probably wont work that way in the future.

It is like bashing the internet of not fulfilling the potential people pitched about it in the 90s. Blockchain is currently in the dail up stage of the internet, it is centralized, slow and needs adoption and lots of man hours to unleash its potential. There are second and third order effects that need to actualize before the "dream" of blockchain technology can be realised. The article purports the lack of this actualisation of the blockchain dream as if we are being deceived.

It's like when people bashed Tesla and said it wont work because there were not enough charging stations across the USA, as if world changing technologies are realized in a day. I find it boring that people push these kind of articles as think pieces. We can do better

Actually it is because we are dealing with an factual data point (I), rather than someone using hyperbole by saying something is ONLY used for x. one data point proves that wrong

I have to agree with you, as someone who lived in the US for 10 years and moved back to my home country, I see the influence of Western culture from TV and the internet, but in my absence the local culture also tweaked itself and started exporting it to neighbouring countries also via the same internet.

There will be influence of the West for a while, but I think other countries are using these mediums also to push their own thought simultaneously. I have watched more spanish TV shows via netflix that I ever would if there was only cable (for example)

There is a bias in this article and that is the context of time. Over time there will be less and less software engineers at the top of this list as software engineering becomes more common field of study. If you look at the people listed, they were people who set up these companies not to make money. I am not saying they are not interested in money, but if you were someone interested in mainly in making money within a reasonable time frame and you were intelligent at the times Google, FB and others were invented, building these companies would have not been the easiest way to make money at those times (dot com bubble etc). These people started these companies due to an obsession with the problem, the need to make a change etc.

These companies have grown to be insane empires, not because it has been software engineers running them, but software engineering is a new field that greatly impacts the world at this time and they are the people that solved the harder mainstream problems at the time. If this was in the industrial age, we would see more blacksmiths and manufacturers and railroad builders on the list, than farmers or accountants or whatever. It is a mixture of time, depth of problem and an obsession to solve it. Not that there is something intrinsically special about software engineers

This is already true. Actually P2P was the primary way of trading crypto in the country till last 2019-2020. So there is already an established P2P market here

I live in Nigeria and this story is not being reported accurately. Back in 2017 the Central Bank asked banks to keep an eye out on people trading crypto and report suspicious activity. At the time there were many multi-level pyramid schemes running in the country and even one that included bitcoin in its name and the govt was clamping down on these issues and cryptocurrencies fell into that bucket

Come 2021 we are in a Bull run again and crypto action is high in the country. The govt sends this letter to banks again to keep an eye out.

This is not a Ban on Bitcoin or cryptocurrency it is shutting down the onramps of fiat into crypto. There are also other nuanced issues in the country about the Central bank needing people to hold the currency (Naira) due to heavy devaluation going on at the moment but lots of people are converting all their money to BTC and this is a way to halt it.

Hope this clarifies this for some people

Hi, serious question what is Vercel? As a developer, what do I use it for? Back-end as a service? Hosting? Database? from reading their homepage several times and looking at their products I still cant tell... can some explain?

All what your saying makes sense, but OP is just saying look, professionals are looking for a high powered computer in the form factor of an iPad. If you look at it that way Apple can still make their simple tablet but have a Pro version for Pros. There is a whole market that would love to do work on "a portable iMac"

This is a great story thanks for sharing, and I think it can be useful for the poster of screenbreak above. My knee jerk reaction when I saw the product was, wow I can create a book of all the articles I read in 2020 and make it a coffee table book. It is a good gift to give close friends as the articles that shaped your year, or one to reminisce on, but above all this book needs to be picture heavy, it needs to feel like a magazine or coffee table book to have mainstream appeal. I hope OP tests this out, there is def a market here

I found this press release pretty disappointing. It is very weak. This press release is like saying when the documentary about how bad McDonald is for you (Super Size me) came out, McDonald's issues a statement saying, oh but they (filmmakers) were not fair, they did not show you guys the steps we take to keep harmful bacteria from your food and ensure we don't poison you.

This whole Press release is about the "Steps" they have taken, very few of them tell us about these steps in detail or how we can verify them. There is no pledge to do better or a consequence to not meeting these goals. If feels to me that FB is mega coorp where the people in it want to do better but the machine is so much bigger than the people in it they are currently lost on how to do it without torching the whole company

I think Facebook is bleeding college age people to Instagram (yes I know it is owned by FB), snapchat and the likes and this is serious ad revenue, if allowed to continue all spells the death of a platform. Form me this is a signal of fear or desperation to save the website facebook. Facebook the company is VERY fine and healthy, but I think Facebook the website is in trouble

I also checked them out and loved it. With some digging around I think they are in some form of beta now and taking custom orders (hence the black box), but on their instagram (posted about 14 hours ago) they say they are about to release a public 1.0 version which should be affordable for an independent developer and large companies alike based on this link

https://globekit.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=a3ee0f28d3...

Ayoayo is a game in the Mancala family in West Africa. I grew up playing it and always thought it was a local game (Nigerian). It is kind of amazing how this game or style of gaming spread all over the world and is part of many cultures. Its funny because many Nigerians think nothing of the game, it is just an old game you pick up when you are a child, kinda like hop scotch or checkers. I actually never knew it was this ancient of a game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayoayo

I blame TV shows like CSI and all the other crap out there that make pixelated images look like something you could "Zoom" into or something the computer can still understand even if the eye does not. Because of this, non tech people do not really understand that pixelated images have LOST information. Add that to the racial situation in the U.S. and the the inaccuracy of the tool for black people. Wow, this can lead to some really troublesome results

Hahaha, glad you like it. Thanks for the support

I have been working on a lot of side projects actually. The first is a Corona app that I built to dump all my research and frustration when the lockdown first happened. When I realized I could not publish it to the app store I reached out to the CDC in West Africa and they are picking up the app. That was exciting.

The second project is a custom deck of cards, but instead of the Typical King, Queen and Jack it is royalty from Nigeria and has had an amazing response on Kickstarter

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ifeanyichu/natives-play...

I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but there are formidable companies all over the world running, and for them, this is one less unreliable aspect of their company.

To give you an idea, if you want to run a data center or your own servers in some countries you need a standby generator (because electricity is not a given) and the Diesel used to run these generators are imported and the economy of these countries is shaky so the exchange rate fluctuates, so suddenly the cost to keep your site up becomes a variable and is now subject to government announcements (not even in an evil authoritarian way), policies and import taxes. In the face of all of this, having a steady AWS bill with reliable infrastructure becomes priceless to these companies

What are good headless CMS engines? There are so many flavors and no real community or indication of which ones will survive, is there an open-source equivalent to Wordpress for headless CMS?

LOL, really? source? Is Germany a big market for them? Apple is also a regular word... its's the name of a fruit in English

Yeah but that's why they chose Vercel not why the name ZEIT had to be changed in the first place