iantimothy

I have not drank for more than a 1000 days. This was the second attempt to completely stop drinking. For the first attempt, I didn't get past 100 days.

I have someone who holds me accountable. That individual started messaging me daily the count: 1 day without drinking, 2 days without drinking, 3 days ... Once we hit 100 days, it became 110 days without drink, 120 days without drink ...

What has helped keep the discipline:

1. Non-alcoholic beer. I second the recommendations of SkyPuncher. 2. I avoid situations where alcohol is present. 3. Friends and colleagues who don't pressure me to just have 'one drink'.

I perform stand-up comedy at clubs and bars. There's a culture of getting a free drink if you are not the head-liner and it isn't an open-mic. One way I maintain the discipline is to treat stand-up comedy like work - I need to have a clear mind to do the job and alcohol diminishes my capacity to perform.

All the best in your journey!

Since Filipinos are the largest growth market for Axie Infinity, they must also be a major source of money flowing into the system. Instead of being a net provider of jobs and capital, it appears to just be redistributing the same wealth between Filipinos, and collecting a 4.25% cut for the service.

It seems that the source of money flowing into the system are individuals with capital to buy the incoming producing PPE-type assets (i.e., Axies).

Guilds pool capital to buy P2E assets and rent it out to scholars for a % of all income earned by the player (known as scholars in the current P2E nomenclature).

I think there are currently two acceptable ways to earn income in our society: 1. Take relatively less risk, get paid a wage. Owner of incoming producing assets bear the risk of deploying capital in such a manner. 2. Take high risk. Deploy capital to acquire assets and pay wages to others who utilize those assets to produce (unguaranteed) income for you.

P2E introduces a third: deploy capital to acquire assets, loan the assets out, and take a cut of income generated.

P2E in its current form has similarities to serfdom. The owners of Axies (and the AXS tokens) are the lords.

This is going to be a super useful tool!

How many layers would someone need to upload for each trait type? Wouldn't the number of unique NFTs that can be generated be constrained by the number of trait types and number of trait values per type?

hello from Singapore! I've been performing standup comedy for about six years as a hobby. Anyway, last year I went to London and Berlin and I found sites like https://www.opencomedy.com/ and https://comedyinenglish.de/ super useful in finding open mic gigs to perform at. I know in the post venue owners and bookers were mentioned but wanted to highlight that for comics who travel, sites like yours are super useful to us too albeit we aren't the ones really making the money.

I took about three and a half months. The trip can be done much faster if the goal is to reach London ASAP - I estimate about 17 days. I spent about a month in China exploring it using her High Speed Trains. Also stayed in cities for varying durations depending on the feel of the city.

This was an amazing resource for me. i travelled from Singapore to London by land this year using buses and trains and the info on this site really helped. What I came to appreciate from this trip is that it’s possible to travel across the world using public transport.

The article that the Law Minister linked to: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/vi...

From my experience landing on sites that have Onswipe turned on, a fair number of these sites don't have content that look good with the Onswipe theme. The reason seems that when the owner of the site is preparing the content, they use the normal theme to see how everything looks, and it probably looks good. They can't ensure that everything looks nice with Onswipe on because most people are probably preparing content on a non touch screen browser and aren't taking the time to use an iPad to verify the content they just posted looks nice with Onswipe.

Is there a way for content owners to know how things will look on an iPad without one?

I love the idea. Just some thoughts. 1. What if the URL I want people to like is not Open Graph ready. Then what's shared looks ugly on the news feed. I know this is supposed to be my job to take care of, but when creating a campaign, there was no reminder about Open Graph and the possibility the story on the news feed will look ugly. 2. Folks could just email the link to their friends after they obtained it by liking the link. And, what's stopping them from quickly removing the like from their profile?

Is an individual's freedom to do something more important than another individual's freedom from something? My country takes a rather paternalistic view on this but like I said, i am casually optimistic that things will change and we as a country are moving towards a more informed citizenry renegotiating the social compact between the govt and people and finding a balance in both positive and negative liberties.

Edited: I can't seen to reply the comment below, so adding the reply here. One of the things my country takes very seriously is both the perception and actual oppression of minorities. In this case, we want ethnic minorities to have the freedom from majority oppression. As an example, there are measures that are put in place that prevents some of our freedom to say certain stuff about the religion Islam in a certain way. To say the rules are like a cudgel instead of a scapel would be right but as a citizen I can see where my government is coming from.

Like the comment below said, generally yes to freedom to instead of freedom from. What is considered not a general case in Singapore differs; that does not make us wrong. Neither does it mean our system is right and perfect. What it does mean is my country is learning and hopefully maturing.

We aren't a police state. We enjoy different kinds of freedom. Sure, previously some of the 'freedom to' stuff was clammed down upon,but the recent elections showed that we might be moving forward in the right direction. I am casually optimistic that we will find the right balance to allow our citizens both 'freedom from' and 'freedom to' liberties.

Hello from Singapore! And welcome to the family. Hope to meet you at echelon2011.

A question. Is there a way for anyone to know their laptop is taking photos of them? Be it a Mac or a PC. And is there a way to know if my computer is transmitting those images. I wonder whether such apps can be installed by malicious individuals to spy on people.

Thanks for this!

I can't remember where I got this quote from, but early on I learned that there are basically three ways to beat the US in technology:

1. The Japanese Way - Innovate By Leapfrogging. 2. The Indian Way - Innovate By Piggybacking. 3. The Chinese Way - Innovate By Copying.

Looking at how things have been over the years, China isn't going to stop a strategy that has worked across industries.

As a developer based in Singapore, it seems that PayPal is the best option. Would like to ask the international developers what options have they used and to the US based companies - when are you bringing your awesome services internationally?

It seems like everyone thought the goal was "How do we charge for content" instead of "How do we provide value that people are willing to pay for content".

Update: The fix has been pushed to the Beta servers.

Some background:

Facebook made a change to allow the use of iFrames in Facebook Page tabs. The development roadmap stated that no new FBML apps would be allowed by the 11th of March and Facebook encouraged developers to create iFrame applications even before that.

There is a critical bug that prevents iFrame applications from being loaded in Facebook Page tabs for users that are using HTTPS on Facebook. Since Facebook is encouraging users to use HTTPS for security, this is impacting developers that followed Facebook's recommendations.

To fellow developers out there, be careful. Wait for a while before jumping onto the iFrame bandwagon.

What about.me did for profiles (facebook), it seems this is a similar take on songs (myspace). It is interesting really ... I had musician friends share their songs by sending a public box.net URL. This would have worked so much better for them.

What's interesting is that companies were already creating incentives for people to like a page, check-in to a place, post to a wall ...

Now, not only do they have to create incentives for these actions to take place, they have to pay Facebook for the right for these actions to be displayed prominently.

It is like double taxation.

I don't know about the rest, but for:

1. Gmail - The history makes it seem like an internal project that became public. Wasn't started to beat some new hot startup earning the attention of the fawning public & investors; wasn't built to muscle into the territory of some startup earning bucketloads of cash.

2. Maps - Was about building a better way to distribute maps on the web. Again, not about muscling in onto a hot new space.

Maybe because ultimately doing a clone means you are fighting for a percentage in what is already a fixed pie?

Google as a company definitely has the smarts to create a new market.

It seems to me that with this launch, Google has become more like Microsoft when Google was gaining some sort of ascendancy - a juggernaut that is so afraid of the upstarts that they chase the shadows of the next big thing, in this case Groupon.

The local search & commerce space cannot possibly only look like Groupon. On Hacker News, we have seen people try different models & different variations. There are some ways that doesn't even rely on deals. Just yesterday we saw http://getpunchd.com/ a mobile play on loyalty schemes.

And Google has Android, a mobile OS coupled with what was once and possibly still the best mapping site on the web. It would seem figuring out how those two combined can be the wedge into the local space should be their priority instead of being scared into creating a clone.

Looks like an implementation of some of the ideas in this article - http://thinkvitamin.com/business/how-to-track-six-key-metric... . Will definitely give your application a look when I create my own SaaS application.

The interface and mechanics of the site looks like an emerging pattern in data collection to understand the relations between nodes on the social graph. Seems like a throwback to the days when psychologists would show physical cards and ask us to choose one.

Reminds me of this family of card games I used to play when young - http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/377365/top-trumps-some-good-...

Haha. Yes! Growing up with the ubiquity of libraries and books, I found it quaint that finding a book was something considered difficult enough that it was a job of professionals and that a premium was paid for the effort to locate the book. I can imagine how quaint I would look when sharing with my children about the process of physically browsing to find hidden gems; "Dad, you mean you didn't find books liked by your friends from your Facebook wall?"

Which of the two books did you prefer?

When Borders came to Singapore, it became the bookstore with probably the best selection of books in stock. It easily became my favorite place to browse and buy books. Two recent incidents stood out which made me realized that Borders was in trouble before I became aware about all the news of it really being in trouble.

They replaced their information counter with a computerized system that failed miserably in helping me locate a book I wanted. The book in question was Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 'The Angel's Game'. My friend had shared about the book over dinner and some of us had decided to get a copy. We went down, searched for it using the computerized system, was informed that the book was available (at least that's what the system seem to be saying). It could not be found anywhere on the shelves (where the system said it was supposed to be); more importantly, none of the staff could help us. In short, the new information counter was useless.

In the early days, the information counter was run by people who knew and loved books. The proof of that was: 1. They could always help locate the book physically. 2. If the book wasn't in stock, they would also be spot on in recommending a similar book that would interest me. It was the second point that got me buying a couple of extra books.

The lost of knowledgeable counter staff in hindsight was indicative of a culture shift in Borders from that of being a place where people passionate about books gathered to a place where shit got sold and it just so happened to be books.

The second incident was noticing that valuable store space was being used to sell toys and kitchenware. Yes, kitchenware in a bookstore.

In the end, I got 'The Angel's Game' and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's 'The Shadow of The Wind' at a local store http://www.booksactually.com/. I recommend this store to anyone who love books and is in Singapore. Clear showcase of how domain knowledge and intimate customer relations can help a local institution compete against the scale and supposedly lower prices of steam rolling multinational companies.

The thing about Tim Ferris' solution to improving your life is that it is built on the base of people who cannot work 4 hour work weeks.

It is like a Multi-Level Market company, except now with time being sold instead of products. Eventually, you will reach a mass of people doing lots of work, for a low cost, just so that someone can outsource the boring parts of his business and tell the world he did it in 4 hours a week, but the true cost, paid by someone else, isn't.

Which if you think about it, is pretty much how the world works. A base of people powering the few at the top.

The one thing that really really irks me, is that people who I've met, and I'm not talking about Tim, who goes with the 4hww philosophy is that they never truly appreciate the work done by the people at the base. They make all the money, but will tell the producers of the work, hey, I can easily outsource this website design to another Indian programmer for half the cost, so you better lower your price or I won't use you.

The base is dispensable.

Inefficiency - "You should blame the system that forced you to work within the structure of the 8 hour work day."

When you are expected to work 8 hours a day, the problem is not that you fill your time with useless shit and then become unproductive.

The problem is that you feel like you need to demonstrate or show to the world that you're doing work for the whole 8 hours, or more specifically, you need to show that you're not slacking off for too long.

So, let's take programmers as an example. I've had colleagues who alt-tab A LOT. Basically, 15 minutes in the IDE, tab out, 5 minutes of chatting. 15 minutes back to the IDE, 5 minutes back to browsing. For a 8 hour day, that's 75% of the time working. Good right? NO.

Context switching is expensive. A large part of the 15 minutes of work in the IDE is resetting the frame of mind to work.

Now why do people context switch. Simple. Micro-management from project managers, team leaders, bosses ...

If I, as a team leader, look over at your screen and see you surfing the net for 1 full hour, I'll get pissed. But if you alt-tab a lot, there is a good chance when I'm spying over your shoulder, you're on the IDE. Good worker!

I hate it. Which is why when I had my own team, I told my guys, you want to surf, sure, spend as long as you want. But when you code, focus on the coding for a full X amount of time. So, I tell them, you want a break, surf for 30 minutes. But make sure you get full one and a half hours of coding done first. Plan what you need to do, tell the team what you aim to achieve, and do it.

I also find that when people don't need to pretend to work, and can rest in peace chatting, surfing, they tend to be less stress.

Another example, sleeping in the office is a big no-no. So what do people do? They run off to the stairs to sleep. Or to the toilet. Ridiculous. If my guy has been pulling all nighters, I think it is perfectly fine for him to rest his head on the desk for a while.