I think people should just learn math *notation* so they have the tools to understand the things they find when they *do* need to learn some specific math for a problem.

Money is a weird thing when used as a motivator, you definitely don’t want to mix the two market economies. Friends/Money.

Do I pay for them year over year, if so do they have access to all other app.net apps? Or do they only have access to my app. If they only have access to my app then what is the app.net “public” timeline for?

Hmm thinking it through I don’t think that it would be possible for your free user scenario to exist… so what this really means is that in effect all the people building apps for app.net will be app.net affiliates bringing people on to the system.

So if I build an app.net app, I am essentially becoming an app.net reseller. Which, when you think about it, is a little more cynical than something free like twitter. (p.s I did pony up the $100 to be a developer, but just thinking out-loud right now)

It does feel kind of annoying to think that I might create a great system called tweeter, but all my users need to pay app.net to be part of it. Then, as tweeter, wouldn’t I be thinking, hmm I wonder how I can get out of this deal and just have these 10m users as my own users.

We’ll see! Either way, it’s pretty exciting 🙂

In other words, let’s imagine a new company called Tweeter who decide to build on top of App.net’s solid API. They pay App.net for the service but then cover that cost by including advertising and partnerships. They can then afford to offer “free” accounts to users. Tweeter would then be effectively identical to Twitter. Do you see how App.net can under-cut Twitter like this?

Twitter was awesome. Sadly, they are a victim of their own success. They offered a popular new service for free but that isn’t sustainable. Something had to change and they chose the path of advertising which appears to be proving both restrictive and unstable for developers.

But they don’t need 3rd party developers any more. They’ve used them to grow to a global size; they’ve literally outgrown the need for 3rd party businesses. They will now use these companies as advertising billboards to spread their partners’ messages.

Firstly, it’s very much an early/alpha product and has a long way to go. Secondly, it’s definitely going down the route of being a Twitter clone – at least to START with. There is a “global stream” which is much like the Twitter firehose although currently you can actually keep up with the App.net flow because it’s a lot less busy!

Most of the people on the alpha are there to build tools and apps on top of the API. This seems to be the crux of it: building a stable Twitter-like ‘infrastructure’ on top of which developers can build their businesses. They PAY for this infrastructure and so can expect a certain level of service.

Twitter, however, seems to be falling foul of their paymasters and the amount of spam/fake accounts. For example, there was a story during the London Olympics where a journalist tweeted about how terrible NBCs coverage was, posted an email address of an NBC executive and Twitter blocked the account because NBC complained (Twitter and NBC had formed a partnership during the games)! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19061032

This clearly illustrates Dalton Caldwell’s point about what is wrong with Twitter now. Yes, it’s “free” and that’s a good thing, but we’re now seeing the problems associated with “free”.

Matt Gemmell (no relation to me) just posted this on App.net:
“These third-party-client endangering changes to the Twitter API are some of the reasons I’m here on app.net: http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes”

Follow that link to read more…

I don’t know if this will be helpful to you, but a “mantra” that has worked really well for me this year in helping me get in better shape (lost 50lbs since Jan, out of breath walking a mile to jogging 5k) was “Fresh start, modest change” (from my other favorite podcast: http://5by5.tv/b2w/47).

It seems that you are always trying such drastic things – from the juice diet to fasting. For me, that kind of stuff never works. So I tried a “modest change” approach.

I made two simple changes that were small enough that I didn’t really notice. First, I started bringing a sack lunch to work everyday instead of eating out. Second, if I wanted to watch something on TV, I had to be moving on a treadmill. That’s it – no fancy meal plans or hip new workout plan, just two really easy to implement changes.

I’d encourage you to give something like this a try and stick to it for a few weeks, I think you will have much better success than trying such a radical shift in lifestyle.

That would generally shape the sound toward all the bad high end hiss…. not your fault, just sayin’

Oddly enough I don’t hear it on the Skype versions. Might be the additional distortion or Skype filtering it out? Actually I hear it sometimes, just not as often. Once again might just be down to how my brain works.

Alternate plan, I attend every hard rock concert I can for the next year and damage my hearing to cover the noise 😉

Nice show guys. Good luck Justin in Pasadena – apart the heat, seems a pretty good place to be.

There is a lot of background noise in my apartment. AC fans etc. The background noise is happening all the time but you can’t hear it when we speak because our voices cover it. When we stop speaking you could hear it but you don;t because a noise gate is triggered to cut off sound and bring it to silence when the audio signal hit’s -15db.

So, as Jason’s words end, he goes quite and the gate shuts off the sound with a tail of about 400ms. During the cut-off tail you can hear the background noise (which sounds like a hiss because you only hear it for half a second).

I’m not sure why the effect is more pronounced with Jason than me. It may be because he finds it very hard to stop his mic from rubbing off his cloths due to the way he sits.

The fix would be for us to record in a quite room with soundproofing. I’m not sure that is going to happen any time soon. Another possible fix is for me to find professional VST gate or live signal filter and purchase one. I’ll have a look.

@Ben The effect is much more pronounced when yu listen to the show very loudly. Try to turn down your overall volume by about 20db you will most likely notice that the effect fades into the background and is not very noticeable.

😀

Every other aspect of the audio felt better. No Skype glitches/catch-ups, no annoying “Justin’s audio over-dubs Jason’s” and an overall great improvement on talk flow!

@Justin: soon buddy, soon 🙂

@Jason Did you forget to bring your uber mic or something? PLEASE don’t do so, at least for me? It gives me a headache to hear the fuzzy static. Pretty pretty please… ill do anything, heck ill take Justin’s hacking approach and PAY you to use whatever he is using.

I can’t be the only one who hears it.

And what was even more encouraging were all the HN fasting articles in the past couple of weeks. Seeing others do it too made it seem even more possible to stick with it.

@Chris Bösing – Oh rats! I was hoping you would say how much junk food you were eating and alcohol you were consuming! Ah well I guess I do have to work heard at it then and make good food choices on my eating days.

@Alex Gemmell – I’m glad you liked the vibe. When you coming to LA???

@Alfie – Sweet! So what are your results one month in?

I was eating some chocolate one day and looked at the back to see how many calories a single square had (35 calories). That night when I went to the gym I watched the display on the stair machine to see how easy it was to burn off a single square of chocolate (and I’m talking tiny 1 inch by .5 inch). 16 flights of stairs – It wasn’t easy at all!

I then thought about which was easier:

a) Eating chocolate and killing myself at the gym
b) Eating healthy food and not killing myself at the gym

I thought about it more and figured that eating healthy in combination with gym and intermittent fasting is a win-win. It’s been so far so good.

My only advice is lots of water. If I do feel like I’m getting a bit hungry through the day, a cup of tea does the trick. I’ve also cut back on my coffee seeing as that can upset a completely empty stomach.

Now on these cyber weapons… if US citizens ever get infected by them, is there any possibility that the DOJ will step in and charge the DOD with cyber terrorism or at least unauthorized access to a network or computer? And do you think that class action law suits can be filled?

It only took you 200 frikking episodes! Keep it up 😉

Here is what I’m going to eat today:
Breakfast: 2 Bananas and protein shake (30 grams)
Lunch: Veggies with fish
2pm snack(end of feeding window) greek yoghurt with fruits

What has helped me a lot to stay sane while doing this is having what some would call a cheat day(I call it reward day ;)). Saturdays everthing is off limits. Pizza and beer ftw.

Feels like every day I get an email from someone showing me a new competitor. Also, I get several new feature requests a day and it’s not slowing down.

All this to say that these are common things to have to deal with and it’s not what is going to result in success or failure.

Whether you can get traffic and convert that traffic into paying customers is really what it comes down to (once you have a good product people will pay for). You’ve done a great job at converting visitors and Pluggio really is a great product. But who is your ideal customer and where do you find more of them?

Of course, it’s certainly not a bad idea to move on to another product (like AnyFu) where you can use what you’ve learned and make use of certain advantages that you have over others in the space.

On weightlifting: I have started a linear progression program(adding weight each time you do an exercise/lift) when I started fasting. It is really awesome how much progress you can achieve in very little time when add weight each workout day and a great motivation.
As a beginner I would recommend Starting Strength http://startingstrength.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ:The_Program . I would hire a personal trainer to teach you the lifts, if you decide to do it.

Since you were talking about reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/leangains and http://www.reddit.com/r/fasting are really awesome resources on this stuff.

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional at this dieting/weightlifting stuff, just talking about my experiences.