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:
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!
Totally get your point! Thanks will pass on the UI/UX credits to bbusetti. she is responsible for the design. In fact we really tasted a lot with older people. My parents now use it a lot, as they can also follow via web and email.
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!
> 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.
With the proliferation of Nexus tablets (or Android tablets in general) and that Play Books is stock in the OS, I feel pretty confident in it sticking around.
The point is, and I should have made it clear in my original comment, I would usually prefer one company that just does something rather than a corporation that tries to do everything. Their priorities change quickly; mainly because they have a lot of products and even if a company is useful to them and their users they might shut it down because it might be "relatively" less important to them. Whereas a company which just does that might hang on to it and try to make that very service even better.
> 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.
Or you could just toss it in your Dropbox... assuming they integrate Readmill into the mobile app, I fail to see why everyone doesn't win.
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.
I agree. All these acquisitions just make me want to come up with self hosted versions that I can run on my own. I know there's ShuBook but the experience just isn't there.
"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:
Oh whoa, I didn't know that the eye had to refocus to watch the screen! I thought it was more like a HUD and assumed that Google had mastered that part of the system (and was probably the major innovation behind Glass).
Are there competing HUD systems out there which can be worn near the eyes and don't require a refocus?
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."
Besides, stock price isn't a good measure of de Castro's performance. Advertising revenue is better. Over the past year, Yahoo!'s advertising revenue has declined while its competitors' have grown. Facebook took the #2 spot in US digital advertising revenues (Google is #1) from Yahoo! last year.
If Yahoo!'s advertising revenue had grown increased at the same rate as, say Google's (up 15% over the past year), revenue would have been ~$600m higher.
It's interesting that de Castro started out at McKinsey. The book 'Dangerous Company' portrays McKinsey consultants as Powerpoint jockeys who are great at formulating high-level strategy but not so good at actually running businesses.
Perhaps de Castro benefited from a rising tide at Google but lacked the turnaround skills required at Yahoo!
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.
> 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.
I hit the same wall when I overturned my eating habits and tried to fit all my nutrients into my three-meals-a-day habit. I succeeded by tweaking things but then it dawned on me I could spread out all the nutrients on a week. It made recipes composition much easier.
It wasn't some kind of soylent though but "regular" meals.
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?
I'm not a biologist but many vitamins are water soluble. They may stay in your body long enough but chances are you'll urinate most of the unnecessary vitamins out.
This is in fact why multi-vitamin pills are a useless generic habit. Vitamins are trace compounds/elements by nature, and your body is very careful to eliminate excesses (since they can catalyze all sorts of side-reactions which can be otherwise harmful).
The classic example is if you take multi-vitamins, you usually have noticeably different colored urine. That's no coincidence.
Yeah except you might be deficient in some vitamin, and in that case you're screwing yourself over by not taking a multivitamin that has just 100% of the RDA's. Not everyone can afford to eat a world-class, healthy diet, and obtain all nutrients sans a multivitamin.
It is medically very difficult to be vitamin deficient. Modern food is fortified in so many ways that its now almost impossible unless you do something like eat exclusively exactly 1 food product. Even then.
It's not about a healthy diet - it's about the fact that vitamins are trace components that your body holds onto what it needs and discards the rest. This is very different to the general nutritional needs of the body (carbohydrates and the like - all the things the Soylent maker is principally concerned with).
Multivitamin pills are an expensive "worried well" type supplement. Very very few people need them. They're not "generally a good idea", and if you can afford them you should be using that money to buy better quality foodstuffs because they certainly won't surrogate for poor nutrition in the major groups that you do need in large quantity.
People do still get scurvy simply by mostly eating cooked foods. It's still rare, but not that uncommon among collage students.
The sad thing is while vitamin deficiency is actually fairly common it's often a slow process and the body can cope fairly well so it's less noticeable.
By common I mean it's something that your average General practitioner doctor will encounter. Pregnant and Nursing mothers are often told to take supplements with good reason. Also of note absorption issues are just as important as diet which is one of the reason B12 shots for example are used to treat deficiency.
With that said, taking a daily multivitamin is often overkill taking it weekly is often just as useful. It's just that they are cheap enough that trying to figure out the ideal dose is generally a waste of time.
"By common I mean it's something that your average General practitioner doctor will encounter"
Well, sure, but that's during specific cases where the person knows that there's something wrong with them. It's not commonly "accidentally" discovered during the course of your regular physicals.
Women who want to become pregnant, or who are already pregnant, should be taking 400 micrograms of folic acid (from before conception to at least 12 weeks conception) and 10 micrograms vitamin d, but avoiding anything with vitamin a.
>you usually have noticeably different colored urine. That's no coincidence.
Personally the only substance I've noticed cause substantial colour changes is high doses of riboflavin (the infamous neon yellow...).
Several of the vitamin B's are often found in energy drinks and various pre-workout mixes in very high doses as well (e.g. it's not uncommon for pre-workout mixes to trigger niacin-flushes as well as riboflavin-neon color). The motivation seems to be that the potential benefits might be good enough and the risks low enough that it's better to dose high and maximize what is available to the body, even if most ends up being excreted.
Not many other supplements tends to be dosed at such high multiples of RDA's as some of the B-vitamins often does.
It would be really handy to have a table of common raw ingredients, the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable), and the temperature at which their various nutrients denature.
> the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable)
Most modern food can be eaten raw. Or lightly seared to kill surface bacteria. Modern food safety is pretty neat. It probably won't taste great though.
NB this does not apply to raw processed meat - for example, ground beef/pork/chicken is probably a bad bet. Surface area to volume ratios are key.
I also came to this realization and quickly built out http://saiko-chriskun.github.com/nutricount. Working on plans to make it into a more complete product with recipes and such :).
Nutritionally complete recipes? I think George Mateljan has been trying to do just that. Here's his 7 day healthiest menu plan. http://www.whfoods.com/hwep.php
(His site could use do-over)
