The thousands of $$ on audio software are spent because they actually provide the exact output needed. Think of them as a precision-tooled machine part critical to the production flow in a factory. Sure, you can replace it with a cheaper alternative but the cheaper part will likely have rough edges and the errors caused by those rough edges will cascade into your final production output...
Hardcore mode blurs every thing you type, so you have no idea if you are writing correctly. All you have to go by is your judgement and the belief that you do not misspell your words. And even if you did, you are willing to edit it all out later.
I can see the appeal of doing this for people who worry too much about what they are writing and constantly go back to edit their words and spellings. However, this is a stupid idea because going back to make minor edits allows the brain to formulate the next thought and frame it into better sentences.
By vomiting everything in one flow, you are simply increasing the amount of work required in terms of editing and re-writing the incorrect parts. Not to mention the large amount of proof-reading work that will inevitably follow all your work.
Does hardcore mode allow pauses? Let's see. Five potatoes to figure it out... Yes it does. Same five-potato time-limit.
Ah, too many potatoes.
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I was sweating buckets the whole time. I hate the idea of my writing vanishing, so the pressure was quite high to keep typing...
I really feel Troy has handled HIBP very, very carefully, honestly, and with the utmost transparency so far. He seems to have put in a lot of thought into everything - whether it is rolling out a feature or planning the future of HIBP.
1. Location matching - both your apps detected you in the same place for an extended period of time. Maybe you guys had mutual friends in the music community?
2. Microphone[0]. They have since refuted that claim[1], but I've had way too many coincidences and I'm choosing to keep my tin-foil hat on... :/
Even if you haven't signed up for a facebook account but someone you know has an account, they by proxy, you have an account. Merely existing as a contact in their address book is enough to create a shadow profile with facebook. Their deep-learning algos can collate such data from all your friends and serve you correspondingly appropriate ads.
In fact, I just thought of an experiment that you could try sometime.
1. Buy a new cellphone number and store a small number of contacts (say, about 5) in your phonebook. Make sure all 5 of them have functional & active FB accounts.
2. Install the FB app on the phone and grant it access to your phonebook.
3. Open the app, create a new user and check out the list of suggested friends.
The page on Tax Reform[0] seems... interesting. Here's the first paragraph:
> Anyone who fills out a tax form knows how harmful the U.S. tax code is today – punishing hard work, savings, and investment. American frustration with the tax code has prompted two decades of Washington, D.C. blue ribbon commissions and detailed plans to reform the code. These efforts have not changed the tremendous burden Americans face in complying with the U.S. tax code. If a tax code were designed to punish hard work, thrift, and investment, the current U.S. tax code could serve as a blueprint.
Autosummarizer[1] summarizes the first paragraph as follows:
> If a tax code were designed to punish hard work, thrift, and investment, the current U.S. tax code could serve as a blueprint.
Well, I have been trying a hobby-dev project that is kinda along these lines but I am almost on the verge of giving up.
The problem is, the feed/stream API endpoints for most of the services mentioned above, either do not exist or have been removed.
- FB and Instagram no longer provide them, for sure.
- WhatsApp doesn't have an official API - the last time I test-drove Yowsup, my number was 'blocked' by WhatsApp.
- No idea if there's an API for iMessage, although I get the feeling there mightn't be...
Screen-scraping all of these services is way too much effort for way little reward. Not to mention that FB keeps 'updating' its UI/UX quite frequently and Instagram doesn't show a 'feed' on the web if you login.
- FB messenger is based off the XMPP protocol, so yeah, there might be a way to access it without having to screen-scrape.
That leaves HN, reddit and the Google gang - is it really worth the time to integrate these into one service? Maybe one could build the basic structure over the weekend and then provide an option add-on different sites as a 'plugin'...
The thousands of $$ on audio software are spent because they actually provide the exact output needed. Think of them as a precision-tooled machine part critical to the production flow in a factory. Sure, you can replace it with a cheaper alternative but the cheaper part will likely have rough edges and the errors caused by those rough edges will cascade into your final production output...