walden42's comments

Live news broadcasts from individuals passionate about researching live events would be great, too. Anything like that that could replace MSM. From people compiling the current latest news from places like Twitter, to people actually out on the streets during events.

> He thinks that Uber is really unfair to union taxi drivers who jump through some hoops to get licensed, etc.

So they were forced to jump through ridiculous hoops, so should we force everyone to follow the same stupidity?

If anything, the solution is tear down these bureaucratic barriers and open up the competition for everyone. But you'll never see the taxis supporting this, because they know they'll lose, and would rather have their business propped up artificially using governmental force.

The list of common mistakes includes "Spending a lot of time trying to get a warm intro. You’re better off just following these rules and emailing me directly."

That goes contrary to a lot of advice other VCs say, which is that getting introduced to a VC is the most common way to get funded. Supposedly most cold emails don't turn into VC funding. Is this no longer the case?

Assuming all assets get stored on S3, the other common writing scenario is logging. How would multiple machines writing to the same log file work?

See MaidSafe.[0]

It's what you describe. They're working on it, hopefully to be released some time this year. You upload something, it gets distributed to random nodes on the SAFE network. Minimum of 4 live copies of your data, and if any of them get taken down, another copy is immediately created on another machine. This completely eliminates the need for hosted servers for most types of apps. You can upload any files, including javascript, which means you can essentially run entire SPA and other applications using this network.

[0] http://maidsafe.net

Ha! I just recently came across this discussion on the MaidSafe forums. There are talks of doing this to bootstrap the network: https://www.maidsafe.org/t/bootstrapping-the-safe-network-vi...

Ah I see you're not really familiar with the project. "backing up personal data to a p2p network" is far from what they're doing. They're creating the backbone for a completely decentralized internet. It's up to everyone to use their API to build the "apps" on the network, whether it's a website, social network, media site (youtube), etc. The possibilities are endless, just like the current internet you now use. The only difference is that it's made with security and privacy in mind. No DNS, centralized servers (like AWS), etc are required to host your apps--it's all taken care of for you.

On to your safecoin questions. They're inventing a new digital currency that aims to get rid of the problems that exist with bitcoin. Namely, scalability. If you're familiar with bitcoin, you'll know that every full node is aware of every transaction. The current limit is 7 transactions per second (though there are talks of lifting it, which has other implications, but that's another matter). Bitcoin also requires specialized hardware to mine and keep the network secure. Miners service no purpose except this end.

Safecoin has no blockchain, therefore not everyone is aware of all other transactions. Transaction are 100% free and unlimited, and the "miners" are nodes that provide storage and bandwidth on the network, thus adding actual value (and this is how the network AND safecoin is to be bootstrapped, answering your first question). Also, app-builders are also rewarded safecoins for people using their apps, adding further incentive to build on the network (yes, you can earn money just by building a useful app people love). Since all nodes don't need to know about every transaction, scalability is not an issue. DDOS protection is already built into the network.

I can go on, but in reality, if it works, it'll blow everything else out of the water and truly change the networking landscape. I'm actually planning to write a blog post explaining how it works since questions like yours come up all the time.

Edit: oh, and feel free to ask questions and browse posts on the forum at maidsafe.org.

Decentralization, and thus p2p, is the very reason services like these are being created, to protect against censorship. That seems the logical next step.

And besides the "altcoin" problem, MaidSafe does this. You pretty much provide a hash to the API, and it fetches your files using chunks from a decentralized system. It's genius. All the hard work they're doing is the "magic work behind the scenes" that implements that.

As for the altcoin, the word "altcoin" connotates a "copy" of bitcoin or something negative. It's not fair to call SafeCoin an "altcoin", since it has nothing whatsoever to do with any other coins. It's completely original (and does not use a blockchain), and it deserves a chance to prove itself. But I understand all the bitcoin evangelists don't even want to consider that another digital currency can make it to the top.

I thought paypal does recurring donations? Anyhow, for bitcoin, look into Coinbase's recurring payment options. I don't think it should be a problem.

Completely free with ACH purchases.

Are there open-source voice recognition projects in the works that could replace the likes of Google Now and the others? If not, there should be.

Try stripping locally and see if the checksum matches.

> From the non-profits perspective, re-occuring and emotionally invested donations are much more valuable than a one off big shot of money.

That's the big one, IMO. Would definitely like to see b) implemented. It would work similarly to Flattr, but specifically for curated lists of non-profits with good track records.

I think it's an interesting issue because the primary issue is what interests people, not the website itself. If a majority of people want to concentrate on the bad, then the bad shows up more. If the mods or admins make the site such that it's impossible to concentrate on the bad, then that would involve some kind of censorship that could be very biased towards someone's definition of good.

The issue is the people, not with Reddit.

Most credit/debit cards globally, mostly US bank accounts only.

Certainly this makes it easier on the government if they really wanted your calls.

Same here. Someone calls, I press Accept, and it could take up to 10 seconds to actually accept the call. It would open a new window, start loading stuff, and then the call was missed by the time it was ready. How could anything like that get past the QA team?

Why not just run backups on a replica suited specifically for that purpose?

I would argue that if built upon a platform like MaidSafe, which should come out late 2014/early 2015, it would be a decentralized network.

Maidsafe seems to be the all-in-one that builds a decentralized internet infrastructure. I have high hopes for it.