alokm

The cross icon is not flat, and the padding for text is not sufficient.

Your photos are good. Getting instagram followers in itself is a separate set of skills than being a good photographer. There is no scope of "organic" growth when the platform is swamped with people trying out different tricks.

The list is very long. I really wish a rebranding or renaming or merging of services was somehow listed or displayed separately. This would give a better idea of the services actually killed.

Getting a 403 on your site.

Most of my revenue is from an app called Hindu Calendar. It has loads of features now relating to traditional Indian calendar, and festivals of India. [Edit]: See https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Alok+Mandavg...

Yes i added ads initially. But I always made sure they did not compromise with user experience. The ad revenue was not significant initially. It has grown steadily over couple of years as the user base has increased.

Monthly ~4-5k USD from Adsense through my Android Apps, and couple of hundred from in app sales for removing ads. I made my apps just to learn about Android initially. I did not know it would be a big hit. So, I just kept on adding features as per popular demand.

I don't think it is right to jump to conclusions based on those images. I have been to one of the clean rooms, where the satellite ASTROSAT was being created. We were in the outer most room. And for that too we had to wear these bunny suits covering all of our body, hair and skin. The actual satellite was in inner levels, where standards were higher and we were not allowed to go. We were not allowed to take any instrument inside of that room. So there were no photos. May be that is the reason for this perception, it is just bad PR. Based on my experience I do find that ISRO takes these standards very seriously.

I see apps trying to overcome this trust deficit by using phrases like. "We wont post anything on your feed" . "No posts. We promise". Even if it isn't a legal commitment, It might go a long way in convincing users. Especially if there is a brand involved.

I have had the fortune of working on this IIT right after my IIT :). I worked on implementing the research software used by Giulio Tononi and his research team. I added a visualizer in OpenGL, and optimized the calculations for calculating integrated information.

I rely on it heavily. I have my home folder backed up and synced across machines on Ubuntu One. But I am using the free tier < 5GB. I will have to move on to other alternatives. I guess it wouldn't have been sustainable for them, seeing as others are giving a lot more in free tier. So they would have had only a handful of paying customers.

One very interesting thing about this game was its size. I was pleasantly surprised to see a game less than 1 MB.

There is a custom URL feature for plus accounts. Eg. https://google.com/+YourFullName. I guess, they are reserving the urls for unique names. I got mine https://google.com/+AlokMandavgane

This foot-in-the-door techniques and many other things have been covered beautifully in an ongoing course https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology. It is about to be over. I do recommend going through the videos. There is a lot to learn.

I concur as a Android Developer. I have kept a mile away from these sort of ad providers. I will not put in ads that I as a user will not like.

Man-Made or not, At least they have existed. That should be enough to add it to periodic table. There is always a non zero probability that they might exist somewhere else in the universe.

But it was only for the 48 hour period of the portathon. And IIRC their total budget was only 2,000,000.

I was involved in a Blackberry portathon. They were offering USD 100 for each of the approved apps submitted at that time. This incentive surely didn't help. I remember participants there, raising concerns about 20-30 different apps by same user converting one currency to another. But it seems BB wanted quantity so badly that they are ready to compromise on the quality side. Infact they were actively promoting a 3rd party tool Blackberry app generator (or something similar). Which was just a app generator packaging single RSS feed as an app.

That would have suggested dominance of bureaucracy in Google. Guidelines suggesting projects to be put on Google Code, etc. This seems more decentralized.

I think the example he took of moving sites from Linode to EC2 is one of the better things he can do while avoiding working on his product. As he claimed he did learn something, adding value to his skills. But yeah, I get the point. There are so many other things which might not be productive.

Are there any existing reliable alternatives?

This coincidentally is also the Final Assignment of the Coursera course by Stanford "Startup Engineering". Every one there would be making a Node based, AWS powered, Bootstrap themed Crowdfunding site.

I also concur that "consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems". But "all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience" is really a philosophical question. Internet can be considered as a living being with different people acting as different components and communicating with each other the way neurons do. But is the internet as a whole, not its participants, conscious as a whole? That is a tough question.

I will try and read up the book you suggested. And I will point towards a very interesting theory I happened to have worked on (as a software developer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory which tries to quantify consciousnesses based on this interconnectedness.

I didn't mean that brain made up of silicon cannot be conscious. We are trying to simulate whatever we have learned about the brain. And that understanding is not complete. So implementing that in silicon (circuit) will not be conscious until we figure how to implement it.

Its not a petri dish he is referring to. He is talking about a brain implemented in silicon or graphene, i.e, a brain simulated on electronic hardware.

Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation. Even if we are able to simulate the brains of lesser beings, doesnt necessarily mean that there will be self awareness in the simulation. I think this is one area where we still have a lot of catching up to do.

These lists can be very locale insensitive. A few years back my friend was trying to get a Gmail id with his name. To his surprise he wasnt able to get any id, no matter how long and obscure suffix he tried. Then it hit me that it was because of his name Kshitij. Systems should take terms from other languages and locales as white lists in these cases.

The claimed proof doesnt directly help us in factoring primes. At least not now. It has more to do with "structure" of primes.