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> Is your chat app asynchronous? As in sending a public message for an offline user?

Ah, so DieWithMe is an interesting, but different concept.

With Bored Chat, it's simply a chat app where you interact via an iMessage like UI. The difference is that all your chat logs (your chat history) are viewable to the world on your profile page...and on a main "activity" feed.

So Bored Chat is basically chat, but with no privacy whatsoever!


I wonder if humans could, or should, help this evolutionary process along.


We've probably hindered it multiple times in the past. We weren't the only apes to master tool making, we were just really good at it and out competed others that tried filling the same niche.


FWIW You may be interested in an app I'm building which allows people who work remotely (or in remote places) to socialize with other people who work remotely. The idea is to allow people such as yourself who are interested in tech to have "water cooler"-style conversations even if they are removed from the tech scene.

Feel free to give it a go: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/water-cooler-chat/id94476300...

You might find some interesting people on there to talk to, it's still early days and currently only my friends are using it so far, but we're a friendly, interesting bunch of people :)


Did anyone else get a brief surge of adrenaline thinking your username was for some reason on the front page of HN?


I expected to receive an algorithmic psych profile of myself based on my HN comments.

Instead, I needed to work out if it was an IP address, or a count of how many hours I've spent on here...


Wow, how old are you? Like 8 million years?


I expected it to be some random user here who was revealing to be actually pg/Zuck or someone famous.


Exactly what happened to me


It's a hobby. It seems you are falling into the trap of vanity metrics when paying attention to number of followers.

You've nailed it here (such an easy trap to fall into).


Thanks for all the replies, everyone, and sorry for the late response. Every reply here has been very helpful.


I'm not sure of the "swipe" idea translates well to professional networking.

"Swipe" seems more suited to making visceral fast (~1 second) decisions based on gut instinct, whereas networking requires >20 seconds when face-to-face and longer in a lower bandwidth environment such as an app.

Additionally when using the app it felt like I was "discarding" someone as I swiped them, which is not the right feeling.

The bigger problem with networking, I find, is breaking the ice. I'd pay good money to be able to intro myself to someone without resorting to a "networking hack".


No disagreement on the swipe - we're playing around with a several other UX mechanisms that might be better suited for higher time/consideration per person, would love to get your feedback on it when new UX's release.

In professional networking, both discovering mutually benefitual relationships and ice breaking are big problems. We're currently largely focused on the former, but hope to tackle the latter as well.


Happy to provide feedback on new UX -- my contact details are in my profile.

Hey...left-field idea for the ice-breaking problem: t-shirts with a list of all your likes and dislikes printed on them.

Instead of the clichéd "what do you do" it's "hey, you like NCIS too!". Easier, cheaper to test than an app.


This was published 18 months ago.

A subsequent publication[0][1] argues that their notion of "negative temperatures" is invalid as they used a flawed definition of entropy.

[0] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cites=41283096248189415...

[1] http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/theo1/hanggi/Dunkel_Nature...


That's why I always read comments before following a link, thank you for sharing this :)


So they did not actually attain below-absolute-0 temperatures?


Isn't it impossible as per laws of physics to achieve less than absolute ZERO temperature?


It depends on what we mean by "temperature".

If we think that temperature is a measure of how much the atoms move around then it is not possible to have less than zero movement.

But if we think temperature as related to the ratio of how much a system's entropy changes when a certain amount of energy is added (or removed) to the system [1],

1/T = dS/dq

then it's possible to construct systems with a negative T.

[1] Eqs. 8–10 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature#Second_law_of_therm...


If I understand correctly, it's like saying a car has negative speed because it's going backwards. If you accelerate it forwards you actually reduce its speed towards 0, but that does not mean that the car is more immobile at -5km/h than at 0km/h.

It's just a matter of convention, a negative temperature just means that the temperature gets closer to 0 as you add energy. Did I get that correctly?


Negative temperature actually has some nuance to it. By the relation 1/T = dS/dq where T is temperature, S is entropy and q is heat added to the system, a negative temperature means that entropy decreases when you add heat to the system and increases when it emits heat. By the second law, entropy always goes up, so a negative temperature object will always emit heat. In that way, something with a negative temperature is extremely hot.


In fact, it's a negative absolute temperature because it's hotter than infinity.


> If I understand correctly, it's like saying a car has negative speed because it's going backwards.

Well, kind of, but I think that would be an oversimplification.

Negative temperatures have a concrete physical meaning, being "hotter than infinity", in the sense that if we bring in contact 2 systems: one with an arbitrarily high positive temperature, and one with a negative temperature, energy (heat) will flow from the negative system to the positive.

This looks tidier if we use the thermodynamic beta (beta = 1/T) instead of temperature. Then we can say that heat always flows from a system with a smaller beta to systems with a larger beta.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_beta

Maybe debt is a somewhat useful metaphor here. If someone has a debt of 5 apples, in some ways if makes sense to say that this person owns -5 apples. But in some other ways it makes no sense: a person with 5 apples can eat them to get less hungry. A person with -5 apples cannot eat them to get more hungry.




This is a step in the right direction. I strongly believe that marijuana legalization is good for the economy -- personally I've come up with brilliant, practical ideas while stoned[0]. Many of which I have gone on to implement and generate wealth. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Think Steve Jobs and Apple etc.

[0] I hope the nomenclature evolves re marijuana. "stoned", "bong", "skunk", "chronic", etc conjure up images that are too tightly aligned with negative stereotypes IMO.


We have plenty of negative names for alcohol and tobacco, though. Booze, fags, etc.


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