The best way to cook popcorn in a pan. The secret is to heat up the kernels evenly in hot oil first, before heating them over a flame to pop them quickly all at once.

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Picular is a site that lets you search for words like “water” or “summer” and see a list of related colors. It seems to work by running a Google image search and extracting the primary color of that image.

This is the kind of project I love. It’s simple and easy to understand, but fun to play with.

Concept

Play Pac-Man online against other players. 1 player plays as Pac-Man and 4 other players play as the ghosts. Pac-Man’s goal is to collect as many dots as possible, and the ghosts’ goal is to work together to catch Pac-Man. Players receive points at the end of the round based on performance, and roles are rotated for the next round.

Gameplay

In terms of strategy, the ghosts will need to work together in order to win. Pac-Man will move faster than the ghosts, so the ghosts’ main strategy will be to trap Pac-Man in a corner. To encourage teamwork, all ghosts will receive the same amount of points at the end of round regardless of who actually caught Pac-Man.

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what benefits there are to building a new product on a blockchain. Blockchains allow an app to be decentralized, and the biggest value they bring is a solid way to handle trust and consensus in an environment with no central authority. I was having a hard time thinking of products that would really benefit from being decentralized, but I came across an idea about decentralized platforms that makes a very strong case for using blockchains.

The idea, introduced to me by this post by Alex Tabarrok, is that a blockchain-based platform is uniquely able to align its needs with the needs of the users. If a traditional platform wants to create economic value for itself, it often needs to do things at the expense of its users. It can’t maximize value for both the users and the platform at the same time. But a blockchain-based platform can, through its tokens, increase its value directly by increasing value for its users.

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When I started using Facebook in 2005, it was exclusive to college students and was by far the best way to communicate with my classmates. It was the first time I could learn what my friends were up to without asking each one individually. Everything I wanted to know about my friends was in one easily accessible place.

All recent updates were shown as one long list, but Facebook eventually introduced the News Feed. This was an effort to filter everyone’s updates to show just the most important ones. Facebook made educated guesses about whose updates were most important to you and hid the ones you wouldn’t care about. I think they also kept an option to see all updates in chronological order if you didn’t want to miss out on anything.

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I grew up in the 90s, and back then video games were made for kids. Toys were for kids, and video games were just the newest, most exciting toys around.

But as my generation grew up, we never really stopped playing games. As we became adults, the game companies kept making games for us, and games shifted to targeting an older audience. It makes sense that these would be successful since adults have more money to spend on games than kids do. Video games became a form of entertainment just like movies, and they started using serious storylines and graphic violence in the same ways.

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Google’s AlphaZero program is a machine that plays chess, and it has managed to quickly become the strongest chess AI in the world by implementing machine learning techniques. While existing chess AIs have mostly been massive dictionaries of moves that are put together by humans, AlphaZero learned chess entirely on its own with minimal human input.

As I understand it, the hardest part of creating an AI that solves problems like chess is finding some way to calculate if you’re winning or not. If that were easy to do, the program could just look at all of its possible moves (which is not very many for a computer) and see which one would leave it winning by more. The trouble is that it’s very hard to tell if you’re winning. You might need to consider all possible outcomes many moves in advance, which quickly becomes too many to calculate.

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Mobile games can make a crazy amount of money. Puzzles and Dragons at its peak was said to be earning $100 million per month! Why do people spend so much?

Mobile games are generally much more simple than traditional video games, so they can’t provide the same rich experiences as traditional video games. Instead, they engage their core users by providing a satisfying experience of winning, especially against other players. Since people often play mobile games in their spare time, money is used as a shortcut to win quickly and efficiently. The entire game’s structure is built around creating an environment to support people who are willing to pay large amounts of money in order to win.

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This is extremely important.

I’m a supporter of LGBT rights. I’m generally not too vocal about it, but with recent events culminating in the Orlando mass shootings, I had to say something.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the LGBT rights movement recently. Hopefully this effort can be another step forward following the Civil Rights Movement, as we work towards equal rights and treatment for all.

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