Inline #keywords are useful

Memiary's design involves using inline keywords to tag a post which i think is a fantastic idea.
Inlining in general is a better because it lowers friction.

A swipe tool for before-after images

A swipe tool and some tinting are extremely effective for before-after visualizations.
See here for implementation.

A peer-to-peer search engine named YaCy

YaCy is a fantastic idea - a mature peer to peer search engine.

• Home: http://yacy.net/en/index.html
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy

What is the complementary product of teaching?

Suppose we develop a firm that offers classes at very low cost and recoup the cost in other ways.
E.g. teach how to setup web sites but recoup the cost from affiliate marketing of DNS and webhosts.
Or teach programming for free - sell laptopss.

Teach cooking for free, sell ingredients.

Buy a large plot of land.
Establish a free center of study.
Make money from rentals.

Complementary Products

The notion of complementary products are very helpful in generating product ideas.

Preconditions for a self-organizing system based on Lyapunov Functions

Self-organizing systems based on Lyapunov Functions

Lyapunov functions can explain how a city/system self-organizes.

Consider Disneyland with 5 rides and 5 customers. Each ride can only service one customer.

• Each customer first waits at the gate and writes down the sequence of rides they plan to take
• Once the gate opens, each customer goes to the first ride on their list
• If more than one customer goes to the same ride, then someone have to wait and a ride somewhere is empty.
• To avoid waiting, customers in queue will then choose rides with no queue.
• This behaviour collectively result in every ride being occupied and no queues.
• The system self-organizes.

Pre-conditions for self-organization

However, self-organization happens only if certain preconditions are true:

1. Perfect information - e.g. all customers know exactly which rides are empty (say within visual range)
2. No cost to switching - e.g. customer can switch to another ride without cost
3. No barriers to switching - e.g. all customer can switch to any other ride at any time
4. No externalities - e.g. customers behaviour are independent, one taking a ride does not affect another taking a ride

Consider if the the opposite conditions hold:

1. Imperfect information
• e.g. customers cannot see which rides are empty (e.g. rides are in housed the buildings) so they'd rather continue queuing rather than risk going to another ride which may have a longer queue
2. Costly switching
• e.g. rides are very far apart and to walk to the next nearest ride takes half a day - then customers may rather stay put
3. Barriers to switching
• e.g. rides are segregated to VIP zone and normal zone - normal customer cannot access VIP rides even if they are empty.
4. Externalities
• e.g. when Customer A is a sloppy person and leaves behind a trail of food and grime everywhere - other customers will then be reluctant to go on a rides that Customer A has been on

Other examples of self-organizing systems

• Checkout queues in a hypermarket encourages self-organizing customers
• Consider what happens if the checkout queues are split into 3 separate groups
• Multi-storey parking buildings with the number of free slots at each floor prominently displayed
• Drivers get better information and make better decisions
• Consider a crowded parking building with zero information

Structure, Behaviour, and Presentation

The separation of a system's internal structure, behaviour and external presentation is inherent in application domains:

• GUI Applications: Model-View-Controller
• structure = Model, behaviour = Controller, presentation = View
• Web Applications: HTML, CSS, Javascript
• structure = HTML, behaviour = Javascript, presentation = CSS
• HtDW Applications: Data definitions, Function definitions,
• structure = data, behaviour = function, presentation = missing

Structure is  internal.
Presentation is external.