Another cofounder of Gather here -- I'm totally okay with you posting your app here (Calla right?) or the whole list. I think the hackernews comment readers would benefit from seeing the wider space of takes on this idea.
The other path here might be working somewhere with a culture of fixed goals rather than a time expectation.
For example, many remote companies that operate asynchronously won't expect you to be in the office 40hrs a week, but will expect a certain level of work to be done each week. If you can get that done in 24 rather than 40, then it works out fine for you.
I just asked my manager for a 24 hr work week (3 days on, 4 days off), and they said sure, and the company prorated my salary down.
The company I was working for came out of a university research lab, and so had a culture of PhD students working part time for it, so this was not outside the norm there.
The downside was not getting equity, nor benefits, but I was on my parent's insurance and wasn't too keen on their equity anyway, so this was fine for me.
It's a cross between Zoom x Pokemon. You only get audio and video from people you're standing next to, and as you walk away from them, the video fades away and the audio drops off.
With current video chat apps, you lose many of the dynamics of real life meetups. In particular, you lose the ability to have multiple people in the same shared space having multiple conversations.
In real life events, you can talk to a few people at a time while still being able to quickly go from one conversation to the next. With video chat, you have to talk to everyone at the same time.
Online Town is meant to fix this.
The way it works is, when you're near someone you get their audio and video, when you walk away from them their video drops off, and their audio fades out.
So you can have multiple conversations within a single virtual space.
Join me in the public room! Would love to get your all thoughts on it :)
Leaned in way more on the 2d game aspect of it, and have video drop-off too, but the place it came from: "being able to have multiple conversations in the same shared space without hearing everyone at the same time" is the same.
The key to the American team's recent success is forgetting about the IMO and just learning math. Instead of teaching mechanics-- techniques specifically for solving olympiad problems (as they had done a lot of before, and as many countries do), the idea was to just show interesting and fun things from real math and build strong intuition for mathematical problem solving through that. If you look at lecture's he's given in the past at MOP: http://www.math.cmu.edu/~ploh/olympiad.shtml, you can see they're mostly just highlights from his area of research.
When he was being considered for coaching he told the MAA he would run training for the IMO team in a very different way from how it was done and how and that choosing him would be a gamble: there was a chance that it would go spectacularly wrong. The gamble has seemingly paid off.
It's also nice that this is a quintessentially American way of doing things :) Just pursue what you find fun and it'll pay off. Don't over-optimize for the accolades.
It might be more interesting if voting occurred at the level of space separated words rather than characters.
As it is right now, twitch is tripping over itself trying to even type "ls" given the delay. As anyone who's ever tried to use ssh over a poor connection can relate to, there's a whole lot of "llllss" type command lines getting run.