Ask HN: Idea Sunday
Fresh start for the last week of April.
Last weeks Idea Sunday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910
2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077
3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601
Humble recommendation: Maybe we can post these in the original post for people who would be interested?
Groups (such as email groups and Facebook groups) and communities need a way to organize and share their data freely, but in a structured way. Also people who have data, or start building some kind of data, in text format, or tabular data, but don't know of any other mean, so they build a blog and start posting everything, then it is impossible to make anything useful with the data later. Or maybe they make a spreadsheet and link to it.
I've come to 2 solutions:
- for the first thing (but also applicable to the second), a structurable database (such as PouchDB) stored in the people's browser and communicating with other people from the group via webRTC could build a decentralized database everyone will have. Some things could be made on top of this;
- other thing is just a blogging platform that is not only a blogging platform (what I really want is it to not be a blogging platform), but it is also some way to publish static atemporal articles, tree-data, tabular data, hierarchical data etc. Written in javascript, running from the browser and communicating directly with GitHub or some other static hosting service with an API. The person would load the contents with the API then deploy the new contents as a static page. Free blogging, no central servers or providers (except for GitHub, but it could be made to generate HTML hostable anywhere), cool stuff can be attached (even some plugin that will take the data from the first solution and share in the blog/page/site).
Pushing and syncing strings is a solved problem, as are atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability. Powerful visualization tools are being made, too. The View and the Controller are taken care of.
The unsolved problem remains: how will we empower users to relate those strings, to have them turn data into information, and information into knowledge? How will we enable the many thousands of non-tech domain experts to create their models? How will we devise the Model?
We wanted to show people that they were in fact able to create structured contents, even if it was in a limited way, and we choose the analogy of file and folders since most people know how to organize them. But structuring and gathering data is half of the problem, you need to translate that data into friendly views and same sort of browsing experience, so we developed same conventions to turn the structure into a small website/embed.
We thought of developing an open way to store and share this data, and let people copy, follow, contribute to these chunks of content. Build a friendly web dashboard that exposes every item with simple views, and which let other developers consume them in any other ways they want.
The problem is that we don’t really know who wants this. We thought that it would be appealing for web agencies as a way to quickly add structured contents to websites, but we were wrong. Some people suggested us to develop a full CMS, but we wanted to work on the problem of sharing and opening up a library of contents, not to be an alternative to Wordpress. We honestly don’t know what to do next. If you want to talk further about it, my email if fsainz/gmail.
- note taking
- server logs
- manual logs of events (I've seen these in use in lots of small business where some employee must log what happened in its turn)
- personal journal
- mixpanel-like thing
- analytics of any kind
- computer-generated logs of anything that doesn't need a full-fledgeded database and system of its own (I'm thinking specifically of the logs of people who used their password to open a dor we have in our building, that communicates via serial port with a server that stores that info, but very ineffienciently)
- (I'll keep thinking about it)
- Online communities. For example, groups of students of some area, groups of pregnant women, groups of people who like tiny houses, groups of people who do geocaching, people who like to save dogs in the streets and give them to adoption, people who like to shoot at birds, people who work with something specific. All these groups probably have groups of email, or Facebook groups, (probably more than one group, maybe various localized groups) where they chat and share interesting links, data and information. Then this data is lost, it isn't searchable by the people who know it exists (specially if they are inside an Excel spreadsheet that was emailed to all the groups' participants), it isn't knowable for people who joined the community later. This people will never know (or will know too later) that that interesting data was there, just behind a pile of emails and posts. There are a lot of examples of data that could be indexed (yes, I'm talking about database indexes) in interesting ways, but I will give none now, and lots of data that could just be organized in an easy way (categories, although I don't like this very much) and made searchable.
For this problem, Trello is a good option, but it is limited, it is centralized, it requires an "owner" of the Trello board to authorize other people, it cannot develop in an organic way, with few people starting to use, then other people joining, and people who don't wanna join never joining. It also cannot index data, just categorize and archive.
- Myself. I don't want a blog, but I have interesting data stored in my computer and my brain I wanna handle to the public over the internet, to whoever be interest in it. I have articles I can't find anywhere else anymore, I have spreadsheet data that should be presented as spreadsheets, I have articles I typed from old magazines, I have videos I don't remember how I got, I also have impressions of books, commentaries about lots of non-mainstream topics, and mainstream topics also, mainly atemporal things, that don't fit well in a blog. I could make a static web page and put all this there, but it seems too difficult for such a low value it will have. I also don't wanna do it because I wanna keep thinking about how would a non-programmer do it. I can't help thinking every people in my situation would: (i) do nothing; or (ii) make a blog, post everything there for two month and abandon the blog. I don't like abandoned blogs.
Pageboxes could do something for this, but I don't know how exactly.
Long time ago, I mused¹ about these kind of things, then worked like mad on devising an implementation. Meanwhile, a side project I’ll take up again, one day.
I love the idea of data blogging.
Thinking more along the lines of what Freebase was doing (before Google smothered it), what Fluidinfo² originally intended to do, and what Silk³ seems to be doing best, right now.
¹ http://rhythmvs.tumblr.com/post/19750973162/hello-world ² http://fluidinfo.com ³ https://www.silk.co
Reading your tumblr post, I think there is useful work to do on the points you mention: Collecting and List Making // Visualising Knowledge // Open Access. We need something simple enough to get the people who already know how to publish posts interested.
Silk is pretty good, and I never heard of Freebase. From wikipedia: "Freebase is a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of metadata composed mainly by its community members. It is an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources". I got to look into this, sounds beautiful.
I love the idea of helping build these community databases and make those contents searchable. I see a challange in the fact that this means adding another channel to discuss contents different than the one they already use, but the promise of making those contents easier to reach might make it worth it.
As for the blog problem, I'm in a similar situation. A blog seems to have some lifespan, and there are some raw contents that I would like to have available without worring about a domain name and the design decisions of CMS theme. I have my own particular "delicious", some comments about different articles, a bunch of photos, and many screenshots and mockups from the different projects I've been working on that I would like just to publish without fuzz (Ideally: add all my project folders. Done). It won't be as beautiful as those web portfolios but I don't need that, I want convenience, I don't like abondend blogs either and I have 3 or 4...
Reading these comments gets me really motivated, thanks!
For a moment, I thought it had been posted as a response for your comment, because it fits well here.
Every time I try to do an in-depth research on Google about some topic I open up 10 or 20 of the most relevant results, only to discover that at least 80% of the information is repeating itself in at least 50-60% of the pages.
One could write a search engine that compares the contents, groups the articles that have similar enough contents and only displays one article per group. This could work especially well in the case of longer searches with enough keywords.
Obviously, this is not a standalone product that would compete against the established search engines, but it could be built on top of them - a browser extension for example.
Any thoughts on this?
The semantic web is the solution. A system that understands content, understands what you know, and understands what you want. Then, all it has to do is show you what's relevant and necessary to the task you're trying to accomplish. In most cases, you won't have to actually do the task, as it will be automated.
I don't see any way around this. Changing how search engines work will still not let you find articles that complement each-other perfectly. And you'll still have to read more than necessary.
Now that the smartphone innovation has slowed down a little, why not bring back real buttons, wheels etc.? They should be well-designed, precisely engineered and fun to use. I belive mobile gadget design is now awesome enough to make this work.
I wouldn't mind a scrollwheel, or even real radiobuttons (one button goes in, the other pops up). The exact functionality would still depend on the current application.
Since they give real physical feedback they should objectively be superior to the touchscreen-only functions, no?
They are also planning to release it for in-car displays.
Most websites have some kind of "terms and conditions". They all seem to manually implement the whole process of:
- coming up with proper T&C
- display them to the user
- ask the user to agree to them
- notify the user that T&C changed
- etc.
For the user, the experience is just plain bad. I can't recall two T&C agreement process that were identical. Sometimes I have to check a box, sometimes I have to press a button. Sometimes I have to scroll to the bottom to be able to click "I agree". And when I do, I don't even get a copy or receipt of what I agreed to.
Call me stupid, but I usually never read T&Cs. As far as I know, my soul could now belong to a lot of companies. I don't think I'm a unique case.
What if websites could delegate the T&C agreement process to a third-party service that does just that. This service could help small businesses create their own T&Cs from templates, standardize the agreement process, let users have access to a list of everything they agreed to, and even let people (or lawyers) review T&Cs to make it easier for others to know what they're getting into. If a company wants to change their T&C, the service will notify users of these changes, and let them react accordingly.
This service could also be extended to more than just website T&Cs, and became a central hub for all your contracts and agreements, from your bank, phone company, rent, job, contract, etc. One place where you can see everything you legally agreed to in your life.
Ideally, I'd like to see the service keep diff's of the terms so consumers (and you) can see how they've changed over time.
I'm also wondering if there's any value in having cohorts of customers based on what set of terms they signed up under.
The goal is not to create "funny and unique" ToS that businesses can use in their own ToS agreement process. The goal is to:
- Standardize ToS (with semantic information) - Democratize ToS (let people review them) - Delegate the ToS agreement process (redirect people to this service to read, review and agree with terms of services.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a "contract hub" where people can manage, track and review all of the ToS (or other contracts) they agreed to in their life.
The change/diff history is an excellent idea. Github for ToS, with version tracking and forking. I like that.
Social networking is nowadays as central to the internet as email, and it is the first such, heavily used, application layer "protocol" that is closed.
For a small period of time I had hopes that this would be the path G+ would take to the top. It isn't.
I believe integrating social networking into email might be the most promising approach. I've always thought a "ShareBox" icon below my Inbox icon would allow social networking to decentralize in a way that would appeal to end users.
There are some projects on the tent Github page but nothing with activity less than months old:
I'm not personally involved in the project.
For the average Joe, making html tables is such a task. <tr><td> about a zillion times. Yes I realize that anyone putting a table into html should really be using a database, but again for the average joe, that is too much brain damage, and still too hard.
The idea is: Copy excel headers and data into the service, and out pops embeddable html/javascript/whatever code that the person can embed directly on their site. From the user perspective, they can have one place to keep their table data and have an easy way to embed a table into html from excel.
Alternatives: Google Docs embed, zoho creator embed, etc - but these do not integrate directly into the site (ie they cannot inherit css styles from the site) Tableizer - does the conversion of excel cells to html, but does not store the table and data for the user to call at a later date (ie data is static and used once)
It is really similar to the http://myjson.com/ idea, except its for people who don't know what json is.
a site which let's you to post what your typical day would be(tday).. the tday can be either in a view of a profession (ex., a typical day of a doctor in San Francisco, a typical day of an cab driver in Japan (location plays a major role of a professional)) or it can be a view of personal one which could be shared with your fb friends..
Users can request for a tday for their known people by inviting them to the site via their social networking connections... also, users can request for a tday of a famous person by including their #tags or @name pointers and other users can support that request by upvoting them (obviously most users' request would be on top).. not only tday, if they can share their most special day, most special week, unforgettable day and other users can upvote them... this lets to know people beyond what is seen from them.. what do you think...
Chrono: chronological inventions and academic breakthroughs of mankind as a dependency graph. This is a lingering idea that has been coming back to me a couple times a year over the last decade or so.
What if there's a kind of semantic wikipedia that is built upon a dependency graph of inventions and academic breakthroughs. What led to the invention of the internet, to nano-tubes, etc? How cool would it be from an education standpoint to be able to jump back in time and see invention upon invention replayed (with backgrounds on how these breakthroughs came to be) up to today. Check out what led to invention X (the galaxy S you're reading this on), played back . Or reversely, lookup which inventions were build (transitively) upon the discovery of Y.
Socio-economic backgrounds, anecdotes, etc. what led to invention X, and how X was important for Y, etc. An interactive "Short history of nearly everything"
However, people do really enjoy TV tropes, so a huge effort to categorize everything could attract a huge audience, too. Such a site would be a good source of inspiration for new ideas incorporating older ones, too.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plgLCYha7pE&list=PLGi4Jd5YfR_...
EDIT: If you create the site, please let me know. This is not something I can work on right now but if it's a wiki like site I'd love to contribute.
I'm not sure that's an actual problem though. The UK had "haynes manuals" for many years. The actual problem is that specialist tools are needed more often now.
This (http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/01/psa-back-up-your-shit/) should be good jumping off point to get a lot of the stuff. The system should have customisable hooks written in something like Python to write your own "filters". e.g. "If I've been in emacs for 1 hour straight, pop up a reminder to take an eye break, etc."
Suggestions? Thoughts?
>> The service should let you specify topics that you are interested in and will analyze every page you visit (with the exception of blacklisted pages) and put it into the appropriate bucket (topic), for future reference.
Evernote does all of this.
A small retail property recently became available about 2 blocks from me in NYC and, for fun, I began thinking about what kind of stores would do well. I'd come up with an idea and realize that a similar type of store was just a block or two away. When I thought I'd come up with a good idea, such as a pet grooming service, I asked the nearby pet store what the traffic was like and apparently it was horrible.
Enter predictive analytics. This tool would draw upon publicly available city records of what types of retail stores have been in neighborhoods that I can characterize through publicly available census data. If I could use the length of existence of a rented (not owned) retail shop as a proxy, I could, with X% probability, be able to predict, with probably surprising specificity, what kind of retail store would do well 2 blocks from me. This combines elements of what sort of retail store isn't serving that particular area (as an assumed factor of success), what kind of stores have failed in the past in the immediate area, which have been 'successful,' behavioral patterns of the neighborhood demographic (heck, combine that with social traffic tracked data), etc.
Obviously, this discounts the innovation of retailers that adds to a store's success, among other factors, but this tool would at least yield an important factor to consider when trying to figure out what store would do well in a particular spot,
Something that could tie in to RightMove (at least in the UK), access your saved properties, and provide a simple interface to schedule viewings (although I guess this would still have to be a manual process to book viewings, but the app should provide a calendar to store them in).
The app could then alert you when the viewing is soon, and provide an interface for you to rate the viewing, add comments and maybe your own photographs to remind you later on, rather than having to scribble notes down on the same piece of paper that becomes home to your chewing gum the next day.
On a social front, it would be good to see how many other people were viewing the same property, to gauge the interest, and maybe you would be able to see an overall rating of a property based on what other people that have viewed think about it?
House/Flat adverts are still relatively useless in the process of finding somewhere suitable, and until you can view and see a property for yourself, it's impossible to tell. I think it would be very useful to be able to see ratings and comments from other users, such as "the second bedroom is a lot smaller than the photos show, and the flooring in the bathroom seriously needs replacing!".
It doesn't look like there's an available API for RightMove at the moment, so I'm not sure how the integration could happen. Still, a stand-a-lone app could still be a worthwhile idea?
EDIT: ...but even then, you might not get personal opinions. Tough one!
I'd personally like to see the use of web/tech to integrate the whole experience - so everything from deposits, rent, grievances and so on is centrally managed and moderated. Again though, hard to get traction.
(I tried FastMail, Atmail, Rackspace, and none of them is a good alternative).
Why not?
- no nice mobile app
- does not integrate with third-party systems (yea "not their problem" but they should do something to promote 3rd party system to integrate with them)
- spam filter is not so great (false positive is the problem - I'm ok having occasional spam in inbox, but email from wife linking some stuff I need order is really annoying.)
It is kinda hard to pinpoint the main reason...
Working in the photo industry, things have changed so fast but I still think there's value in physical, printed products. I haven't worked out the perfect setup but something like:
- a small retail location in a high-traffic, high tourism area (think union square in SF or 3rd St in Santa Monica)
- "print stations" where people can drop in, connect their phone and get great prints on demand. It looks like an apple store not a crappy kiosk as Walgreens
- photo booths or "selfie stations" where friends/family can snap some shots together and get prints
- a staffed area like the apple Genius Bar where people can get a quick professional portrait taken and printed or order higher price-point printed products (think books or framed prints)
- sell photo related smartphone accessories
- have an app to order prints for pickup and do deals with other local attractions, hotels, conferences and Uber. For example, a hotel in the embarcadero encourages you to take a photo using the app or a specific hashtag. Those photos are automatically sent to the store and you can pickup prints any time.
Photo booths still very much exist and have been really popular at weddings recently
If people want a Genius Bar for a "professional portrait" they actually have someone take a professional portrait.
To your points, however, any time I try to print at a wal-mart or drug store kiosk there's a 50% chance the kiosk is broken or busy.
I'm very familiar with the wedding and portrait industry as well as photo booths. I think the booths in a retail location could work well–and could be a way to drive app downloads (want the file? download the app).
> If people want a Genius Bar for a "professional portrait" they actually have someone take a professional portrait.
Right, this would be a place to do that. It would be a combination of low-cost with contemporary styling/posing.
The idea is that you need some sort of external consequence in order to really motivate yourself to do things outside of work, school, etc.
What do you guys think?
I've been using it for several months and I'm quite happy with it. Been charged ~5 times for different goals, to the tune of maybe $40?
This would be great help when trying to dj dancing party: now show me a list of "blues", "chicago", "slow", "with breaks" to choose the next song. Actually in this context, separate service / app would be great - it would work on a mobile device, rather than just desktop.
(a long standing idea on spotify list already: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Ideas/Tag-Music/idi...)
Unofficial Google Music API in Python, quite well documented. http://unofficial-google-music-api.readthedocs.org/en/latest...
About to get started writing a little script that will take care of synchronising my library with my google music one, and automatically uploading those that it can't find a match for. A few of my friends also use it, so I was also thinking of making a little tool that would allow us to compare our libraries and show us what each other are missing etc.
2. A peer to peer service for facilitating sharing of paywalled scientific journal articles. You could put in a request for a specific article, the utility would check which of your friends had access to the material, your friend would be prompted to download the article and place it into a designated folder for transmission.
Problem: I've got 2TB of videos, music, and images on my hard drives, and I've found my available tools to be too low-leverage on managing this anymore.
Context: about 2 years ago, I've stopped the directory structure madness, and embraced search as first-order link for media files. As a byproduct of this, I notice I don't have a clear mental structure of what videos/music is downloaded to my computer anymore, and to where (good riddance!). Neither do I want it to; instead, I'd like to have a "youtube for local hard drive":
Basically, I'm looking for a local Media Browser application for windows: specifically, an app which allows:
* thumbnailed preview of all videos & images
* Automagically categorized based on all online, or within-file available meta-information
* With a built-in search
To perform the following operations:
* Preview a thumbnail on video files (similar to file explorer)
* Display categorized lists of all media available locally on my drives
* Channelsurf, similar to youtube: be able to start from one movie file, and have "similar" videos around it
* Double-clicking on the file to start mplayer
* typing the first 2-4 letters of the movie/image to instantly bring up the list of media with that part in it
While specifically not doing:
* Anything that requires me to touch any of the files in any way shape or form whatsoever
* Any upsale (I'm looking at you, windows 8 "personal videos"), advertising, or introduce any friction during interaction
* Bringing up any browsers: solution must be windows-native, and responsive (<20ms results)
Specific things I've tried so far:
* The closest thing I can wave towards "want" is apple's itunes, and JRiver's media center; they both share the same weakness of not being able to use mplayer as playback engine
* Banshee on windows is unable to show video previews, have multiple stability issues, and can't use mplayer for double-click
(I've posted full details of this to http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/2646/media-b... a month ago, to no response avail, but getting upvotes, which evidences a market to be had for this )
Regarding built-in media players, not one vendor takes usability of playback seriously. Specifically, when I hit "enter" on a file, that means I'd like to see it played back, like, now. Not "queueing", nor 5 seconds later. When I scroll left & right, that means I'd like it to go +-1 min / hour, like, now; and not 5-10 seconds "seeking". On my quadcore 3.4ghz battlestation, this remains a problem for every single native, and web-based app. MPlayer is, to date, the only one which consistently delivers on sub-second videoplayback, and it does so from cold start. (There are also major problems with how subtitles are handled by players, but I grant you that might be a niche)
Hence my strong requirement above for the app to go with shell.exec, instead of half-baked non-implementation of every single video codec under the sun.
edit: Also, I'm not sure how to make it a viable business.
I want this on a set top box... And anything like yamj or xbmc absolutely chokes on my collection and I spend hours fixing incorrectly identified files.
agree with the idea/problem
* Ideally no downloads or installs required, you just list your top x priorities (up to 3, because we all know that if you have more than 3 priorities... you have none).
* Each one limited to 50 characters or so (e.g. "Write Chapter 3 of my book" , "Buy food for Sunday's cookout" , etc.)
* You get a custom link that you can edit at any time, so when in doubt you reference it and know instantly what you should be working on
* Analytics would be extra fun, high potential for interesting trends. Basic sentiment analysis would yield "priority" trends and tendencies by city/state/country
Especially since women's vocal range is affected by their cycle. I thought to use DSP to help determine their cycle and facilitate pregnancy or help avoid it. It turns out getting the proper audio baseline for the vocal range of women is tough and they'd be saying weird words into their phone daily.
Advantage: End user will not have to install anything. Cloud based bookmarking. Advantage for the website owner: Their link circulating because the website that provides this plugin has internal networking.
- easily install dot files on a new system
- keep track of files in git
- possible to specify different configurations (OS X, Linux, etc.)
- possible to exclude sensible dot files (i.e. .ssh/id_rsa)
- easy to update files and keep them in sync
- the tool should not be mixed with individual dot files repositories so that it's easy to upgrade to a newer version
- eventually: a dot file repository where people can share / show off their configurations
There are a few tools available on Github but none which have all the above features (AFAIK).
I thought about how it should look when I do a fresh install:
sudo apt-get install vim zsh git git clone my repo into .dotfiles cd .dotfiles ./update.sh
and I'm right back to where I was. :). The script differentiates between Mac OS X and Linux, and running git pull followed by update.sh also syncs any changes I may have made on another machine to the current one.
What's Doubles Poker? It's quite possibly the most fun you'll ever have playing poker. Two people get paired together for a duration of a tournament. The game is typically no limit Texas Hold'em but any game with an even number of rounds per hand of play would work.
During each hand the two teammates are not allowed to talk. Teammate 1 plays pre-flop and then passes the cards to teammate 2 who plays the flop. Teammate 2 passes the cards back to teammate 1 who plays the turn. Finally teammate 2 plays the river. On the next hand the order is switched so Teammate 2 begins playing pre-flop.
It can be a great deal of fun and adds another level of complexity to the game. Now you have to figure out not only what your opponents have but what your teammate's motivations in the hand are. Is he setting you up for a big bluff or was he just taking a cheap shot at winning the hand on the flop?
Here's a Double's Poker tournament that was aired on tv awhile back:
http://www.pokertube.com/videos/doubles-poker-championship-e...
I'd love to create an app (mobile or otherwise) where people could experience the joy and excitement of this form of poker.
I think you have an interesting idea, though.
Maybe it would be better for poker teams to transfer chips to each other in between hands as a two-player mechanic instead. If there is a tournament and both team members are seated at different tables, then the optimal strategy might be to allocate more chips to the table where both players think they have a larger edge. However, by moving chips to the other table, that becomes a signal to other players that would could cause them to shift gears.
I think there is something to your rough concept though, and it could be a lot of fun.
(and since you're on the web, might as well save notebooks, share, edit concurrently in realtime, etc)
Why? With a taller screen, there's less scrolling and your eyes don't have to jump as much when reading from line to line.
I would like to know if there would be a market for this and why manufacturers phased out 4:3 displays?
There are no "monitors" made anymore just HDTVs. Sometimes real small ones in laptops.
I wish it was possible emails sent are erased from the recipient's email client. I want to own the parts of the email conversation that I wrote.
The reason to want this is to not leave an electronic trail of everything you say. Chat clients, which communicate synchronously, can already do this. Is it impossible to do asynchronously with email?
One problem is people might want to archive what you write, which would defeat the purpose of OTR. This isn't something a messaging protocol can solve. Once text shows up on a screen, you can copy the text. But I can imagine people archiving rarely in practice, if only because you'd have to do something manually, which would make keeping an electronic record the exception and not the rule.
A completely private social platform with messaging, email, timeline, blog, pics, docs, etc.
A completely transparent social platform with messaging, activity tracking, content management, knowledge storage, wishlist/preference/opinion management, idea generation, etc.
You might not know yet, but privacy is the root of all evil, and the privacy madness has to stop.
The more we hide, the more we have to hide. It's a never ending cycle.
People don't see the world as it really is. They see the world the way others want it to be seen. They see an artificial, curated version of the world where people have no flaws.
This disconnection between what is real and what we think is real makes people feel broken, different, not good enough. How are they supposed to know that nobody is perfect when everybody actively try to show their perfect side? We all wear masks by fear of rejection, fear of being different.
Just like you, I need privacy because privacy is expected of me. I need to lie because people don't want to hear the truth. I have to wear a mask because everybody else does. Being completely transparent and honest is a sure way to be rejected and jailed. But if I had the choice, I would prefer to be myself, to never have to remember lies, to never have to hide.
Do you think the privacy paradigm is sustainable? Do you think it makes sense to use so much resources to encrypt everything? Do you think it makes sense to hide yourself behind proxies and firewalls? Do you think it makes sense to protect everything with passwords? Do you think it makes sense to keep creating fake profiles online? Do you think it makes sense to disable location tracking on your devices? Do you think it makes sense to constantly worry about others learning the truth? I don't.
I want to live in a world where I don't ever have to recall or input a password or a PIN. I want to live in a world where I don't have to lock my doors, lock my bike, lock my PC. I want to live in a world where I don't need to encrypt anything. I want to live in a world where I don't have to worry about privacy settings at all.
I want financial information to be public. I want all media content to be public. I want my location to be tracked and available to anyone at all time. I want my health records to be available to anyone. I want my every thought and emotion to be queryable. I don't ever want to waste energy communicating with the world information that can be tracked by machines.
In the future, people will not fear the NSA. People will not fear online tracking. People will embrace them. We will soon see people pay third-party services to track their every move, their every thought. Why waste my time being explicit about what I want and do when I can delegate that task to something else? The only thing I should input in a system are my values, my opinions, my feelings. Everything else is objective.
Privacy is the antithesis of society. Privacy is an act of pure selfishness. Privacy is slowing down innovation and discoveries in every possible field. Privacy is what inhibits humanity to reach the next level. I can't think of anything that sustains worries and fears more than society's expectation of privacy.
Privacy is a symptom, a defense mechanism. Privacy is not a cure.
Prove me wrong.
I live in an oppressed country. I need privacy to try to topple the government by any means. They watch us, they hear us, they follow us, the read everything we write, they want us dead, we want them dead.
Survival is a harsh word. Learn it or die.
Do you think Tor, Wikileaks, Bitmessage, Darknet are just toys that geeks code in their basements just for fun?
Do you know Snowden, Assange, Stallman, and many others fight for your rights and your liberty against those who try to oppress you?
Innocence, meet reality.
Privacy is more than a human right, is a vital need.
In heaven you don't need privacy, in hell you don't have it. Welcome to reality.
> I have to wear a mask because everybody else does.
No you don't. It seems like this is the problem you are trying to solve. It's a subtle problem, in that norms sweep you easily, but it's solution isn't shooting down privacy.
Your comment would also be received better, particular the claims to what privacy is, if it contained citations to peer reviewed, published research.
Use cases:
- Remind me to CC someone when emailing someone else.
- Remind me that I need to include X information when opening a ticket on a web page.
- Remind me to use new technique X when using App Y.
- Remind me where I was when I closed this doc.
Bonus points for:
- Triggering off of typed text (like an email address or function name)
- Triggering off of a selected email subject/to/from
- "Do not show until" on one-offs (I dont need to do this until tomorrow morning)
- taking a photo of the current mileage displayed on the dashboard that is automatically analyzed using text recognition technology.
- the current position (using the phones location information, e.g. GPS and cell-tower information) and address.
In case the photo cannot be interpreted or the location is not know, it should also be possible to manually enter the required information using an easy to use interface. It should be possible to categorize trips and take a "snapshot" at the origin and destination location.
Didn't hear if it actually made it to market. It still would be quite niche, as the only "improvement" would be that the user wouldn't have to enter the current mileage by hand and can just snap a picture.
However I have a strong feeling that other tools, such as "automatic.com" or other systems that plug into the Can BUS of the car are of more use, if you have to manage a small fleet of cars with varying drivers.
I still can't wrap my head around why people are willing to rate products on pages like amazon or leave restaurant ratings on yelp and write detailed reports on tripadvisor or holidaycheck, but are not willing to do the same for their workplace and schools attended.
The obstacle seems to high for most of the users to write honestly. Only a fraction of the potential people that could be rating (all of the students for example) actually do it.
Facebook would have had the chance in the early days. But I guess that card is drawn...
I'm aware writelatex and sharelatex exist. I would like a latex feature in Docs though. Preferably one that compiled/rendered the output in realtime
Think 'Macbook Air' for developers (open-source devs, .NET guys won't benefit much from this) installed with an operating system without all the usual bloatware.
Don't get me wrong the Macbook Air is a great machine, but it obviously has too much 'Apple stuff' on it that I don't use very much at all.
Officemates told me that the closest to a great developer laptop is the Dellbook XPS13.
It reminds me of this XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1350/
Been thinking about this since Asus came out with a laptop with an air ionizer in 2008.
One system: Take a photo of the bike every time you park it in a non-standard place (standard being e.g. "work", "home" or "girlfriend's"). Unfortunately, taking out my smart-phone every time I go grocery-shopping is bothersome, and I might only find out I need to suddenly go elsewhere when I've already parked the bike.
Ideally, my bike (or, through statistical inference, my smartphone) should just publish GPS coordinates. Unfortunately this drains the battery very fast. Perhaps a background service that uses the GPS a little more sparingly than the Google Maps app?
I would pay something like $100/year for such software that would keep up with every new version of its supported programs.
Wine is fantastic but too limited at the moment.