Ask HN: Idea Sunday
First week of May edition.
I'd love to see this thread albeit less frequent (once or maybe twice in a month). Let people give crazy ideas, and let other be motivated to build maybe one of those. I found interesting and intellectually stimulating discussions happening around some of the ideas posted on these threads which IMO alighn with the core vision of HN.
- people rushing to make an Idea Sunday thread/post at midnight
- people unable to find the main Idea Sunday thread
The former issue can be solved by having the whoishiring bot post Idea Sunday, and the latter can be solved by having the post "stickied" to the top of HN. I don't mean at position 1, but at an unnumbered position above that (I realize this is a may seem antithetic to some HNers, but most forums have this ability). That way it can act like an announcement thread; no one will miss it since its at the top, and no one will race to make it first since only whoishiring can post it.
An additional benefit would be that future "Who is hiring?" posts could also be posted in the same place, so everyone can find it more easily.
All told, I've really enjoyed the Idea Sunday posts, so I hope dang will rethink cancelling the experiment. As to the point that they are growing less interesting with regularity, I think a monthly or twice-monthly post may make more sense than a weekly one.
I am surprised that people post them themselves, and don't appear to be checking for other threads posted the same day.
Currently Social Media Management tools like Hootsuite provide a link shortner so it's relatively easier for them to integrate a service like http://snip.ly/ however they don't.
The product I'm thinking to create will allow anyone to manage, split test their pop ups and promote themselves using a service like snip.ly. An analytics module will accompany the product so all the data can be meaningfully used to enhance the campaigns.
Hope I was able to clearly explain my idea. Would detail out some more if anyone is interested.
Last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601
I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).
1) Replace the pointless hashing with some actually useful calculation or form of work. Trouble is, I'm not sure what kind of asymmetrically difficult function could be used instead of hashing that would have some value for society.
2) Replace the hashing with some kind of genetic algorithm or other AI solution search. So instead of trying to find the proper hash, you're trying to find the proper algorithm to some currently-posed problem. Miners who find the current-best solution can then be rewarded with some form of bitcoin, which can be traded among themselves as currency, or used to decide what the next problem the network searches for a solution to will be. I figure this would make the entire blockchain into a giant sort of AI/brain, with the problems it tackles being more or less democratically chosen by whoever wants to spend the most of their bitcoin for it. The spent bitcoin then goes to the people who find the best solutions, in addition to whatever small amount of new bitcoin is mined. And replace "bitcoin" with whatever the new name would be, of course.
May be possible, maybe not. There's basically no chance I'll be able to implement some version of either any time soon, so feel free to run with it if anyone thinks they can.
There are a few problems with actually implementing your suggestions. You call hashing "pointless", but it is anything but that. Hashing, specifically SHA256 in bitcoin's case, has a well understood and possibly proven (?) level of difficulty. There is no known way to gain an advantage, other than simply throwing more computational power at the problem. Thus, because the problem being solved is arbitrary, random, and difficult, it takes a huge amount of computational power to make an invalid transaction.
Not only do you have to find initial "acceptable" hashes for your faked block, you have to create hashes of all the following blocks up until the present time, and push this version of the blockchain as legitimate until a majority of the network adopts it as the correct branch. The absolutely ridiculous computational power required to do this is what keeps transactions of cryptocurrencies safe. You don't just have to fake one hash, you have to find and fake an entire chain of them!
Many scientific problems don't have the same kind of guarantees about difficulty. And even if they are really, really hard, what happens when you find the answer? You'd essentially have to hard-fork all the clients. SHA256 and other hash functions used have a search space that is astronomically high, and is guaranteed never to be "completed".
Hashing is a way to make transactions safe, permanent, and unmodifiable because of the cryptographic properties which come with the field. There's very little chance of someone stumbling upon sequential solutions, and essentially impossible for someone to "derail" the blockchain due to those properties. The value that hashing provides are those guarantees.
It's definitely a half-baked idea. I'd like to take a shot at seeing if I could work out those details, but it's not the top priority on my list of projects. Maybe in a few years, if it is possible and no one else has managed it yet.
something like 1Password but automatically changing the passwords every day/week/month
However, automating this process for 3rd party apps would require to connect to the apps in a way that it allows the product to change passwords of your other accounts.
I'm not even sure if 3rd party apps provide you the API to change password etc from another product. If that can be done then this product is very feasible.
There are several apps in the market that do what I want a logger to do but they tend to present the data in a form which is not very effective in motivating me and reminding me the purpose. For example, There are a lot of app that one can use for tracking activities but Moves take the whole paradigm of activity tracking to the next level.