Hacker News Reader

jmickeyon Argdown

This is something I have had at the back of my mind for a few years now - a website that lets people upload hypotheses and link evidence that supports or rejects the hypothesis.

Such a website would allow people to gain insights, by gathering individual bits of evidence observed in various news articles, research papers, etc. and linking them together to form a larger picture.

jmickeyon Personal Kanban 101

I've had good success with using Trello and Portable Kanban (http://edgars.lazdini.lv/portable-kanban/) for personal task management.

One advantage of Personal Kanban is that it is a native app, so there is no latency between writing something down, moving tasks across boards. Sadly, it is not open source.

jmickeyon Languages I want to write

I understand that is how object oriented databases work. For example, you can define the equation for a financial derivative, then change the price of one of the components and derivative price is updated automatically.

jmickeyon The culture war at the heart of open source

Richard Stallman has considered this issue, alas, with no clear solutions yet - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

jmickeyon Indico – Open source tool for event organization, archival and collaboration

I periodically help to organize meetups with invited speakers and am looking for a solution that would help me manage communication with all guests + event attendees.

I would like to track - which guests have been confirmed, which have not yet. With whom we have had an pre-event call, etc. Would Indico work for this? Are there better tools?

jmickeyon Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

In our company, business analysts are relatively technical - they know their way around databases and understand SQL better than most developers. They do create complicated data workflows as ETL jobs, but they are not developers.

Is it a stretch to say that dry.io would enable these people to take on simple development tasks that would be currently done by programmers?

jmickeyon Dry.io wants to democratize software development using AI

I believe that you are not the target audience here.

Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)

jmickeyon Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History

Can you please provide some examples? Genuinely interested! :)

jmickeyon Stop Saying, ‘We Take Your Privacy and Security Seriously’

As long as the cookie does not track the visitor across different sites?

jmickeyon Ursula K. Le Guin Was a Creator of Worlds

Perhaps unrelated - is there anywhere a repository of fictional worlds that creators can use for their projects at cost of free of charge?

This would be great for many industries - computer game development, board game development, movie creators, writers, etc. :)

jmickeyon Ask HN: What was the Internet like before corporations got their hands on it?

This is still my favourite website from those days - https://hamsterrepublic.com/ :)

jmickeyon Mobile customer location data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters

No need to invent new jurisprudence - if the location data can be used to identify an individual, it is personal data under the GDPR and enjoys all the rights and protections enabled by the regulation.

jmickeyon Modified virus used to kill cancer cells

Sounds a lot like what people at Rigvir are doing (https://www.rigvir.com/our-company/about-rigvir.php)

jmickeyon I crossed the Alps on a space hopper

I do wonder how having a postal address is related to being a legal or illegal immigrant. After all - if your friend has a fixed address, they can share it with you, so you can receive mail, can they not?

Regardless if you are an illegal immigrant or not.

jmickeyon I crossed the Alps on a space hopper

I hoped to see that the author dealt more directly with the address problem.

Is there no way to set up free post boxes with a fixed address for those that need them?

jmickeyon Teaching foreign policy majors to code

What about teaching coders about foreign policy? Now that sounds exciting! :)

jmickeyon Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

But what is your end goal? What purpose does this caste system serve?

History has shown that once people no longer believe they have a fair chance of achieving prosperity, they revolt. So, even ignoring any other characteristics, your way of social organisation is not stable in the long run.

jmickeyon Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not

It seems to me your policy would lead to the creation of permanent two-class society, where moving between the classes is difficult. Besides, do you really want to live in a fortress segregated from the rest of the society?

Why not invest money in education, training and a social security net that gives poorer individuals the means and space to catapult themselves into wealth?

jmickeyon PgModeler – PostgreSQL Database Modeler

Is there any chance the Windows demo binaries can be made portable?

That would make it easier for users not having administrator access to evaluate if PgModeler fits their requirements. :)

jmickeyon How should we evaluate progress in AI?

Relevant - AI Progress Measurement page by the EFF: https://www.eff.org/ai/metrics

jmickeyon Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and land on a moving target

Aerones have developed a drone that can haul a human - https://www.aerones.com/eng/news/?text_id=18

jmickeyon Apple will start paying $21B in back taxes to Ireland

Agreed, this is something we at http://volteuropa.org are working towards!

Unified tax rates would greatly reduce the burden of setting up and running a business in the EU.

jmickeyon Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

Well, with shares you are more or less guaranteed that they will increase in value, if the company does well.

With tokens this is not clear, as it would be possible for Telegram to do insanely well, but the tokens not being very popular/being used for some unimportant feature.

jmickeyon Mixpanel analytics accidentally slurped up passwords

Mind you an IP address is personal data only if it identifies an individual. Same goes with any other information.

jmickeyon Mixpanel analytics accidentally slurped up passwords

It can get tricky. Analysing web performance is not a direct requirement to fulfill orders, so you would need an explicit opt-in from your customers that lets them agree to their personal data being used in this way.

With Mailchimp you probably need to let your customers separately opt into their e-mail being used for marketing purposes, as again that use is not strictly required to fulfil their order.

Same with any other information - your customers need to be aware of all the ways you will use their data. If any uses are not covered by a legal agreement, there needs to be an option to opt-in.

jmickeyon Mixpanel analytics accidentally slurped up passwords

In essence the GDPR requires you to be accountable about all personal data you collect and use in your daily operations.

Compiling a list of all personal data currently located in your systems and making sure you have a legal basis for each item, goes a long way towards compliance (though of course this is not all you need to do)

jmickeyon The Competitive Landscape for Machine Intelligence

Regarding this - "Model here means business rules, like rules for approving loans or adjusting power consumption in data centers. In traditional software, programmers created these rules by hand. Today machine intelligence can use data and new algorithms to generate a model too complex for any human programmer to write."

Isn't it a bit problematic that the business rules generated by the model are too complex for humans to reason about them? How can you rely on the rules to be 100% appropriate for the task if it's impossible to reason about them?