Ask HN: What's your best startup idea that you're not going to pursue? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> An online-only bank (with ATM support of course) that lets you have as many "virtual" accounts as you want, and lets you set up programmatic rules for transferring money in between accounts on certain days/times, or triggered by events ("transfer $100 from B to A if account A goes below $100, and notify me by email"; "on overdraft from A, withdraw from B instead"). Then have a debit card that you can use to charge to any of your accounts, and an app that lets you configure which account it's drawing from.

This would make "budgeting" very easy. Have a "food" account, an "entertainment" account, etc. Do weekly or monthly budgets by transferring money into your mini-accounts, and denying transactions for each account when it goes over budget. (Or let the transaction go through from a backup account, but notify you that you went over budget.)

Also, have an API that anyone can write apps for.

Of course, I'll never do this because starting a bank is really hard.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to see a not for profit bank in the sense that the profit the bank does make, goes directly back into the local community surrounding the bank. The bank would have a physical presence but strong and modern on-line support.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like you're describing a credit union.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_union](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_union)

<comment><USER6> That just validates the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Github for travel planning. You can collaborate with your co-travelers on creating an itinerary but then like github you can fork other peoples completed itineraries and make them your own.

<comment><USER8> TripIt?

<comment><USER9> Not exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Love this thread idea, had been considering posting one myself.

\- Tablets for seniors: when the elderly population sees an iPad ad, they're not captivated or entranced; they're intimidated and disappointed that they're left behind by technology. I envision the "jitterbug for tablets" \-- built on Android with big, tactile buttons; a 'never get lost, take me home' feature; remotely controlled functionality (IE turn on/off apps); etc. They wouldn't use much bandwidth, so you could build 3G right into the device and charge a significant monthly premium -- after all, it's a dramatic quality-of-life improvement for someone sitting in a retirement home.

GE and a few other companies are doing similar projects, but no one is really executing all that well IMO. Problems: would be super hard to get off the ground / defend, and the market is becoming increasingly obsolete.

<comment><USER11> Yes, it would probably be hard to get off the ground before all your potential customers died.

<comment><USER12> The thing about old people is that they're making more of them every day.

<comment><USER13> The old people 20 years from now will not be the same as the ones today. Rampant tech consumption among the newer generations will purge the need.

<comment><USER12> The obvious business model is making the technology-du-jour accessible, not tablets in particular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something that pipelines charitable donations through micro-financing. Say someone needs a payday loan, and Bill Gates is going to donate a billion dollars to some charity. Instead, that person gets the loan with no interest or penalties and sets up a payment plan with that charity for the amount. Should create more efficient spending patterns for low-income families, particular those that encounter short-term deficits, while still getting the charities the same amount of money in the long run.

<comment><USER15> The charity doesn't get the same amount of money though. Even setting aside the reduced value of getting money in the future instead of now, you're not going to get 100% payments and you have no interest or penalties to make up for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Remote sysadmin service.

Percona has a remote DBA service that gives us 24/7 access to a team of proficient DBAs for a fraction of the cost of hiring one.

I'd like to see the same product for cloud sysadmins.

<comment><USER17> Pythian do this, not sure how much they cost though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Uber for digitizing, storage and disposal.

I have boxes and boxes of tapes, disks, notebooks, books, and photos. All of which I'd prefer to have digital. Other physical things could be digitized with video, photographs, and scans. I would take them to my street corner and a driver would pick them up and deliver them to a digitizer. They could show up in the cloud a week later, or be delivered back to me in a hard drive.

Once the digital copies are received, the customer can request to have the goods responsibly disposed of. The service could also cover long term storage for customers who want the originals to remain intact. Possessions can be returned to the owner within a day or two's notice.

A service like this would allow people to minimize their physical existence while preserving the memories associated with physical possessions.

<comment><USER19> Considering myself a minimalist I have tried to do this on a much smaller scale: for myself.

I ran into a big problem: how do I label/organize this mess of both physical/digital memories? What are your thoughts on that specific part of the problem? How would you solve it? More importantly, how would you automate it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Uber for hiring a undocumented worker/day laborer. Sometimes I hire these guys[0,1] and I have to go pick them up [2], try to find one that speaks decent English, negotiate pricing, explain the job, and manage the quality of work[3].

There is actually a huge potential to improve the worker side of the current status quo. Right now, these guys have a ton of idle time[4] and there is a pricing opportunity[5]. There's a lot of other opportunities in this, I've been mulling it over for the past few years, I can build it just don't want to market/grow it[6]

[0] for projects that I don't necessarily need a contractor for [1] or, work that a regular contractor doesn't do, like; my lawn guy doesn't clean gutters, my housekeeper doesn't clean windows [2] taking them home is worse - they're probably dirty & sweaty and I don't that in my car [3] can't have high expectations, these are generalists don't expect them to do high quality tile or carpentry [4] they sit in front of hardware stores for hours just waiting, some days they have no work, there is never a guarantee of work [5] they would take less money for guaranteed work, they could build a reputation and charge more for work, they could have their own transportation; saving the buyer the hassle of playing taxi service (often the buyer is a contractor, not a lone home owner like me) [6] if you do, let's talk

<comment><USER21> regulatory issues?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A couple of years ago I proposed an idea for "AirBnB for self storage" on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/Collaborative-Consumption/What-is- the-n...](http://www.quora.com/Collaborative-Consumption/What-is-the-next-big- Airbnb-for-X-company-idea)

Still seems like a massive opportunity. $24 billion market in the US. Inconvenient locations (for many people). People have (collectively) a massive amount of under-utilized space. Not without its challenges but neither was AirBnB when it started.

<comment><USER23> Already exists (in SF at least). Roost, StowThat.

<comment><USER22> AirBnB existed before AirBnB as well. People just called it Homeaway or VRBO. AirBnB did a few key things much better. I think there's the same opportunity in self-storage (although not sure what makes this model finally take off).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Identify damaged roofs via satellite imagery, match to addresses, and sell the list to roofers for marketing?

<comment><USER25> Aerial drone imaging? It would be much more accurate and give you better resolution. Downside is harder to scale.

<comment><USER26> Google has started doing something like this[0]. They're basically taking advantage of the detailed satellite imagery they already have. You certainly don't have the same flexibility as you would with drones, but seems like decent quality and definitely helps with the scaling problem.

[0] [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2014/07/bringing- google-...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2014/07/bringing-google-earth- images-to-business.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A service for freelancers that automatically withdraws projected income tax and puts it into a safe money market fund so that they can make a little change on it (more in better times).

<comment><USER28> The problem I have with this is that I end up using the gross take on projects to float my receivables. In theory your idea has merit, but in practice we all have cash flow challenges and the money I owe uncle sam can bridge those challenges for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Order while you wait infrastructure at restaurants. Basically pull up the menu via wifi while waiting for your table to clear. Take the order, and maybe even pay ahead. Orchestrate the order so that the food is available shortly after you sit down.

This lets the restaurant increase their profits by serving more parties through their tables at peak times - maybe 10-15 min per table that uses the order system.

Some variant of this might also work for busy bars too.

<comment><USER16> I've always had a funny lower-tech idea along the same lines. It's an airplane themed restaurant where each table has one of the service buttons that airplanes have. When you want a server to come by, hit the button. It lights up at the table and at the server station.

<comment><USER30> The Yo! Sushi chain in the UK does this. When you press the button, something on your table lights up and a cute (usually)Japanese-ish soundbite rings around the restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A store-to-kitchen cart. I carry it in store, checkout items from within the cart - mos t current carts are clunky, heavy - one that you can push onto your car trunk and carry out into your pantry/kitchen. Basically the iPod of shopping carts. Would save billion of shopping bags, no more "paper or plastic?"

<comment><USER32> I have used something like this for years: [http://www.amazon.com/Folding- Shopping-Double-Basket-Capacit...](http://www.amazon.com/Folding-Shopping- Double-Basket-Capacity/dp/B0000UZ58C)

It doesn't let you check out from within the cart itself (is that really necessary? If that is what you need, why not just create an app like the Apple Store has?), but it does let you use the same cart both in and outside the store. I bought mine since it makes it a lot easier to walk my groceries home.

<comment><USER31> I too have used that, but it's clunky & unwieldy. Need something more senior- friendly, better ergonomics e.g. something that folds up into your car trunk like a stretcher for ambulances. Make it fashionable to bring your cart to store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I started a site just for ideas like this, mostly for hackathons: [http://www.freeideas.co](http://www.freeideas.co)

</comment><comment><USER34> I had this random idea today, that I'd totally do if I had any free time. There may already be somebody doing this - I haven't looked. But here ya go:

An "eliza bot" like service that doles out Freudian dream analysis when you tell it about your dreams. Maybe even combine a logging service so you can log your dreams (ala the way some people keep dream journals).

I really have few ideas for monetizing the thing, I mostly just think it would be fun to do. But possibly you could do some cool targeted advertising based on the "discussions" you have with the dream-analysis-bot.

<comment><USER35> I really like this idea, though I suspect it'd be let down by the ELIZA-like. I don't think even a cutting-edge AI would do a lot better than ELIZA did, and she really was limited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A specialst book store or lending library or archive in hard to find new and seconhand books. For some subjects, amazon and its secondhand book site Abe books (?) sucks if you delve into narrow neiches. They are enthuaists out there who crave a book which will teach them something. These books are published in areas which may not be as commercial as they once were.

The neiches are small. One for example is model engineering and related subjects. Books with plans, drawings etc. Construction methods.

</comment><comment><USER37> Recipes based on the content of your pantry/fridge. The ideal solution would provide a db based on sensors/user input to know what ingredients and amount of those ingredients you have. Additionally, you can hook it into some calorie counter or diet tracking/fitness apps and it will make decisions based off of that.

Then you simply specify: "I want to make dinner, what can I cook?" The app links you to the recipe and any videos for making that recipe right to your device.

<comment><USER38> I've thought of this too and there seem to be a few companies trying something like it. The difficult part seems to be keeping your stock up to date. You'd basically have to update it after every meal.

Maybe a smart refrigerator will figure it out some day or Amazon with their automated service/scanner combo. It certainly could prevent food waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> GeekFit - an online community of geeks/coders looking to improve from sedentary to athletic.

<comment><USER40> I'm curious, there are a lot of online communities for fitness. What do you think could be done to cater to tech folks that isn't currently offered?

<comment><USER39> I was mostly thinking more in terms of getting people together in the "real world", rather than just an another online community for mountain biking, triathlon, etc.

Possibly a week-long summer camp, weekend hackathons/fitness outside major cities, weekly runs or bicycle rides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> A sort of reverse kickstarter with combinations.

Instead of just makers saying what they can do it would be based more on what people say they want, and attach a value to say they'd pay a certain amount for it. You could also declare that given x, y and z you could do a, b or c and thus giant chains could be resolved.

All a bit GOSPLAN like though.

I've also considered Tinder crossed with auctions: bid according to how hot you think they are, with highest bids getting to meet (and pay!)

<comment><USER42> This is a but like Quirky

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I thought of a math edu-game similar to CeeBot.

In CeeBot you learn programming concepts and whole languages by writing instructions for virtual robots. You can see how they move around and perform different tasks. (Actually Mehran Sahami from Stanford teaches the programming methodology course with a little virtual robot named Karel with exactly the same principle).

The player in my game would be a spacecraft captain. But unlike in other games, where you just press a button and the vessel goes to any direction, this ship had been hit by a meteoroid and its main computer is broken. Therefore all the commands have to be done manually and any computation is performed on a piece of paper and just put into the command line.

There could be no graphics at all. Just the roar of your enginges.

In the beginning the tasks are simple, but the more you play the more complicated the calculations become. It begins with simple arithmetics and trade. Later you need trigonometry to fire a "torpedo". It would be great if you could progress it even further, with advanced math and phisics, and also chemistry - you need to combine different substances in order to burn them as fuel or to produce oxygen to breathe or combine nitrogen and carbondiaxide in order to grow food in the farm.

It would be great if instead of taking tests the teacher would just say: "John, you are still on level 8, you should go to Alpha Centauri and fight with pirates. Play more!" \- which would mean - learn to solve problems with two unknowns and calculate volume of spheres.

And imagine a multiplayer with students on the same level who have to make accurate calclulations fast because without it they would just float in the dark and cold outerspace.

I will never make it - I don't know math and programming that well - but I'd play the game!

</comment><comment><USER44> A search platform that allows users to find stores that specialize in whatever it is they're looking for. For example, here in Austin we have a store that sells upholstery fabric, specifically, and another that sells just bookcases. I've also seen a disc golf store. If I were looking for any of the above, I wouldn't remember that those specialty stores existed and so would probably go to Michael's for fabric or Ikea for a bookcase or Dick's for a disc. If there were a way to show stores that could give me a better selection to suit my particular need/want, I'd much rather shop there. Maybe if I search "fabric" it would pull up a location-specific list of fabric stores further categorized?

</comment><comment><USER45> A system to retrofit an appliance into a smart home.

Example: My AC has its own remote. With my device I can record the wireless signals it outputs, similar to a garage opener in a car. Then with my mobile app I can create my own interface to power on/off, set temp, etc. I now use just my smart phone to turn on my AC. I press power on the custom UI I created in the app, it will send a packet to the hardware in my LAN, and that hardware sends the matching wireless signal to the AC.

Some things might still need physical fittings and cannot always be wireless devices such as power switches. New power splitters with this functionality would also be a good way to control appliances that just need to power on and off.

</comment><comment><USER46> I posted this before:

Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap.

<comment><USER47> Just move to Australia and watch ABC for Kids. Entertaining, educational shows for kids and no ads: [http://www.abc.net.au/children/shows/guide/](http://www.abc.net.au/children/shows/guide/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> "Music Finder"

You open an app. You're played three different pieces of music. You're asked which one you like best. The program branches and plays you three more pieces of music. Again they're different but from a more similar selection.

At each point you can highlight bits of music to go back to - to buy that music or to start the chain from that point.

One example would have this tightly connected to one particular publisher's catalogue.

It would eventually teach about music, giving comprehensive sleeve notes about the composer or the piece of music or the history or music theory or etc.

<comment><USER49> Why 3 and not 2?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Something with the Oculus VR tech. I think there's massive, exciting options opening up with the Gear VR or similar, and anyone starting now will have a substantial first mover advantage.

I have two specific applications for VR: the metaverse, and really good porn. (These do not need to be combined though I suppose they could.)

I would argue that Second Life failed mostly due to execution issues. I'd love to see a virtual world where I can socialize, and where I can build cool spaces to hang out with my friends / hold meetings / work.

<comment><USER51> There are already a few projects working on both.

Phillip Rosedale, the guy behind Second Life, is working on a next-gen equivalent. Janus VR, meanwhile, is busy working at turning the Web into a metaverse, and getting some rave reviews.

As for porn, [http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw/](http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw/) is your source there... "Really good" porn is, of course, highly taste-dependent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> WeWillWalkYou - An online platform for volunteering to walk, visit, cook for, seniors. Trade time with a stranger's loved ones in your town, for the same for your folks back home.

<comment><USER53> It can be also repurposed as an idea for a dystopian novel :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Underground garbage disposal. In Tel Aviv, the garbage gets picked up every day (hot climate), and because of traffic this is done early morning (4-5am).

The system will have dedicated "containers" on corners or squares where you drop your garbage and an underground network of carts delivers it to a central point where it can be picked up. Or even to the dump if possible.

This can be fully automated and I think will save a lot of money in manpower and gas (for driving the garbage trucks through the whole city).

<comment><USER55> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> "Blind Lego Watchmaker" \- lego biomorphs.

Dawkins' book "the Blind Watchmaker" introduced "biomorphs". These are intended to show the power of repeated random change and selection. He uses a small computer program to draw six images composed of lines. The user selects one and the program redraws another six images, making small changes based on the image the user choses. This is repeated many times.

The new version is pretty similar except it uses Lego pieces instead of lines.

</comment><comment><USER56> Take your pick: [http://startjumper.com](http://startjumper.com)

It's kind of like a parking lot for business opportunities I didn't go through with.

</comment><comment><USER57> Since all the scandals about security, I came up with a different approach, instead to increase cryptography, just build kind of a reverse surveillance. A place like gravatar that informs you who is accessing to your profiles on your social media. The idea is very simple, you provide a jpg that can send back a message every time it's being rendered by a client. It can be that it requires a new image standard that allows to send some info to the main servers.

</comment><comment><USER58> Starbucks of marijuana.

<comment><USER59> Amsterdam Coffee shops, but _franchised_... This could be massive in the USA. Like the idea...

<comment><USER58> Start it in Colorado and Washington, of course. Go into any Weedbucks and the "O.G. Kush" (or any strain) is just as good (e.g. THC concentration constant) as at any other. Special sales on April 20th, and at 4:20pm everyday.

You'd make a killing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> TextMe - Too much texting apps started popping around. Cactus - Photo sharing app with option to put a title on it. Had this a while ago, then whisper and others showed up. Escape the Monster - iOS kids game, some creature have to avoi d obstacles to escape the monster. Lack of time. Invoicer - Mac app for making invoices. Lack of time. Donster - Texting using only recorded sounds. Lack of time.

</comment><comment><USER61> Reading through this I came up with one: Tinder for jobs. Employers can look through a small CV of candidates that they might like, while potential employees can do the same for workplaces. Matches lead to interviews.

I can't really see myself ever doing this though because you'd got a chicken and egg problem, plus it'd probably only ever be used by tech companies unless there was an easy to use API.

<comment><USER62> There's the opposite already: [http://www.jobrapp.com/](http://www.jobrapp.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Something a bit like Pocket app, except where the content is automatically summarized for you.

I've made a naive summarizer that seems to get the job done for the summaries part: [http://breue.com/summarizer](http://breue.com/summarizer)

I'm just not sure what the final product would look like or if there would be enough of a reason for people to prefer it over Pocket.

<comment><USER64> I'm probably an edge case user but I don't save stuff to Pocket because I want summaries of stories. I save them because I want access to the actual content.

For example, I do save articles I can just read. For that, a summary service would be great BUT that is true with or without Pocket. On the flipside, if I saw stuff like a blog post on technical code someone wrote about for something, more than likely I want to save that reference for later (true for a huge chunk of stuff I save or the type of things I save).

That said, I came across several people who have either worked on summarizers or talked about it but nothing seemed to have ever took off on those. I can't speak for others but in general I prefer to read content for myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> A Verilog/VHDL killer.

<comment><USER66> There's Chisel (Scala based) the LowRisc team from Berkeley are using[1]. It can output Verilog and also compiles to cycle accurate simulators.

There's also PSHDL from Karsten Becker[2] at TUHH. It's immature and seems to be focused on teaching at the moment.

[1] [https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/](https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/) [2] [http://blog.pshdl.org/](http://blog.pshdl.org/)

<comment><USER67> Hi, just a quick correction - the Berkeley RISC-V team are not one and the same with the lowRISC team. We collaborate with them, and we have Krste on our technical advisory board. We are of course also using Chisel though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> An insurance company who's policy covers anything you own against any kind of loss for any reason. House, car, boat, bike etc for flood, fire, theft etc. Basically, if you buy insurance you should simply be insured. Period. No fine print.

Yes, it would probably be more expensive than people's current policies.

<comment><USER69> I shudder to think what the actuary tables will look like!

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> What Dropbox did for storage, but for CPUs. The classic business example would be that you have to to process a large Excel doc and are willing to pay extra to speed it up. With fast internet connections and cheap online storage, it could be opened up to a growing number of tasks like video rendering.

<comment><USER71> That was the idea behind PiCloud [1], which was acquired by... Dropbox [2].

[1] [http://www.picloud.com/](http://www.picloud.com/)

[2] [http://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox- piclou/](http://www.wired.com/2013/11/dropbox-piclou/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Probably one of:

\- a "Rap Genius" for crowd-translating doujin manga (kind of exists on danbooru but not quite)

\- A collaborative gaming site for pen-and-paper RPG and boardgame players which would let you design and run your games as a virtual representation of the physical game (probably exists or else is a bad idea)

<comment><USER73> Re RPG Games:

I have heard Roll20 is pretty popular and fun to use. I have never done it myself but it seems like a really cool way to play.

[http://roll20.net/](http://roll20.net/)

<comment><USER72> Well, at least I know I can have a good idea.

Now I just need to be able to not be the last to have it.

<comment><USER26> And also be able to implement the idea. Not that I'm saying that you couldn't. But in general, I think having a great idea is not really worth all that much on it's own.

<comment><USER72> Yeah. And of course, implementing it _well_ matters, because someone with an actual team and money is certain to want to eat your lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How about a kickstarter kickstarter?

It seems like you need a lot of money and experience to build a successful kickstarter?

What if there's a different service where a person can put up an idea with minimal cost and flare, and just raise enough funding to hire a video team, PR team, etc to then run a kickstarter campaign?

<comment><USER25> But then how will I get the idea? I think we need kickstarterkickstarterkickerstarter.com. It literally just sends someone to your house and kicks you until you have a good idea.

<comment><USER74> Genius :-) Had a good laugh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I am fed up with all those warranty cards I am getting with every equipment I buy like juicer,external HDD,etc. so thought what if I can make a smartphone app with open API which other manufacturers can use to link their warranty info.

Through the app, you can apply for warranty , see when it is expiring etc.

<comment><USER12> You don't in normal circumstance have to "apply" for a warranty, at least in the US.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act)

<comment><USER76> Those cards are more for the purpose of giving the company your contact info in case they need to notify you of a product recall. Still, the idea makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Another one is predicting price rises and optimal time to sell Magic the Gathering cards before rotation. Its like the stockmarket only unregulated Gambling. People, do invest in these cards and flip them. Not for the faint of heart but people love to buy into dreams...

<comment><USER77> My friend and I kinda do this. We started 8-10 years ago when we were in high school. We pooled ~10k together to buy legacy staples. Since then we've bought _some_ cards, but very minimal compared to legacy cards.

We aim for the cards that will be useful post-rotation as many card sale sites do an okay job estimating release price. Also, we mostly played legacy.

Snapcaster for instance was ~$25-30 on release (although some places sold it for as low as 15). Then it was ~20-30 for a while until it saw a lot of legacy play and jumped up. It is currently 30-35. ROI probably similar to an index fund.

Tarmogoyf was probably our biggest 'buy' since our legacy staples. We didn't buy that many (5 play sets). And sold as soon as the price hit $100-120. This we risked due to rumors of 'modern'.

Force of Will, a legacy staple for a long time. 8 years ago we paid ~$10-15 per FoW. Now they're going for ~$90. The S&P is up ~70%, FoW is up ~566%. We bought 20 play sets (80 cards) for roughly $1000.

We're still holding many of our original collection. But, sold off enough to get our original $10k back. At this point the price keeps going up, many cards fall out of circulation (destroyed/lost/etc). The only "risk" is reprints.

One issue is unloading many cards. With stocks I can create a sell order and sell it for roughly asking price. Whether I'm selling $100 of shares or $100k of shares it will go through instantly. With magic it isn't hard to deal with ~500 cards or so. But, once you scale up it is a full time job. If we bought $10k worth of FoW vs $1k we'd have 800 FoW to try and sell at some point. This would take a _long time_.

You either pay SCG prices to get cards quick. Or you use ebay for a 10-20% discount. But, takes longer and no guaranteed sale.

As far as logistics we each put in roughly 5k and split the original buy cards evenly. Since then our collections have fluxed. He bought/sold a Black Lotus at one point, I never did. He bought individual power 9 cards and sold a 'power 9 set' (5-10% markup) a few times. I was more passive.

<comment><USER53> As for the scaling up part, you could hire a student (or even a responsible high school kid) to do the buying part for you.

A friend of mine was a full time magic trader, and he hired a kid to sift through mountains of commons that he bought in bulk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> GPS powered fast food inhibitor. e.g. You get a text coupon for a salad at "insert healthy restaurant" whenever you pull into the parking lot of a Mcdonalds.

The idea is to catch people and entice them to eat differently right before they make the decision to eat fast food.

</comment><comment><USER38> Heroku for queue jobs. Pay by the minute.

Basically I hate maintaining an AWS instance that is idle most of the time. And Heroku will only get you so far.

It would probably be difficult to make profits on because you'd be charging slices of a penny at a time...

<comment><USER79> No exactly this, but take a look on [http://www.picloud.com/](http://www.picloud.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> An on-demand "Uber for babysitters" ... most of you shot it down but I still think it's a good idea

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7356497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7356497)

<comment> rush-tea I read somewhere that this is already been done, but I do not remember the startup name

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> ... thought about building a mobile femtocell attached to a helium baloon, so if you find yourself (playing Ingress) in a dead spot, perhaps the femtocell in the baloon 10 to 30 meters above you could help out?

</comment><comment><USER82> A paper version of a sat nav. Essentially its a book with a picture of all the roads. A reader will be able to use it on the go to see where they are trying to get to.

<comment><USER83> A road atlas with pictures then? That would be a huge book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> App that connects people with leftover food to pet owners.

</comment><comment><USER21> the missing B in AirBnB. I really wish I can finish the work on this idea someday. I have tech MVP but I dont know how to move forward. The idea : Basically, people can charge for Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner at their places. There are people who like to cook and people who dont. Why not let former earn money and later save money while eating healthy meals and meeting new people.

<comment><USER85> I have thought about this too, but in the country I'm currently living (France), it would be too much of a mess with the licence / legal side - <USER2> somebody gets really sick after a dinner, that could end bad.

That being said, it's a great idea and I would love to work on this one day.

<comment><USER86> Isn't this what super-marmite.com was doing?

<comment><USER85> Thanks ! Didn't know that one, but seems to be this.

Doesn't seem to really take off - 6000 users in France after 3 years of operations (data from a french article a year ago, not sure if reliable), and their FB page has last posts about a year ago too - I would say it's dead now.

I'm gonna take a look why it didn't take off.

Btw, the same idea in UK - Cookisto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> A subscription payment service with easy canceling for both consumer & merchant, built-in pro-rating, and support for groups.

</comment><comment><USER88> A task management app that organizes all your completed tasks into a resume.

<comment><USER21> this is pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment> rush-tea shazam for face recognition? Sometime when you see a movie, you can't make out who stars in it. take a quick picture and shazam it away to get the actor / actress name!

<comment><USER89> Google play does this when watching certain movies and shows. Not sure if it's added manually or does intelligent recognition. However, it's certainly useful - so I could see generalizing that capability for other movies / plays??

<br/>

Granted, the movies and shows on Play have at least a context to do the pattern matching with - a cast list greatly reduces the possible matches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> An end to end Recruitment management services..

Fully automated and fully mobile.

</comment><comment><USER91> I love the format of this thread:

How bout this idea..

>> already exists, here is URL

</comment><comment><USER92> Location based anon social network. I am working on it.

<comment><USER64> Curious but why do you see this as valuable?

Secret exists to confess anonymously within your circle.

General social networks to connect to your connections (FB, LinkedIn, etc).

An insane list of failed startups that try to get strangers to connect but no one actively seeks meeting strangers for the sake of in general.

I am having a hard time seeing why I'd want to connect to anyone anonymously in my area that don't fall into the above categories but I'd love to hear why you think it makes sense

<comment><USER92> Let's see. Its fully anon system where visitor can talk to other visitors. Its fully anon. You just see form where the other visitor is.

<comment><USER64> Unfortunately, at least for me, that isn't a selling feature. It's basically Secret (perhaps more social) without the personal friends angle and adding in location. Can't see a reason to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> A secondary market in sports bets.

<comment><USER94> See betfair (UK only).

<comment><USER93> They doubtless predate my idea (~2009 in conversation with one of the Ron Conway boys), which is way too obvious not to have been done before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> True CloudOS</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you back up your files? - <AUTHOR> There are several old HN threads about what tools people use to back up their personal files to remote servers, but I'm specifically wondering what the best options are for hosting the remote backups.<p>I'd love to push all my data to some remote filesystem using Attic, rsync, or similar tools, but am having trouble finding cost effective options. <comment><USER2> Backblaze and Tarsnap allow you to ship off your files to remote filesystems for relatively cheap. I personally have Syncthing on all my machines sharing a large directory. My HTPC also keeps staggered backups of the data in case of data corruption, deletion or encrypting-malware. Used to have Spideroak, but it failed to sync files several times, so I left it.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the easiest way to create a social login for my website? - <AUTHOR>

I know that there is oauth.io but that hasn't launched yet.Is there an quick easy way to impletement a social login for my website with Facebook and Twitter? <comment><USER2> If you're working in Node, definitely check out rem.js @ [https://github.com/tcr/rem](https://github.com/tcr/rem)

</comment><comment><USER3> Devise has a social integration plugin, I think it was called devise-social, for Rails</comment>


Top VPNs Secretly Owned by Chinese Corps - <AUTHOR> https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252466203/Top-VPNs-secretly-owned-by-Chinese-firms <comment><USER2> It's not linked in the article but this is VPNpros post about it which lists the products and firms: [https://vpnpro.com/blog/hidden-vpn-owners- unveiled-97-vpns-2...](https://vpnpro.com/blog/hidden-vpn-owners- unveiled-97-vpns-23-companies/)

<comment><USER3> This bothered me a lot.

They linked to things like the definition of a VPN, but couldn't link to the article they based __all __of their information on.

I know I'm a bit on the extreme side, but I wouldn't be sad to see entire domains get banned for things like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Infographic here: [https://vpnpro.com/wp-content/uploads/Infographic- VPNpro-97-...](https://vpnpro.com/wp-content/uploads/Infographic- VPNpro-97-VPN-products-run-by-just-23-companies.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> So which VPNs and which parent corps?

I wonder if Private Internet Access is still the top offering.</comment>


Tools for creating ideas - <AUTHOR> http://creatingminds.org/tools/tools_ideation.htm <comment><AUTHOR> I recommend : Assumption Busting: Surfacing and challenging unconscious assumptions.

Attribute Listing: Listing attributes of objects and then challenging them.

SCAMPER: Using action verbs as stimuli.

Wishing: State ideas as wishes to expand thinking.

</comment><comment><USER2> One of my favorites isn't there and might not quite fit, but it's Devonthink Pro, as described by Steven Berlin Johnson: [http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002...](http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html) .

</comment><comment><USER3> There are good lists and methods from Edward De Bono (i.e: Lateral Thinking), Genrich Altshuller (TRIZ). For a good anthology on thinking skills instruction you can look at: <http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED306559.pdf>

But it's important to note that those are tools and ideas production can't be generalized in a methodic way, similar discussions on the scientific method. Ironically the source of science can be unscientific sources as beliefs, religion, magic thinking, myths, random.

If it helps, I summarized a list of all hacker news articles with ideas in the title (using hnsearch api, sample code included in the main article). These are mainly articles about ideas vs execution, etc but can help: [http://blog.databigbang.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/Hacke...](http://blog.databigbang.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/HackerNews-Ideas-Articles.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great resources and very good articles in hacker news. Here [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=tit...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=title%3Aidea&sortby=points+desc&start=0) the same but ordered by points

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And there is more, for defining, selecting and implementing ideas:

<http://creatingminds.org/tools/tools.htm>

</comment><comment><USER5> I use a notebook for mind mapping and Google docs to keep lists of ideas</comment>


Show HN: A rap song about meetings - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu3KIiKPpWc <comment><USER2> Amazing!

There are plenty of song on his YouTube channel:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoGRABtFGU7ng79NqF0KuIQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoGRABtFGU7ng79NqF0KuIQ/videos)</comment>


Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-struggle-to-detoxify-the-internet <comment><USER2> There is nothing "toxic" about the internet except for the centralization of communication on a handful of corporate controlled social networks that have perverse incentives to censor anything that might impact their advertising or other income.

There is no single solution for content moderation that is good. That is why giant communities controlled by a single entity with a single standard are inherently toxic themselves. The solutions are innumberable and should be. That's how the gordian knot of moderation is cut. Not one set of standards but a diversity of them.

Federation and peer to peer seem to be the only way forwards. Unfortunately most users of the big sites are there for monetary reasons and these reason don't translate to smaller sites. So they'll stick around until the censorship gets so tight the money dries up (ie, what google/youtube is doing now).

<comment><USER3> > There is nothing "toxic" about the internet except for the centralization of > communication on a handful of corporate controlled social networks that have > perverse incentives to censor anything that might impact their advertising > or other income.

Give me a break. There is PLENTY of toxicity online, just like there is in real life.

In fact the lack of accountability in the online world lets people get away with MORE toxicity than they would in the physical world.

Yes, centralized/privatized control of the spaces in which we congregate and interact online is also a big problem, but it's a completely different problem.

Solving one won't solve the other.

<comment><USER4> Dealing with physical "toxicity" is an order of magnitude more relevant than ensuring that online spaced are composed of doubleplusgood thoughts. With the definition of doubleplusgood being ever more amphorous and ever more transparent as a social climbing strategy...

I've been homeless enough that reading about "toxicity" is like reading about a toddler saying lime applesauce is too sour. There are physical realms where such concern would be far better directed. Where you could secure future safety and security for your child with far more impact!*

Your child is probably swalliwing little bits of plastic on a daily basis, is probably being fed diabetic inducing diets, is subject to a regime of hyper stimuli, etc... Toxicity is omnipresent but not because of the Russians.

* - via helping create the garden of neighborhoods and communities that are sane

<comment><USER3> I never said it was a zero sum game. But the discussion was about online spaces.

I agree with you 100% that solving real-world problems like the ones you describe is vitally important, it's just not the topic at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Social media is toxic because of its ability to distill extremism.

Say you have a person with an extremist view on dating and women - a 1 in 1,000,000 type view. Well, social media gives them a place where hundreds of like-minded individuals can gather in one spot and reinforce their extremism. Then, people with non-extremist views take notice of the community and stop by with popcorn because it's outrageous, disgusting, but above all, entertaining.

I think sometimes we overestimate how toxic a community is by doing bad math: "Oh, /r/incels has a subscription count of X and growing?? It must be converting more users to its extremism!! Quick, ban it!" What percentage of subs were just popcorn bystanders and what percentage of content creators were trolls? I would guess much higher than one would expect.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how popularity is relevant to a decision to content-based ban.

<comment><USER7> It's relevant to a discussion of free-speech absolutism in a public forum. Free speech as a principle is valuable and if the cost of millions of people being able to express their views is that one random Nazi gets to have his say, then I think most people would think that it's worth it. If that one Nazi were to turn into a thousand Nazis, then I suspect people would be more circumspect about the whole thing. So the question about how prevalent hate- speech is on Reddit has a lot to say about to what extent Reddit will be willing to censor its users.

<comment><USER8> > If that one Nazi were to turn into a thousand Nazis, then I suspect people > would be more circumspect about the whole thing.

Why? I mean what do you care how many people say the earth is flat? As for Nazis, Antifia and whatever other group you care to use an example, it seems like we already have a descent set of laws in place to protect people from direct harm from those groups.

I'm sorry but I think what's going on at these social media companies and with the legacy media is blatant political censorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my experience, especially on Reddit, toxic is defined as anything admins/moderators don't agree with. Meanwhile other toxic behavior such as doxxing/harassment/raids are ignored, and done by the meta-subreddits such as subredditdrama and topmindsofreddit.

</comment><comment><USER10> _" According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn't crack the top ten.) The rankings don't reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people online go where you'd expect them to go."_

The author is technically clueless. Nice swipe at Bitcoin, too bad it doesn't even make sense to compare Bitcoin "harvesting" with people going to a web site.

These are all the same lame arguments that have been made over and over. No, r/The_Donald doesn't represent the end of the world. Yes, Reddit had some subs that many people would find objectionable. The totally valid and correct argument is: Don't go visit a site when the content offends you.

</comment><comment><USER11> >>an attempt to "self-investigate" claims that the restaurant's basement was a dungeon full of kidnapped children. Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement.

Ah, but did you look for the secret passage under the prep station? The recent JRE episode with AJ was talking about how we have this mix of people on the Internet having fun with ideas, sometimes just to get a laugh, sometimes because they are just wondering out loud, and then this subpop of genuinely mentally disturbed people who take it all very literally and too seriously. That there's no filter between these groups is one of the dangers of the Internet, I guess.

<comment><USER12> How is that any different than the new yorker or traditional media spreading lies and hate about jussie smollet, covington or any other incident and causing mentally unstable people to attack others?

I find it strange how new yorker feels they should be allowed to be toxic but everyone else isn't. It's strange how they feel they aren't responsible for the mentally unstable they accidentally influence but everyone else is responsible.

Using that logic, every movie director, author, journalist, musician, etc would be liable for the actions of the mentally unstable. That would be the end of all media, including the new yorker.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A year late to this, but it's a fantastic and still relevant topic (content moderation)

</comment><comment><USER13> So long as Reddit has very specific rules regarding what is forbidden, i.e. posting personally identifiable information, then I think the subreddit system is already as close to a perfect solution as I'd want. Subreddits are opt-in and opt-out, and are moderated with VASTLY different tolerances and tastes. I tend to prefer highly controversial conversations, at the expense of pleasantness, and there are subreddits that cater to this just fine. There are others whose sensibilities do not tolerate that, and there subreddits for that too.

What I cannot stand is people demanding that subreddits be removed. I filtered out posts from t/The_Donald immediately, and yet I still see people that cannot believe that subreddit still exists. The_Donald is just a highly moderated right wing echo chamber, not unlike r/LateStageCapitalism or equivalent left wing subs. I hate, and am banned, from most of them...but I'm happy they exist for those who subscribe.

<comment><USER14> just wondering what subreddits do you subscribe to? I enjoy talking about politics but r/politics is insufferable, I've found r/news to have much better discussions, but it all depends on the post and which type of people a specific headline will attract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Define what's even toxic?

If you look into what is being removed from youtube, twitter, patreon, etc. It's not people calling for genocide that are being removed. Nobody would argue over those.

The 'toxicity' being removed seems to be political views.

Patreon is a perfect example of the system working correctly however. They started banning people over politics. The right-wing left patreon and went to subscriber-star. Patreon is now in money problems.

"Patreon needs to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to build a sustainable business," said Patreon CEO Jack Conte.

</comment><comment><USER16> (2018)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Detoxify"? Reddit and the internet was fine until the establishment decided to take control of it and censor it. If people didn't like reddit's or the internet's "toxicity", they wouldn't use it. Nobody is forcing anyone to use reddit. If the puritans at the new yorker or the rest of the media don't like reddit, they simply don't have to use it. It would be like me complaining about the toxicity of the new yorker and demanding the new yorker be "detoxified". Or, I could simply not consume the new yorker's content.

The new yorker along with the rest of the media uses the same excuse that china, russia and others use to censor. I guess "detoxify" sounds better than "clean up".

[https://news.sky.com/story/china-cracks-down-in-clean-up- of-...](https://news.sky.com/story/china-cracks-down-in-clean-up-of-internet- services-including-vpns-10740188)

All this "detoxify" or "clean up" internet nonsense is just cover to censor and control the masses.

<comment><USER17> > Reddit and the internet was fine until

You need to spend some more time with the Usenet archives.

<comment><USER12> What about it? What you find "toxic", others might not find "toxic". That's my point. And if there is "toxicity" in usenet, don't use it. Or use the newsgroups that you find less "toxic".

But you are missing my point. My point isn't about "toxicity", it's about censorship. "Toxicity" is just an excuse to censor and control.

Usenet had been around for decades and has always been "toxic". So what? Did the world end?

<comment><USER17> Because normal people don't want to frequent toxic environments. It's unpleasant.

<comment><USER12> Is that why reddit is so popular? It was "toxic" and yet it grew and normal people used it in droves. Your argument contradicts itself. Most people don't mind reddit or usenet or the "toxicity". It's a handful of busybodies with power trying justify censorship. No different than the church ladies whining about "toxic" rap or "toxic" tv or "toxic" whatever when they themselves are toxic too.

And who defines normal? The saudis? The chinese? The catholic church? The US government? The media? Or do you get to decide?

If you find it unpleasant, then don't use it. If you don't like baseball, then don't watch it. Go watch something else. Everytime we as a society get beyond the puritanical blasphemy craze, it rears its ugly head again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another leftist publication that advocates censoring unwanted speech.

It's only a matter of time before "hate speech" will get you automatically deplatformed. It's going to be fun seeing how what's considered "hate speech" evolves.

</comment><comment><USER19> IMO there's very little on the internet that's significantly more toxic than Hollywood movies and pop music. Porn, I guess.

If you do find it: congrats, you must be pretty inventive.

On the extremist content: those people are not well versed. If you reaaaally want to you can let it brainwash you, but at that point a book could do the job as well.

And: internet extremists don't have significant attention spans and can barely act in the world. If they learned how to read, well... they'd soon know better.

Are "book extremists" still a thing?

<comment><USER19> Too cynic? IMO the topic demands a huge grain of salt, but perhaps I was otherwise unproductive.</comment></comment>


Tech Cofounder Needed - <AUTHOR> ONAIR is an AI powered ad platform allowing to use for free wifi on any flight.
https://on-air.app
ONAIR connected 40+ major airlines with 4,500+ planes to date.
ONAIR is looking for a tech cofounder right now to finish our product.
Ideal candidate: love to code; meets deadlines; experienced fullstack developer with app developing experience; machine learning experience is a +; CTO experience is a +;
If you don't meet some criteria, but love what ONAIR does feel free to contact me.
linkedin.com/in/dmoshe <comment><USER2> Not qualified, but do have a question: The word "cofounder" here is used to describe what, exactly? If the company exists already, and is providing service, my "layperson" definition of "cofounder" would be hard to meet, considering the company is already "founded".</comment>


What's Hot In Applied Math: Intro to Random Graphs - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.cornell.edu/~durrett/RGD/RGD.html

<comment><USER2> Someone in the know, what makes this so nifty? I understand they've used a random walk to measure the internet and show the stock market is predictable. Is that sort of thing the motivation here? I do like a nice spot of stochasticity.</comment>


Google Announce All Chromebooks debuting in 2017 and beyond will run Android apps - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/all-chromebooks-debuting-in-2017-and-beyond-will-run-android-apps/ <comment><USER2> Google are really bad at launching non Web software. It's it soon a year since they announced this and still we don't have a date for when they will do a general roll out.

<comment><USER3> I think they're really bad at launching web software. On anything but a chrome browser their web experience sucks - not because of standards because of injections of advertising to force you to use chrome. Their products are really going to shit and consumers are paying for it. Search is still fine so "meh"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> excellent! I hope that Google eventually merges ChromeOS & Android into one, such that any generic linux mobile device can run any Chrome app and any Android app easily.

<comment><USER5> The real win is a chrome phone. Safety plus can run android apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why it's only on new hardware?

<comment><USER7> Not all have enough ram for linux kernel, browser, AND android apps in their own containers.

Not all chromebooks have touch screens.

Not all chromebooks have an x86, not sure if the chromeos+android glue runs on arm. In particular whatever seperation there is between android apps in a container might require some of the x86 bits.</comment></comment>


The quest to save Stephen Hawking's voice - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest-to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php <comment><USER2> People get strongly attached to speech synthesizers, even (especially?) the old robotic-sounding ones, whether they're using it to speak for them (as with Hawking) or read to them (e.g. blind people). I know a blind guy who was so attached to the ETI-Eloquence synthesizer (developed in the 90s) that, to use it on his Mac, he did a hack involving the WINE Win32 compatibility layer. Some blind people favor the more robotic-sounding synths in general because those tend to be better at high speeds than the more natural-sounding voices based on real recordings.

The lesson is that software companies shouldn't be quick to kill an old product or let it die just because they have a newer one that they think is better.

Edit: Perhaps the next generation of blind techies will become attached to something open-source, like espeak-ng (which ships with the NVDA screen reader for Windows). Then, if they want it frozen in time at version X, that will be feasible.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Hawking appears to have preferred his old CallText for similar reasons to why I prefer chunky old bitmap fonts in my terminal windows rather than something like Consolas: One part nostalgia, and one part noise- robustness.

> The lesson is that software companies shouldn't be quick to kill an old > product or let it die just because they have a newer one that they think is > better.

I wish Microsoft had stopped trying to "improve" Windows after Windows 95, UI- wise. Maybe port it to the NT kernel and offer support for modern hardware like GPUs and USB, but that's it. Too many of their improvements to the experience aren't, really.

<comment><USER4> I'd be delighted with a Windows 10 kernel and technology stack sporting a Windows 2000 GUI. That represents the nostalgic apex for me. XP's default "Fisher Price" skin was when things turned sour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if one of the reasons Hawking was so tied to that specific voice and hardware was so that there could be a way to verify that a recording was actually him. If nobody else had that hardware and software combo, it wouldn't be possible for anyone else to put words into his mouth.

With that in mind, it was nice to read that the original CallText boards as well as the emulator are with the family. That should provide the security to ensure that nobody can impersonate him in the future.

<comment><USER6> He was so tied to that specific voice, because that was his voice. If someone told you that today, you get a completely new voice, would you? It just so happens that this particular synthetic voice was attached to an extremely popular person, and it was his identifying trait.

<comment><USER7> Lots of people do. Politicians are well known for changing their speech later in life in order to convey a different feeling, usually "confident and statesman-like".

Personally I modify my speech by context, just as I modify my writing. When I'm "home" (where I grew up, my parent's house) I emphasise my accent a little more, just as I use local slang.

Some people, subconsciously echo a speaking-partners accent - changing the tone, timbre, inflections, and such between conversations.

But yes, you're right that voice was strongly linked to his identity as is often the case for prolific public speakers.

<comment><USER8> Speech != voice.

One can definitely train to speak better with coaching, but your voice and most specifically your voice "ID" is unique to you. That can't be changed.

<comment><USER7> English word choice is confusing here because voice can be "the style of speech/writing".

By changing [style of] their speech I mean the frequency, timbre, intonations, accent, nasality, etc., and NOT words, or content (which obviously can also be changed).

There are often key elements that match based on morphology of the vocal apparatus, but if I speak like a toff with a cold vs. a barrel-chested Nor'n Irelander there's little ID left.

Good mimics, those who have radio/TV shows for example, can if they choose leave nothing for a normal listener to distinguish their speech from that of the subject of their mimicry. Impressionists tend to charicateur their subjects somewhat, however.

In UK it used to be relatively common to have a "telephone choice" that would sometimes confuse even close acquaintances in to thinking you were someone else.

Another common example is when taking different languages one has a different voice.

<comment><USER7> s/"telephone choice"/"telephone voice"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The CallText 5010 is a descendent of DECtalk, so the voice he used has been around. Hawking's voice was based on Perfect Paul, which the DECtalk Express I have here is set to, and sounds very much like him. You can still buy these devices and a software version is available.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk) [https://www.fastcompany.com/3050267/stephen-hawkings- voice-i...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3050267/stephen-hawkings-voice-is-now- open-source-and-free-to-download)

<comment><USER2> Just curious, do you still use a DECtalk Express day to day, or do you just have one for the sake of nostalgia? What do you use a speech synthesizer for (e.g. screen reader)?

<comment><USER9> It's just for fun. I got it _because_ it sounds like Hawking. It came DOA from a music shop and it just turned out the battery pack needed to be serviced. Anything with a serial port can use it to speak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand that his voice was his identity but our voices naturally and distinctly change as we mature and age. I am left to wonder why it was so important that his voice remain frozen in time?

Also, though it borders on surveillance, this text-to-speech technology offered the byproduct to record every spoken word that Professor Hawking said in lecture and made available as searchable text. He had authored every conversation he had. Does such a repository exist in his estate?

<comment><USER11> I would imagine part of it is that our voices change _gradually_. Even in extreme cases, like when we go hoarse or get sick, there's an essential progression to link our new voice to the old, and there's an identifiable common thread. Meanwhile, for Hawking, it would have been a sudden, disjoint change - and with the exception of the mentioned upgraded CallText voice, any replacement would have been completely new, utterly unrelated to his prior voice; Imagine how disconcerting it would be to awake with a stranger's voice, with no expectation of getting your own back.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. And whereas biological human voices deteriorate with time, the proposed replacements for Hawking's voice were supposedly improvements (though not necessarily improvements _to him_ ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mewse-hn Great story, would be nice if the voice emulator became open source

<comment><USER12> I think in this case, that's not something that should happen. It's his voice, and it should die with him.

I certainly wouldn't want people putting words in my [dead] mouth after I'm gone, and I doubt he would either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some previous discussion, four months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16637162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16637162)

</comment><comment><USER14> I really enjoyed reading that, thank you for posting.

</comment><comment><USER15> shameless plug: [https://www.voicemynah.com](https://www.voicemynah.com)

I attempted to source his audio and recreate one as above.</comment>


Sphere Packing Solved in Higher Dimensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160330-sphere-packing-solved-in-higher-dimensions/ <comment><USER2> This is a really excellent walkthrough of the applications of sphere packing to information theory: [http://www.ams.org/programs/students/wwtbam/cohn- slides-2014...](http://www.ams.org/programs/students/wwtbam/cohn- slides-2014-web.pdf) as well as the answer to a question I asked earlier in the thread.

edit: that's funny, I just realized the author of this link is quoted in the OP's article.

<comment><USER3> Whoa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we have s/Higher/8 and 24/ in the title? As written it suggests that sphere packing had been solved in _all_ higher dimensions, which would be far more dramatic.

<comment><USER5> Seriously, I was very excited when I saw the title, and very let down by the actual result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be nice to see a graph of packing density against dimensionality.

EDIT: Looks like I spoke too soon! There's one in the link posted by @foota in these comments (p33 of [1])

[1] [http://www.ams.org/programs/students/wwtbam/cohn- slides-2014...](http://www.ams.org/programs/students/wwtbam/cohn- slides-2014-web.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> _It's possible to build an analogue of the pyramidal orange stacking in every dimension, but as the dimensions get higher, the gaps between the high- dimensional oranges grow._

In case like me you're wondering just _how_ densely you can pack spheres in the highly favorable 24th dimension: the best you can do is about 0.2% of the total volume.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice#Geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice#Geometry)

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to look at the "believed optimal" schemes for packing spheres in each dimension and analyze how the packing density changes.

<comment><USER8> MathWorld has a really good article [0] with density numbers from R2 through R8 if you're interested.

[0] [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HyperspherePacking.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HyperspherePacking.html)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! You might also be interested in this thing, sort of a slideshow, that I posted up above: [http://www.ams.org/programs/students/wwtbam/cohn- slides-2014...](http://www.ams.org/programs/students/wwtbam/cohn- slides-2014-web.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Way back in college I wanted to learn more about robots, so I took a class called 'Cybernetics' taught by David Huffman (who invented Huffman coding). The class wasn't about robots (I misunderstood; it was about information theory and control systems).

In the very first lecture Huffman concluded the class with the statement "It turns out, sphere packing in 7 dimensions is easy! And this has applications to telephone routing..." (he worked for Bell Labs).

I thought it was interesting how he spent nearly an hour explaining something that seemed totally pure math and it ended up helping AT&T scale phone networks.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice, although it would be nice to have an idea of the proofs behind.

<comment><USER8> The paper [0] was linked, the article gave context to the problem and outlined the approach. What more do you want?

[0] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04246](http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04246)

<comment><USER11> This is more grokable for the average geek than most, but I think he was looking for a less mathematically jargon-y translation. E.g., something like[1] this written to translate from the "math" domain into the "average dude" domain, done by the co-founder of Julia. R_8 / R_24 is still impressive, haters. ;)

We both might know enough about math to know what a Lebesgue measure is, but Real Analysis wasn't a requirement for most CS majors posting on here I'd imagine. (I agree with my uncle/aunt poster, though-- this is way more accessible to the general mathematician than a Wiles on Fermat or Perelman on Poincare. It's self-contained enough to clearly define * weakly-holomorphic modular form* [which I could take a stab at, but not with too high of a confidence factor]. Spending a few minutes to throw (19) in there was kind of the author to do, so those from other disciplines of mathematics could continue reading instead of just presuming what \gamma was.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fascinating article. I wonder if this is indeed the same E8 as the Lie group that Garrett Lisi suggested (incorrectly) as a possible structure for a theory of everything?

<comment><USER13> Lisi's proposal was discussed 8 years ago at [0]. A quick scan of [1] and [2] leads me to suspect that it is the same E8 - but I'm not a mathematician so don't go and bet any money on it...

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=258198)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_(mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E8_\(mathematics\))

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leech_lattice)

<comment><USER14> Not the exact same mathematical object, but closely related -- it's not at all coincidental that both are called E8.

The lattice is really easy to describe. It's a set of points in 8-dimensional space, so each point is specified by 8 numbers. A point is in the lattice if the following conditions hold. (1) Either all its coordinates are integers, or all are half-integers. (2) The sum of the coordinates is an even integer.

(And then the densest packing of spheres in 8-dimensional space puts the centre of a sphere at each point. The radius of the spheres is then 1/sqrt(2).)

The E8 that features in Garrett Lisi's attempted "theory of everything" is a so-called "Lie group". I'll attempt to sketch the relationship between lattices like the E8 lattice, and "Lie algebras", and Lie groups, and particle physics, but note that all of what follows is really handwavy and sometimes just plain wrong. Sometimes on purpose, probably sometimes by mistake. I'm sorry about any mistakes, but the deliberate lies and sketchiness are necessary to keep this shorter than textbook length. I hope it's at least semi-comprehensible.

(Although it's shorter than a textbook, it's also too long for a single HN comment. I'll break it into pieces and make each a reply to its predecessor. HN mods, let me know if this is considered bad form and I'll refrain from doing it in the future.)

OK, here goes.

PHYSICS AND SYMMETRY

OK, let's begin at the physics end. Here are some facts about plain old Newtonian physics. (1) The physical laws make no reference to particular positions in space; equivalently, if we e.g. replace (x,y,z) with (x+a,y+b,z+c) everywhere, for constant a,b,c, then the laws don't change. (2) If you have a system of particles interacting only with one another, the total momentum (sum of mass times velocity) is constant. It turns out that #1 and #2 are sort of equivalent: for a broad class of physical theories, _symmetries_ (like #1, the fact that adding a constant to the coordinates changes nothing) are equivalent to _conservation laws_ (like #2, conservation of momentum). Here's a subtler one: the laws don't pick out preferred times any more than preferred positions, and that fact is equivalent to conservation of energy.

That was all in Newtonian physics, but it works more or less the same in relativity and in quantum mechanics.

There are some much subtler kinds of symmetry present in our physical laws, and they give rise to subtler conservation laws. For instance, you may be familiar with the notion of "phase" in optics; in a classical picture this corresponds to the exact location/timing of the electromagnetic waves that make up light; in quantum mechanics everything is described by a "wavefunction" whose value at every point in the relevant configuration space is a complex number, and the optical phase of light turns out to correspond to the phase of the photons' wavefunctions. Changing all the phases by the same constant amount leaves every possible observation you could make unaltered, which means it's a symmetry of the physical laws; and this symmetry turns out to correspond to _conservation of electric charge_.

This picture gets more complicated when you throw in the "weak nuclear force", which turns out actually to be kinda the same thing as electricity and magnetism, and hairier still when you throw in the "strong nuclear force". You get symmetries that, e.g., describe exchanging different kinds of particle with one another (kinda), and corresponding conservation laws.

GROUPS AND LIE GROUPS

If you look at a high enough level of abstraction at what different kinds of symmetry have in common, you get the pure-mathematical notion of a _group_. The idea, roughly, is that if you have some thing (e.g., a block of metal or a physical theory) and some kind of symmetry (e.g., ways you can move the block of metal around and end up with it looking exactly the same as before; ways you can change some things in the laws of physics and end up with equivalent laws), then _all the symmetries of the thing_ together have a particular kind of mathematical structure. This basically comes down to these rather obvious observations: if you have two operations that leave your thing looking the same then _doing one and then the other_ also leaves your thing looking the same; and _undoing_ one such operation also leaves your thing doing the same. And a mathematical structure that supports "doing one thing and then another", and "undoing a thing", is a group.

These symmetries in physics have an important feature: they don't occur in isolation but come in continuously-varying families. E.g., translation- invariance, the (x+a,y+b,z+c) thing, allows _any_ value of a,b,c; you can vary them continuously and get the same results all the time as you do so. This means that the _symmetry groups_ that describe them mathematically have this continuously-varying property, and the mathematical formalization of this gives you the notion of "Lie groups". (Named after a mathematician called Sophus Lie.)

Some Lie groups can be built out of other simpler ones, in something a bit like the way that some numbers can be written as the product of other smaller ones. If you break them down as far as possible, you get to the so-called "simple Lie groups", which are kinda like the prime numbers: every Lie group can be built out of simple Lie groups.

And it turns out that we can figure out what all the possible simple Lie groups are. There are four infinite families of them called A,B,C,D, and a few special ones that don't fit into the families. The most complicated of these special ones is called E8.

<comment><USER14> (Second part. There will be one more.)

A BIT MORE PHYSICS

Garrett Lisi's attempted "theory of everything" was based around the idea that the pattern of symmetries of the laws of physics is that of the group E8. We don't see all those symmetries in the laws we know, but that isn't necessarily a problem because of a thing called _spontaneous symmetry breaking_. Imagine a big tank of water. Within that tank (at least away from its edges) no direction is different from any other -- the laws of physics don't have preferred directions, and neither does a bunch of water molecules bouncing off one another at random. This symmetry corresponds to _conservation of angular momentum_ , so e.g. movements of water within the tank should obey that law. OK; now what if we reduce the temperature and the water freezes? Ice crystals, unlike liquid water, have a regular structure and they _do_ have a preferred direction; so some things that happen in our tank full of ice may fail to conserve angular momentum.

(Let me be careful about this. Of course the overall laws of physics still satisfy that law, so if we consider the whole contents of the tank C of AM will still hold. But if we treat the ice in the tank as "background" and consider, I dunno, electrons moving around within the ice or something, _their_ total angular momentum may fail to be constant, because of angle- dependent interactions with the ice.)

The same kind of thing can happen with the more "abstract" kinds of symmetry: as the universe cools -- and note that the universe now is much much cooler than shortly after the big bang -- it may settle into some less-symmetrical configuration (like our tank of ice), and the asymmetries in the universe may look to use like asymmetries in the laws, even though the real fundamental laws are symmetrical.

So, anyway, Lisi's theory is probably wrong, but the mere fact that E8 is bigger than the group of symmetries we actually observe in the universe isn't in itself good reason to disbelieve it. Now let's do (or at least gesture vaguely towards) some more mathematics, with the hope of ending up with some understanding of how the group E8 relates to the lattice E8.

LIE ALGEBRAS

To describe the relationship between the Lie group E8 and the lattice E8, I need to go via another kind of mathematical object called a Lie algebra. These are in some sense simpler cousins of the Lie groups, but they're harder to describe and harder to explain why you'd care about them. Still, here goes.

Let's look at one of the very simplest Lie groups. Take the ordinary euclidean plane -- imagine an infinitely large perfectly flat piece of paper. Fix a point in it; call it O. And consider _rotations around O_. These form a Lie group; it's sometimes called U(1), never mind why. We can describe it geometrically: it's a circle. (Pick some point that isn't O; call it P. Describe any rotation by saying where P goes to. That point is always on the circle through P with centre O. Conversely, if we pick such a point, there's a rotation that takes P there.)

A circle is pretty simple, but you know what's even simpler? A straight line. And if you look only at very small portions of the circle, they look a lot like very small portions of a straight line. This is the fundamental idea behind calculus: all nice things look linear if you look at a small enough scale. And linear things are easier to work with, mathematically. So: suppose we have a Lie group -- that is, a continuously-varying set of symmetries of something. Take a tiny region of it near to the origin; that is, near to the trivial symmetry that does nothing. This tiny region looks like a piece of euclidean space in some number of dimensions, but there's some extra structure on it that describes the relationships between those symmetries -- what happens when you do one followed by another.

What does that extra structure look like? It turns out that it's best described by what's called a _bracket operation_ , meaning that given two elements x,y we have another written [x,y] which you should think of as meaning xy-yx. Imagine e.g. that x,y are actually matrices. Matrix multiplication usually doesn't commute, so generally xy-yx is not zero. Here, in some sense the multiplication operation corresponds to the "do one symmetry followed by another" operation on the original Lie group; that no longer exists in our "infinitesimal" view, but the bracket describing what changes when you switch the order of the symmetries still does. Kinda.

The bracket operation obeys a number of laws like the so-called Jacobi identity [x,[y,z]] + [y,[z,x]] + [z,[x,y]] = 0. The details aren't important right now. Anyway, the idea that we end up with when we follow this path and _do_ attend to the details is that of a thing called a "Lie algebra", which describes what small pieces of a Lie group look like, and which in general looks like a euclidean space of some dimension together with a "bracket operation".

Corresponding to the Lie group called E8 there is, therefore, a Lie algebra also called E8.

<comment><USER14> (Third and final part.)

REPRESENTATIONS, WEIGHTS, AND ROOTS

Suppose we have a Lie group and its corresponding Lie algebra which, remember, is kinda like a blown-up copy of an infinitesimally tiny bit of the original group. Then there's a natural way for the group to "act on" the algebra, which roughly speaking corresponds to the ordinary "do one symmetry and then another" operation in the group.

But the Lie algebra is, among other things, a vector space (what I've described above as a euclidean space), and it turns out that each symmetry in the group gives us a linear transformation of that space. Another way to say this is that we're taking our abstract symmetry group, and exhibiting its elements as symmetries of a particular object, namely the Lie algebra. This situation, where you have a group and you find a way to turn its elements into linear transformations of a vector space, is called a _representation_ of the group.

We can also have the Lie algebra act on itself in a basically-equivalent way, and then what we get is a representation of the Lie algebra.

(In quantum physics, the state of the universe is described by a vector in an enormous vector space, symmetries of the laws of physics correspond to linear transformations on that vector space, and so representations arise quite naturally. If instead of asking about the whole universe we ask about some much smaller configuration of particles, we get a much smaller vector space; if the symmetries we're interested in leave that configuration of particles alone, we get a representation on the smaller vector space.)

The next bit is kinda unmotivated. I'm sorry.

So, suppose you have a representation of a Lie algebra -- a manifestation of its elements as linear transformations on a vector space. Consider what's called a "Cartan subalgebra", which is to say as large as possible a subspace of the Lie algebra with the property that within it _all the brackets are zero_. (Meaning that the corresponding things in the Lie group _commute_ , meaning that it doesn't matter whether you do A then B or B then A.) Let's give names to some key objects here. G consists of the linear transformations corresponding (under our representation) to the original Lie algebra. H consists of the ones coming from the Cartan subalgebra; so it's just a portion of G, usually a lot smaller than G itself.

Now, suppose we have g in G and h in H. We can apply our bracket operation to them -- in fact, since we're doing all this via the representation, the bracket is always just gh-hg in terms of matrix (= linear transformation) multiplication. If we're lucky, the following amazing thing might happen: this might (1) always be a scalar multiple of g, where (2) the actual multiple only depends on h. That is, we might have [g,h] = f(h)g for some function f, which in fact will always have to be linear. That would be a hell of a coincidence, but perhaps a smaller coincidence might happen: the same might hold but only for some subspace of G.

The linear functions on H for which this _does_ happen for a nontrivial subspace of G are called _weights_ for the representation. (It's a pretty terrible name. I'm sorry.)

There's a particularly important representation called the "adjoint representation", which is the one I described above immediately under the heading "REPRESENTATIONS, WEIGHTS, AND ROOTS". The weights of the adjoint representation are called "roots", which is also a terrible name.

What happens for E8? Well, the Cartan subalgebra is pretty small; it's 8-dimensional (versus 248-dimensional, as it happens, for E8 itself). To describe a linear function that maps an 8-dimensional space onto numbers, you need 8 numbers -- e.g., the first says what number (1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) maps to. So you can think of its roots as also living in an 8-dimensional space.

It turns out that there are exactly 240 roots for E8; they are as follows. First, there are all the 8-dimensional integer vectors of length sqrt(2); that is, the vectors of 8 integers consisting of six 0s and two +-1s. There are 112 of these. Second, there are the 8-dimensional vectors whose entries are all +1/2 or -1/2, where we have an even number of +1/2 and an even number of -1/2\. There are 128 of these.

THE ROOT LATTICE

Finally: the _root lattice_ for a Lie algebra consists of all integral combinations of its roots. So, e.g., for E8 we have the 240 roots listed above; call them r1,r2,...,r240. The root lattice consists of everything you can get by picking integers a1,a2,...,a240 and computing a1.r1 + ... + a240.r240.

And lo, the root lattice is exactly the E8 lattice I described way up above.

<comment><USER15> That was one hell of a ride. Great explanations, really enjoyed it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So how many golf balls fit in 7-dimensional school bus?

<comment><USER17> If I'm solving 7-dimensional brain teasers during interviews, I better be getting a 7-dimensional paycheck if I'm hired.

<comment><USER18> Of course you will. Now the trick is to find a 7-dimensional bank to cash it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Relevant: How to turn a sphere inside out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M)

Perfect Shapes in Higher Dimensions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4TqVAbfz4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4TqVAbfz4)

<comment><USER20> I think the sphere eversion is actually not a related problem in mathematical terms.

In any case, that video is part of the excellent longer film "Outside In" made at the Geometry Center in the 90s:

[http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/outreach/oi/](http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/outreach/oi/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if this has impact on pCells, the "holy grail of networking": [http://www.cnet.com/news/is-pcell-the-holy-grail-of- wireless...](http://www.cnet.com/news/is-pcell-the-holy-grail-of-wireless- networking/)

<comment><USER22> There are lots of holy grails in networking. PCells are possible today but there's basically zero business cases for rolling this tech. Consider that users don't want to pay more for faster access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> although the practical implication of proving leech and E8 are optimal is somewhat unsurprising (as both have been known to be remarkably close to the feasible optimal), the theoretical framework using modular forms could shed some light on the connection with the monster. but then again i tend to be a bit of an optimist hoping john conway's desire for a connection get fulfilled.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's just amazing what mathematics can do.

What was once attacked with NP-hard algorithms now has a constructive one.

Reminds me a little bit of the lottery problem - one has to find the minimum sized set of tickets that guarantee a match of at least K numbers on any of the tickets. Statistics can easily get you the expected number of tickets you have to buy but finding that minimum set can be mapped to a minimum set cover (where you're trying to cover all tickets with your set so that tickets in the set match all possible tickets in at least K numbers).

Then, all of a sudden maths can put bounds and direct formulas of how many tickets your set has to have (not trivial).

Leaving you again with a constructive polynomial algorithm.

<comment><USER25> For anyone else that's curious, the lottery problem is called the Transylvanian lottery: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania_lottery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania_lottery)

The primary observation is if you want to match k numbers on tickets where you pick n numbers, each ticket simultaneously covers n choose k different k-tuples. The Translyvanian lottery is designed so that finite projective planes give you the minimal result (no pair appears on more than one ticket).

This sort of combinatorial design is rumored to have been used by the MIT syndicate that gamed the Massachusetts lottery (notably, they manually and laboriously picked their numbers while the other two syndicates were using random quick picks).

(I've had to learn a lot about lotteries in the last two years :P)

On a side note, finding a minimal set of tickets to cover a set of outcomes is exactly analogous to testing software with pairwise testing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All- pairs_testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pairs_testing)

<comment><USER24> General problem - having ticket with k numbers where possible numbers are from 1 to n, find the minimal set of tickets that will cover all of the possible ones so that at least one ticket in your set has at least m equal numbers on the ticket that is drawn (m <= k). (Trivial example. To win the lottery - guarantee k matches - one has to buy all of the tickets.)

It is still unsolved although maths has provided some nice bounds for large amounts of (n,k,m) triplets, and solutions to (n,k,2). Although, for the (n,k,2) a simple greedy set cover finds the optimal solution always.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Higher dimensions like in Hegel?)</comment>


Let us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers - <AUTHOR> https://trackthis.link/ <comment><USER2> Previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283382)

(Links to the blog post about this - [https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/hey- advertisers-track-this/](https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/hey-advertisers- track-this/))

</comment><comment><USER3> Doubt the effectiveness of doing this one time. I already go on stints looking for something that's not in my long-standing interests. My browsing history will correct the aberration afterwards.

IMO, to hide true traffic you'd need to run a constant steam of noise requests, in which the real visits would be undiscernible. And the noise might need to be non-uniform, unpredictable and still follow the patterns of normal traffic, so it can't be filtered out.

<comment><USER4> I propose peer-to-peer networked browsing. Whenever someone _else_ visits a website, it loads on your browser, with your cookies. Their browser anonymously and securely sends the URL to your browser. It runs in the background, loading fully rendered web pages headlessly. And also these URLs never make it on to your browsing history. In fact you do not ever see the URLs at all, for the privacy of the network. They exist only for the trackers.

Solved.

<comment><USER5> Seems like a good way to get arrested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I get the feeling that trackers are smart enough to detect this kind of activity

And besides, I imagine most people who care enough to use tools like this have personalised ads disabled already

<comment><USER7> Maybe I'm in the minority here, but if I am going to get shown ads I would rather they are tailored to me instead of being irrelevant.

<comment><USER8> That depends on whether they're tailored to show me products I might be interested in, or misleading information that has been tested to work well to influence people with my political inclinations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are we incentivizing trackers to get more powerful ? This seems to be the equivalent of antibiotics overdose.

</comment><comment><USER10> For a website that's has an agenda against trackers, you'd think they wouldn't include google analytics / trackers...

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of that old emacs email extension that inserts a bunch of random keywords into every email.

<comment><USER12> M-x spook.

[https://everything2.com/title/M-x+spook](https://everything2.com/title/M-x+spook)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Beautiful! But this could run as an invisible background job alongside the ad blocker.

<comment><USER14> It already exists, Its called ad nauseam. Its an adblocker that opens every ad in the background. Google has banned it from the chrome store so that says something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If we want to fight tracking, both users and publishers have to see some benefit in it. Now publishers want first-party tracking and don't care about third-party; while users mostly don't care.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are browser extensions like Noiszy and AdNauseam that pollute your history and activity profile on an ongoing basis.

<comment><USER17> Which has the side effect of requiring you to input a captcha every time you quickly want to google anything.

<comment><USER18> I already have to do that, if you're on Firefox, you get treated like a bot and have to solve 10+ puzzles on recaptcha, possibly even just ending on a "network error" screen regardless.

<comment><USER14> If you enable the resist fingerprinting setting on Firefox every website will slam you with captchas and random errors.

<comment><USER18> I don't run with resist fingerprinting, the problem persists even if I am on a fresh firefox install with no addons and try to log into my google account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> HaHa. This is pure evil. I'm liking it. The 'Anti-Tor' is here.

</comment><comment><USER20> Prime Question : Does this fool google reCaptcha V2.0?

</comment><comment><USER21> This assumes that trackers are accurate

</comment><comment> ga-vu This never worked for me.</comment>


Aung San Suu Kyi: Released from House Arrest - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/11751209 <comment><USER2> In 2006 I visited the Yangon Zoo. Four elephants were chained behind a short barrier (designed more to keep humans out than elephants in). They begged zoo visitors for handouts, swaying side to side as much as the chains allowed. A fifth elephant, the matriarch, was swaying too but it had no chains.

Maybe the elephant had been there so long that it had grown chains in its mind. Or maybe it realized there is little freedom in Burma, inside or outside of its enclosure.

I hope this turns out to be a positive change. If there are any HNers living in Burma, I look forward to the day when the barriers are torn down and we're free to hack together :)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who don't know her, she won the Nobel Peace prize in 1991.

From <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/world/asia/14myanmar.html> _"She is a hero of mine," said President Obama, "and a source of inspiration for all who work to advance basic human rights in Burma and around the world."_</comment>


Do they really use Fiber Optics in AT&T fiber service? - <AUTHOR> https://forums.att.com/t5/AT-T-Internet-Features/Why-the-lies-about-U-Verse/td-p/4746505 <comment><AUTHOR> I saw their marketing recently in Costco as well. Do our cities (where they claim to support) already have fiber optic cables laid out?</comment>


Show HN: Time to give crowdshipping a go? - <AUTHOR> http://signup.tinycarrier.com TinyCarrier is a web service that connects travelers and people who have a need to send or receive things. It could be personal stuff like books and clothing, a product that you have someone buy for you because it is not available in your country. Transporting items for other people is not a new concept, we just make it safe, social and global.
This is not a package/parcel service. Carries will be packing the items themselves in their own luggage. Carrier and requester are responsible for reporting goods in customs. The service will support this with communicate managed information about each location and the service will we ranking and testimonial based similar to AirBnB and Couchsurfing.
We will eventually be providing an API to allow for blogs, apps and curator services to make use of it as well.
For people thinking: commercialisation of drug mules, silk road, etc. In stead of thinking that everyone are criminals, try think that they are not (because their aren't) and think about the benefits. <comment><USER2> How will this site prevent travellers from being used as drug-mules? I'd be very cautious of carrying goods for somebody else on a flight.

The answer may be the 'community ratings' but how often does somebody need something shipped internationally? I doubt it is often enough.

I currently live in Australia, and I can get anything I want from Amazon, shipped fairly cheaply (for things that I want to buy). For my own belongings, that I've left in Canada, I have to go get them out of storage anyway, and they're all too big to have somebody put in their suitcase.

I think you're looking at too small a market with too much risk and not enough repeat business, but I would have said the same of AirBnB.

</comment><comment><USER3> Had this idea for years, couldn't think of a way to make money out of it, and also the fear of drug trafficking, the need to clear customs, the need for an import export license etc.

The idea is nice, I'm an expat so I always ask friends who fly back home to bring stuff, especially snacks that you cant find here. But making it a business is really tricky. I would gladly use such a service if it caches up, but I don't have the energy to invest in finding how to do it right.</comment>


U.S. Army establishes Cyber Command - <AUTHOR> http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/10/01/46012-army-establishes-army-cyber-command/index.html?ref=home-headline-title2

<comment><USER2> When I first heard about it, I thought that USCYBERCOM would end up becoming another branch of the U.S. military vs. the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force each getting their own. I could see them thinking that "the net" is just another type of terrain/environment for warfare. I don't think it is a bad idea to have the knowledge and resources in more places (after all, each branch has aviation, etc.), but I'm still surprised.

USCYBERCOM ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command> ) is composed of:

\- Army Forces Cyber Command (Army)

[http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/10/01/46012-army- establishes-...](http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/10/01/46012-army-establishes- army-cyber-command/)

\- Fleet Cyber Command / United States Tenth Fleet (Navy)

<http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=50954>

\- 24th Air Force (Air Force)

<http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123163831>

\- United States Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command (Marine Corps)

[http://www.ftmeade.army.mil/pages/news/stories/2010/jan/cybe...](http://www.ftmeade.army.mil/pages/news/stories/2010/jan/cyber.html)</comment>