Ask HN: How to learn language? - <AUTHOR>

I know, my english is very bad. I read a lot in english and hear english podcasts, but nothing help, because I don't get feedback and therefore I can't get better (or very slow).
Because of family, full-time job and side project I don't have spare time to just sit down and studying language. Only time I have is about 20-30 minutes per day while I travel from my work. Unfortunately, I can't memorize if I hear some sort of audio/video course. I learn from writing and conversations.
What could you suggest me?
One idea is to write some blog posts on mobile (n900, with keyboard and git, yeah) and then push it to github to allow pull requests. But I can't expect that some one will correct me. <comment><USER3> > One idea is to write some blog posts on mobile (n900, with keyboard and git, > yeah) and then push it to github to allow pull requests. But I can't expect > that some one will correct me.

Ah, but if you contribute to Wikipedia, someone DEFINITELY will correct your mistakes, AND in a way with rudimentary version control, so you can compare what you wrote to how it looks after the editors swarm in. Find a page on Wikipedia in your language about something that interests you and translate it into English. I personally use this technique to maintain & keep learning my (non-English) foreign languages, and if I can get a response from non-English wikipedia you can DEFINITELY get one from English Wikipedia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's nice idea! Thank you!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, glad to help!

Remember to try it the other way too, foreign language -> your language. Feedback isn't as reliable but it's a nice easy break and good for vocab/idiom acquisition.

Another thought... If you have trouble with active learning from language tapes, have you tried passive listening? This is where you just put on some background noise of people chatting in the language you want to learn (radio, podcast, Let's Play), maybe put some wordless music on over it, and then just listen for hours and hours while you work or commute with no expectation of understanding anything, like you're sitting in a coffee shop and the language is just washing over you. I've been trying this for a while and I do think it helps to improve the instincts & ear. Also anyone with an internet connection can do it, you can do it for HOURS at a programming job without anyone noticing, and it takes so little willpower (you just turn on the radio) that it's easy to maintain the habit over long periods of time. Most importantly, you can pick podcasts and games you are interested in... you're not just stuck with whatever boring situation is in the tape, like anigbrowl said. Maybe not as efficient as a conversation partner, but it's good for building confidence and good if you don't have a lot of time to ACTIVELY devote to language- learning. I'm not sure how well this would work if you knew next to nothing about the language in question, but that's obviously not your situation. So, yeah... maybe try audio again, but this time give up "trying". (:

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First of all, your English seems quite good. And English is a difficult language, especially the grammar. I wish I could express myself in Mandarin as well as you just did in English. Please don't be too hard on yourself. We're not language monks. The point is to communicate, and if anyone gives you a hard time about your ability while you're making a good effort, I think they probably need to get some perspective.

It's true, people are hesitant to make corrections. For one thing, although what you said might not have been completely correct, it was perfectly understandable. Another thing is that they might not know how best to make the correction without hurting your feelings or seeming pedantic. You just can't count on people to correct you.

One useful thing I did lately was to get on WeChat and start chatting with my Chinese friends. Many lines they send to me are goldmines of useful expressions, expressed naturally. Slowly but surely, I'm building up an arsenal of fragments I can use in situations that come up a lot. And I think each little fragment I master tunes my neural network to make learning the next fragment a little bit easier.

You say you can't learn from audio/video courses. I hope that's not true. I would think very carefully about why it's impossible. Maybe there's a way, and if there is, that would very very very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You say you can't learn from audio/video courses. I hope that's not true.

Audio/video courses are to passive. After 5 minutes I can't remember me any more on rules or how to pronounce. I learn best if I participate actively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to teach English. You need to talk to a native speaker who can answer questions or explain the pattern of mistakes. And I do mean talk - doing it in writing is going to be much, much slower. On the positive side, your English is not great but it's not 'very bad' \- I had no trouble understanding your sentence construction.

I fyou don't have access to a native speaker, the next best thing is to practice with movies. Audio/video courses are no good because typically you are dealing with isolated sentences or very artificial conversations - <USER2> don't care about any of the imaginary people or their situations, so your brain is not doing any work to imagine what things they would want to say. Pick some English-language films you like a lot (because you are going to have to watch them many times) and watch them with subtitles in your own language, then subtitles in English, then without any subtitles. Practice repeating the dialog to yourself, as if you were going to do the work of an actor. You can also practice writing out some of your favorite parts.

Repetition has value, in the right context. The story and characters are easy for your brain to engage with, so they will function as a mental anchor for the more abstract patterns of grammar and correct usage.

<comment><AUTHOR> I watch "Peppa Pig", "Hello Kitty" and so on in English with my daughter :D But also watch conference talks (like Google.io) in English. I understand most of written text (except of Harvard Business Review - authors select not common used words) and a little bit worse talks in videos.

But it's opposite if I want to speak or write.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My suggestion has always been playing games. I learned English purely from playing Runescape. Pick a (multiplayer) game like World of Warcraft or Minecraft and find an English-speaking group to play with.

</comment><comment><USER7> Download duolingo. It's awesome, and you can set goals of 5, 10 or 20 minutes a day, which sounds like it would fit in perfectly to your schedule.

</comment><comment><USER8> What language do you speak? Maybe we can do some cross language chats? I teach you English, you teach me whatever. I know a fair amount of Spanish and Japanese.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it possible to get involved in some kind of online live chat situation during your commute?</comment>


Why non-profit pricing? - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2580-why-non-profit-pricing <comment><USER2> > _Some might say that non-profits do good, while for-profits do business, but > I don't believe that 1. matters, or 2. suggests that for-profits don't do > good._

It's pretty easy to say "non-profits should pay the same as for-profits" when you exclude the entire foundation of the difference.

Non-profits get treated differently to incentivise their work. Instead of working to increase shareholder value, they work for some ulterior goal -- generally a beneficial goal that couldn't be brought around as a side-effect of some profit-making enterprise.

This difference isn't just a "some other difference", it's the crux. It's why they get special tax status while for-profit businesses -- yes, even those that "do good" -- don't. Society wants to encourage the work of non-profits.

Companies should consider offering special pricing to non-profits because it helps to encourage organisations that exist purely to do good, not organisations that are legally mandated to make money and may do good as a side-effect.

<comment><USER3> That assumes you believe non-profits actually do good. I do not feel this is remotely accurate about nonprofits as a class. Some aim to do good but are hideously ineffective, and some do "charitable" things that I find full-stop evil. (Some do good well, and I _choose_ to donate to them.) That is true for just about anyone, since nonprofits are so diverse. Why assume a-priority they are better than other organizations?

<comment><USER2> The actual implementation of non-profit status in the US is a different issue.

Consider patents. I agree with the idea of patents, but totally disagree with the US implementation. Likewise, I agree with giving discounts to non-profit organisations, but the more I dig the less I agree with the US system for awarding the status.

But that wasn't the argument made in the post. It wasn't "we would discount to non-profits if only there weren't so many lame orgs with that status" it was "why would we ever do this?".

<comment><USER4> >The actual implementation of non-profit status in the US is a different issue.

And how would you change that? I mean, you can't actually have the government decide what is "the greater good" and what is not- the whole point of charities is that they are non-governmental entities; they work on problems the government is either not addressing or addressing ineffectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know a few non-profits who get tens of thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft software and Cisco hardware for mere pennies on the dollar. Every year.

What would they be using if these large companies weren't so "generous"? Probably lower-cost alternatives, free, and open source options. And then they'd tell their non-profit friends about it. Not a good idea for Microsoft's bottom line I bet.

For companies like 37s and BingoCardCreator, on the other hand, a non-profit discount probably doesn't make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER6> I work for a non-profit as an IT manager (35 paid employees, ~50 unpaid employees) for an organization that tries to reduce poverty in the world. I've worked as an IT manager at "for-profits" for a while now, and this job is by far the most challenging.

This isn't true for all non-profits, but here there is nearly no budget. Our pay-scale is fixed, and we use interns in a big way. We rely heavily on 'sponsorship' from organizations who support our cause for nearly everything we do.

Of course I take advantage of blanket donation programs (from Microsoft and Cisco, for example) and "non-profit discounts", but that's not what I really want. I don't want to pick SharePoint because it's free for us, I want to pick it because it is a good solution and fits our needs. Sadly (and by-design, surely) that price point affects my proposals to management, and I have to say "Microsoft gives it to us for free, 37signals offers no discounts". :(

But these blanket discounts aren't what I push for with vendors. I want to build a special relationship with our sponsors. I want _you_ to donate _your_ software or services to us because _you_ believe in _our_ cause, just as I believe in our cause and have taken a serious pay cut to support it. I want that relationship to be sustainable: I don't want you to feel that the burden of supporting us is greater than the reward.

And there can be a lot of rewards. We have an extensive for-profit network, and we work very close with them. We have a ton of young, highly-educated staff who come through our organization. We have a very large base of supporters who engage us, and who we engage, online (twitter, facebook, etc). The list goes on and on, it only requires a bit of creative thinking to replace dollar signs.

So I'd re-phrase the question: What are _you_ doing to leverage a group of people who _need_ and _are passionate about_ using your product for an _important cause_ which _you support_ , but don't have the resources to pay full price?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> _We don't want to be one of those companies that has a "who you are determines how much we can charge you" pricing model. We find those models unfair, dishonest, and flat out unappealing._

Using moralistic language like this to describe non-profit pricing is a bit too harsh.

Would it be dishonest to donate their product or offer a discount to a single non-profit ? If not, why would it be dishonest to offer the same deal to 10 non-profits or all non-profits ?

I wonder what the blogger would say about freemium plans and tiered pricing. Freemium pricing always means that the paid customers subsidize free customers (many of whom will never become paid customers).OTH the absence of freemium may reduce the number of paid customers making the product un-viable.

Is it unfair and dishonest to do freemium pricing ?

[disclosure: All of our iPhone apps are registered in Apple's "education pricing" discount program for students and faculty. I see nothing dishonest about this.]

<comment><USER8> "Would it be dishonest to donate their product or offer a discount to a single non-profit ? If not, why would it be dishonest to offer the same deal to 10 non-profits or all non-profits?"

At our discretion, no. Just like you may choose to support a specific charity or cause without supporting all charities or causes, we may choose to put our support behind a specific charity or cause. As I mentioned in post, we've done exactly that.

But to say we should support every single non-profit by offering them a lower price simply because they are a non-profit doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER9> This is exactly his point.

You choose causes to support based on some criteria. Others choose causes based on the US Tax definition of 'non-profit'. Given that both are a matter of choice, it is harsh to call a set of criteria different than your own dishonest and unfair.

Or to strike more directly at the heart of the matter: when we behave charitably it is almost always suboptimal. A dollar given to the Gates Foundation is a dollar not given to Habitat for Humanity, and vice versa.

To criticize a system of generosity for being suboptimal is certainly reasonable, but now how most would probably want to spend their time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have not enjoyed getting teachers who make $60k explain to me why I need to subsidize them (haven't hit $60k in my entire life).

<comment><USER10> Where I was a teacher, $60k was the highest you could earn without a PhD. And it took 10 years to work your way up to that level.

EDIT: This was 5 years ago. I doubt teachers are making thousands of dollars more these days. My point is, the argument "teachers make so much money! What are they complaining about" is at best misinformed.

If you're hurting for money, try substitute teaching for 1 or 2 days and see what the difference is between a teacher's workday and your own. You'll probably take your less than $60k job over their most-likely-also-less- than-$60k-more-like-$30k-job

<comment><USER11> When I taught, I was working 10-12 hour days (some of this was due to my own inefficiency, and some of it was due to the massive inefficiency of the school in which I taught) and pulled in about $30k/year. Our salary schedule was such that the most I could earn without a doctorate was about $38k (after 20 years of experience).

That said, there are plenty of grant programs within schools. At least two of the districts in the city in which I live now have foundations set aside for things like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If one of the principal reasons for choosing your product is an opportunity to maximise profits, then an organisation that doesn't actually have that motivation arguably derives less value from it and logically ought to be less willing to pay market price. Same applies for discounts "for academic use" etc. Price discrimination isn't just about assuming a particular entity has less funds, period.

Whilst nonprofit != charity it's also perfectly reasonable to make the value judgement that it's fair to implicitly subsidise social goals at the expense of other clients' shareholder returns. Provided no laws are being flaunted, I can offer discounts on a service I provide to people for virtually any whether its because I believe in their mission, like them on a personal level, respect their OAP or veteran status or just desperately want their money. One of my local curry houses gives discounts to Arsenal season ticket holders. Nobody should feel _obliged_ to make these concessions, but when many companies do makes sense for nonprofits to ask the question. I bet 37signals get plenty of emails from startups and small businesses asking for a dose of sympathy and lower prices too.

Sometimes, where you have a high margin business and close competitors that will discount, it makes sense to give them what they ask for too.

<comment><USER13> I think a lot of the academic discounts are an attempt to get lock-in and thus maximize profits over time.

If a budding artist gets used to Creative Suite (because it's cheap for them), or a new coder gets a cheap Mac, or a mechanic student gets a discount on SnapOn tools, all of those have a likely impact on their future purchases.

<comment><USER14> The discounts on Westlaw for law students in the late 1980s were certainly meant to gain lock-in. The law librarian who taught my law school class how to do online searching told us, "The company wants you to think of their product as heroin."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or, you know, a standard case of price discrimination (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination>). Non-profit vs. others isn't a perfect measure of willingness and ability to pay, but does have some correlation. Rebates and coupons aren't perfect at identifying those with higher elasticity either, but they are still in common use.

<comment><USER16> ...In common use on 37Signal's signup pages, in fact. I don't blame 'em (because coupons work), but it certainly doesn't perfectly jibe with their "consistent pricing" mantra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> my experience is that non-profits are just as niggardly as ordinary businesses are, if not more so, but there's no incentive for the organization or its employees to do any better... nothing ever has an upside.

<comment><USER18> While your command of vocabulary is impressive, you should be careful with 'niggardly'. The word, while not technically racist, is obviously very close to some very bad parts of US history.

I'd suggest: stingy, greedy, or others - <http://www.answers.com/topic/niggardly>

<comment><USER19> The resemblance is entirely coincidental. The two words have unrelated etymologies. We might as well advise people to avoid words like "luck" and "truck," which are not technically profane, but obviously sound very close to a very bad word.

<comment><USER20> "Niggardly" is a rather uncommonly used word, though. One of our city officials used "niggardly" in a public event a few months ago, and a bunch of people got in an uproar. Were those people ignorant about this word? Yes. Would it have been better for the city official to have avoided it? I think so. Not every instance of language use is necessarily an opportune moment to enhance the vocabulary of others.

That said, I would like to think that on this particular forum such concerns ought to be minimal, at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> eh, it seems to me like more for-profit companies should put more of their marketing budget into charity. Now, I mean, not just any charity, but a charity related to their field, something that their customers care about. I mean, I know I've donated prizes to a few programming contests to good effect... and I pretty regularly see my competitors names as mirrors when I go to download open-source products.

And really, how many banner ads would it take to gain the credibility of getting on the EFF "thanks" page? (I'm not there just yet... but I do have, for example, a LOPSA member discount.)

The other advantage of taking it out of your advertising budget is that the legal status of the entity you are giving to doesn't matter. From the for- profit corp's perspective, they are buying advertising.

I mean, when I do it, at least, I don't write off the retail "value" of the thing I gave away as some sort of charitable donation; I think that's scummy, 'cause it cost me some fraction of that to provide. I give away the service, then whatever it costs to provide that service, obviously, is part of the cost of running prgmr.com and is written off against any income, just like what it costs to run the for-pay domains; except these don't have any money coming in. I'm getting good (and usually pretty cheap) advertising; I don't need to run some tax scam, too.

</comment><comment><USER21> I imagine the reason the reason why many non profits ask about a discount is because it's common to grant one. It seems likely that the firms offering those discounts are doing so not "out of the goodness of their heart" because their experience is different than 37signals--that their "for profit" customers can and will pay a much higher price for their product or service. Offering a non-profit discount is a way to capture what money the the non- profits are willing to pay. Why leave money on the table?

It's not clear to me why market segmentation would be described as "unfair or dishonest". Does Jason go through life gritting his teeth at the immorality of senior citizen's discounts at the movie theatre? Does adding a few minor differences to a product, business class seating for example, transmute an "unfair and dishonest" practice into an acceptable one?

To be clear, I can imagine cases where having "a clear price that we stick to" is an effective policy. Saturn seemed to do well with that policy for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER22> Non-profits take forever to make decisions. Don't waste your time with them.</comment>


Web Typography Is Lacking Behind. How to change it? - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/web-technology/digital-typography-needs-to-move-forward/

<comment><USER2> Lacking Behind - A serious medical condition that saddens rappers everywhere and makes them admit "I like big [behinds] and I cannot lie."</comment>


Vulnerability Spotlight: Python.org certificate parsing denial-of-service - <AUTHOR> https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2019/01/vulnerability-spotlight-pythonorg.html <comment><USER2> [https://bugs.python.org/issue35746#msg333764](https://bugs.python.org/issue35746#msg333764)

>td;dr if you have cert validation enabled and only trust public root CAs from CA/B forum, then you are not affected.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the advisory page loading for others?

[https://www.talosintelligence.com/reports/TALOS-2018-0758](https://www.talosintelligence.com/reports/TALOS-2018-0758) 404s

<comment><USER2> 2019 not 2018.

[https://www.talosintelligence.com/vulnerability_reports/TALO...](https://www.talosintelligence.com/vulnerability_reports/TALOS-2019-0758)</comment></comment>


I'm no longer advocating for clean energy; here's why (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://jmkorhonen.net/2017/07/26/im-no-longer-advocating-for-clean-energy-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> It was hard to figure out what the author's main points are, but it seems that they are upset because (paraphrasing) "environmentalists are against nuclear energy". Meanwhile, the author sees nuclear energy as part of the solution to moving away from fossil fuels.

I think both, the author and the author's antagonists, are right: it'll take a diversified source of energy (nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) to ween the world off of burning shit, however it's very likely too late to mitigate the problems we're going to face as a result of human-induced climate change.

<comment><USER3> >I've recently studied the criticisms of prevailing economic system, and the possibilities of radical left politics that would make "Star Trek socialism" – or Fully Automated Luxury Communism – a topic of serious political debate.

His point is that, "I'm a consultant, I work in sweeping generalizations and broker attention, give me money."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author has every right to stop, but should be mindful that solar is now cheaper than coal in many geographies. And some of the most well-funded companies on the planet are spending oodles of capital on battery technology. (Literally almost every big tech company.)

Edit: Irony being that some of the largest deployments of solar panels are in OPEC nations.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know if _anyone_ in the world has been able to make even a gross estimate of how much energy (and in general, environmental impact) goes into making clean energy, and how it actually compares to dirty energy when everything is included? (I mean including everything starting with mining the relevant metals, etc.)

<comment><USER6> This is called EROEI: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested)

<comment><USER5> Makes sense, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Considering the growth in renewable technology I'd like to see an updated graph of build times. I doubt building Nuclear energy is anywhere near as fast as renewable energy today.

<comment> King-Aaron This may be pretty inaccurate, but I recall hearing a comment from someone (in a position of authority on the subject, but for the life of me can't remember who it was) mention that "no nuclear reactor construction has ever been completed on-time or on-budget".

I'd love to find the source of this quote though and check it's validity.

<comment><USER8> This is a problem when you build ten, build a thousand and you'll have an engineering force able to more accurately predict things.</comment></comment></comment>


Hire devs or outsource for Bitcoin startup? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, massive respect to the hackernews community.
I've had bad luck hiring developers for startups in the past, as I'm not a developer.  I have not outsourced development before, and think it might work better?
Luckily some companies already successfully turn merchant accepted into dollars for them.  So it's easy to show a developer what an example of a successfully adopted end product can look like to a user.  Bitpay, etc.
So how would one choose between a software development company, and in housing? <comment><USER2> In general, it's better to have the team work closely together in one office. If you want to bring in contract developers they should be reachable during the time when you work because you'll probably need to communicate very often. So, the timezone difference shouldn't be too large (USA - Europe is probably too much already, at least for your main developers). Later you might want to have a backup developer in a different time zone, so he can troubleshoot problems while you're sleeping. Also, when outsourcing it would be better to pick someone (or a team) with startup experience.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is the startup experienced hire more flexible? Yes, its funny, with a bitcoin business, I'd imagine there is no business that gets port scanned more often. Everyone's probably looking for a hotwallet. I think I can mitigate that with deterministic wallets and or pre computed pools of watch only addresses. Both of these solutions would result in private keys never seeing a network.

So for hiring devs in the philippines, it seems that there's no hits for the word bitcoin in the searchable job resumes. Any tips on what other keywords I might be using? Node.js and javascript if we use any of the bitcore.io stuff? A database guy, a full stack guy? I think 3 guys can get the job done in a reasonable time frame. Chain.com could likely take much of the load off the backend dev.

At a loss as to how to choose 3 programmers from a sea of programmers with job applications ready for hire.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would lean towards hiring devs, even if remotely, as opposed to outsourcing.

Especially if your startup may be handling users' private keys, you will want a trustworthy domestic dev team. The last thing you want is millions of dollars (or bitcoins!) worth of your users' deposits to disappear without a trace overseas.</comment>


Time has no meaning at the North Pole - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/time-has-no-meaning-at-the-north-pole/ <comment><USER2> This is nonsense. Time has the same meaning at the North Pole as everywhere else on the planet. Scientific American was once an esteemed publication with very high standards. How sad to see what it has become.</comment>


How Computer Chips Work - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/how-computer-chips-work-1645654993

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8412744](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8412744)</comment>


Trends to watch in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/12/14-trends-for-2013.html

<comment><USER2> These trends are so broad and vague as to be basically meaningless.

<comment> d--b More interesting than to read about big data, the cloud and the slower pace of investment, though...

<comment><USER3> Not for me, I came here to read about big data, the cloud, and investment. Sometimes C++.

This article is Yahoo news worthy. But what amuses me is that people will up vote everything these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Trends that already happened in 2012 and might continue through 2013"

</comment><comment><USER5> Too much government stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope he is right about "health data commons".

Medical research can be greatly accelerated with access to the masses of data which have already been collected on people's medical histories, their response to treatments etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please keep using pdf.</comment>


Prodeus: Get Your Degree from YouTube - <AUTHOR> http://www.prodeus.co <comment><USER2> It's definitely a fascinating idea, I could see it fit as even an embedded service in online classes(Of trad university, or even new-age course- suppliers) where professors who make videos or have cleared-videos on a class playlist use that as class-participation etc. It's interesting indeed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Forget massive tuition costs. Earn an online degree with Prodeus for free. Find interesting classes and courses on Youtube, track your time learning and accrue hours towards a powerful digital credential, the ProDegree.</comment>


ScienceUrls is my new favorite Internet time waster. - <AUTHOR> http://scienceurls.com

<comment><USER2> Are you using hackurls.com source code ?

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm the author of ScienceURLs.

Actually, the whole thing was custom-written in about 2 days. I didn't even know that hackurls.com existed before I read your comment here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for making the site. Very useful.</comment></comment></comment>


Ambivalence on Technocracy - <AUTHOR> https://sonya.substack.com/p/ambivalence-on-technocracy <comment><USER2> >Competitive markets solve most problems on their own. (The largest exceptions are externalities and physical monopolies.)

I believe I align in position with the author for the most part, but this quote seems difficult for me. "Free market solves issues apart from every stakeholder other than supplier and consumer, i.e. most issues". Perhaps I am missing an element that is preventing me from embracing the principle of charity here.

More broadly thinking about the article,

\- (Not aimed at article or author) I think it is a disservice and detrimental to call modern states 'democracies', given that they lie somewhere in between pure democracies, meritocracies and clique dictatorships (given the amount of true input the people have in decisions, and the misalignment between public opinion and government decision (A large part of the latter appears to be a general 'lag' where governments trail behind general movement to the 'left' over centuries).

\- Laissez-faire govs (free market) could be argued as observationally a poor way to raise QOL (example reference: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/20446694?mag=socialism-make- peo...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20446694?mag=socialism-make-people- happy&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents), and here is a rebuttal to this theory: [http://www.forastateofhappiness.com/does-size-matter-i- highe...](http://www.forastateofhappiness.com/does-size-matter-i-higher-tax- happier-countries/)) \- There is clearly a problem with a free market, in that financial incentive is a blunt tool (hence externalities)

Government and capitalist structures both broadly reflect the same issue, "they don't truly reflect or act to our opinions, needs and wants". There seems to be 'bearish' opinion on government, turning people towards capitalism. Examples include embracing Uber and Airbnb (deciding not to, or missing the relevance, of legislation in the hotel and taxi industry).

Based on all of the above, it could be argued that:

\- The idealistic structure would be a socialist state reflecting expertise (meritocracy-technocracy spectrum) and opinion (pure/direct democracy)

\- However, the pragmatic structure (for those that have become cynical with the previous bullet) is to refer to the free market to fulfil needs.

\- The free market doesn't mirror opinion/needs (in a similar way to modern gov), but arguably is more likely to adopt systems _soon_ to allow for this (online 'referendums', 'vote with your wallet')

\- Governments are oligopolies in that there are very few options, and then only every 4 years.

\- In contrast for this, if we have a more outspoken and educated populace, then organisations will have to cater for this else demand falls (and other orgs that _do_ will fill the vacuum)

In practice, I feel that the best option to rely on (or expect) is a mix of both - E.g., New structures are explored by Capitalism that are carefully guided by the population and applied ethics - While more mature structures can be adopted / absorbed into socialist systems.

Therefore (hopefully) capitalist incentives will become far more nuanced, moving from a financial incentive (peppered with a little legislation) to a system that caters for more externalities, ethics, etc. This removes the 'middle-man'. At the moment, the government listens to the poeple, and legislates accordingly. This can take centuries or never happen at all. With a direct link between organisation and us (new technology allows for this), we can more rapidly see action taken. Facebook springs to mind - People are starting to question it's purely $-driven actions.

This vastly simplifies the issue of course, especially as organisations can all run concurrently (rather than a single party being in place to govern), meaning that a misaligned sub-population could still provide demand for an immoral company. Despite this, I am optimistic that orgs will start to use their online platforms to garner opinion and ensure that their output is aligned with us. They are incentivised to do so, as it increases demand. This optimism is actually a phoenix from the ashes of cynicism (after waiting decades for governments to open up local online referendums, treat petitions more seriously etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the substantive and interesting comment!

<comment><USER2> It was an interesting and thought-provoking article, thank _you_. I was going to email my comment to you actually, to see if you were able to provide rebuttals or issues with my points. Thoughts welcome.</comment></comment></comment>


House of pane: Apple was warned of glass danger - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Apple-was-warned-about-glass-danger-by-Cupertino-12723598.php <comment><USER2> So, Apple gets defeated by Windows after all?

</comment><comment><USER3> A fitting metaphor for style over substance!</comment>


The Great App bubble - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1684020/the-great-app-bubble

<comment><USER2> After fighting against a large number of people telling me I 'HAD' to turn my site into an app, I finally gave in today and decided to turn it into an app, and charge for what most people happily get for free.

I seem to regularly be the one to burst the bubble, so I guess that means the bubble should be over now.</comment>


Anonymous Facebook Attacks Begin at 9 AM - <AUTHOR> http://techzwn.com/2011/11/anonymous-facebook-attacks-begin-early/

<comment><USER2> I'm going to bet that these "attacks" aren't going to do anything to the Facebook network.

Also, Facebook users have _opted in_ to Facebook, and its data storage "tactics". If you aren't happy with it, then don't opt-in. As a 16 year old kid, I'm not missing out on anything important. My relationships, social life and life is still intact, despite not being part of Facebook.

There may be some who argue that people opt-in to Facebook don't know about it (certainly my teachers do). Let me say that complacency isn't an excuse. Only you are to blame if you sign up to some business offering you a $100,000 loan for 0% interest without considering and researching the possible repercussions.

It's your data. Facebook is free for you, but it obviously costs them money (without even considering the cost of technology, there's hiring employees). They have to recoup that somehow, and effectively to keep all your friends, your friends and your friends' friends' friends on it.

Disclaimer: I do have a Facebook account that I use to sign up to services that require that I have a Facebook account, like my school's gaming club, but there's no activity on it.

<comment><USER3> >Also, Facebook users have opted in to Facebook, and its data storage "tactics"

Not always.

Facebook stores data of people that are not even members, using tricks to make their real-world friends submit that kind of data. Upload you mobile phone contacts, find people from you Gmail address book on Facebook, etc.

So Facebook may well have lots of data about you, even though you do not have an account or any knowledge of that profiling.

(OpFacebook is stupid anyway)

<comment><USER2> They aren't tricks. Inviting your a friend to Facebook via. email isn't a trick, and keeping a record of it so that Facebook can notify both parties that the request has been accepted isn't a trick, for example.

It's still, nevertheless, far less than what people put on Facebook themselves. It might be comparable to me asking my friend about this person I saw the other day. Her friends are giving me that information. Though, as the person, I wouldn't appreciate my information shared, it's something that happens often in the real world, not just Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess people don't have anything better to do with their time.</comment>


Coverband: Production Ruby Code Coverage - <AUTHOR> https://techblog.livingsocial.com/blog/2013/12/17/coverband-production-ruby-code-coverage/

<comment><USER2> (Disclaimer: I work with Dan at LivingSocial) This has been a much nicer solution than my previous techniques which mostly involved grep and hope. Runtime analysis is just what's needed here. Great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds awesome! Can't wait to try it out!</comment>


Optimizing Django: tricks for faster page loads - <AUTHOR> http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/django-compress

<comment><USER2> This is not optimizing django.

This is use django-compress to bundle your js and css to have fewer HTTP requests and use HTTP expire headers for longer client-side caching.

<comment><USER3> Any good material/resource for optimizing django? If you know any.. Learning it for a while now...

<comment><USER4> <http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/cache/>

and check ur pages to make sure ORM isnt making ridiculous querys

edit: also use PNGCrush on ur PNGs if you made them with Adobe: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmt/files/>

<comment><USER3> Thank You, good Sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This blog article gives a good illustration of why I built InstaCDN. Getting your js/css/image assets combined, minified, gzipped and served from a CDN is tedious and error prone.

The article describes how to install some prerequisite minification software and perform series of configuration steps that span python, html, apache/lighttpd. It seems likely that his instructions will provide improved performance, but there's no CDN integration, some configuration details are left up to the reader to puzzle out and the comments already include some "gotchas" from real world configuration interactions.

InstaCDN is an alternative approach that does all the right stuff through a trivial REST API.

Would love some feedback, and to find out if/how it's breaking any of your complex css/js.

<http://www.instacdn.com/>

<comment><USER6> Seems nice, but I would try just to see it working and then give up. You have bills and it's a free service... Not having any kind of paid plan or income strategy makes you look suspicious.

<comment><USER5> It's just a side project right now. And amazon cloudfront is amazingly inexpensive. It would take a lot of adoption before I would need to start charging anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I have not used it myself (my projects are either internal or rather write-heavy), I heard a lot of good things about Cache Machine[1] (which is used in Mozilla Addons) and Johnny Cache[2]. Both provides automatic caching and invalidation of Django model.

      [1]: http://github.com/jbalogh/django-cache-machine
      [2]: http://packages.python.org/johnny-cache/

</comment><comment><USER8> Could be handy with Google App Engine. Other than that, doesn't seem extraordinarily "optimizing"

</comment><comment><USER9> While the versioning looks useful, for CSS/javascript compression I'm interested in knowing if most people use a language framework or if they configure the web server to do it.</comment>


Colleges Set to Offer Exit Tests - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323980604579029143959843818.html

<comment><USER2> I certainly don't trust GPAs. The best signal I can read from a transcript is how quickly someone when above and beyond the basics. Did they skip intro classes? Did they get into grad level courses? How quickly? Did they take more of any hard subject than required?

But GPA? A very poor one can be a signal (usually bad, occasionally good) but a good doesn't tell me much.</comment>


Don't Drop Out – Why There Is Value in College - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/essays-by-kern/don-t-drop-out-ed0e8d14e22d/

<comment><USER2> This is good stuff. I hate to see all the "stay in school" advice centered on "you'll get your dream job".

I met so many friends that have been helpful for my own learning and even job placements.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really liked how the author's points on how college helps in intellectual development, making friends and also having some fun in life. Life is not all about work; which most of the proponents of dropping out ignore.</comment></comment>


DuckDuckGo Wants Answers to Linux Questions - <AUTHOR> http://fossforce.com/2016/04/duckduckgo-wants-answers-linux-questions/ <comment><USER2> My favourite bang is !g

<comment><USER3> Agreed - I've found that >75% of my DuckDuckGo searches are !bang searches either for Wikipedia or Google-owned sites. I don't actually end up using DuckDuckGo search results all that much.

<comment><USER4> Why use DuckDuckGo then and suffer an extra roundtrip?

Chrome supports using different search engines directly.

In my Chrome, searching youtube.com is just "you<tab>query<return>", the en.wikipedia.org is "en<tab>query<return>", Google Maps is "maps..." etc.

The nice thing is that it picks up various search engines automatically. Useful for work etc.

And if you want to use DuckDuckGo _occasionally_ , it's just a "duck<tab>" away.

(And Google is my default search engine.)

<comment><USER5> I really dislike Google as a company and I like that DDG allegedly encrypts my searches and gets the data instead.

<comment><USER6> I don't think any amount of "encryption" will allow DDG to make a query to Google without Google knowing the contents of the query.

Also, doesn't !g just open a Google search with the specified query?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a tad confused. What do they want us to do?

<comment><USER8> Sorry for the confusion. In the reddit post there are a couple of Linux Instant Answers referenced. They each have an overview page with metadata:

[https://duck.co/ia/view/linux_cheat_sheet](https://duck.co/ia/view/linux_cheat_sheet) [https://duck.co/ia/view/linux_error](https://duck.co/ia/view/linux_error)

To actually see them in action, here are two example queries:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux%20cheat%20sheet&ia=cheatshee...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux%20cheat%20sheet&ia=cheatsheet) [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux%20enoent](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux%20enoent)

It would be great if Linux experts could check for errors and suggest improvements. This can be done via the "Create issue" button in each overview page. It's also possible to create new Instant Answers or submit PRs for improvements. We have a list of Instant Answers we're looking for, and links to our docs, here: [https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Programming- IA...](https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Programming-IA-Coverage)

I see you've already been doing this (thank you!) but hopefully explaining it here clears up confusion for others.

<comment><USER7> No probs, your documentation (once I found it) is actually top notch. Take it from someone who had to setup the LibreOffice repo on my system, which is quite well documented, you guys actually have the best and clearest documentation I've seen!

Contributing was a pleasure :-)

<comment><USER8> And that comment will go straight to the docs guy - thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ping greycat.</comment>


Ask HN: What "missing" technical solution(s) do you wish existed? - <AUTHOR> This could be just about anything, from "project A but written in language B", "an API or library for real world activity C", "a unified solution for both D and E", all the way to "An open source version of proprietary solution Z", etc.<p>Go wild, dream big. You never know, someone might respond with a link to such a project that already exists... or decide to start one! <comment><USER2> A peer to peer encrypted datastore that everyone can use to store their own metadata.

Facebook knows what movies I like and interests I have, Spotify knows what songs I listen to, Amazon knows what books I like to read. All of these pieces of data are currently silo'd and controlled by private corporations many of which can do whatever they like with that data.

I want a private encrypted datastore that does this instead. Peer to peer so nobody controls it or can kill it. And controlled by you so Government can't get access. You set up a node and contribute CPU power and disk space. Then you get a private address and key and can push small pieces of metadata to it. This data is mirrored and very redundant so it won't disappear if some nodes go offline.

Then any site can integrate with this store. People will build libraries to write to it with various languages and others will build websites which make it easy for the layman to store and get data from it. People could create online "metadata banks" so that less technical people don't have to run their own node. Integrating with this datastore will eventually be as easy as integrating with current oauth services.

Having one global system not controlled by anyone also means there's now a standardized way for any service to request access to your data. They don't have to specifically integrate with Facebook, Spotify, Bandcamp, Last.fm etc, they just have one integration point and you can choose what data you want to share with them.

And in theory it will live on forever so as future services grow and die your data doesn't die with it.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Major problem: Either existing services need to shift gears to support this third-party that reduces their control over data (when often, your data is how they make their money), or else new equivalent services using said third-party need to be made and meaningfully dislodge them (difficult, inertia is a thing).

<comment><USER2> These services already have apis that give up the data. So anyone could build data extractors that allow you to regularly pull your Metadata from them and store it in this new datastore.

Only the consumers of the data need to change their behavior. If there's easy to use libraries to access the data store and enough demand for it then more and more consumers will adopt it over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to slot my phone into a dock connected to three high resolution monitors and a keyboard/mouse and be able to do development work.

Essentially, when it's in my hand it's in Phone Mode, when it's in the dock it's in Desktop PC mode.

We are getting there with tablets. You can do this with the Surface for example thanks to Display Link technology. I just want the device to be _phone sized_ , around 5.5" or so with a good battery life when operating as a phone, a decent processor, a decent amount of Ram (8GB at least), and about 500GB of SSD storage.

With a Surface or equivalent tablet, you still need to carry around a bag with you to carry it in which is a pain. If that could be small enough to fit in your pocket that would be ideal!

<comment><USER5> Does the development environment have to be housed entirely on the phone itself? I ask because phones are too underpowered for most dev work. But, cloud technology is getting to the point where you can play AAA video games remotely with low latency using a modest computer as a client.

To extend on what you have, I think it would be really cool to have a phone app that brings up a remotely-hosted triple monitor dev environment when it's docked. The actual dev server could be anywhere and all you would need to access it, both at home and at work, is the phone. Kind of like a visual tmux.

edited: removed "which is why the many attempts at making desktop docks for phones have failed". There are many reasons they have failed, but not catering to devs probably isn't one of them. :)

<comment><USER6> Cloud is problematic because of cost of bandwidth and storage compared to local solutions. Until bandwidth is actually plentiful, uncapped, and cheap, I would rather have a local solution.

<comment><USER5> We're talking about a setup that's already plugged into the wall (triple monitors, keyboard, mouse). Just have the phone use Wifi.

I'll admit, having a self contained setup would be nicer, but that's not going to happen until batteries get much denser or phones get a lot more efficient.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure why what I plug it into cannot have its own computing and storage power. There are wired caps on data too.

In fact, why the heck did Apple sell a display and an iMac? Why not insert a processor board (a blade) into the display to turn it into an iMac? Why was the Mac Pro anything more than a bunch of slots for blades?

I want to carry a small display, some storage, and computing power and be able to dock it with more storage, display, and computing power. I really think we need to examine the PC in the post-PC world. Given the prices, I'm fine with the cloud being my backup, not work environment.

<comment><USER5> Hmm. That's an interesting idea. How would the phone and the PC work together, though? I could see it work if they were all the same architecture. Then you're just adding more ram and cores.

Actually, the ram could be an issue. For example, say you're running a video editing program that's using 15gb of ram and you want to undock. You'd need some way of storing the state of the program and the ram its using when it's not docked. Either that or you'd be forced to shut it down completely.

<comment><USER7> They wouldn't need to be the same architecture, but use a common means of communicating for coordinating tasks.

There's some precedent in the design of the Transputer plus daughterboards. Borrowing from the latter to handle the heterogenous nature of phone/PC pairings.

Making it hot-swappable would, of course, be a challenge. Using physical mechanisms to hold the device means that boards/phones/whatevers could be ejected safely only once various conditions (state saving, rerouting of data, etc.) were met.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. A language that synthesizes the advantages of Bash, Node, and ML... Basically an expressive yet simple type system, nice syntax, interactive environment, fast compilation, the ability to run as a script in Unix, first- class support for pipelines, files and sockets, and built in stuff for dealing with HTTP, JSON, regex, etc.

2\. An event sourcing database that's not a gargantuan Java EE thing, something like the Redis or SQLite of event sourcing. I just want to store a bunch of events and build indexes in the form of update functions. And then easily access the cached indexes and live event streams through HTTP.

3\. Something like Emacs but built on a React-like screen update model and engineered to be fast on something like a Raspberry Pi. We have a common room computer in our collective house that we use as a chat, todo, clock, etc, and right now it runs Emacs in xterm which is pretty good but the programming model is somewhat antiquated. (I tried making a React app but Chromium on the Raspberry Pi 2 is laggy, and besides Emacs is much nicer as an interactive environment.)

4\. A tiny laptop with no trackpad and an e-ink display.

5\. A scriptable bank account and a common metadata format for bills and invoices.

6\. A low cost global roaming SIM card and a flourishing web of minimal bandwidth text services.

7\. An accurate ebook parser generating semantic markup and a nice variety of innovative reading interfaces, for example showing one paragraph at a time, some kind of interactive mind mapping reader, etc.

8\. A collaborative text editor that works more like a chat than a word processor.

<comment><USER9> > a common metadata format for bills and invoices

Such a format does exist: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDIFACT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDIFACT)

It's just hardly anyone uses it. It's got some adoption with large companies such as auto manufacturers that mandate their suppliers to use it but it's far from wide-spread (and certainly not with SMBs or consumer-oriented offerings).

There also is MT940 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MT940](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MT940) ) which in theory can be used for exchanging and scripting bank accounting data. The format is a terrible mess though with each bank implementing it slightly differently (if they do offer it at all).

Then there is the Incoterms ruleset ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms) ), which is commonly used in supply chain management.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish that webcams on laptops had open-source hardware and also a hardware switch, which connects and disconnects the webcam from the laptop (and thanks to open source hardware you can be sure, that the switch has no "back-door"). Turining that switch off and on would be much easier than putting the duct tape off and on all the time.

Similar hardware switch would be useful for cameras and microphones in smartphones. You can never be sure, what your iOS, or Windows Phone, or some modified Android OS is actualy doing.

<comment> this-dang-guy I really miss the laptops that had physical switches and the little sliding camera covers.

I'd even settle for a good case that just covers/muffles all of that.

<comment><USER11> especially microphones are a problem - you can always sticky tape the camera but you can not easily reversibly incapacitate the microphone

<comment><USER12> Sure you can. Think out of the box. A small speaker that sticks over the microphone opening and constantly plays a recording with two voices overlaid, one reading the Gettysburg address and the other reading the declaration of independence, constitution and amendments. You would have to be shouting to be intelligible over top of that.

<comment><USER13> Even better, think of how a microphone works. Its just a magnet and wire, right?

Could you place a small magnet over the mic to essentially lock it in place? no movement == nothing to record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to see a "local cloud" computing system. Where CPUs/GPUs are stored in a rack on site and at each workstation is only a KVM + monitor plus a high bandwidth (say fiber optic) video link back to the cabinet.

This would be almost a regression back to mainframe days, but it could give everyone the power of a high-end workstation as well as save energy since most scenarios wont' have a 100% load factor. An office of 20 people probably never actually _needs_ 20x (1CPU 1hdd, etc). You could buy one rack with 5 beefy workstations and have a much more efficient load factor. As long as you could keep the video link up, the users should never feel any lag.

edit: you'd also need a video-card multiplexer, so for the 20 worker scenario, you'd have one board with 5-10 gpus multiplexed to 20 fiber optic outputs (doesn't have to be fiber, but something high enough to give you 4k @ 60fps )

<comment><USER15> Never thought about this architecture from an energy savings perspective but it's actually probably really good. Another thing is USB over ethernet is a now a thing in the Linux kernel... so even with pluggable hardware this could make perfect sense. Interesting idea.

<comment><USER14> I could also see this in a suburban neighborhood. Instead of buying "internet" from your ISP, you could buy "computing" from them. Every block has a server cabinet, with fiber video links to each house. Then your ISP is responsible for maintaining your OS.

This could go either way: given the current state of American ISP's, it could be a disaster. But in a "perfect world", it would "just work" because as soon as your OS went down, the tech would be dispached to remote in and fix it, or drive out there and replace a blade in the server. In aggregate, this would drive up demand and evolve a highly reliable OS. In that case everyone _should_ have a highly reliable service (albeit with privacy concerns), as long as the video could keep up.

<comment><USER15> Not keen on this idea... I think individual independence in computing hardware is a very important social and technological feature against fascist technocracy. I think sharing infrastructure at the office level could make sense, or within a home, but not across a neighborhood with current technology.

While you may be right that overall availability would increase under such a design, I don't really think reliability is a problem for most people right now.

Maybe it would work in some special scenarios though? For example it may be a viable model to provide 'basic service' computing to individual homes within a low income / government supported housing environment, prisons, or hotels. (Fun fact: In mainland Chinese hotels, they often provide computers specifically so that people can watch porn.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a really bad memory, but the part that affects me most is inability to remember conversations, even fairly recent ones (like the day before). Just zero recall of it ever happening. I'd love a way to quickly and unobtrusively log 'talked with Able and Baker about X Y and Z at such and such time and place'. Right now all I can think of is typing it into my phone or writing in a notepad.

But having such a solution, that I could review to improve recall, or search if necessary, would be lovely. Something quick and unobtrusive.

<comment><USER17> Kind of like the rememberance agents the early wearable computing people used? [http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear- ra.html](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear-ra.html)

<comment><USER16> Something like that would be wonderful, yeah. Far as I can tell, it's not a real existing thing, right? Just an idea that there was a prototype of?

<comment><USER18> I was actually building something like that for myself.

Would you use it if you had to manually log it?

<comment><USER16> Yeah. Having to manually log to /some/ extent is actually my expectation; it just has to be simpler than typing out a whole log entry. I don't want to type out

"dec 02 2016 Hung out with Alex and Sammy, talked about Star Wars and whether Darth Maul or Qui-Gon would win in a fistfight, Sammy was backing Darth Maul and won the argument"

I don't have any ideas to improve that in any way, I don't know if it CAN be improved without some element of literal mind-reading, I just know that typing out the above is inadequate, it's too clunky, time-consuming, and conspicuous.

<comment><USER19> What about a Speech-to-text solution? Don't have to take the time to pull out your notebook or type on your phone's screen. Just tap a button on a headset or tell GNow to add a log entry, and speak the entry.

Communication; the next best thing to reading minds!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the age of Single Page Applications that work almost without any backend I am missing a BaaS - Backend as a Service, that would handle users (sign up, sign in, forgot password), their data (save some user generated data, load user generated data) and payment processing at the same time. Right now you could try to combine Kinvey with Stripe or Cognito with PayPal but it is not easy at all.

<comment><USER20> userapp.io

<comment><USER11> so it seems userapp.io is not very active, is the project dead?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You know how the iPod is now this tiny little clip on chip with earphones? I want a phone like that. No app, no "smart this or that" \- just a phone, with an contact list. The thing can to voice calls and SMS ONLY. It's a real cellular phone, but without all the crap, and a monthly use cost of under $20. Make that, and you'll see a revolution.

<comment><USER22> What kind of revolution are you expecting? Loads of people already have smartphones and I don't see them switching, and you can already get a flip phone for < $10.

<comment><USER21> This point is a Trump/Brexit type phone - none of the built up cruft and corruption of a "smart phone". If is just a phone. The "revolution" will be the massive loss of revenue the popularity of such a device would bring, which consumers could use as a purchase weapon to say "no more spy hardware!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Source-specific IP Multicast support on the open internet, which probably needs some serious magic to make it feasible on core routers, if it is solvable at all.

Some shabby server in someone's basement could stream data to millions. CDNs would no longer be needed.

<comment><USER24> There is a great fear of Multicast from many network engineers I talk to. This comes from at its core, it being too easy to create cycles. At the internet scale the potential for cycles would be even higher, b/c the TTL needed would have to be on the order of ~20-30 hops, and many engineers will just set this number too high.

Now I don't have experience with Source-specific Multicast, which is supposed to resolve the cycle problem, but I think there remains a lot of fear of Multicast in the industry.

Can anyone else comment on cycle issues?

Also, in terms of scaling, Multicast requires of copy of the packet on the router to every port which is registered as a listener to a Multicast address, this will increase load on the larger routers.

<comment><USER23> About scalability, a possible compromise might be making some distance-based limitations. I.e. limit subscriptions per prefix or adjust packet drop rates.

That way regional SSM can still be useful and local islands (which whould hopefully grow over time) could be bridged by unicast links or - if they have overlap - by leapfrogging.

Even at the ISP level there would be still be use-cases for SSM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd love to bring banking to the 21th century. (Ability to create virtual cards, scale bank accounts based on needs/usage, easy access to loans etc.). And all this would have to work internationally (go anywhere in the world...2 people have a smartphone? Great, this system works). Give people the ability to save, invest and help them along that way and give them more power about their money.

Also the ability to get the entire system to work electronically offline.

So we'd need advancements in not just technology (tbh, the tech would be the easy bit), but laws and ideas/conceptions people have with banks/monitory systems in general.

<comment><USER26> Currently a digital nomad in the need of a bic/swift able bank account with a debit card attached and at best a proper online interface.

I really dont understand how this shit is so hard.

<comment><USER25> like I said, because of a lot of reason (some personal, some unfortunate incidents), I've been looking for the above solution for over 5 years and have found none so far. :(

Sadly it's never the technology, it's the laws that are the issue (and I can see why they are necessary too, so it's just in limbo)

<comment><USER26> Yeah absolutely. Were it just about the technology i am sure we could have fixed that long ago :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I want a technology that reads and transmits blood, hormone and micro-biome information so that I can optimise nutrition, rest and training. I'd accept some form of implant but bonus points for the least invasive solution.

<comment><USER28> Medical lab technologiats are in an ideal place to start delivering this sort of information. If information and tissue/food/etc could be condensed on to small disposable chips, it could convey a lot of information.

Get sick in the stomach? Put a sample of your food on small chips before you eat and now we know that Chinese restaurant you ate at had high levels of E coli.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A browser on Linux that just works and doesn't use up all my RAM.

Basically like Chromium a year ago? before they removed support for Hangouts and I had to switch to Chrome. Which crashes all the time, usually when using Hangouts.

<comment><USER30> What's broken about Hangouts? I just tried it in Chromium for Windows and it seems to work OK.

<comment><USER30> Late edit: This is a serious question. I can't find any information about Chromium dropping support for Hangouts. What happened?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Go wild, dream big.

I want a DNS replacement that allows you to "subscribe" to TLDs, each with their own policies and practices. Domains are identified by a tuple of a public key and the domain name, so that if someone wants to share a domain, the browser can let them select the host they want. It should have 3 (or more) distinct modes of operation: Gossip, where popular portions of the zone are continually shared between nodes; P2P, where queries traverse a graph of peers, rather than a tree; and a Classic mode, which functions as DNS does.

I want a standard way for ALL OSes (incl. Mobile) to share notifications. I can't even get my phone and smartwatch to share all the notifications I need, and they're from the same manufacturer!

I want a protocol and software to combine the paradigms of Syncthing and FTP, so you could download a folder's contents (or a subset thereof), or keep it up to date, all with syncthing's discovery and authentication framework.

I want a platform where every action is entirely scriptable in something that's not Javascript. Get an IRC message while I'm not there? Send the text to program A. New USB device inserted? Launch a virus scanner there. It would be exceedingly helpful if you could tie in to the browser and define scripting events on 3rd party pages.

Finally, I wish Plan 9 was a viable desktop OS because its protocols and paradigms line up very nicely with some of these. Plus, it's a really neat, simple OS.

<comment><USER32> > I want a protocol and software to combine the paradigms of Syncthing and > FTP, so you could download a folder's contents (or a subset thereof), or > keep it up to date, all with syncthing's discovery and authentication > framework.

Could you explain this syncthing desire more?

I developed SyncthingFUSE [0] for something that possibly sounds similar to your desire. I've let the project languish, but planning to pick it back up.

[0] [https://github.com/burkemw3/syncthingfuse](https://github.com/burkemw3/syncthingfuse)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I want a simple bug tracker that's hosted entirely within my VCS repository, with a fully featured web interface.

There are a few abandoned projects like this, but they're all CLI-focused with view-only web at most. I want something _better_ than just keeping a TODO file, not worse.

<comment><USER5> Have you looked at Fossil?

[https://www.fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wi...](https://www.fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> FPGAs in desktop/laptop computers. That would open all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Energy from nuclear fusion.

Highly dense electrical energy source. I want to see electric planes, phones that last for months, drones that stay in the air for days, etc.

Some kind of magical security system so we could return to native code instead of putting VMs on top of VMs. No idea if this one is feasible or how it might be achieved.

Cheaper IC foundries. I think there might be a market for old processes if they were substantially less expensive.

<comment><USER34> I don't think that some kind of awesome battery will give us phones that last for months. We'd either make the battery smaller (=cheaper) or crank up the processor.

<comment><USER22> You're probably right, but I guess it would be a possibility if we just replaced the battery in current phones.

For the other things I didn't necessarily have a battery in mind (doesn't change your point though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would really like a (preferably cross-platform) solution for browsing the internet in a maximally silo-ed way. I think Firefox has been making some progress on this, but here's my ideal workflow:

\- I can set up any number of "site groups" that sites go into by default - "www.google.com" and "www.gmail.com" are in the "google" group, and those sites open in their own pseudo-profiles with their own history and own cookies, etc. \- For a given site, I can open new tabs in any group (or for sites in multiple groups, set the "current group" for the site. This way I can have a github account for personal stuff, github account for a different context, etc. \- For sites not on any "siloed groups, everything operates in a "clear after closing" mode, where once all browser instances are closed, all data, cookies and history is cleared.

Right now I just accomplish this manually by using a locked-down version of Firefox for default browsing and different Chrome profiles for each "site group". It helps that I've forsaken more or less all web-apps, so I don't have to worry about accidentally clicking a link in Google Hangouts that will then open in the Google profile.

<comment><USER36> Have you seen Qubes OS [0]? I have never used it, but the video demo [1] looks to have exactly what you want. You define different "security domains" and can open applications in each. Each domain has it's own data and can have multiple applications. Like you could download a file from your Google Drive (in your Google domain) and open it. But, that doesn't have any effect on other domains. And, those domains don't see that file.

Edit: Just read the other half of your comment. There seems to also be a throwaway domain that you can use that is doesn't persist data after you close it.

[0] [https://www.qubes-os.org](https://www.qubes-os.org) [1] [https://www.qubes-os.org/video-tours/](https://www.qubes-os.org/video-tours/)

<comment><USER35> I specifically meant in a browser. I'm certainly planning on looking into Qubes for an OS, but this is really more of a problem with data leaking within a browser, I don't think the OS has much say in that.

<comment><USER36> Well, you'd ideally create different VMs for where you want barriers to data leak-age via cookies, history, session- + localstorage, and loading assets/scripts/etc from or making requests cross domain to 3rd parties.

But to your point, even within a given browser/VM/whatever that I _intend_ on using for a single task. I'd still eventually end up slipping up and going to a site that should have been in a different group or logging into something that I wanted in an ephemeral group.

There is a real problem currently with data sharing on the web, where it's pretty much all or nothing. That'll still be true under the scheme you mention, just the goalpost will be moved to within whatever grouping scheme you pick.

It seems there isn't a good way to allow sites to do useful things like ajax to lots of services not on the same domain, while preventing the site provider from sharing your data with people you don't want to have it.

Ad- and tracker- blockers alleviate some of this by preventing certain undesired code from running and thus sharing data. But, user tracking is still possible (and used to actually happen by) using server-side logging and shipping info to 3rd parties.

Ultimately, we are relying on the people or organization behind a site to not share our data.

And, yes the tools could get a bit better with grouping/profiles. But, the vast majority of users won't use these tools. And, even if you use them, you have to be diligent in only opening certain sites in certain "groups" and/or managing which group you are logging into your account in.

So, features like this always will be niche unless there is a revolutionary shift in users' technical ability and attitude towards data protection / privacy.

<comment><USER19> Maybe visiting a site would locally select the appropriate group that site was assigned to. For example, going to gmail.com would automatically use the "Google" Group. If a site is assigned to multiple groups, prompt the user to select a group. An unassigned site would use a default group, or create its own group for return visits, or create a temporary group.

<comment><USER35> Yes, this is what I was suggesting. Currently I am doing it manually, but if you can assign groups by site domain, it should feel much more seamless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> An open source & free, ACID compliant, horizontally scalable database that supports versioned data out of the box.

Currently there is way too much time and money is being spent on re- implementing this functionality on normal DBs.

PS: There is Datomic, but it's not free: [http://www.datomic.com/](http://www.datomic.com/)

<comment><USER38> I wanted to say "Postgres with bitemporal tables"\---practically the same thing. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'd like to be able to implant a tiny subdermal body heat-powered circuit in an animal so I can track their location on a map.

<comment><USER40> Same thing, but very light weight and with a discount for buying in bulk.

(Best friend is an ornithologist.)

<comment><USER15> This stuff must already exist for humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I want a backend service I can call from my statically generated (i.e. jekyll) websites, to implement things like blog comments, analytics, etc.

A true cloud platform where I don't have to mess with admining and provisioning servers and containers. I want to just upload my code and pay for the cycles and bandwidth I use. Aws lambda for http basically.

<comment><USER17> I started to take a swing at the comments part a couple years ago with firebase: [https://github.com/mimming/firebase-jekyll- comments](https://github.com/mimming/firebase-jekyll-comments)

<comment><USER41> That's pretty cool, what's the status? Have you had anyone adopt it? The setup seems a bit complex honestly. But generally, firebases nosql store is a turn off imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." -Bjarne Stroustrup

I've had a not-specific-enough idea of what that language would be for a long time. As far as I'm aware, nobody has created it yet.

</comment><comment><USER43> \- Realtime DBaaS/BaaS using GraphQL - ie, like Parse or Firebase but where you don't have to use a vendor-specific client, just GraphQL. Sane configuration of permissions/access rules.

\- Functions-as-a-service with a better UX than AWS Lambda

\- Server-side-rendering-as-a-service for React-based SPAs. When a request comes in it renders the page, sends it up to the client, and automatically 'solves' hydration of data.

\- A better scripting language than Bash.. maybe Ruby but with a simpler way of running shell commands / getting stdout+stderr. Should be really easy to test.

<comment><USER44> You're on my wavelength with these, I've wanted each one at some point. #2 might become a reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> A solution for game assets building.

Ideally it would be possible to build all assets (maps, models, textures, binaries) in a game from source files to the format that's distributed to people.

Unfortunately due to the build times for certain things like maps it's not feasible to rebuild everything before every release. Combined with the fact that the files are relatively large means that we can't store everything in one git repository.

I'd be very grateful if anyone knows a solution to this.

<comment><USER46> Have you looked at Git LFS? [https://git-lfs.github.com/](https://git- lfs.github.com/)

GitLab have it in the Community and Commercial Editions: [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/23/announcing-git-lfs- suppo...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/23/announcing-git-lfs-support-in- gitlab/)

<comment><USER45> I haven't yet, thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> A programming language and toolset that could transpile to human readable code for just about every popular/mainstream language out there. The closest I've seen is Haxe. This would be great for sharing business logic between different platforms. Right now it's a fragmented mess of tools of various quality, many using regexes to get you only 90% there. For example pretty much everything can transpile very well to Javascript, so no problem there. But what if I want to write common code for iOS, Android, and the web? I've never figured out a good solution here besides contortions with C/C++ or Javascript that introduced more problems than it was worth. Either that or you have to go all- in with a big framework like Xamarin.

I think part of the problem is that there isn't a demand, and, if I may rant a little, the reason there isn't a demand is that most developers do not separate business logic and platform-specific stuff (rendering, I/O, etc.) in the first place, whether from lack of skill/experience (which everyone including me is guilty of early in their careers), or the fact that the framework/platform you're working in "discourages" it.

<comment><USER48> What is wrong with C++ for that? Works fine but maybe you have a specific case? What about C# or F#? That works fine as well for that purpose.

<comment><USER47> Having done a few years of cross-mobile C++, we get into opinion territory perhaps, but it was never a smooth experience for me. Apologies, but don't have time today to go into too much justification for my opinion. It _can_ be the lesser evil (e.g. you have an existing greater-than 10K LoC C++ codebase that you don't feel like porting to both Java and Swift), but, let's say I want to write a few methods, a few hundred lines of business logic, to validate user input on all three platforms. Sure I can bring out the C++ hammer but I've found that decision comes with more tool-fatigue overhead than it's worth, especially on Android. And I don't know the C++->Javascript story that well, that may be smoothing out these days.

But even if all that worked smoothly, what if I want to move my logic to PHP as well? I know, now I'm getting crazy, but that's what the poster asked for :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A relational database that scales out infinitely. Is available as a service and payment is per query, a long free period and very cheap

</comment><comment><USER50> A secure communication technology that is understandable (after reading some mans) and verifiable by an average user, without being infosec expert.

For now, there are so many unknowns in the equation, that users have no choice but to rely on vendor's authority, which means centralization.

Don't tell me it's theoretically impossible because it's possible in almost every other area.

<comment><USER30> How verifiable? You've seen the Underhanded C code competition? [http://underhanded-c.org/](http://underhanded-c.org/)

<comment><USER50> I'm not talking about code bugs and backdoors, which can always exist. I'm talking about protocols, encryption schemes and architectures. We need "comprehensible security", as opposed to incomprehensible, "NP-hard" and (soon) even "quantum-hard" security, accessible to only 0.1% of engineers, let alone users.

We still don't have digital signing technology that is verifiable as easily as paper signature and works peer-to peer, without some big corp/govt involved.

<comment><USER51> The challenge here is that it's super-easy to design protocols that the average person would consider 100% secure, even after reading some documentation. It's the same problem where anyone can create a lock/encryption that they don't know how to break, but there's always someone smarter or better versed in breaking it.

Subtle bugs don't look like problems until someone figures out an exploit against them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> 1 device with multiple Airplay points that can output to multiple amplified speakers. Price would determine how many Airplay points / speakers exist (1 device for 4 speakers, 1 device for 8, etc...) Bonus points if the device has the amplifiers built into it.

In my house, I have multiple Airport Expresses for the sole purpose of connecting them to different channels on an amplifier to to stream different audio sources to different parts of the house. So 1 point exists for the speakers in the kitchen; 1 for the speakers in the dining room; 1 for the patio, etc...

So the wife could be prepping dinner in the kitchen, listening to 1 music stream and I can be on the patio prepping the brick pizza oven listening to another stream (we have vastly different music tastes)

So I've always wanted 1 device with x endpoints that I could configure each and connect to specific speakers.

Then again, with the routers being put on "hold" \- this may be moot and I might have to switch to a Creston or something else.

<comment><USER53> Couldn't this be simplified by just having an airport express + a set of powered speakers (or appletv if there is a tv too) in each room/location?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would like to see a SPA persistence framework that is based on the Command pattern, so that it can give you an automatically-generated backend, Operational Transformation-based collaboration, offline functionality, and undo/redo.

</comment><comment><USER54> haskell on rails. the amazing static typing, binary compilation, etc of haskell, with a large ecosystem and monolith framework (like rails) behind it. haskell's community's focus on challenging, technical, scientific or mathematical problems has left normal web developers plainly not using it. but as our rails codebase has grown, it's hard to identify refactoring issues outside of obessive and overlapping unit tests.

i think Java actually comes closest to what I want here but unfortunately it's pretty hard to get past all the cruft the ecosystem has accrued over the years, plus it's java and marketing that as a company/developer sucks. also java is missing some expressiveness of haskells TS

<comment><USER55> I agree with you both that it would be amazing to see this in Haskell, and that Java (which I'm using full time now, after years of rails) is close-ish to what you want. I think this is what Scala is supposed to be, but I'm not sure it has realized that potential. You should look into Kotlin - you'll still miss Haskell's type system, but it's a good bit nicer than Java, and has a lot less history.

<comment><USER54> did you switch to java for work reasons or because you wanted to?

<comment><USER55> For work reasons, but I was very happy to do it. Java would not have been my _first_ choice, but I would have preferred it to another project using Rails, if those were the only options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Rails but for JavaScript. Today you have to pick and validate a crypto framework to do token based auth. Or maybe not JavaScript.

A distributed application framework. You run software on your OWN machine, offloading computation and storage needs to other trusted nodes. Framework should have the trust system, a data store that automatically replicates, system to explicitly show what data is being shared with whom. Effectively, you can still log into your account from anywhere. The software and data will sync. Won't work for problems that need large scale data and also lowers its collective value. For instance, a social network but no advertising.

<comment><USER9> Sounds a lot like Ethereum: [https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'd like some sort of AI to tag and classify my huge amount of epub, mobi and pdf books.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'd like a blend of Svbtle and Medium. Svbtle is the perfect blog editor interface, and I like the way it displays code samples. (Medium's lack of support for syntax highlighting without the GitHub Gist widget is a dealbreaker for me.) But Svbtle has no social features or commenting features, and I like those about Medium. I also like the social "highlighter" feature of Medium. One thing I'd add (back) is the ability to write notes in the margin.

</comment><comment><USER59> An immediately consistent NoSQL opensource database, so a CP system, that is persistent, gets horizontal scalability right and is popular enough to be used in production with confidence.

<comment><USER60> hbase?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Home loan which re-amortizes to the full term every month so when you pay ahead on it, the amount lowers over time. Snowball your home loan, easily marketable.

<comment><USER62> Doesn't that automatically happen if you over-pay each month? I guess it might be depend on your mortgage type, and location.

I know in the UK I made no special effort to do this. I had a mortgage, and each month I was supposed to pay £260. Instead I paid £800 and I completely paid off my flat many years earlier than expected, with a corresponding saving in the interest I would have otherwise paid.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> Doesn't that automatically happen if you over-pay each month?_

Short answer (in the US): Nope.

Basically, by default extra money comes off of the payments at the end of the mortgage, not off the principal.

Now, that said, _some_ mortgages do allow you to apply an over-payment towards the principal, but you usually have to specify it for each payment you send in, they won't make it the default for your account. Oh, and they will likely only recalculate the size of your payments annually.

One final note: Keep in mind that paying extra (regardless of how it is applied) won't count for anything if you hit a bad patch and start missing payments, so if you are going to dump extra funds into your mortgage instead of hanging on to it, first build up a healthy cushion (3-6 months of all expenses).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> * standalone stream processing engine ("event sourcing", "complex event processing") that can run queries (similar to how relational database runs SQL queries) and works in publish-subscribe mode, one that is not a proof-of-concept by some researcher, but actually working software

* database for system logs (JSON documents) that is not as brittle as ElasticSearch and not as big of a memory hog

* topic map engine usable from Perl or Python

</comment><comment><USER64> How about a music player based on YouTube(maybe built on yt-dl, and X-platform), because of youtube's poor support for listening to music.

<comment><USER65> Youtube generally disapproves of separating audio from video; google 'Streamus'.

<comment><USER64> What if we don't separate them, just let the video play?

I'm talking about just a good player with nice features (easy playlist manipulation, pre-buffering for next video, queuing up videos, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I wish there was a good javascript library to handle table (filtering, sorting, paging, ...). The best I found so far was datatable, but it is not perfect.

<comment><USER67> I am not very familiar with datatable; could you tell me more about its shortcomings?

<comment><USER66> IMHO I think Datatable doesn't have a nice and clean interface. For example, you can't just do table.AddRow({col1:'newCol1', col2 : 'newCol2'});

It is not always very clear on what plugin you should use for paging or sorting, column reordering. Then it become heavy to save a state using methods from different pluging.

So could be a lot simpler.

Still the best open source free js table on the market on my knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I wish we had a messaging protocol/standard so that we could chat with anyone regardless of the messaging app, just like you can browse (mostly)any websites regardless of your web browser.

I would also like the protocol/standard to be iterated upon to include new features like bots, stickers, file transfers, etc.

<comment><USER53> XMPP exists. Most major IM networks are built on it, but without federation and without being-your-own-client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> A brain-computer interface for entering text into a document without speaking aloud or using my hands. This would allow much faster transcription of ideas and the ability to do so while washing dishes, sorting laundry, hanging onto a subway pole, carrying groceries home, etc.

</comment><comment><USER70> Swift support on android [I'm aware of kotlin et al, I'm the kind of guy who never got well with Java]

<comment><USER26> Rubymotion, dozens of js frameworks, Xamarin...

I dont really see why swift.

<comment><USER70> It doesnt have to be swift, it could be dart or something else, what I'm wishing its a language distinct from Java but with first tier support, ideally supported by google (We all know that JS/Xamarin/Rubimotion aren't there yet)

<comment><USER26> oh ok. Yeah i feel you on that. I doubt google cares tho. They seem to have rather a lot of crappy apps than a few proper ones.

I stopped doing android ads because i dont like Java enough to make more than a shitty app. So really with you on this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> 1 - A better laptop : 14 inch, borderless screen like the xps 13, Keyboard of a think pad or dell latitude and battery life of a mac book pro

2 - A better linux distro : basically the polish, convience, drivers and apps support of windows/macos but running the linux kernel

</comment><comment><USER72> I want more Sandstorm apps [0]. Specifically:

* an issue tracker (like Bugzilla)

* a money tracker (like Gnucash)

* a Q&A thing (like StackOverflow)

* a meeting organizer (tracking agendas and minutes)

[0] [https://apps.sandstorm.io/](https://apps.sandstorm.io/)

</comment><comment><USER40> An easy to use parsing library with some sort of way to import sub-trees (ie: everything between these parentheses uses this other parser) and good default parsers for obvious things like C-style math and JSON objects.

<comment><USER73> That would be PetitParser [http://scg.unibe.ch/research/helvetia/petitparser](http://scg.unibe.ch/research/helvetia/petitparser)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> A parser that would walk all web document elements, exercise keyboard access functions, then report back on what is or is not accessible via keyboard, touch, or click.

<comment><USER67> If you would be happy with a browser extension or JavaScript library, I'll make it.

<comment><USER74> I think that would actually be the best way to implement it. A bookmarklet would be nice, however I don't see that fitting within the technical constraints of size limits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I want a successor to Haskell which follows the Elm mantra.

<comment><USER76> Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean by Elm mantra, and what do you think is blocking Haskell from succeeding in such that it needs a successor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> A "sharding framework". So I can kinda build my own db and the framework making ~automatic sharding + ~cross-shard-query.

</comment><comment><USER61> Tivo for streaming video on a PC so you can locally store/rewind/replay things you've watched recently, locally.

</comment><comment><USER34> Something like cargo, but for C++ projects.

</comment><comment> this-dang-guy Something that allowed people to step back and evaluate issues realistically, with correct (non-biased/non-skewed) data.

Unfortunately, the best we can do is use stats, studies, and reports. Nothing that's truly free of bias and 100% accurate.

</comment><comment><USER77> native Ruby support for: 1\. amazon lambda 2\. iOS apps 3\. Android apps

<comment><USER26> Rubymotion covers 2 & 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> A Wikipedia for music.

<comment><USER22> Would it store music, or just information about music?

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> ios pythonista like software for android

</comment><comment><USER80> A way of using nuclear power to directly generate electricity, without going through a thermal cycle first. Similar to how photovoltaics work: instead of capturing heat from sunlight and going through a Carnot cycle engine to generate electricity, PV directly converts photons to electricity. Something like this with nuclear power would be revolutionary I think.

<comment><USER81> Hey dude, I think you're shadowbanned! Most all of your comments show as [dead] :(

<comment><USER82> Looks like it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066519)</comment></comment></comment>


Daily Overview - jack-r-abbit http://www.overv.eu/ <comment> jack-r-abbit Some really cool overhead imagery. I just wish they had an RSS feed.</comment>