Designing the perfect laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/10/07/41FE-perfect-laptop_1.html

<comment><USER2> I mostly want _less_ stuff in a laptop. A well-built 12" tablet, except:

       - entirely solid state: no fans, mechanical hard disks, optical drives, or other moving parts barring the LCD,
       - no touchpad, only trackpoint,
       - no camera,
       - no fingerprint reader,
       - no "trusted computing" hardware,
       - no Windows bundled,
       - a serious warranty on the LCD: no dead pixels, free replacements if vertical dead lines in X years,
       - good battery autonomy,
       - decent linux drivers for all hardware available.

Still waiting..

</comment><comment><USER3> The "perfect laptop" described here sounds more like The Homer. It's like they asked 10-year-olds to design it.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I could do much better -- "It would have negative weight, so it would actually float. It would have 128 dual-core CPUs and 42 GPUs. It would ship with a new operating system that would do all my work without me even asking."

This is equally unrealistic, but a much better fantasy.

<comment><USER5> And a cupholder on _both_ sides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Light and with a DVI port. Why do most laptops (Apple is the only brand with DVI without a docking station, I think) only have VGA ports? DVI->VGA is trivial through a simple adaptor, if the graphics adaptor supports it (and it does), but the other way around is impossible.

</comment><comment><USER7> Definately not what I would call a "perfect laptop".

"A detachable, integrated smartphone" Really?

</comment><comment><USER8> fail.

i thought at one point the laptop would also make coffee, since they added in the design pretty much everything that came through their mind

<comment><USER9> I'd settle for a laptop that _tells my coffeepot_ to make coffee.

<comment><USER10> /me smells a good idea for a network-enabled coffee maker, with web-based configuration of scheduled brewing, plus REST API for controlling the coffee maker via other applications....

 _grin_

<comment><USER9> I guess all you need is an X10 controller or somethingorother. Too bad I couldn't get it to actually change the filter and stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The perfect laptop is a 10" MacBook Air

For only $999</comment>


Hacking a Gnuplot into Minecraft - <AUTHOR> http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/hacking-a-gnuplot-into-minecraft/ <comment><USER2> No libs for editing the world? What about the list at [http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Development_Resources#Libr...](http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Development_Resources#Libraries)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I somehow missed that. Substrate seems quite developed[1]. As for it being running on .Net, I wonder how well it does on mono.

[1] [http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/245996-sdk-substrate- map...](http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/245996-sdk-substrate-map-editing- library-for-cnet-062/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find the best contributors to help in a Git codebase? - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking recently about how to find the "experts" in a given git repository, in the form of this project: https://github.com/augmentable-dev/gitpert which has had some okay outputs in codebases I'm familiar with.
I'm wondering what others think of the underlying question (and the project too!)
Say you're new to a codebase but have identified an area you want to change, is there a way to use git history to figure out who's best to ask about it? Does the question matter all that much?
GitHub uses git-blame to figure out "suggested reviewers" for Pull Requests, which is a pretty awesome feature, and basically what I'm going for. I wonder if more detail/resolution is at all useful. <comment><USER2> Your "answer" sounds like it has value, but I'm not sure your "question" is well framed.

I would expect actively maintained repos to have a preferred channel for seeking help and/or discussing changes (ticket system, mailing list, gitter chat, IRC, etc). I think you'd do best to use that channel even if your "expert" is not there. If the expert isn't making themselves available there's probably a reason. For example if people contact me privately about my FOSS projects I almost always direct them to use the preferred channel. Perhaps it's still useful to identify who those people are, even if you don't contact them (e.g. to read their commits, their blog, etc.)

On the other hand, if we're talking about forensic work on an inactive repo perhaps it makes sense to understand "who is who". Another use-case would be understanding who-is-who on a repo you have no intention of working on (think, investigating some algorithm details in Chromium).

</comment><comment><USER3> > _Say you 're new to a codebase but have identified an area you want to > change, is there a way to use git history to figure out who's best to ask > about it? Does the question matter all that much?_

Not really, because I'll discover it either on GitHub or GitLab and I'll open an issue, and the go to people tend to either manifest, or be tagged by curators.

I guess relevant indicators to look at for an individual:

Number of issues of a certain label.

Number of comments on issues of a certain label.

Most tagged persons for a certain tag (i.e: based on other contributors action of tagging, this is the go to person for X label).

Change of issue state (who closed an issue, what label was on that issue, is there a pattern).</comment>


Ask HN: Avoid Manipulation of .ssh/Authorized_keys - <AUTHOR> Recently I asked the question how you handle ssh keys of your teams: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157180
I received many good ideas of how to do this, in particular to use signed certificates instead of public-private keys.
One big question remains for me: how do you avoid that users who get access via a certificate to a server, simply add a public key to .ssh/authorized_keys and then can access the server also without a certificate from then on?
If a user has root access via the certificate on a server, they could always manipulate that, right? <comment><USER2> "If a user has root access via the certificate on a server"

1\. If at all possible, avoid giving anybody (even yourself) root access.

2\. You can move the authorized keys files to a different location. See [https://serverfault.com/questions/313465/is-a-central- locati...](https://serverfault.com/questions/313465/is-a-central-location-for- authorized-keys-a-good-idea). That's not hacker-proof against users having root access, but will prevent users of good will from doing the wrong thing.

3\. Depending on OS/file system, you may be able to make .ssh/authorized_keys immutable, even for root, on the server. For example, FreeBSD has the "system immutable" flag. Files with that flag set can only be modified after booting in single-user mode ([https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/freebsd- file-f...](https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/freebsd-file-flags- enhance-unix-filesystem-security/))

<comment><USER3> Also, AuthorizedKeysFile may also be set to none to skip checking for user keys in files altogether!

Or choose to disable keys based authentication if using certs.

Or customize keys so that they get served from a db or some such, the only requirement for this is to write a script or binary.

I linked to all of this in another reply and it was downvoted for some reason. Odd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are your users evil, or just careless?

If they're evil, then after giving them root access, you can never take it back again. They can do anything to persist their access, and you will never forsee what they could do, so you shouldn't try.

If your users are careless, a simple note at the top of authorized_keys saying "Don't add anything to this file plz without asking the security team" should be sufficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your answer. Of course, in general, the users are not evil. However, I am thinking about the security concerns when someone is leaving the company. Maybe for some reason they turn evil and decide to place their key to still have access after they left.

<comment><USER5> If your main concern is just the keys file then maybe simply setting up a cron that would "echo "" > .ssh/authorized_keys" would do the trick. But like said - it's otheriwse an endless cat and mouse game. For examples you can look at King of the Hill CTF games on YouTube

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you use openssh as your ssh server you may want to look at the AuthorizedKeysFile option

[https://man.openbsd.org/sshd_config#AuthorizedKeysFile](https://man.openbsd.org/sshd_config#AuthorizedKeysFile)

Other useful options are AuthenticationMethods and AuthorizedKeysCommands.

<comment><USER3> Not sure why this is downvoted. Anyone care to explain ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This isn't a good cross-platform option but on AWS I just use systems manager and don't actually allow direct SSH login. There are a few things you can't do like using SCP but in my world this is a feature, not a bug. It means that to send stuff in and out of the environment requires a S3 bucket which we can analyse.

I'm sure that you could either build your own using xterm.js [0] or by using one of the many projects that implements it. I'm not sure if systems manager uses this project but it certainly looks very similar.

[0] [https://xtermjs.org/](https://xtermjs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> If you want a really good solution, consider using an SSH CA.

See e.g. this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157781)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am, but my question is how to control for people still adding keys in addition to having logged in with a certificate.</comment></comment>


Ugly Software (like Blackboard) Gives Education a Bad Name - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartlyedu.com/blog/posts/19-ugly-software-gives-education-a-bad-name

<comment><USER2> If something is repeatedly happening (restaurants have bad sites, enterprise software is crap, education software is ugly..), it might be worth digging a little deeper and understanding why. If something is perplexingly broken, there is slightly harder to find reason why. That's why it's perplexing.

Very often people seem at grasp at a hand wavy, superficial explanation. For example, a few days ago there was a thread on restaurant sites. A lot of comenters seemed to conclude that this is because service providers to this market suck. While that's almost axiomatically true, it should just trigger another why.

If you are off to fix the restaurant site problem, you need to answer the second why. Conclude that service providers suck stopping there will lead you try fix the problem be starting a web site design business for restaurants that doesn't suck. But restaurants didn't just magically all end up with bad service providers. Surely some good ones tried and either failed or started to suck. There was a reason.

Same here. The "horrible mentality" of schools is s symptom, not a root cause.

<comment><USER3> From what I've seen, Blackboard (the company) spends a lot of effort suing competitors to kept them out of the market. They have a bucket load of patents they're quite happy to wield in order to protect their turf

<comment><USER4> More than patents, what keeps potential competition from attacking the problem is people telling them blackboard will sue them.

This is a horrible meme. No other company that I know of has its potential competitors talked out of the business by this gossip of fear.

Hint: not everyone is operating in the U.S.

<comment><USER5> Can they still sue a company that is based outside of the USA? I always wondered this, but never found an answer. Europe, for example, does not have software patents, but I think that is more complicated than this.

<comment><USER4> Groupon, can't get groupon.com.au because an Australian guy registered the domain and trademark. Not only can you compete with Blackboard, but if you registered blackboard.com.foo and sold competing software, they would have no recourse in certain jurisdictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sungard is another offender in this sphere. Huge company, crappy software (the Sony Root-kit) and incompetent, litigious management.

When I was an undergrad I found a CSRF vulnerability in their product Banner. I tried contacting SungardHE on my own, but couldn't contact a human being, so I brought it to the attention of the IT dept at my university. They asked me to prepare a demo against their dev server. After seeing the demo, IT brought this to the attention of Sungard.

A day or two later, someone at Sungard called the school's general counsel and demanded that they bring charges against me for some ambiguously defined computer crime. A professor I was working for went to bat for me and smoothed things over.

We reached an agreement where I wouldn't disclose until they had distributed a patch and they would acknowledge me for the fix. They reneged on their end of the deal, so I released to Bugtraq.

I'm all for someone eating their lunch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugly[0] companies (like Blackboard) give software a bad name

[0] I'm referring not just to the software they produce, but the arrogant mentality and litigious nature of the company as a whole

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure how true that really is in Blackboard's market, given their use of software patents to attack competition.

As far as getting good software into education, you're fighting both your competition and the establishment. Not an enviable position. Most of my experiences with how UK schools procure their IT equipment and software have reminded me of 'enterprisey' corporations and the disconnect between purchasers and buyers. (At least their excuse is they have neither enough time or money to do a good job.)

<comment><USER8> I feel a similar way. My other half is a teacher, and every time I've looked at the software systems she uses (in the UK) I'm appalled. I've identified a few software tools which would make teachers lives much better and easier, based on problems she actually has. Are they hard to build? Not that hard. Could I get them in to schools? Not a chance.

Approved bidders, closed lists, hugely expensive bidding processes, it's calculated to keep the market sewn up by the education IT vendors (usual suspects, Capita, Fujitsu, etc.)

At a time when the UK is looking to save money, the state of school software provisioning is shameful on multiple levels.

<comment><USER9> Also we have to keep in mind sometimes incompetent IT people are in charge. We had a grad who came back and designed a software for the entire school (potentially district) to use.

Although it's in place, it's been severely restricted due to irrational concerns over security and other illogical arguments. In order for the buying to even occur (keep in mind this was free for the school), there must be knowledgeable IT people in charge.

This is a much smaller scale here since it was for a high school instead of a college, but you'd be surprised at how incompetent people can be.

Right now in the IT people I work under at the university are smart, but lightyears behind when it comes to good user interfaces and the latest technologies.

<comment><USER10> This seems to be why people don't go into educational software. Educational software doesn't win because it's the best, it wins because a bureaucrat mandates it for use.

<comment><USER11> I am in education during the day and we write software for our campus using cutting edge tools and technology, but only for "non administrative" things.

It was decided well above my pay grade that grade checking, admissions, financial aid, registration, and online courses would use Oracle, PeopleSoft and Desire2Learn.

Your assessment is 100% accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently graduated from undergrad. While I was there, my alma mater switched from Blackboard to Moodle. A few of the 'bleeding edge' professors started experimenting with Moodle's features, but most used it exactly the same as Blackboard (post the syllabus, post weekly assignments if they weren't already on the syllabus).

Moodle was prettier. That's all most of the student's noticed. I'm reminded of the chapter in ReWork 'Tools Don't Matter'.

With either system, the great teachers were still insightful, engaging, and likable. Two years of Moodle didn't change that.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a strong team behind a new competitor to Blackbord, <http://www.instructure.com/>.

Decent article about them: <http://mfeldstein.com/instructure-canvas-a-new- lms-entrant/>

<comment><USER14> Like Jonathan said, Instructure is making a run at solving this.

The CEO founded Mozy. Team is solid. Free for teachers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Moodle seems to do the basic job if you don't want to deal with Blackboard.

<comment><USER16> Moodle is horrid! I can _never_ find _anything_ on it. Blackboard works at least!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There was a question recently posted (by me - hope it's not a problem I'm bringing it up again): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011805>

which gives a lot of insight into the issue.

I'm currently a student and my university uses BlackBoard. The software is simply awful. Every professor chooses a different ugly template for their own course, so there is no consistency. In my university, the more able professors have started making their own websites to put up lecture notes, tutorials and grades.

Even the new updates are just a skin of their poorly designed product. No new functionality is added(or even improved), but instead it's just a 'prettier version' of the older system. And the amounts they charge universities for such tools is crazy.

But as someone already mentioned, they have a monopoly in the education sector, and they make it really difficult for universities to switch to an alternative tool [1].

[1] <http://www.dowling.edu/mydowling/tech/bbdocs/bb-exp.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> An HNer, kylemathews, has a nice Drupal-based package, eduglu (<http://eduglu.com/>). It's both an opensource project and start-up. Having followed him on Twitter for a while now, I know his interest and passion for improving/hacking education long precedes his financial interest in it. Really rooting for his project and anything else that moves the edu situation forward.

</comment><comment><USER19> Universities should stop using Blackboard. They tried to use a software patent to prevent competitors from implementing "roles" (otherwise known as user groups).

Eben Moglen even gave a keynote on this: [https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+-...](https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen)

The keynote was followed by an open discussion with Blackboard's lawyer: [https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime...](https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small)

As Eben Moglen put it: "Preventing people from learning how things work is the opposite of education."

</comment><comment><USER20> Having only Blackboard as a delivery mechanism in South Africa (TUT) was really detrimental. Everything is a service call or a call out. I eventually (after 2 semesters) just used my own Moodle setups.

</comment><comment><USER21> Most faculty just want a simple place to put course documents and announcements and Blackboard (and Moodle for that matter) are just overkill for most of them. The main reason it seems is that they're purchased by committees who make decisions by checking off boxes on a large feature list, where it doesn't seem to matter if anyone actually uses those features. You can tell how bad it's gotten since many faculty are already doing their own thing, i.e. using Google groups, pbwiki or making their own simple websites.

Due to my frustration using WebCT for classes I TA'd as a graduate student, I recently partnered with another student to build a simple alternative in Django. Check it out at <http://thiscourse.com> It's designed to provide access to the crucial features as quickly as possible. We're always interested in getting feedback and have had a few classes use it successfully so far.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have just visited the Blackboard web site. After following many links and viewing about 20 pages there, I have no idea what it actually does, what is required to run it, and what it costs.

I don't understand why companies make such useless web sites.

<comment><USER23> Because their products are in the dark ages. And semi-monopolistic. The requirements are incomprehensible, the pricing is highly variable. The combination of needless complexity and high cost means the easiest way to find this stuff out is having a team of sales reps fly out to confuse you further.

One of the Bb products we use (transact/envision/cash registers), they basically ship you the server with the software, and updates are handled by their techs. We actually resorted to disk-to-disk type cloning of that server to give ourselves a backout plan for when their engineers break stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The more cognitive energy students spend on figuring out how to use systems stops them from focusing the course content. The bigger barrier to participation the less participation there will be. Course management systems like blackboard, desire2learn, etc are rarely if evaluated on user-centered principals of design and usability. Decisions are made based on business factors like cost, licensing, etc. Features are only evaluated in an abstract sense. I guess it is this way with many large organizations.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a student still in college, I cannot stand blackboard. I cringe every time I need to use it because it is ugly, slow, confusing and often does not work correctly.

Most professors prefer not to use it but are forced to by the College since they are paying for BB services.

I personally feel the education sector is a wide open game, create something that will increase learning potential and bring more value to a students degree and you will have success.

</comment><comment><USER26> Horrible software, us UofToronto students have to use this despite having had our own univ server CCNet in the past that worked flawlessly and blazingly fast.

<comment><USER27> I agree partially: Blackboard is much much worse than CCNet, but CCNet wasn't all that great either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anybody remember Peoplesoft?

Ugh...

<comment><USER29> I thought I was done with Peoplesoft after I graduated (it was many times worse than the downloadable software that came before it, and that looked over a decade old), but now my work uses it for some things :(

<blink>Processing...</blink>

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure it's not <blink>, as Chrome doesn't respond to <blink> anymore. That means they _re-implemented it in Javascript_

<comment><USER31> <http://plugins.jquery.com/project/blink>

you know... just in case ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence My school used eCollege a Blackboard competitor. Let me tell you, it is just as bad.

</comment><comment><USER32> Are we talking about Blackboard, the company founded by Cal students?

<comment><USER29> Don't think so. None of the founders of the two original companies that merged to form blackboard.com list Cal in their background. 2 from Cornell and 2 from American University

Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc>.

Founders:

* Cornell 1. <http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcane>

* Cornell 2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gilfus>

* American 1: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/chasen>

* American 2: [http://investor.blackboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=177018&dc...](http://investor.blackboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=177018&dc=177018&p=irol-govBio&ID=117636)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Blackboard (the webapp) itself isn't that bad, and the iPad app is really nice. It's just any site that tells you that you just failed a quiz is bad by association.

<comment><USER30> _Blackboard (the webapp) itself isn't that bad_

I can name a few problems with Blackboard (the webapp). I've seen both sides of it; I've suffered through 7 semesters with BB as a student, and 2 as a teaching assistant.

It uses frames. When you open a link in a new tab, you get the bare page without the top/left nav bars. Really? They couldn't even use a little 1998 Javascript to get the page to reload inside the frameset?

Too many modules are enabled by default, which causes confusion when profs use things differently. Does the syllabus go in "Course Information" or "Course Documents"? Or, since it contains the prof's email, "Staff Information"? Do homework assignments go under "Assignments" or "Course Documents"?

There are two ways to upload files. One is convenient for both students and teachers, one is not. Guess which one is more obvious? The nonintuitive one, Digital Dropbox, is buried two pages deep. It has two choices: "Add File" and "Send File". If you add a file, but don't send it, the teacher never sees it. From the teacher's end, Digital Dropbox renames files, for your convenience. Yes, BB, thanks so much for renaming my students' Java files so that I can't compile them. Also, for your convenience, any .html files that are uploaded get their extension changed to _.rtf_ , prompting more shell scripts just to de-BlackBoard your students' files.

The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the Assignments tab. This makes _way_ more sense, since you can view and complete the assignment all on one page. To enable this, the teacher has to select an assignment type of "Assignment", instead of the default "Content Unit". As a TA, I only knew this existed because one semester, one of my profs used this. (Once, out of all the classes I took that had digital submission.)

The grading page is _horrible_. It has a table for the grades, like you would expect, with one column per assignment, and one row per student. If you have more than 5ish assignments or 15 students, it overflows the page. This would be fine, except the table doesn't respond to the scroll wheel. It has a scrollbar on the right, and a scrollbar on the bottom, and watches their position with Javascript. When you scroll one of these, the table contents are updated to reflect that position of the table. This makes scrolling awkward every time - the screen flashes a bit, and you have no idea how many columns Blackboard decided you wanted to scroll until you look at the header row. Oh, and every time you resize the page, the table is reset to the top-left.

TL;DR These people need some serious UX help, fast.

<comment><USER34> _The better upload option is for teachers to allow submissions in the Assignments tab._

Is there a way to quickly download all submissions for an assignment at once? So far, I've been stuck with going into each submission's sub-page and clicking the download link.

 _The grading page is horrible. …_

Also, columns you tell it not to use in grade calculation may simply not appear anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In my school district, we have been using Blackboard Learn for as long as I can remember. According to Wikpedia, it's the " _next generation learning management system_ ". In essence, it provides a way for teachers to interact with students, as well as for students to interact among themselves. Posting grades, class announcements, and homework assignments are only a few of the things teachers can do through the site. Students can view all of this information, as well as form groups, run blogs, use calendars, and create discussion boards.

My point is that Blackboard is not a piece of ugly software. It is fully functional and has a nice and intuitive design to it. The article says that:

       Badly designed software with poor usability goes hand in hand with general appeal

However, this software is not badly designed as it does what it is supposed to do (and more), and the usability is perfectly fine. Ironically, our district has switched to another piece of software to replace Blackboard's, but only because of the teacher's belief that it offered too many features.

I think that the author of this post should rethink Blackboard.

<comment><USER36> My experiences with Blackboard paint a far less flattering picture. An "intuitive" interface is entirely subjective, but I've hardly ever tried to do something new without wandering through confusing, cryptic and downright _hidden_ menus for half an hour. Computed columns in the gradebook are crippled for no reason (formulas cannot be nested) and use an obscene[1] "keyboardless" entry form with pointless user-side validation. If you ever want to give yourself a migraine, crack open the source to any nontrivial page and try to tease apart the miles of needlessly complicated and frequently broken Javascript.

Granted, my university does not use the latest-and-greatest version (yet) of Blackboard Learn, but for someone with your history of using the application these should not be totally alien points.

[1]<http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/9500/whygodwhyl.png></comment></comment>


Computer system transcribes words users "speak silently" - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2018/computer-system-transcribes-words-users-speak-silently-0404 <comment><AUTHOR> Researchers have created a potential keyboard competitor. A headset that is worn, which picks up sound (?) and electrical signals from the jaw area, with a resolution of 20 unique signals. Testers have been able to communicate chess game moves "silently" with an accuracy of around 92%. Researchers seem optimistic that N > 20 in the future.

This reminds me of a relevant HackerNews discussion about biological interfaces a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16727719)

I am so happy to see progress in this area. While we're still some ways away from replacing keyboards, this seems like a huge step in the right direction. AFAIK, a vocabulary size of 20 for inconspicuous communication is unheard of, but if this has been done elsewhere, please share links!

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm so happy to see this. Keyboards allow me to have private conversations in an office setting, which is great because I am shy in person :-)

It's one reason I suppose that we will have keyboards around for a while longer, despite advances in voice recognition. That and I can't imagine trying to code with voice...

<comment><USER3> >Keyboards allow me to have private conversations in an office setting

I'm sure you already know this (since it's old tech), but, one can deduce what you're typing just by listening to your keyboard typing sounds.

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/snooping_on_t...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/snooping_on_tex.html)

<comment><USER2> Yep I am aware. And there are even easier methods: A $30 keystroke logger could be inserted on my keyboard USB plug and I'd never notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great. Several people have pointed how this can essentially be used to read minds.

So it WILL be built, to keep the homeland safe. :-(

Almost forgot: "I love Big Brother!"

<comment><USER5> I doubt this could ever be used to arbitrarily read minds. Even if you could do the measurements without the targer knowing, you would have to somehow correlate the target's real thoughts with those measurements. In the article, the targets voluntarily provide that correlation to measurements during a training phase. It might be the case that some neuro-physical patterns might be common across targets, but that seems very unlikely.

If the target is in your custody and you coerce him to give training data, then he could just give garbage data. You tell him to think "fish barrel neuton whale", but he really thinks "somebody once told me".

Do sub-vocalizations only occur for certain categories of thoughts? I suspect that facial memories do not induce sub-vocalizations.

<comment><USER6> Maybe a more intrusive setting would be something like a polygraph. The subject would be first tested to ensure that the training worked to a high accuracy level (like the polygraph baseline measurement). You could tell to some extent whether the subject was cooperating with this training because you could see the resulting accuracy rates, and maybe continue the training until they improved, or else declare the subject to have failed to cooperate with the test.

Probably, as with an present-day polygraph, people could specifically train themselves to produce inaccurate results, but also presumably most people wouldn't have done so.

On the other hand, I don't know what level of language this system operates at so I don't know if you're detecting phonemes, words, phoneme features (like +voice/-voice), or what. This seems significant for understanding how usable it would be for "mind reading" if the subject's thoughts included many words that hadn't been individually trained. If you're just detecting conditions that you've already trained for, it doesn't seem like there's really anything new here (from the mind-reading point of view, as opposed to the UI point of view) compared to existing biofeedback or polygraph systems because you're mainly just detecting when a known physiological state is or isn't re- elicited, which is something the earlier systems could already do.

Edit: other commenters said they can only distinguish about 20 words, so presumably the technology has a long way to go before it would be relevant to semi-adversarial mind reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in
      the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips
      move.

</comment><comment><USER8> How cool - as an MIT undergrad back in the 80's I spent quite a bit of time trying to design a device for this purpose using ultrasound to probe what's going on in the throat/mouth during subvocalized thoughts. For me the genesis was realizing I couldn't "say" sentences in my head any faster than I could say them out loud, and suspecting that my brain was trying to subvocalize the words (send below-threshold activation signals to the muscles in my mouth and throat, and accidentally introducing speech rate limiting in the process). I've no formal proof if that's the case, but it does appear they were able to make the concept work.

As cool as this kind of tech is, there are a lot of really troubling interrogation style abuses that become possible if you can hear a person's subvocalized thoughts.

<comment><USER9> That said, I can think much faster than I can speak or type, and both communication forms interact differently with my thought process.

Speech recognition will never be a good input UI for me as I think _while_ typing — they're in a tight feedback loop. Speech does not work this way; I can't easily delete the last 3 words and reform the same sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This would be amazing for stutterers

</comment><comment><USER11> This could be a great tool for use on the battlefield. Reminds me of the subvocal mics from the Shadowrun RPG, which was really a key piece of equipment to buy for any character working in a group.

</comment><comment><USER12> Was anyone else __greatly __concerned with this? I was worried as soon as I read the headline, and as I read through the article I was simultaneously fascinated and distressed as my fears were confirmed.

This technology is absolutely fabulous and has _so_ many potential uses (far beyond the accessibility and military use mentioned in the article). Think about it: wearing a headset that can respond to your thoughts. An Alexa/Bixsby/Siri/Google/whatever Voice Assistant right inside your head, performing tasks and answering questions all without ever needing you to whip out your phone or speak aloud. I already wear a Bluetooth headset 24/7 because of my job. I know some people think in concepts and visuals, but I form my thoughts by verbalizing my them into words and always have an inner monologue going.

You could quickly and (most importantly) _privately_ take notes just by thinking of what you want to remember. You could quickly send messages in loud environments __without losing focus __\- if you 're at a concert and want to message your friends to see where they're at, you just need to think it; no need for shouting or getting your phone out. You could do things in the middle of a conversation without the other party being aware and without drawing attention to yourself - take notes on the resort they went to on vacation or that book they recommended, look up the definition of a word or fact you're unsure of so you don't look like an idiot, send a quick message to your boss or spouse without interrupting conversation, lookup movie showtimes or restaurant hours. Keep a journal of your thoughts and you would never forget anything ever again - record your thoughts as you're brainstorming, falling asleep, driving, or shopping.

The possibilities grow when you consider using this technology in the future with others (especially tech that isn't yet widespread, well-developed, or even thought up yet). I see this technology being combined with some sort of augmented reality that acts as an alternative to our current mobile device displays. An obvious contender would be [the AR 'smart' glasses currently on the market]([https://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-ar- glasses,review-2804.htm...](https://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-ar- glasses,review-2804.html)) and in research/development. These technologies would help integrate the internet and computing power into our daily lives _more seamlessly and less obtrusively_.

AR displays could be navigated more effectively using your thoughts rather than tracking eye movement. Also, in addition to your voice assistant responding via audio they could respond with visuals on your private AR display. You could see an acquaintance on the street and as you're about to pass them, quickly think "What's their name, and pull up their contact/profile". When you're in an important meeting you could silently and privately pull up relevant items, like a job posting if you're in an interview.

The ability and very real possibility for this technology to become a common, everyday household fixture is what really concerned me. People don't care enough about their privacy; just look at all of the technology out there today like social media and Google where we freely give away our data to make our lives easier. I'm guilty of it too. The only thing standing between us and chaos is our fragile and naive trust that these corporations will handle our data honestly, morally, transparently, and properly. I really hope we change as a society and start taking our privacy seriously before more technologies like this become commonplace. Otherwise, companies providing it will be able to store and sell your thoughts. I can see companies tracking and selling your thoughts as you walk through the grocery store or as you watch TV, and it only grows darker from there.

Alright, I'm done with my rant and fear of a dystopian future. I just had to share because I've been thinking about it all morning since I woke up!

<comment><USER13> Seems no more dystopian in an assistant setting than voice input now: listen for a wake-phrase and relay what's said after that.

As gargoyle tech, it's even more promising than that Tap chorded keyboard-cum- knuckleduster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. This has some seriously scary implications for uses by repressive regimes. Literal thought policing.</comment>


Kazakhstan's National HTTPS Certificate Is Cancelled - <AUTHOR> https://tsarka.org/post/national-certificate-cancelled <comment><USER2> Was posted earlier today by a very new 'tsarka' account: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20632373)

Have you heard of Tsarka before? They don't have any press releases from when it started? As others have echoed - could this just be a state sponsored actor?

<comment><USER3> As I wrote in a comment on that post:

"I can't help but think if the government were wanting to spread positive propoganda about these tests, your post is exactly what they would write: "everyone wins and everyone is happy with our results of MTIMing the entire country".

Who knows how much information the state hoovered up during this "pilot".

<comment><USER2> I should have quoted you directly - I just didn't look deep enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Discussion in mozilla.dev.security.policy (mailing list to discuss TLS implementation in Firefox/NSS): [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wnuKAhACo3E)

<comment><USER5> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567114)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am i the only one reading this article as a harsh criticism veiled to pass censorship? I'm not sure, though, but this sentence sounds absurdly false: « Everyone got their own: we got the free Internet, the government got an instrument for fighting digital weapons. »

</comment><comment><USER7> > the tests were completed, all the tasks set during the pilot were > successfully solved

So, it was a pilot and it succeeded. Now what?

</comment><comment><USER8> How do we know that other super CAs aren't being used for MITM by other countries?

<comment><USER6> Some are. The French and Tunisian governments have been caught emitting fake TLS certificates through their national CA in the past.

There's probably many more who don't get caught because their attacks are more targeted.

The whole Public Key Infrastructure is fully insecure because of this property that any root CA can emit a internet-wide valid certificate for any domain.

That's why people work on DANE for DNS and Tor onion services (among others) to reduce the attack surface to the name resolution level, which in the case of onion services equals breaking an ed25519 keypair because the onion domain name is tied to the key.

We need to ditch PKI as soon as possible!

<comment><USER9> PKI weaknesses extend far beyond state sponsored attacks.

Things like Let's Encrypt allow anyone that can intercept 100% of the traffic to your site to get a signed cert for your domain with no further validation. Unless your site is directly peered to multiple backbones, you are trusting at least one service provider not to man in the middle your traffic.

Cert pinning sort of protects against this, but it is widely considered impractical.

The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this, though I think there are still CA's that don't participate. As long as browsers accept certs from those CA's, certificate transparency doesn't solve the problem either. (Also, what percentage of sites actually monitor to see if there are malicious certificates for their domains?)

<comment><USER6> > Things like Let's Encrypt

Any CA will do that. Paying a hundred bucks for a certificate will has never stopped a malicious actor, therefore Let's Encrypt does not introduce any new concern.

> Cert pinning sort of protects against this

DANE was designed for this. Since DNS is always a SPOF on the web, registering TLS public keys in DNS reduces the attack surface (instead of introducing a new channel for transport security).

> The certificate transparency efforts also sort of protect against this

That's bullshit. Nothing prevents a CA to emit certificates without declaring them. We should not rely on those big corporations for our security: our interests are FAR from aligned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't believe it — Uzbek propaganda!!!</comment>


Campingspot, an experimental map for camping around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.campingspot.me/

<comment><USER2> Awesome. I spend a lot of time camping and the books I use to discover new places are often out of date with directions that only the seasoned explorer could follow.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm getting nothing but a blank screen?

<comment><AUTHOR> how are you seeing the page?

<comment><USER3> I'm trying to view it on Mac OS 10.6.8 with Chrome 24.0.1312.52.</comment></comment></comment>


Trying to understand how the brain is computing the mind - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/conversation/ed_boyden-how-the-brain-is-computing-the-mind <comment><USER2> Interesting read. Neither an interview nor an article, it reads more like a stream of consciousness content centered around neuroscience tech.

The core idea (for those screaming tl;dr) is based on the initial quote "[t]he history of science has shown us that you need the tools first. Then you get the data. Then you can make the theory. Then you can achieve understanding." Ed Boyden feels that the tools part has been largely left undeveloped in neuroscience, and his group has apparently been working on the problem for the past decade or so.

One such new technology/tool that I found most interesting was:

> Our group had been developing a way of taking brain circuits and tumors and > other complex tissues and physically expanding them to make them bigger. > What we do to make the brain or a tumor bigger is we take a piece of brain > tissue and we chemically synthesize throughout the cells, in-between the > molecules, around the molecules, in that piece of brain, a web of a polymer > that's very similar to the stuff in baby diapers. And then, when we add > water, the polymer swells and pushes all the molecules apart, so it becomes > big enough that you can see it even using cheap optics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Optogenetics is incredibly exciting. Trying to understand the brain without such a technique seems analogous to trying to debug a complex program without being able to vary its inputs and instrument it to dump state information.

Boyden mentions that optimistically, this technique could be perfected within just 5 years and potentially yield enough information to allow us to construct computational models of (small) neural circuits. Would be interesting to see how quickly this progresses now that it seems that we have the tools.</comment>


Ask YC: Have you built a good website that nobody visits? - <AUTHOR> Did you ever launch a project that deserved popularity, but inexplicably failed? Something you still think could have changed the world? Post a link here. <comment><USER2> <http://watrcoolr.us>

Never "launched" it, but I still think it deserves popularity :).

It's a browser start page that I made for myself (and use) that displays the top stories for a set of most-emailed-like feeds. The feeds have been tweaked over time to yield the most interesting stories at any given time. After all, they were the most emailed ones...

It's not really for news junkies or the news.yc crowd in particular. However, it could work for you as I am in the news.yc crowd. Anyway, almost everyone I have explained it to and that has tried it as their homepage has liked it. That is, I've gotten really good feedback in terms of constant use from friends and family.

So I think there is some non-negligible subset of people who would like this as their home page, but I of course have no way to reach them :)

If you do click on it, note it isn't just one story. You can click the arrows on screen or use the arrows on your keyboard to move off the front story. But if you have as your home page, the latest story will just be displayed.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree with other posters. This is a neat interface - I like how it completely takes away the clutter, allowing you to focus on the current story. User configurable, perhaps? No-cycling, custom feed selections, etc.

Personally, I would like longer excerpts...two to four line excerpts just don't cut it for me. However, I presume that's a function of the provider's feed settings. Also, some of the feeds are just...meh. I don't care for Abby, Drudge, etc.

Question, why load a new page for each story?

<comment><USER2> Most of the excerpt lengths are from the feeds, though I am cutting it off after one paragraph. The idea is you would quickly move through them and click through to the story if you want.

I don't understand your question about the new page. Can you please expand? There shouldn't be a new page load for each story, i.e. when you hit the arrow keys it should be taking the excerpts from memory.

As for the feed choice, these are just general interest feeds of course. I've thought about custom feeds, but then this just becomes another feed reader (and a worse one at that). I think its usefulness stems from the aggregation, i.e. you do no work to get a snapshot of the most emailed stories out there. And since they are not your feeds, you don't really care if you miss something.

That being said, I can really see some sub-watrcoolrs. What would you think of a hacker oriented one? Any feed ideas?

Also, what do you mean by "no-cycling?" Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://dowser.sf.net>

A desktop metasearcher + archiver + personal search engine. It got lost in the noise when Google & Yahoo had their pissing match over desktop search in late 2004. The failure wasn't inexplicable: it was just too much work for one person... which makes the quote on the bottom of the page bitterly ironic.

<comment><USER5> Dowser is/was amazing. When I was at Flock I would always use it as the example of what we should be doing with search in the browser.

Mozilla's start page with the google box is nice but nothing compared to dowser.

<comment><USER4> That's... actually very cool and gratifying to hear. Thank you. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://cadmium.avecora.com/>

Failed social network advertising system that targets advertisements to Facebook Application users, by profile keywords (interests, activities), age, gender, specific networks, etc. Also targets ads throughout the web in participating partner websites.

Apparently no interest, and then Facebook launched Social Ads, with similar targeting features a month or so later.

Was hoping to integrate it with other social networks (Bebo, MySpace, Hi5, etc) and integrate with other websites to serve highly targeted advertising.

Also, ask me in a month, and I'll see how well my current venture is going. :/

<comment><USER7> Random curiosity: did you change your name from Steve to Mark? If it isn't personal, mind sharing why?

<comment><USER8> Isn't it obvious? It's one character shorter. Just like one of Arc's guiding principles: "How code looks matters: short names, no swearing". Of course, since ones name is so frequently typed, one might prefer something even shorter. Like, "Joe", as a purely hypothetical example. I'm not sure one can go any shorter than three characters for a common male US name.

More seriously, I'm guessing Mark/Steven is of Asian descent (Bao make this seem more likely). They don't necessarily take their American name very seriously, since it's not their "real" name. I've known several Asian folks who've gone through a couple of Americanized names over the span of a few years. Their Japanese or Chinese or Vietnamese or Thai name stays the same throughout.

<comment><USER9> Most Asian Americans I know take their "American" names very seriously, as it's their legal, social, and personal identity.

Growing up Asian in the US, I hated when kids always asked me for my "real" name. I have a Chinese name, as well as an English name. Both are aliases for the person and both are "real".

<comment><USER8> Apologies for implying otherwise. I was primarily referring to Asians who grew up in Asia and still call Asia home, but that do business with Americans. I promise I won't ask you your "real" name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe someone should create a site that collects sites like these... abandoned, mostly-finished ideas. People could go there for inspiration and stuff.

It'd be kinda meta if I created such a site, then submitted that site to itself when no one showed up. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.imageboard.net/top/>

A forum designed without the use of text using just images to communicate with a built in editor and voting tools. Roommate and I made it as a toy for a programming competition, so we weren't expecting grand things. It got grabbed by the 4chan crowd so... uh... yeah. I linked to the best ones for a reason ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, and a great domain name. You didn't go forward?

<comment><USER11> No real idea of where to take it from here. We have a few ideas that break from the theme of no text, such as tagging and a reddit style interface, and improved ways for the community to segregate out the flock of penises.

We did the bulk of it as a 48 hour coding competition with the theme of 'antitext'. I wanted to make something in Django, and my roommate wanted to make something in flash. So from the start there was no real direction aside from the neatness factor and wanting to see if we could pull it off.

Any suggestions would be appreciated :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://tagger.flaptor.com> \- automatically suggests tags for blog posts or articles.

It's still mostly a demo, we are improving it very slowly because most of our resources are going into other projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kickass! When you paste the Disclaimer text into the box, it suggests "the darjeeling limited" and "potty training". The first three paragraphs of Yegge gave me "faithfulness" and "registry cleaner". Just make it work, and it will be awesome.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it doesn't know when to shut up. It tends to work better with longer articles, we usually test it with content from Google News.

<comment><USER13> Have you looked at work done on keyword extraction from academic literature?

<http://www.nzdl.org/Kea/>

It's simple and accurate.

<comment><USER12> Yes, we have. What we do is not keyword extraction, our tool suggests tags based on probabilistic algorithms. For example, if your document contains the terms Bush and Obama it should be tagged as politics even if that word is not present in it. Compare to the Yahoo Extraction Tool, for example. This approach will not add new keywords that would help in a search. It's only useful to have an idea of what the document is about.

The main problem is not the algorithm but the input data. Our system learns from millions of tagged blog posts among other sources. The quality of the tags varies a lot, and most of the work we do is about deciding what data to use for training.

<comment><USER14> When is the API coming? I can see us using this quite a bit.

<comment><USER12> The API is already available although we haven't announced it. There is a WordPress plugin that uses it, called TagMahal.

Please contact us if you'd like to use the API, if you need to do up to 5k queries per day or so it shouldn't have much of an impact on our server.

<comment><USER15> I would like to see a Blogspot plug-in too! I just tried it on my latest post and it worked much better than I did. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not that it was built to change the world, but I've personally been very happy with <http://www.iheartquotes.com/>

It was a two day project to bring the Unix fortune program to the web. You can browse online but I've gotten more use out of the API which I turned into a Twitter bot and include in my .bash_profiles.

The Paul Graham tag: <http://www.iheartquotes.com/tags/paul_graham>

On Twitter <http://www.twitter.com/iheartquotes>

In my .bash_profile curl -m 3 <http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random>

<comment><AUTHOR> This site makes me happy too! Thanks for sharing :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> <http://www.thephotostream.com> could change the way people consume their daily web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Make it scroll scroll scroll as people add new stories.

<comment><USER17> Yeah one of the things I am working on is ways to do two things:

1) See "more" than the 28 newest on the homepage.

AND

2) See when people click / add stories to the stream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nothing world changing, but the pastebin I wrote recently, I find it pretty handy for sharing js snippets

<http://paste.arandomurl.com/>

it shows the page rendered above in a frame below, you can test snippets of javascript / css in it, processing js works as well

<http://paste.arandomurl.com/4826dda37f28b>

<comment><AUTHOR> I once did the same for ActionScript. And of course this stuff works best for visually-oriented languages, like CFDG: <http://korsh.com/cfdg/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Never had the resources to launch an advertising network (<http://precimark.com>), an independent music platform (<http://kroomsa.com>), a startup aggregator (<http://startuplogic.com>) from the scratch and without a marketing budget.

I guess hackers like building websites but making them grow is something entirely different. For me, it is extremely hard to focus at a single app and make it grow. Instead, I find it more enjoyable to churn out more and more websites whether anybody visits them or not. Maybe its good, maybe its bad. What do you guys say?

</comment><comment><USER20> <http://seekler.com>

It was our project for awhile and I still think community driven ranked lists of the best of any given category would be great for online shopping and finding new bars and making recommendations, but it just didn't work out how we wanted. We got bogged down on to many things, made it to complicated, and focused on bad pieces... So the project is now just chilling as we are starting a new project.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a shame - the idea is quite nice. Could use a simpler UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not big or world changing but something I would have thought people would find useful. It's a mortgage calculator that actually works out the useful numbers for you, i.e. repayment costs taking inflation into account, discounted periods, extra payments and a nice graph at the end:

<http://www.maggenhoof.co.uk/mortgage>

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I was looking for something like this the other day.

It would be better (for me that is) if you included some refinance options, i.e. compare your current mortgage to your refinance options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://fidness.com> is my little pet project. I've never let it get out to more than a few of my nerd-ish friends, who inconveniently don't do enough physical activity to get anything out of the site. I don't know if that's their fault for being lazy or mine for having an underwhelming site.

</comment><comment><USER23> <http://www.flugpo.com>

We have this Social Classifieds Network that is trying to inject more trust in to online classifieds but it's hard to get above the noise of craigslist and kijiji. Not a failure yet but not a success either.

<comment><AUTHOR> The world needs an antisocial network, where each user is explicitly supposed to swindle others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> <http://www.pokerup.us> Poker-based social community. Find and create home poker games, online poker games. Poker league management and promotion for pub poker and online tournaments.

</comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps not quite grandiose or revolutionary enough to meet the description at the top of this page, but here's my dead-in-the-water project:

<http://ploya.com>

It's supposed to be a community for finding out about and then getting into interesting internships or graduate jobs. It seemed to catch on a bit for a couple of positions, but has declined since then.

My own interest in the site dropped significantly once I got my final internship and graduate job, and I guess this generalises to most potential users.

</comment><comment><USER26> <http://www.jihadonyou.com>

Just a place to vent frustrations. A friend of mine and I built this in a weekend. There's a blog post somewhere describing the tale.

We made it on techcrunch. We made it on digg and reddit. There was a short spike of traffic. A little bit of foreign media coverage and then silence.

It seems adsense doesn't appreciate our ideas or those of our posters. It also seems that the adwords we bought seem to either never be searched for or that google doesn't like our domain.

</comment><comment><USER27> <http://MyHouseResearch.com>

I quickly threw this site together for myself because I wanted a way to compare real estate that I was thinking about purchasing. It's nothing earth shattering but I found it useful in helping me organize my research when I was looking to buy a house.

I have some more ideas that will make it more useful - I've just never implemented them because I ended up buying a house! Do you think others would find this site useful?

</comment><comment><USER28> <http://maps.staticrooster.com/>

GPS overlay data on maps with geosynced photos. Like personal Google maps w/ panoramio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, that's a great way to show photos on the map! Why didn't I think about that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> <http://www.mygrub.net>

Like Yelp, but more for blogging about restaurants, instead of writing reviews. I noticed that people were using the 'review' space in Yelp to write about their own personal experiences which were irrelevant to the review. So, I thought there could be a market for this.

This was one of the very first websites I created and left it more or less half finished.

</comment><comment><USER30> Certainly not world changing, and most definitely not ready for prime time. But considering it's a couple of guys throwing things at a server a couple of times a month more as stress relief than anything, it's not THAT bad.

<http://www.famoushotdish.com>

And yes, this was before we had even heard of alltop. Our first version was in October 07.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just launched, so not dead yet. Got 100 or so registrations, but no one seems to want to post anything. "Can't find anything that's cool" is the excuse. Anyway, the site is a unique way to list and vote on any item you think is cool. <http://thatscool.org> I'll send you an invite, pronto. Add something, anything!!

</comment><comment><USER10> A lot of people roll their own popurls.com site. I wrote one, too, to teach myself the Apache Wicket framework. This one is for web developers. <http://devfunnel.com>.

I was going to add the ability to "follow" it on twitter, but I've run out of steam, and no one seems very interested in it. I've moved onto other projects. :)

<comment><USER32> That's really pretty cool. However, it seems like it would be hard to hold the attention of people who don't like to scroll down.

I guess that's one of my favorite things about HN. Loads fast and only need to scroll on the most commented articles.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, that's why I added the collapsible arrow thingies at the left-hand side, to hide specific languages. I was going to eventually persist their open/closed state w/ cookies. I might still do it, but it's hard to get the motivation to work on it when I get fewer than five page hits a day. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> <http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent>

Sure beats QuickBooks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why did this fail? Also, "Inventors of The Facebook"?

<comment><USER34> "The Facebook" was the original name of the site. thefacebook.com still links to it, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> <http://lifeshelf.net>

It's basically a web version of Delicious Library (not del.icio.us. Think delicious monster, mac fans).

I didn't really launch it per se, so I can't say that it failed, but if I don't have people using/looking at it, I'm finding it hard to convince myself to fix all the egregious bugs.

</comment><comment><USER36> <http://newsconomy.com/> Social bookmarking and news website.

</comment><comment><USER37> Simple fun site to review companies.

<http://www.pingmycompany.com>

</comment><comment><USER38> <http://search.brianreily.com> \- lets you search multiple sites from one bar.

Its been a work in progress for a long time (thus why its a subdomain), and haven't had a chance to do much with it.

So I guess it hasn't _failed_, but it hasn't succeeded.

</comment><comment><USER39> <http://www.OtherWeather.com>

Social weather forecasting, with a Google Map mashup and some social networking features. Launched in late 07, haven't had time to really promote so it's not deadpool yet. Although I have no users :(

</comment><comment><USER40> <http://esposure.com> recently launched. It hasn't quite failed, but nobody visits really. It's a place where you can post screencasts/demos of whatever it is you or your Web app does.

</comment><comment><USER41> <http://toobs.tlrobinson.net> \- crime maps and reports for USC / Los Angeles/

To be fair, it was built in 24 hours for a programming contest two years ago, and hasn't been touched since.

</comment><comment><USER42> <http://www.mylistwatcher.com> \- We Watch Your Amazon Wish Lists and will alert you when the price of any item meets your target price. Never miss a bargain again!

</comment><comment><USER43> <http://www.answermonk.com>

We liked the idea of automatically tagging your links based on what you were searching for, but with all the link/bookmark sites we kind of lost interest.

</comment><comment><USER44> <http://nshrine.com/> A place where social networking communities can share shrines, memorials, etc. It still has a chance, but its growth is pretty disappointing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love your wording: "Keep This Shrine Ad Free" :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> <http://www.thecollegeblognetwork.com>

not sure if it I'd consider it a failure, but definitely has not seen the organic growth that we initially expected.

</comment><comment><USER46> <http://brl.codesimply.net/>

Inexplicably, when you ask people to name an easy-to-learn language that's designed for web/database applications, they still say PHP.

</comment><comment><USER47> resently I released <http://www.fictionthis.com/> \- "allows you to share ideas and have unbiased input into creating a published work of quality fiction. This open project was developed for inspired members of our online community to create their own version of the story and to rate their fellow authors."

I thinks its a great idea, but traffic has been slowly disappearing.. feedback anyone?

</comment><comment><USER48> <http://www.merawaala.com> create,share and embed comparisons .. kind of like a youtube for comparisons

</comment><comment><USER49> bitpal.com - bitpal is a cross platform personal information manager designed to live on a thumb drive. It manages your contacts todos and calendar that sycs between two or more copies (think home and work)of outlook and even betwen outlook and mac (iCal and address book). Never could get the flash drive companies to figure out their biz models. Its a great little tool. www.bitpal.com

</comment><comment><USER50> <http://www.feedcrush.com>

A mashup of 1 college radio station's play data with much larger ambitions...

</comment><comment><USER51> when i was in college i created the site, icantspelldostoevsky.com.

it was kind of a play on words, there was never a correct way to spell dostoevsky, and since he was an existential man, the site was meant as a philosophical discussion playground. think wiki for philosophy, but at the time wikimedia was not around yet, and i used bulletin board software.

</comment><comment><USER52> maybe it wouldn't change the world, but if you're into reading multiple local papers "popurls style" <http://www.newshoured.com/> might be a friend.

<comment><USER10> Ha... I was thinking about making the exact same thing! I was going to target it for mobile audiences. Yours seems to work pretty well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Ya, but I forgot the link since I haven't visited it in a while. :)

</comment><comment><USER54> yeah, my blog is awesome :p

</comment><comment><USER55> digg.com

</comment><comment><USER56> <http://free.LocalDataPlace.com> \- which we built for local recycling (ala freecycle). We haven't been willing to spam existing freecycle groups but we need good local traction to catch on.

<comment><USER57> You should look for groups focused on recycling and sustainability and promote your site to them as a way to do that. Obviously don't be spammy, but if you get involved in the overall discussion then people will be interested in what you have to say about your site. Look around Google Groups for related communities.

If it's having trouble getting nationwide traction, just focus on a specific region initially (such as where you live) -- do some networking and get the site name out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> duthel's comment is not spam.</comment>