Ask YC: Feedback on my webapp (semantic social bookmarking tool) - <AUTHOR>

http://www.faviki.com
Faviki is a social bookmarking tool which allows people to tag webpages they want to remember with Wikipedia terms.
Unlike classic tags, which are just words, "Wikipedia tags" represent references to unique concepts that have their own URL. So, instead of having different tags for the same concept, which is the case with classic tags (cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola) there are just the one unique "Coca-Cola" tag everybody uses.
You can register or just sign in as demo/demo and try it with bookmarklet.
The webapp is still in beta, but I just wanted valuable feedback from the YC community to help in next iterations. Thanks! <comment><USER3> I like the concept! Tags have never made sense to me because I may describe very similar things using very different tags depending on my mood that day, what I happen to be thinking about, or any other external influences. But if there are designated "tags" for each concept then your bookmarks really are better organized.

Definitely a good job overall!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like the concept. That is one of frustrations I've had with other bookmarking tools. I hope you'll continue to use it! :)

<comment><USER4> yes, me too, I have been using del.icio.us for 1+ year and now I have a gigantic un-useful tag cloud. Your app will not solve the problem of having too much tags, but at least make tags more meaningful. I would suggest you to integrate it with del.icio.us in some way because I don't really feel like switching to another bookmarks system at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i'd say change your pitch. "semantic social bookmarking tool" sounds like it came from a random startup idea generator.

<comment><AUTHOR> hmmm. you're maybe right. problem is that's really the shortest way to describe it accurately

<comment><USER5> yes and no. i know what all the words mean, but when i read it and reread it, i didn't get an idea of what's actually unique about the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point. I'll tell my marketing team to get to work on that ;)

<comment><USER6> I think the idea is not to explain what the sites does but the problem it solves. the details of how it solves the problem are less interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice. A few thoughts:

1\. Interface. Is there any way to rewrite it so that the user can just add tags naturally, and then let the program make suggestions? It's a bit frustrating to wait, after each term, for the program to search for the corresponding tag. If you could input your own tags, and then it could list an official suggestion beside each typed term, I think that might increase usability.

2\. Very minor point, but the demo video should be easier to find. I could be alone in this, but I always try to poke around for one as the easiest way to quickly grasp a web app, and the link was buried at the bottom of the page.

Seems like a great app, though; the complete lack of structure for Delicious tags was always one of the things that stressed me about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback! 1.I am aware of that problem, and i'm thinking about ways to make adding tags easer, like suggesting tags according to content. Your suggestion is interesting, I'll consider it definitely. 2\. You're right. I added the link on the homepage

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any way to import my existing bookmarks from del.icio.us (and clean up the tags)? Seems like that's one of your biggest barriers to adoption, at least from people who already use a social bookmarking site.

The app looks great, nice and clean, but I already have hundreds of bookmarks in del.icio.us, and don't want to start from scratch somewhere else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point taken. Thanks for feedback. Importer will be available soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great concept! Certainly does help to structure tags that can grow out of control in any tag cloud. I'm wondering if you've considered building this as an API or dev library so that it can be used by developers not just for bookmarking but also for tagging in general. But then, where's the money in that, eh? (^_^)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback. Right now RSS feeds are available for every page, but I definitely plan to make API in the future, and make it as open as possible for developers.

<comment><USER9> That's great to hear! All the best to Faviki!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Caught a typo on the front page, 2nd paragraph, last line: "...and intrests well organized."

Nice concept, though. Will check it out now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Personally, I love the UI, awesome design, awesome execution. Bookmarklet is sweet as well.

But, I don't know why I need to use this? Why will this help me? What would I store in there?

Currently, my bookmarks menu bar is pretty sufficient.. Is the idea to bookmark stuff I don't know a lot about so I can learn about it via wikipedia?

<comment><AUTHOR> Faviki is not for websites you visit frequently. It's for websites you don't want to forget. It provides a way to organize them and find it later. Wikipedia's role is to help organize bookmarks, and also to provide some useful info about concepts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frankly, I hate to see someone with your kind of drive, cleverness, and design sense working on something so trivial. Is a bookmarking tool the most useful thing you can think of working on? If so, post on yc, I'm sure people will toss out a few ideas with no strings attached.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://faviki.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/9/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting, and good job there! I was contemplating doing something similar, but got diverted with other things. Would you share a bit more about your experience with using dbpedia?

Are you querying dbpedia for the tags? If not, how deep do your tags cross- link?

</comment><comment><USER14> Might want to checkout Zigtag in private beta.

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

mention YC when applying and I'll fast track your invite.

We are doing some great things with semantic bookmarking as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> Really, really nice. Excellent work, and I especially like the toolbar button to make bookmarking easy. I'm seriously thinking about using this over del.icio.us.

One quick question, is there a way to import del.icio.us links?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it!

Unfortunately, there is no way to import del.icio.us links yet, but that feature will be available soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> When you mouse over an item, the date disappears... Seems odd to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> agreed. bug added in todo list

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> how will you handle homonyms like 'bow':

from wikipedia:

# bow - To bend forward at the waist in respect (e.g. "bow down") # bow - <USER2> front of the ship (e.g. "bow and stern") # bow - the weapon which shoots arrows (e.g. "bow and arrow") # bow - a kind of tied ribbon (e.g. bow on a present, a bowtie) # bow - to bend outward at the sides (e.g. a "bow-legged" cowboy)

</comment><comment><USER18> Who is the target user? I agree that a semantic web is better, but I cant honestly see myself using it.

As far as execution and design however, nice job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not? :)

Target users are people who need more precise way to tag. Wikipedia covers concepts from various fields..

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice UI, and nice idea with the concept tagging. Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it! Thanks for feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice Job, shows that sometimes simple is the best way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I did my best to make it as simple as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> sweet app. anyway to pull in fb friends?</comment>


Fujitsu announces 1,200 UK job cuts - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/careers-hr/people-management/news/index.cfm?newsid=16346 Two directors get £1.6m pay off. SOmething wrong here <comment><AUTHOR> Two directors get £1.6m pay off. Workers face the unemployment line. Something wrong here.</comment>


The Fall of Hacker Groups - <AUTHOR> http://phrack.org/papers/fall_of_groups.html <comment><USER2> I've been following "the scene" for nearly 20 years now. It's not smaller or less influential, it's just different. It feels A LOT more dangerous now to be out there doing anything that might be construed as hacking. All of the crazy prosecutions, the "war on terror", and the NSA? Are you kidding? The stakes are way higher now. Sure there have always been dangers but not like now. It's no wonder that people are hiding from the surveillance state. I know this post has a tin foil hat feel but it just seems a lot harder to trust that other end of the wire now. Anon has had every bit as much influence on the wider world as any group I can remember.

<comment><USER3> It's not "tin foil hat", it is circumspection based on public reports about what the NSA, etc., does. But I am with you. There is shit we used to do in the 80's that I would never even _dream_ about doing today.

<comment><USER4> Other than something like blue box, what would be one such thing? If anything things are away too tame now. I think of is something like CarShark that isn't publicly released.

<comment> at-fates-hands Most states have local ordinances against dumpster diving and cops have been known to arrest and fine people since they assume people are trying to get information for identity theft.

Back in the day, hacking university systems was generally frowned upon, but never really punished. Today, it's a federal offense to tamper with university systems. See Aaron Schwartz case.

Back when analog cell phones were out, you could program your Motorola cell phone to be a scanner and pick up conversations people were having in your area. Safe harmless fun. You could also clone your analog phone as well because of a loop hole in FCC laws. Now, it's still possible to do on GSM systems, but you run the risk of getting caught and cloning GSM devices is federal offense with hefty jail sentences attached.

Back in the day, you could hack your cable box so you could get all the premium channels for free. Cable companies half heartedly tried to track down people who used them, but it was pretty low on their radar. Try that today and within hours, the feds will most likely be on your doorstep asking why you were tampering with private property and the cable company will most likely file a lawsuit against you.

Times have changed man. The 80's and 90's were like the last frontier, until the feds jumped in and started creating laws to really hamper people from pushing the boundaries. Hacking went from really fun, and having inside knowledge to everything you considered doing you had to think about the possibility of doing hard time and dealing with prosecutors with a hard on to convict hackers and send them to jail for long periods of time.

<comment><USER5> I guess I'll play devils advocate. All of the things you mention should have been (or were) illegal at the time, but the technology was ahead of the law.

>you could program your Motorola cell phone to be a scanner and pick up conversations people were having in your area. Safe harmless fun.

Maybe for some people it was harmless fun, but what about the people who did this as a form of espionage? Or any criminal?

>Back in the day, you could hack your cable box so you could get all the premium channels for free.

Illegal then, but now the technology and laws have caught up so that finding the people that do this is trivial.

>The 80's and 90's were like the last frontier, until the feds jumped in and started creating laws to really hamper people from pushing the boundaries.

Curious why you think this is. Do you think people really aren't pushing the boundaries today like they did back then?

<comment> at-fates-hands >>>> Curious why you think this is. Do you think people really aren't pushing the boundaries today like they did back then?

Not at all. The law hasn't just caught up, it's like a boot on the throat of the people trying to push existing technologies to new places and uses.

Just take GeoHot. Guy jailbreaks the PS3 and all hell breaks loose. Sony says they're going to patch the way he broke into the system. Then GeoHot says he's writing firmware to go around that. Then Sony sues him, then Sony wanted all the users who watched his videos on YouTube. Then Sony finally settled out of court after he agreed not to hack any more Sony products.

All this because he wanted to run some custom software on his PS3.

There are definitely people out there seriously pushing the hacking boundaries, but my point was the consequences have gotten way out of hand. When I hacked the university email system in 97', I got my network privileges revoked for a year. What do you think the punishment would be nowadays?

You're just not able to hack for fun anymore since anything you do could be construed as a crime, and a serious one at that. Even a guy using his neighbors wireless service is now a federal crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion it's too much "american" media and societys individualistic culture that has spread like a disease on the internet and kind of destroyed much of the original 90s internet culture. And thereby also the safehaven for the hacker people. The one place where many people felt at home has been stripped from them though this "capitalization" of the internet in my opinion. I loved playing around with the net before it got big. Remembering the times I played age of empires with random Chinese ppl and build websites with html where i uploaded my favorite games for people to download (had almost 1000 downloads at one of my sites!) or when I "hacked" games by alternating attributes in their config files and posted results on various forums... This was when the net was free and interesting today most of the landscape is dominated by commercials and Hollywood/media brainwashing.

<comment><USER7> I think that you are absolutely right that the web has changed, but I think that it's pretty easy and cliche to blame 'Murican media on it. It's inevitable that things like the internet are going change for a multitude of different reasons - to blame any one seems shortsighted. People were making the same claims about Endless September and the AOL invasions; but the internet adapted and became something else. In one case, it turned into the internet you remember as the "original".

The internet has changed, but to try to make a claim that there ever was an "original internet culture" is to miss what the internet is and always has been, an amorphous mass of people, constantly changing and evolving into something else based on the technologies available to it.

I loved the net of the 90's and even the early 2000's as well, and I miss it and remember it fondly. But to try to say that it was the original internet; you might as well just be yelling "Get off my lawn". And even then, the BBS folks might want a word with you.

<comment><USER6> Well yes I realize that you cannot blame america for capitalism, capitalism didn't even originate in america. It has been around for several centuries.

However the output of the american media in the 2000s and 2010s, a media that is heavily influenced by capitalism has definitely shaped the internet and the worldly culture into its current form.

The internet is an amorphous mass of people, yes. But in the earlier days not everyone participated like you are "programmed" to do in our current society. Comparisons could be made with the early aviators or sailors, it is true that these things existed and were new in their relative eras and that everybody knew about them. But that doesn't mean everybody felt the need to explore these technologies. So, as the type of people changes that usually uses the internet, (from students, software people and mostly male teenagers that have an urge to explore it, to more corporate people and just about anybody) the content also naturally changed and the mental/emotinal rewards those original people once got when they visited 'teh intehrnetz' are not the same as they once were.

Look at a game like Utopia for example (you know the old browser based strategy game that was created by mehul). It was all about calculations and working in synergy with other people from all over the world (also somewhat about backstabbing, abusing and hacking of course). It was one of the bigger online browser games there was back then. If you compare to current online games like farmville and candycrush it's nothing the same and the types of people are nothing the same, why? Because it was different sorts of people that usually browsed the web back then. So yes, there was and has always been an original culture online that has gradually been merged with the mainstream people which has evolved internet into its' present form, and I don't disagree or agree with that, I just state it as a fact.

<comment><USER8> > _Look at a game like Utopia for example (you know the old browser based > strategy game that was created by mehul). It was all about calculations and > working in synergy with other people from all over the world (also somewhat > about backstabbing, abusing and hacking of course). It was one of the bigger > online browser games there was back then. If you compare to current online > games like farmville and candycrush it 's nothing the same and the types of > people are nothing the same, why? Because it was different sorts of people > that usually browsed the web back then. So yes, there was and has always > been an original culture online that has gradually been merged with the > mainstream people which has evolved internet into its' present form, and I > don't disagree or agree with that, I just state it as a fact._

Have you never seen Eve Online? There's as much calculation and cooperation and backstabbing as in anything I've seen, it's just prettier now. And if subscribing to a game isn't your thing, there are a lot of deep web-based strategy games out there. Picking shit like candycrush is disingenuous; I could just as easily say that the early Web was useless because it had so many shitty Pokemon fan pages.

<comment><USER6> Well sure but it the net was definitely more oriented to ppl that was into hacking / coding back then compared to now. Mainstream wasn't the net back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sadly this latest Phrack post reads as lucid as the methamphetamine inspired posts lately on cpunks.org. Phrack what happened man, you used to be cool.

The real reason that there is no more "hacking scene" is simply availability.

Back in the baud days, most BBS hacking was to get into well connected boards and from there get connected to the internet. As most people now virtually have always-on Internet, the value of stealing a connection has vanished.

Another example of availability killing a scene (well, almost dead) is the once-thriving phreaking scene. Groups were dedicated to discovering and sharing the latest info on how to get free phone calls. As the cost of a phone call got cheaper and cheaper, the value of free phone calls also vanished. Who likes jail time anyway? Take Skype for instance... Instant and virtually free international calls. Why would I bother diving into a pit in the cold when it's totally legal AND free!

I would compare the various scenes to ham radio. It's still a thing even though technology has replaced it multiple times over, but the hard cores will still be enthusiastic as ever.

Edit: The Phrack paper being "released" via the Full Disclosure list earlier today was a nice touch.

<comment><USER10> > Back in the baud days, most BBS hacking was to get into well connected > boards and from there get connected to the internet.

I'm not sure what you mean. Free dialup internet access used to be trivial. You could put fake bank account or credit card numbers into services like AOL and get free accounts that lasted days or weeks. Many local dialup ISPs just mailed you a monthly bill. All you had to do was put in someone else's contact info and bam, instant free account.

<comment><USER9> Not where I was from. Even when Australia only had a hand full of dialup ISPs, they cracked down pretty fast on generated cards. At one point, a close friend got a knock at the door and a suspended sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was involved in this "scene" in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were the same age I was then today, I doubt very much I'd have gone down the same route because of how much the world has changed.

Back then I was using a Commodore 64 hooked up to a tv with a modem (starting at 300 baud and moving up from there); hacking (in the phrack sense) and "phreaking" allowed me to access a much wider world of information and computer resources than I otherwise would have had. Access to "real" computers that can run C compilers! Access to instant communications with people around the world!

These days this sort of thing is no big deal; you can buy a veritable super computer for less than a hundred bucks and run a free OS on it with a full developer ecosystem, worldwide calling is essentially free, the modern Internet gives you access to more free information than anyone could possible consume. But back then, as a 12-18 year old (without parents who worked in CompSci academia or such) all of that was unattainable by legal means, thus the hacking.

The "groups" for me were a secondary thing and a means to share knowledge (again, prior to the web and easy access to ridiculous amounts of information) and they aren't really needed anymore for my personal use case (though I'm not suggesting mine is the only use case, I know a lot of people who were certainly more into it for the social aspects, which still exist today).

<comment><USER12> I think this is one of the more important points. Most of what we were doing back then is now easily done by everyone.

We dropped trunks to get free conference lines so we could all be on the phone together. We scammed the phone companies for free long distance to talk to each other. We had private BBSs. All of that has been suplanted with every day tech and done better.

We cracked programs because we were young and couldn't afford software. You had to know someone, be in the scene, to get access to that stuff. Now there are thousands of websites.

All the really postive stuff is out there for everyone. It's the dark hacking that is thriving and I am not surprised it is not out in the open. But I am certain it is there... they just don't want the publicity. We used to do it for the thrill... they do it for the cash.

Although hacktivism is new. We were to busy trying to figure out how it worked to make any real statements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is a perfect example of how Phrack died years ago. I'm pretty sure this was penned by a 16 year old as a homework assignment for english class. The rank wind of my farts produces more inspired thought than this ridiculously short, purposeless, rambling piece of pseudo-anarchistic crap.

<comment><USER14> +1 for trolling/flaming (simply not enough of it left on the internet) but I dont agree. it's propoganda but I welcome this and all forms of ranting and propoganda. agitation can lead to discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't agree with the thesis here. As somebody whose day job involves tracking "hacker groups" in the adversarial sense and whose hobbies largely involve belonging to "hacker groups" in the doing-cool-shit sense, I feel like there's an assertion with precisely no evidence to support it.

Also, statements like "We live in days of limited creativity" strike me as extreme nostalgia and conservatism. We live in days of INCREDIBLE creativity, in my view.

<comment><USER16> I think the point is that these days we live in an era of abstractions over abstractions which are all very well documented and ever-changing. There are not hundreds of them, but thousands. There's no way to actually push the boundaries here, and even if it is, nobody cares to do so. There's no "scene". You get a few +1's or Likes in social media and that's all. Fuck that. That's no collective.

<comment><USER15> If somebody's view of how to communicate and work with others is restricted to Google+ and FB and Twitter, then that's their _own_ lack of creativity showing, I think.

<comment><USER16> What else have you got, really? Hackerspaces and Github don't count. IRC is dead for the most part. Some ezines seem to struggle along with a few mailing lists, but that's it. Most active members in these "underground" cultures(e.g. demoscene and vx scene) are old ones from the dawn of time, some newbies come and go but hardly any stick. These communities have been shrinking for the past 15 years or so.

Or am I really missing something? I really think there was so much more low- hanging fruit to grab back in late 80's and early 90's and the computing culture back then thrived around doing just that. Now the whole "computing culture" seems to be about node.js and MongoDB or what have you. That's a _fucking_ disgrace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps it is a (nice) reflection on the fact that getting information is not the challenge anymore. The real challenge is interpreting it.

Perhaps the people that normally would be intellectually challenged by understanding routers, are now analyzing data on an extremely big scale.

Or perhaps not.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hm, what does it say about the Hacker News community that the topic of a replacement for "Comic Sans" attracts way more discussion than the issues rised in this quite interesting paper?

Seems to be a case of Parkinson's law of triviality going on here.

<comment><USER19> Hacker News has close to nothing to do with the kind of hacker groups being discussed in the paper.

<comment><USER18> Agreed, never the less the topic is interesting, and the development of groups, organisations and their history is surly an issue that is worth discussing even for readers of hacker news.

Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community.

<comment><USER20> _Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community._

Not significantly, I think. The old-school hacker communities arose as a reaction to the large-scale centralization of technology in the form of the phone companies, IBM, and so on; corporate and government infrastructure was a playground for phone phreaks and hackers who passed around, in grimy photocopied 'zines and text files, skeleton keys to get access to a forbidden realm that was otherwise completely inaccessible. Going back to the '70s, hacking was a way -- at least as the hackers themselves saw it -- to empower people to enter a world that was otherwise reserved for giant bureaucracies.

In a world of iPhones and $5 Digital Ocean droplets, the thrill comes from _creation_ , not _access_. These days, black-hat hackers are professional criminals running electronic short-cons, and "hacker communities" are usually developing-world mafias; they're not (at the risk of romanticizing the way the world used to be) the harmless dialup daytrippers of legend. The lineal descendants of hackers like Cap'n Crunch or the Mentor aren't running botnets; they're building new technologies that are going to _keep_ empowering us.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. There's so much work for people with those kinds of skills in the US and Europe that the "dialup daytrippers" end up in the corporate world right out of college. Even people who participate in illegal activities often have day jobs where they do white hat things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sitting in a small room, with 6 others, building the next big SaaS product felt very much like it did 15 years ago on EFnet

</comment><comment><USER23> Completely misses the point. Hacker groups died because the information they had got distributed to the web.

Wind back the clock to 1984. How do you learn to program a Macintosh? Some small circulation magazines (books were _rare_ \--there is a reason O'Reilly became such a phenomenon), a local users group (if you were amazingly lucky and lived in SF, LA or San Diego), or a hacker group.

How would your learn it now? The web. You don't need a hacker group. Or books. Or magazines.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's gotta be one of the best things I've ever read.

>Instead of reaching for the fellow man, we want to set ourselves apart, andthus, remarkable.

So true.

>Modern life nearly conspires against the collective. We are tormented by a relentless flow of information as well as the daily worries of an eternally insecure, unwarranted life.

Amen to that!

</comment><comment><USER25> Has it just not moved east?

Hackers in the west, of any hat-shade, are jaded and cynical now, having been through 20+ years of watching (especially in the US) the responses change exponentially.

In the east, from Sudan, through the middle east, to India, you see a lot of the same behavior as was here in the 90s, which the older crowd in the USA or Europe have moved past, everything from being super psyched about being on Microsoft/Googles security help lists, to having names with more numbers in than my model datasets.

The environment here has moved on, in some ways, become more business oriented, and "professional" whereas in the those countries, it is still all fresh and exciting and new, without the governmental and corporate behavior we have all come to know and love in the USA and to a lesser extent, Europe.

</comment><comment><USER26> isn't if funny how PG bridges the gap between true hackerdom and pure commercialism/capitalism? I too want to be a ruling VC /ruling hacker when I grow up

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDA0t49AaZ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDA0t49AaZ4)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for sharing the youtube link. This is the most (only?) interesting interview of PG I ever watched. It feels way more closer to the PG who wrote the Lisp- and hackers-related essays (or those in Hackers and Painters) than the PG who is responsible for YC Startups. As you say, it's funny how it is the same person :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I myself feel ashamed that I have stopped reading phrack at all. Sure enough, I've forgotten about it in the race to "keep up" as described in the article. It is, in essence, the original Hacker News. Time to re-evaluate...

</comment><comment><USER14> First, I found that there are some true gems in the article and feel it is worth reading. But here is my contribution to discussion through some criticism.

         In effect, hacking has arguably grown. Hacker communities,
         definitely not. So what went wrong?

I assume an American wrote this and I am wondering if the above is not a mostly US American problem. Of course what is a problem for the US becomes a problem for everyone else eventually in one way or another but at the moment... EU hacker communities are more fluid and inclusive of youth and counter-political cultures. And more often than not the Tenured hackers stick around to work with and collaborate with the new and younger. Though they have plenty of problems I don't think lack of growth is one of them. There are some more inclusive hacker spaces in the US but most of the tenured and serious US hackers went commercial and stayed that way.

In the US context I agree with all the statements. Much also applies to the entire community as a whole. But what is missing is this: the community is just getting old. It is now coming into contact with what happens to any new field of discovery or thought: tenure and structure. It's a problem with memory in general. As it is created there becomes an assumption that one should reference it. This field has history now and those that come along will be forced to consider it just as someone who studies photography has to think about Atget. This requirement adds latency that naturally changes the makeup of the field.

         It is important to note that our capitalist worries are
         more deeply rooted in us than might seem at first, even
         in the most politically diverse people. Supporting oneself
         is not easy, it does not come for free. Getting some
         education, finding a job, staying up-to-date... regardless
         of what your aspirations are, whatever you feel obliged to
         do is probably a lot, already. And it likely involves a
         prevalence of "minding your own business".

Much of the article has to do with productivity issues. This is not unique to our field except that once upon a time the median age of the field was a teenager with lots of energy and time and now median age is older. It is true that the grind of day to day in societies like the US that hold capitalism as God makes it harder for one to have time for much else than survival. But 1. this isn't the case everywhere yet. Just see some of the newer capitalistic societies in the EU that have not yet shed every part of socialist history just yet. (ahem, Berlin!). 2. One should also consider that we are just getting old. Want to solve these problems, be less freaking proud, more inclusive and bring in youth. It's the same for every field. The article perhaps says the same thing but better:

         If our thoughts on creating hacker groups were to be
         summarised, this is how they would look: No one ever
         feels like we do. They are not to be trusted and we do
         not have the time for them. The only attitude consonant
         to our search for a comfortable, safe life is to constrain
         ourselves to our own limitations, ignore the intelligent
         life out there, and surrender to the mediocracy that our
         society has condemned our leisure time to.

Side note: these problems _might_ relate to the fields chauvinism problem. from my experience women are twice as likely to be inclusive in this field. there could be many reasons for this but it's worth considering that the inclusive problem and lack of trust actually may be related to the male chauvinism issue.

Finally, that Anonymous and these types of communities will not have as much impact as l0pht, mod, lod, others... is __seriously debatable! __

    This article discusses why recently we do not see many
         hacker groups anymore, and why the ones we do, such as
         Anonymous and its satellite efforts, do not succeed in
         having the same cultural impact as their forefathers.

Most of the older groups such as l0pht spent their time saying XYZ company sucks because their developers missed a bug in a product. Whereas anonymous spends its time saying XYZ Gov/Inc/Policy sucks and we should riot. Which one do you think should have more impact?

<comment><USER28> Well said. It is always interesting to watch hackers age. When I read the article I felt that much of the angst was pining for the "old days" when things were better. But reminiscing always gets it wrong :-).

That said, I've been wondering of late about hacker spaces. I've been a member of Hacker Dojo now (Mountain View CA) for about 6 months and by and large when I am there it has a lot of people hanging out on the free WiFi and perhaps hacking but not a lot of interacting except with perhaps 1 or 2 close associates nearby. But in part it seems to have no _purpose_ as hacking has had in the past. I'm trying to come up with ideas to change that.

<comment><USER29> Hacker spaces have definitely changed. In the 90s the one here was a crazy 24hr party, it's entire membership was anarchists with zero regard for laws which they considered only existed to control information. Somehow I managed amazing productivity yet was largely high out of my gourd with Skinny Puppy blasting in the background almost constantly. Everything was surprisingly well organized, we would all decide on something like we need 60 handsets to try to clone and we'd accomplish that by the end of the day. We need to code our own STS-like dialup chat board because we're not paying for a license. 25 of us would work on that until 6:00am the next morning and it'd be done even with the craziest of distractions going on, such as around 11pm a steady stream of local misfits would come in as we'd converted it into an all ages boozecan and defacto nightclub with a stupid amount of lights rigged up that were in hindsight absolutely frightening considering the terribad wiring job we hacked together. It looked like the video from Front242 - Operating Tracks but with more eye searing strobe lights.

Now the hacker space I go to is largely populated with professional developers and students so gone is the raging music, the drugs, the anarchy/activism, the close-knit community, the epic amount of crime and nobody knows each other. There's less women too, in the 90s I would say it was half and half with many girls actively participating. I can count on one hand the amount of female hackers I've seen at the new space. Even though our old space was drug fueled insanity more work seemed to get done. No group projects going on anymore, there's a few but it's usually something like making your bike glow in the dark and not hacking software just for the sake of hacking. Doesn't help that none of us have any spare time either, we are all too busy in careers/school to afford an all nighter hack session like back in the day. Barely any of us can even manage to coordinate a time when everybody can be in the same room for 5 mins for a meeting let alone work on any projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> here I know most of you do not read German, but this is probably the best hacker community site:

[http://www.ccc.de/en/](http://www.ccc.de/en/)

Much better than Phrack in my opiion

</comment><comment><USER31> If I had a few million to spare, I'd support individual hackers and collectives as well. Because we need people that aren't under the pressure to deliver something for profit.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does the thesis hold? It seems to me there are more hackers labs than before. Also they don't convey exactly the same spirit they are still from the same vein, no?

<comment><USER33> I think people are still learning, exploring together, and sharing code. But I think the arena has changed. It used to be local + irc, now it is (I guess) local + something not irc. It really doesn't matter for a small group how you communicate -- it could be sms, email, some-web-app-chat-thingy ... I of course have a moral issue with anything that isn't open, like email, usenet and irc -- but that doesn't matter, because I'm not 14 and part of whatever is emerging next.

While I'd hope the coming generation read some of the old phrack articles -- why would they bother to keep up with the new phrack? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see vibrant phrack magazine -- but we can't really expect the coming generation (as a whole) to use what is now some ancient 'zine.

I think hacking has always been by nature a secret art. It started in a grey area, and as legislation caught up became ever more black. Now, you could presumably find yourself held forever in a dark hole accursed of "cyber terrorism" because some twat admin didn't disable telnet or dialup acces on your local nuclear plant.

To me it seems pretty obvious that hoping for any progress of the art in the open is a vain hope at this point. We've made it impossible. More power to the criminal organizations that have enough foresight to value talent when they come across it -- no matter if they pay in dope, girls[or: boys -- I guess I'm more caught up in old stereotypes than I'd like (even if they might've been wrong forever)], alcohol or cash.

<comment><USER34> There are a ton of groups that use IRC though... It's mainly IRC, Jabber/XMPP, and Skype. There are plenty of groups to be found.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I loved the early internet, IRC, newsgroups etc. The really old school phreakers even before that was also a different time. Back then you could do stuff like that and go on to start companies like Apple (Woz). Now, you'll end up in a solitary confined cell or have to join the FBI/NSA if you are caught.

Hacker groups aren't as tied to freedom as it used to feel.

</comment><comment><USER36> Why the elite hacker scene has pretty much disappeared is something I have thought about over the past decade as well. I know many people from the groups he mentioned in the beginning - mostly the American ones, but also some European, Australian etc. ones as well.

Ultimately success is what killed it off I'd say. I recognize some HN names as people who were actively, or at least peripherally involved in the scene, hanging out on EFnet's +hack and then #hack etc. Many of these people went into dot-coms and startups from the mid-1990s on. Some sold their companies for billions of dollars, many got tens of millions of VC dollars, or stock options, or buyout dollars, or whatnot. As someone mentioned in the thread for this post, Mudge became a program manager at DARPA - some people went into the security field, and thrived.

Aside from the financial/career success of the dot-com boom, the growth of the Internet helped kill it off as well. Prior to the Internet, a very technical working class kid would take his Commodore 64 hooked up to the family TV, plug it into his POTS phone line with his 300 (then 1200, then 2400...) baud modem, and call a Bulletin Board Service, which inevitably was a Commodore 64 or Apple ][ belonging to another technical teenager, whose class background might be slightly tonier as he often had a dedicated phone line in his room.

So what kind of social structures evolve when the kind of kids who gather on 4chan today get together on this network of Commodore 64's that are fairly independent of everyone else? One thing is for sure, to take a page from this fellow's essay, all of the rules and structures that make up American society with its class structures and relations, large international military and police force and so forth go out the window. If the kids want access to a Cray, they're going to get access to a Cray. They don't care if it's used for some secret DoD research project, or some Goldman Sachs number crunching. These were the days when your local Bell switch might be on a dialup, when a tone-generating blue box could seize hold of the telephone company's in-band signalling.

So some of this fits into what the essay writer says. We had our own communication network, a kind of 4chan'ish network of Commodores and Apple ]['s in teenage boys bedrooms across America. We controlled it. When the Internet came, we shifted to that, but our communication network became controlled by DARPA, then the NSF, then a variety of corporations, which were then whittled down to a handful - AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, Sprint, Comcast, Time-Warner and several more. The network became corporatized, firewalled, censored, monitored, spammed and spam-resisted etc. Under the threat of spam, attorney generals and corporate control tightening, Usenet effectively disappeared. The disappearance of Usenet is tied to the disappearance of the hacker scene. The same forces which killed Usenet are the forces which killed the scene. Understand why Usenet died and you understand why the scene died.

The carrot is what killed it, not the stick. In 1990 Operation Sundevil happened, the MoD guys were arrested etc. Repression didn't really kill things, it just made people a little more careful. Maybe the arrested guys would quit, but everyone else just started buying early cell phones and such to hack outside their house.

The Internet killed it. It swallowed up the need for a network of BBS's in boy's bedrooms. It swallowed its own Usenet via monopolization, shady corporations doing spam, attorney generals and such. It also started a dot-com boom and then social boom and now mobile/cloud boom. A teenage boy can publish a traction-getting app or website for next to nothing in a way that could never have happened back then. Some of the scene people from the 1980s and 1990s are very, very wealthy Tesla-owning retired founder dudes nowadays.

<comment> j-b Success and the Internet.. that sounds about right. I knew people from the early AOL days that used to write VB apps to "hack" AOL. Various hacker groups would steal OH/Internal accounts, etc. and create private portals in Master AOL showing off their car or whatever. AoLaZy, AoHeLL, Island55, etc. and then broadband happened and everyone grew up and got a programming job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I want to say that hacker groups haven't declined, it's just that now they don't call themselves hacker groups, they call themselves startup companies.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't think this quite hits the nail on the head. Perhaps hacker communities haven't grown, but I think the reasons given are a bit too abstract. In my opinion, there are two main factors at play here. One is that many of the late 90's early 2000's hackers went corporate for the $$, or worse, went government. I'll never forget calling Mudge up and asking him how DARPA was treating him, and he was loving it simply because of all the cool things he was seeing.

For quite a while I think the hacker community was much more about hobby and IT professionals who were curious (sysadmins breaking out of the box), whereas now people just want to break into stuff and get paid big bucks (banks seem to be the centerpiece of the pen-testing economy to me). I interviewed at a local security company, and when I started talking about evil-maid attacks, I got blank stares back. So what really ended up happening is that guys starting realizing they could just run scans and produce fancy reports and get paid lots of money, and they got lazy and stopped contributing to the community as much.

Secondly though, is the chilling effect. I have been ranting about NSA for at least a decade, but we didn't have much proof beyond the Echelon/Tempest leaks. Now we know how pervasive it really is and that it's still probably even worse than we thought, and people are starting to realize that we only temporarily won the 90's crypto wars.

Eben Moglen said about the cryptowars: "in 95 at Harvard, Stuart Baker (former NSA General Counsel), after a debate about the right to encrypt, said, "...public key encryption will become available. We fought a long losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic..."

I spent some time at unallocated space, which is the closest big hacker lab to NSA headquarters, and it was sorta hush-hush that we just don't talk about NSA stuff while there. Great guys, all around, but I feel like too many hackers got mired in the technical and forgot about the political side of things.

We have to realize that what is going on is a massive control power play being put into action. Surveillance of the level that is happening isn't about security at all. It's about control. I'm willing to bet that in the next few months we are about to see some COINTELPRO level releases from Greenwald and team. Hack all you want, and maybe even get hired by some contractor to make lots of money... but if you dare start applying those skills to politics... you better watch out because you just went to the top of a list somewhere.

I have put it like this, if data = information, and information = power, then secret data = secret information = secret power. Hackers are a threat to those who wield secret data, and their communities are heavily targeted for infiltration and worse. This to me, is much more influential on the hacker community than some imaged lack of creativity. I think the creativity is there, but people are having to hide it away.

<comment><USER38> I would like a clarification about the downvote please. I come here for the good conversation, not for reddit style disagreement votes.</comment></comment>


The App Store is slow, so I built App Store Instant - <AUTHOR> http://appoftheday.com/instant

<comment><USER2> I just want to point out, re: all these "instant" things, Google instant is useful not because its instant, but because its finishing queries for you.

Partial queries are not useful.

My 2cents

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you. I didn't build App Store Instant as a replica of Google Instant. With the APIs available, there isn't a reliable way to predict apps.

I built it because iTunes is slow. Try searching iTunes and clicking on an App (to read the description). It takes me 5+ seconds. This takes ~1 second.

<comment><USER3> Are you logging your queries? If you have enough searches you could build your own predictions. You're also proxying results, so you could use those to build an index too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am logging queries. Do you have any tips/suggestions as to how to do my own predictions?

<comment><USER4> For each prefix, which app are people eventually satisified with?

E.g. if "in" often leads to instapaper, predict that, while if "ins" often eventually leads to "instantapp", that's the prediction for that prefix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What we really need is a better app store interface on the iPad. Apple's implementation is terrible[1]. AppShopper shows it would be possible to do. I'd even pay money for such an app. The app could include "spotlight apps" too, as another source of revenue.

[1] It is terrible because it always resets itself to the beginning everytime you launch it. Couple that with the fact that installing an app causes the app store to close, means you just can't search around very effectively on it. Simple example: navigate to the third page of top apps, find an app you like, install it, go back to the app store, you've been pushed back to the first page and have to redrill down to page three to keep perusing.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Browsing is especially difficult when you click on an app to find out more details about it, click back when you're done, and then find that you've been kicked back to page one.

Unfortunately I think this is one of the places where you're likely to get rejected by Apple for 'duplicating built in functionality', even if you've improved upon it, so I doubt anyone is going to do it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have 'instant' overload.

<comment><USER8> Time for a 'slow search' movement to go with 'slow food' and 'slow news'!

<comment><USER9> I have been wanting to do a slowfeed movement for years

<comment><USER10> Assuming you're not simply being facetious, what would that look like?

Some sort of meta-rss feed that delivers a 'best-of' for weekend perusal? Perhaps it could be collated/curated and then printed in a handy offline version for weekend digestion?

<comment><USER11> _what would that look like?_

<http://hackermonthly.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The JavaScript (and a bit of the CSS) looks awfully similar to iTunes Instant which was released a few days ago: <http://labs.stephenou.com/itunes>

Edit: according to a few people I've heard from, Stephen (creator of iTunes Instant) did help out / supply some of the code for App Store Instant. My mistake. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Although I've got "instant overload" too this is the first of the instant apps with a built in, scalable business model - each of the links on this site is iTunes / linksynergy affiliate enabled - that's truly smart :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm excited to see how it scales!

<comment><USER14> I need to contact you, but your contact us form is not working. Any other way?

<comment><AUTHOR> jordan (at) appoftheday (dot) com

EDIT: Fixed the contact form, thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> www.instantdomainsearch.com has been doing the instant lookup thing for a while.

<comment><USER16> Not to mention Domize (<http://www.domize.com>). I remember using them years ago, I still love it. It's funny, since I can't stand Google Instant, but really enjoy Domize, interesting how that works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The thing that sets this one apart from the others is that it can actually generate revenue (via affiliate links).

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice idea but worthless results I'm afraid.

"secret of monkey island" - no hit, suggestions have none of these words.

"air video" - no hit, though at least suggestions include air.

"best camera" - ditto.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was a bug affecting apps that have spaced in them. Fixed!

(Air Video still doesn't show on top when you type Air Video as apparently Apple's iTunes API is ranking Air Mouse Pro higher)

<comment><USER18> Still appears to be broken.

"Red Laser"

"Better Christmas List"

<comment><AUTHOR> Both worked for me. Can you try clearing your cache?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Will this be a new hacker news meme or something? Being bored or current search tool on site is slow so I built (Insert Name) Instant.

<comment><USER20> There are worse memes than actually building something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems to be missing some of the apps that I can find from the itunes store. We Rule isn't showing up. While another of the We series is.

I like the design a lot simple, fast, and calming.

</comment><comment><USER22> How did you manage to scrap the Apple Store? Are you storing all the apps data locally? I guess it would be a huge overhead to send each of these queries to Apple...

</comment><comment><USER23> Excellent work! Feature suggestion: iPad / iPhone filtering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great suggestion. I thought about doing tabs when building it, but wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Any ideas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> OK, it's not working comprehensively. I think the search term "book" should bring up waaaaay more than the 9 results I'm getting!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a preview of the first 9 results. Apple only returns back a limited number. I need to find a better way of displaying if there are more than the 9 results. Any ideas?

<comment><USER24> OK, too bad Apple limits it like that. It really kills its usefulness then. Books in the App Store (aside from the ePubs in the iBookstore) is a rat's nest that's hell to wade through on the desktop. An Instant like this would really help with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I also have instant overload but I must admit, this is one of the better instant apps I've seen! And no begging for a job. :)

</comment><comment><USER26> very snappy, well done! it found all but one of my published iPhone apps, and very quickly, like Google Instant. Of course, one huge advantage you have is less traffic. And you've got less to render. You may also be showing more of a cached, less real-time view of what's actually in the store (guess).

</comment><comment><USER27> I typed in "go" and SmartGo Pro was the first result. Impressive.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice, too bad I don't shop the App Store by keyword search.

</comment><comment><USER29> My game GloSnake isn't showing up :(

<comment><USER30> When I searched for GloSnake, it showed up briefly and then disappeared. I can't seem to get it to come back again.

(edit) When getting as far as "Glos", it shows up. If I type beyond that, it seems to disappear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Found a bug in my code. Try searching now!

<comment><USER30> Appears to be fixed. Nice work :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My two cents ...

I find the results often unexpected as a result of matching a search term to several app fields. I search the word "instant" and receive AIM as the top result (presumably because AIM is an "instant" messenger application). Same thing occurs due to matching against developer names, causing what I'd consider to be false (or 'less true') matches to show up because the string matches a developer name, and yet matching app names are lower in the match results, even though the string is in the app name--and often the beginning of the app name.

It'd be worthwhile to consider tightening the parameters. I'd wager a typical user performing an instant search is not searching by developer name. I'd further wager an average user is searching by keyword and description less frequently on an 'instant' search than by app name. So perhaps you could try a bit of weighting, pushing X app name matches higher in the results, followed by X description matches, followed by X developer name matches. Perhaps tweak the UI to reflect this.

And, of course, I could be completely wrong and this is all just a matter of my expectations not being fulfilled after searching.

</comment><comment><USER32> Haha I see your logic.

Guy creates ytinstant.com, gets hired by google.

You create App Store Instant, and (hopefully) get hired by apple.

<comment><USER33> Ehm, the logic is right there in the headline:

 _The App Store is slow_ , so I built App Store Instant

<comment><USER34> I'm not supporting the above statement, and the blithe logic it displays, but I can't go along with this, either. If that is as deep as the analysis of motivations goes on Hacker News, none of you should ever be allowed to vote.

<comment><USER34> I'd love to respond to the below (dead) post and the thoughtful dorks who downvoted me, so might as well reply to myself.

I don't care why he wrote this application. My point is that you can't just say "LOOK HE SAYS WHY RIGHT THERE, THAT'S WHY!" and have any sort of intellectual credibility, unless the intellectual credibility of a third grader is what you're aiming for.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


USCYBERCOM has released GENADMIN 16-0073 [pdf] - e-sushi https://www.cybercom.mil/J3/orders/Gen%20Admin/16-0073.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Huh. I got a warning from Firefox that the site was configured insecurely. Invalid security certificate.

</comment><comment><USER2> 403 Forbidden and invalid cert. What is it?</comment>


Harvard stores 700 terabytes of data into a single gram of DNA (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134672-harvard-cracks-dna-storage-crams-700-terabytes-of-data-into-a-single-gram <comment><USER2> It's weird when you read about tech advances that are so profound, you have to stop and consider the philosophical implications. I have a dime on my desk that probably weighs 2 grams... something that small could contain more raw data than a person could possibly read in their entire life... that could contain 1.4 million hours of cd quality audio. Insane!

<comment><USER3> What does that have to do with philosophy?

<comment><USER4> Considering and quantifying the some total of your actions in life is largely philosophical in nature. Yes its not writing a paper on the applications of Friedrich Nietzsche in 2015, but everyone also isn't an academic.

Much like figuring out how much to tip your waiter is a mathematical exercise. Just one that might not shake the foundations of academic mathematics.

Just because territory is well travel, doesn't mean everyone has walked there.

<comment><USER3> By that definition, everything is philosophy.

<comment><USER5> [http://xkcd.com/903/](http://xkcd.com/903/)

"Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at 'Philosophy'."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My quibble is with the claim that 3TB (3.5") hard drives are the "densest storage medium in use today". Yes, the article is two and a half years old, but by then 32GB MicroSD cards had been around for a couple of years. 100 such cards would exceed the capacity of a 3TB hard drive and weigh a tenth as much.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the article isn't great. We go through how we calculated densities; we didn't use hard drive enclosures, but did include thickness for HD platters in calculating density. In general, magnetic tape mostly wins as they are so thin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My first thought was, how long did it take to write and read this data? I don't expect exceptional speed, but I do wonder about throughput and seeking.

<comment><USER9> FTA: While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours.

OK, so assuming 1 hour for 3 billion bases, it's 1000 hours for 3 trillions bases (3 Terabits) or 1 million hours for ~3 petabits (or 400TBs of data). Yeah, that's a long time, roughly 100 years :)

<comment><USER10> I believe that also consumes the strands you're reading, so unless the source is copied many times, it is probably even slower than that.

<comment><USER11> Good thing cells have been copying DNA since life began.

<comment><USER12> Great, now my hard drive is going to get cancer!

<comment><USER11> At least you can remove/destroy the cells though. Aside from DNA storage & replication, there's no auxiliary purpose of the tissue.

[http://xkcd.com/1217/](http://xkcd.com/1217/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> DNA storage is pretty silly. The claim is 5.5petabits/mm^3 with a 100x redundancy. The problem is that massive storage is only as good as your ability to encode/decode into it.

Let's be clear: this work encoded just 5.27 megabits. It's stored in what's basically a large molecular hash table where each piece of key-value data is replicated a million times for redundancy. Each piece then read 100x to correct for the -abundant- errors in each piece. So they encoded less than a megabyte.

The problem with encoding information into DNA is that writing serial polymers accurately is difficult and slow. In this paper they're using an inkjet printed DNA array. It takes a day to make them, resulting in a bandwidth of:

(5.27 Mbits) / (24x60x60 sec) = 66 bits/sec

Reading is a little faster. The fastest system, the HiSeq 2500 reads 120Gbits raw in 27 hours. Factoring in the necessary 100x redundancy, one has a -maximum- read rate of:

(120 Gbits / 100) / (27x60x60 sec) = 12 Kbits / sec

So for 5.5 petabits it would take 16,000 years to write the data into a cubic mm but only 16 years to read it at the current rate.

If we get a little scifi, and assume we build programmable polymerases and get nanopore (direct read) sequencing. Even then, physics limits you to something like 1000 read/writes per sec per pore/polymerase. Instrumenting to these will probably limit per-feature size to being larger than 100micron on a fabricated chip, giving us an ultimate read/write limit around:

(2cm/100um)^2 x 1000 bit/sec = 40Mbit/sec

for a giant 2cmx2cm chip. With the necessary error-correction and redundancy, it's probably going to cap out around 1Mbit/sec at best.

Those 700TB take about 2months to read/write at these rates, and we'll have much-better solid state storage technologies by the time we figure out how to all that with DNA.

<comment><USER7> Largely agreed, though I think information storage in sequenced polymers in general is fairly interesting, but we are long ways off. Also, there are applications for DNA storage that are somewhat interesting when weight becomes very important (space travel) or biocompatibility (barcoding food ingredients).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If they have possible values: TGAC, why not convert everything into base4? Wouldn't you get astronomical gains in storage?

<comment><USER15> Not astronomical gains. Ignoring the technical challenges of a biological system like DNA, base 4 can encode the same data in exactly half as many characters, so capacity would double.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that's right. Assuming we had 5 characters to encode data,

with base2 we get 2^5 = 32 possible combinations

with base4 we get 4^5 = 1024 possible combinations

<comment><USER16> But storage length is the log of the number of possible combinations, so you're back to just double the amount of storage.

<comment><USER14> Both functions (2^x and 4^x) have exponential growth, but their exponential growth is not linearly related.

2*(2^x) != (4^x)

<comment><USER16> We are talking about data, which is the log of the number of combinations, like any measure of information. If this interests you, definitely look into basic information theory, and then move onto coding theory.

Take, for example, 32bit integers vs 64bit integers (unsigned for simplicity). Two 32 bit integers can represent exactly the same number of combinations that a single 64 bit number can. Sure, there's an exponential number more combinations in a 64bit integer than a 32 bit, but the number of combinations is not how the storage capacity is measured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The era of sexually transmitted data is upon us. :]

<comment><USER18> What would be great is each time you copy that data, it mutated a bit... and if the mutation was positive, you could copy it again.

<comment><USER19> I see what you did there, with that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Particularly impressive when you consider the human genome is only ~700 MB.[1] So this is like a million times as much data as human DNA stores, but in the same DNA format. Impressive.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much- memory-w...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-memory-would- be-required-to-store-human-dna)

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the current state of this research (since this article is 2012 material)?

</comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't DNA have a halflife of like 13 years or something? Wonder what the error rate is on 700TB of DNA just sitting there for a year. I guess you could engineer a system with multiple redundancies and checksums, with that kind of density raid2 or raid1000 doesn't make a difference.

<comment><USER7> Depends on how you store it, but if it's dry it's much much longer. e.g., see here: [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/ab...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201411378/abstract)

<comment><USER22> Haha that paper was published today! Are you the author?

This is pretty interesting. I'd love to read the paper but it looks like I can't download the article yet since its not finished uploading to the site.

<comment><USER7> I am an author on the 2012 paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty old, and not sure why it's here again today. That said, I was an author on the paper, and I'm happy to answer questions during a useless meeting I have to attend in 30 minutes.

<comment><USER22> The last author too, excellent!

What kind of IO bandwidth can you currently get from DNA? Does reading from it damage the DNA? What kind of hurdles need to be overcome to bring this to market and are they hurdles we can overcome in the near future?

edit; Hey looks like you answered most of these else where, so thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Soon, we will use our body as storage and eyes as monitors :)

<comment><USER24> We don't already?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I look forward to a portable storage device that has all the books, and all the movies, on a chain around my neck.

</comment><comment><USER26> So, what's the latency?

</comment><comment><USER27> This article is 2 years old. Are there any new developments?

</comment><comment><USER28> How robust is DNA against natural or artificial radiation?

<comment><USER29> A question that's somewhat akin to asking, 'How robust are humans to flying projectiles?' ;-)

Of course, it's all about the energy. I'm not a biologist, so I won't speak to the details of how resilient DNA is to specific types of exposure or why, but I am a physicist and I can tell you that if you blast DNA with high energy radiation, like gamma rays, it's gonna have a bad time. That said, if we want to talk about robustness in terms of what it's likely to be exposed to, then it's pretty darn robust. We are exposed to a wide band of EM radiation on a constant basis, and can even withstand exposures on the higher end without becoming 'corrupted'.

I'd also note that standard, non-specially designed electronics aren't very resilient to radiation either. Not to mention, if you could reliably read/write data using DNA, I'd expect that redundancy would become... easy. Security on the other hand...

<comment><USER30> > Security on the other hand...

Sneeze once and everyone has a copy? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And gets sued by the patent holders of the DNA code!

</comment><comment><USER32> the market for archival storage solutions is getting bigger and bigger... this seems like a great step forward for biological storage.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone remind me why this isn't in our hard drives yet.

<comment><USER33> Because this is a discovery, not an invention. If they could make high- performance biological storage devices the size of hard drives, you don't think they would be doing this already?

This probably required a machine significantly larger than most desktop computers, with a pricetag in the $100,000+ range. That and it has a R/W speed of ~30Kb/s...

It will be in our hard drives when the technology has been developed to make that happen.

I mean, graphene is already looking to be a far more efficient and powerful alternative to silicon. Why isn't that in our processors yet? It's because creating a logic gate and creating an x86 CPU are entirely different things.

The same way that encoding a bunch of data into DNA and replicating it a few billion times is entirely different from making an on-demand biological data storage device.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Although, it doesn't make sense that they copied 700 TBs if the speed is 30kb/s.

Any idea on how long this will take to get to market, and whether it's being worked on?</comment></comment></comment>


Learning How to Prove: From the Coq Proof Assistant to Textbook Style - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.01466 <comment><USER2> Would be nice if someone well versed in Coq will add[1] the corresponding page in Learn X in Y minutes site.

[1] [https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes- docs/issues/316...](https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes- docs/issues/3161)

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I was recently looking into doing this after seeing a similar request on discourse (not that I am a coq expert by any means).

[https://github.com/philzook58/learnxinyminutes- docs/blob/mas...](https://github.com/philzook58/learnxinyminutes- docs/blob/master/learncoq.v)

I was thinking about basically taking the OCaml one and transcribing it, leaving proving to a short blurb at the end and the references. Still useful I think.

<comment><USER2> Amazing, hopefully, pull request soon ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think here is room for some literate programming here. Why not have once source document for both formal proofs and semi-formal expositions. Then one can extract from that the coq proof and thus have a proof that everything is sound and also extract a LaTeX document that is nicely readable. In particular one would probably not extract proof bodies because coq proofs are not that readable but replace them by semi-formal proofs that are also included in the same source document.

<comment><USER5> Coq used to support a "declarative proof mode" that's a lot more readable _and_ maintainable than the usual proof scripts. Older versions of Coq could even output a pretty-printed version of any proof term, where the structure of the corresponding proof was explained in English text.

Very old versions of Agda had an even more developed support for "literate" proofs, where _any_ item in the proof language could have a natural-language form, that could also be endowed with features in natural language grammar (singular/plural forms, grammatical class such as noun/adjective/verb/adverb, symbolic vs. written out form) and thus allow for complex phrases to be pretty-printed automatically.

All of these features were left to bitrot, unfortunately. I don't think the version of Agda I mentioned can even be downloaded anymore. (Newer versions of Coq have _some_ support for 'structured' proofs that is supposed to improve maintainability if proactively used, but it's a far cry from what those features could allow 'out of the box', with no need for special care or discipline from the user.)

<comment><USER6> > Coq used to support a "declarative proof mode" that's a lot more readable > and maintainable than the usual proof scripts.

I liked playing around with that, but it was quite restricted in what it really do. And it lacked the automation that Isabelle/HOL has. In Isabelle you can really focus on the general structure of the proof and have it fill in the intermediate steps by automated theorem proving. In Coq's mathematical proof language I remember having to write a lot more of hand-holding code.

Isabelle's Isar proof language is not quite as readable as textbook proofs, but it does make proofs somewhat "informally" readable. There are some nice examples in [https://isabelle.in.tum.de/library/HOL/HOL- Isar_Examples/doc...](https://isabelle.in.tum.de/library/HOL/HOL- Isar_Examples/document.pdf) (though the very first one is not the nicest, I think).

Edit: Forgot to mention, the above document is kind of what the OP asked for, you can generate this kind of LaTeX document from a fully formally checked Isabelle/HOL development.

<comment> jerome-jh Opinion of a programmer learning Coq: I think the Coq program is THE proof, everything else is aesthetic. I quite do not like the idea proposed in the paper to comment every Coq line. There is risk to give an illusion of understanding. Whereas true understanding occurs when following side by side the Coq code and the evolution of the goals, and agreeing with the prover. To me, it is like following a proof on the blackboard. You may think you have understood, and stumble when doing it on paper. Doing the proof in Coq and forcing me to understand each step gives me the impression to do it on paper ... well sometimes I write bits on paper when the prover still goes too fast.

<comment><USER5> > Whereas true understanding occurs when following side by side the Coq code > and the evolution of the goals

This is the only way to understand a proof script, _because_ proof scripts in and of themselves are totally opaque. It's like running a function with no source information step-by-step in a debugger. Declarative proofs are high- level (and can in fact be made arbitrarily-high-level by omitting proof steps and turning them into well-structured "sketches") and give you the equivalent information within the source code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I wonder why LaTeX math mode doesn't do some fancy static analysis. Considering how much math is just a language, and we know how to prove (and check) things about languages. Maybe you could automatically defend against a misspelled variable in an equation, or go much further...

Are there any cool projects I'm missing out on?

<comment><USER8> I was watching a video by Kevin Buzzard, he talks about using Lean Theorem Prover, seems pretty interesting [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp- mQ3HxgDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-mQ3HxgDE)

<comment><USER9> I watched that the other day and this is the most inspiring, maybe potentially ground breaking video I've seen in the last decade. That's the first time I watched something and thought, this is probably the future. This is the start of something that will have repercussion in the next thousand of years.

I recommend this paper from Lamport on how to write a 21st century proof: [https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf](https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/proof.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have taught the course where CS undergrads tackle proving for many years. It has not been my experience that for those who have difficulty the stumbling block lies in making sure that their arguments are formalizable.

This may have to do with my institution and my students (or perhaps with me) but I find that 30%-ish of them just do not have a turn for mathematics or proving, at all. Just as I do not have a turn for graphic design and no amount of effort moving things around in the GIMP seems to help, these folks do not get even the simplest exercises in Epp or Rosen. Even when the other 70%-ish are very ready to go on, there is a core that will not get those questions on the exam no matter how much time we devote to the topic.

(These folks, as far as I can tell and I've been doing this since 1990, go on to solid careers.)

<comment><USER11> >30%-ish of them just do not have a turn for mathematics or proving

This is a total cop out. Doubly so when discussing alternative ways to teach. Maybe they have the wrong background. Maybe they need something different in high school. Or a different set of prereqs. Who knows why, but saying it's something practically innate is a huge leap.</comment></comment>


FastSpark: A New Fast Native Implementation of Spark from Scratch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rajasekar3eg/fastspark-a-new-fast-native-implementation-of-spark-from-scratch-368373a29a5c <comment><USER3> A lot of people using PySpark are moving to Dask for significantly faster performance. Dask is also built for kubernetes - which is a huge deployment win.

Spark is still in-between yarn and kubernetes.

<comment><USER4> Spark is still potentially faster for SQL-like workloads due to the existence of a query optimizer. Dask works at a different level of abstraction and does not have a query optimizer.

<comment><USER3> Are you talking about the spark SQL catalyst optimiser ?

That's apples to oranges - because dask does not expose a SQL syntax that needs a query optimiser.

Also pyspark has the additional issue of serialisation between python and jvm. Turns out that just getting rid of that is a huge performance boost.

<comment><USER4> It's not apples to oranges with respect to my point though.

Most operations on dataframe-like objects can be described in SQL operations. Spark supports these operations and Catalyst can optimize query plans for these.

You are correct in that Dask does not optimize for this because Dask operations are more primitive hence it does not have the correct level of abstraction to do query optimization, only task graph optimization. Which reinforces my point that if you have a SQL-like workload on Dask.dataframes, chances are Dask may not outperform Spark.

<comment><USER3> IMHO i dont agree with you. Spark's SQL is a consequence of the need to work across languages - Scala and Python. So SQL gives the abstraction necessary to be usable in both places. It is also the language in which data scientists communicate with Spark production engineers.

Every Spark production engineer i know, translates the SQL written by data scientists back into high performance RDD code.

That's the advantage of Dask - there is no SQL abstraction needed. Pandas Dataframes are already the lingua franca of data scientists.. in fact, orders of magnitude more than SQL ever will be.

TLDR - Dask doesnt need SQL because the people who will push Dask to production already are far more comfortable in Dataframes than they ever will be in SQL.

You may still argue that spark RDD is faster than dask (and you may indeed by right)...but not having a SQL engine is not a problem for Dask.

<comment><USER4> > Spark's SQL is a consequence of the need to work across languages - <USER2> > and Python

Not really. The Spark API has equivalent calls in both Scala and Python, with Scala being the superset. Spark's SQL is a high-level abstraction that internally mapped to these operations.

> Every Spark production engineer i know, translates the SQL written by data > scientists back into high performance RDD code.

This would be very unusual and rarely advisable with Spark > 2.0. Spark Dataframes are generally more memory-efficient, type-safe and performant than RDDs in most situations, so most data engineers work directly in Spark Dataframes -- dropping to RDDs only in specific situations requiring more control.

If you know data engineers who are somehow translating SQL into RDDs (except in rare circumstances) you might want to advise them to move to Spark > 2.0 and change their paradigms. They might be working with older Spark paradigms [1] and might have missed the shift that happened around 2.0 and missing out on all the work that has been done since.

> That's the advantage of Dask - there is no SQL abstraction needed.

SQL is only a language to access the dataframe abstraction (Spark Dataframes, Pandas dataframes, etc.) -- the fact it is higher-level means it is amenable to certain types of optimization.

If you take the full set of dataframe operations and restrict it to the set that SQL supports (group by's, where's, pivots, joins, window functions, etc.) you can apply query optimization.

Dask does not, and hence allows more powerful lower-level manipulations on data, but it therefore also cannot perform SQL-level query optimization, only task-graph level optimizations.

This Spark vs Dask comparison on the Dask website provides more details [2].

> Pandas Dataframes are already the lingua franca of data scientists.. in > fact, orders of magnitude more than SQL ever will be.

I wonder if this is where our misunderstanding lies -- I sense that you might be thinking of SQL strictly as the syntax, whereas I use SQL as a shorthand for a set of mathematical operations on tabular structures -- which is equivalent in the subset.

[1] [https://databricks.com/blog/2016/07/14/a-tale-of-three- apach...](https://databricks.com/blog/2016/07/14/a-tale-of-three-apache-spark- apis-rdds-dataframes-and-datasets.html)

[2] [https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/spark.html#](https://docs.dask.org/en/latest/spark.html#)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author of the article here. Sorry about Medium restriction. I will just use Github to host my content hereafter. For now, you can use this friend link. [https://medium.com/@rajasekar3eg/fastspark-a-new-fast- native...](https://medium.com/@rajasekar3eg/fastspark-a-new-fast-native- implementation-of-spark-from- scratch-368373a29a5c?source=friends_link&sk=4c498ff1410d550048b9871191720997)

</comment><comment><USER6> The examples are all in Rust, so it's very hard to make a non-toy demo. Usually if one uses the RDD API, one has some sort of library code that's already in Java or Python and it's impractical to port that code to make the job run. Or more likely, somebody will write an initial version using that code and then port / optimize the job later.

Native dependencies usually mean you'll need docker. Spark pre-dates docker, and just relatively recently added the Kubernetes runner, which makes dockerized jobs easy. But historically it hasn't been easy to run a job in a containerized environment with the native dependencies you need. You can ship native deps with your job, but that's not easy, especially if you need a rebuild with each job.

The main advantage of Spark is flexibility and interoperability. You save time by not having to write something optimized on day 1 (for something you might throw away). And you get SQL support, something Beam / Hadoop don't have (certainly not for Python). There are lots of benchmarks where Spark SQL is not a winner, but the point is Spark will help you save development time.

<comment><USER5> The author of the repo here. It is still very much in the POC stage. It will definitely have python APIs in the future. One of the primary reasons to choose a native language is to have better python integration. I intend to have to APIs almost identical to Spark, so that it will be easy to migrate. It is still very early to assure this, but it is the objective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Also relevant: [https://github.com/thrill/thrill](https://github.com/thrill/thrill)

A Spark inspired framework written in modern C++.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds too good to be true. If it is this easy to be orders of magnitude faster than spark on JVM, why haven't the spark developers ported spark to native code already?

<comment><USER9> I know that Spark has had a lot of work put into it, but my personal experience with it has been pretty negative. I've spent a lot of time at my job trying to tune it to our workflows (extremely deep queries), with only moderate success. I've just POC'd a custom SQL execution engine that was 200x faster than spark for the same workflows. Now, our requirements are pretty non-standard, but I find it pretty easy to believe these benchmarks.

<comment><USER10> McSherry et al's paper "Scalability! But at what COST?" is worth reading. A single threaded, single core implementation typically outperforms Spark.

The best rule of thumb I'm aware of is: unless you can't fit your computation on a single machine or your jobs are likely to fail before completing from the size and length involved, you are generally better off without Spark or similar systems. And if sampling can get you back onto a single machine, then you're _really_ better off.

<comment><USER5> In my experience too I observed that distributed code introduces a lot of redundancy and it requires a lot of data to beat the performance of a single- threaded/single machine implementation. Check out McSherrys' Timely Dataflow, it is truly an amazing piece of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's mondo righteous. I think I may have finally found a reason to learn Rust.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm kind of surprised it took this long for someone to do this. It was clear very early on that the JVM was a bad match for what Spark was trying to do.

<comment><USER13> this sounds far too simplistic, so .. reference?

<comment><USER14> I attended a talk at Strata a few years back by a Spark committer who was talking about how Spark was stretching JVM memory allocations far past how the JVM was originally designed. Do a couple searches for "spark JVM OOM" and you'll see some discussions about similar things.

<comment><USER12> Dead on

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm wondering how much could be gained if one used all possible optimizations: e.g. by analyzing the data flow graph - expressed using DSL - and generating native node programs, using CPU thread pinning and user space network stack (like ScyllaDB does [1]).

[1] [https://www.scylladb.com/product/technology/](https://www.scylladb.com/product/technology/)

<comment><USER16> A lot. [https://www.weld.rs/](https://www.weld.rs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For the confused: this is about Apache Spark, not the Ada-based SPARK language. [0]

Perhaps I'm alone here but I'd prefer the title say _Apache Spark_ explicitly.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_\(programming_language\))

<comment><USER18> Spark (and Apache Spark) is a trademark of the Apache Foundation. If the title were SPARK in all caps, I'd understand, but how often do you read articles about SPARK where the name is written as "Spark?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like to see people re-implement things and share their (better) results. Even if the results isn't better than the 'battle-tested' existing solutions, at least we can learn something in the process.

<comment><USER4> Scylla [1] for instance is a C++ rewrite and a drop-in replacement of JVM- based Cassandra, and from what I've read is fairly stable and performs much faster.

[1] [https://www.scylladb.com/](https://www.scylladb.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See also bigslice ([https://bigslice.io](https://bigslice.io)) for another take on this.

</comment><comment><USER21> > You've reached the end of your free member preview for this month

:( I guess I can read Medium posts only during first couple of days in a month

<comment><USER22> Anonymous windows have found a second use-case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if Spark, compiled with Graal, would produce much better performance (compared to plain Spark), so no need to rewrite.

</comment><comment><USER24> "You've reached the end of your free member preview for this month"

Stop hosting your content on a platform that holds it hostage so that it can make money off it without giving anything back to you.

<comment><USER25> Try incognito mode

<comment><USER26> You can also use Reader Mode on Safari, which not only avoids the modals and popups but gets rid of the top and bottom bars as well. Long-click on the Reader Mode button and you can set it to always use it on medium.com.

<comment><USER27> > Long-click on the Reader Mode button and you can set it to always use it on > medium.com.

Learning this just made my day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice, but I can't find any reason to choose Spark over modern Distributed SQL databases (CockroachDB, CitusDB, TiDB etc. or cloud vendor-specific SQL DBs)

<comment><USER29> Spark is specifically useful for querying streaming data. How would a distributed database help with that? You'd have to build your own stream executor on top of that.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. at the same time, Building stream execution pipeline is not rocket science. I am not saying modern distributed SQL Databases are exact replacement or clones of Spark. I am saying with little more help from the application server they are much more capable than Spark.

You can use the following options individually or in combination.

Option 1 : Pipeline DB extension (PostgreSQL)

Option 2 : Service broker in commercial SQL databases or building PUSH/PULL queue if not supported. There are many libraries in each programming language which tries to do that. Also see option 4.

Option 3 : Using CDC or Replication for synchronous or asynchronous streamed computation on single or multi node cluster

Option 4 : Transducers. For example, you can compose many sql functions or procedures to act on a single chunk of data instead of always doing async streamed computation after each stage of transformation.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Do you think there's an audience online interested in reading/writing? - <AUTHOR>

I had an idea back in September about creating a new method for editing and revising text files online. You know, for people interested in critiquing things and for writers who want feedback on their writing. Right now, the only solution available is text document - textarea, which is inefficient and scares away both writers and editors. I had a better idea and worked on mapping out a quick idea for a site.
I've had quite a lot of work since then, but now that I'm graduating I have a lot of time to actually work on things, and I'm wondering if it's worth trying to make this site. I'm not thinking about venture funding or anything regarding making money off of it, not yet. I just want to see if it's possible to make a sizable set of writers online, more so than there are on sites already. (Not counting Scribd, which is focused more on display than it is on editing/revising.)
My one worry is that text takes more effort from users. It's harder to create and it's harder to read over, even if editing is made potentially simpler. Do you think that Internet users would be willing to spend their time reading and editing people's work if it was made easy for them? Or do you think that there's an inherent barrier in text that keeps people out? What would you think considering the various communities online you've all seen? <comment><USER2> there are two issues that I see:

1\. People tend to lurk rather than participate (on most large forums, something like 1% generate 90% of the traffic)

2\. People as a whole have very poor writing skills and "crowdsourcing" editing and revisions will likely result in works with poor grammar and structure.

I've thought about an idea like this, but more like a 'Choose your own adventure' type crowdsourcing/entertainment site. I'd make it wiki style where each "page" would have multiple paths to go down.

The hard part is keeping the pr0n out (there's actually a huge demand for text based porn of all things).</comment>


Show HN: Tagging for Semantic Web made easy - <AUTHOR> http://contenttagger.com <comment><AUTHOR> ContentTagger automatically shows you the 'child' attributes from a chosen domain or range attribute so it becomes more easy to select something. On top of that I'm able to pass a link with the code to Google Structured Data Developer console and Facebook Graph, so easy testing!

In the future I want to add more schemas (currently only schema.org) and create a library which you can use to query linked data yourself with SparQL.

Stack: Node, MongoDB, React

If you have any questions or feedback let me know so I can make the product even better, thank you!</comment>


Changing Safe Harbor Laws to Force 8Chan, Reddit and Others to Clean Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/opinion/8chan-reddit-youtube-el-paso.html <comment><USER2> Making speech that we don't agree with illegal will just push it into darker corners of the internet. (Look at the fallout from sesta to see what I mean — Online sex trafficking is now much harder to police than it used to be, but legitimate speech and health information has been taken down).

A much better approach than giving up on the right to free speech is to eliminate the commercial incentives that make publication of clickbait and hate speech trolling so profitable for the big internet giants.

One approach is to make all online tracking and ad targeting truly opt-in. This would cut of the stream of revenue for low quality content providers by shifting money to display advertising that is priced based on the strength of the brand of the publication producing the content.

If google and fb want to keep making money in such a world, then they'll have to change their recommendation algorithms to be based off of the quality of the underlying content, and not engagement.

As much as 8chan is a cesspool, it was apparently the second place the shooter's manifesto was published. The document itself went to a mainstream social network, and the content was heavily sourced from Twitter.</comment>


TSA Randomizer now online - <AUTHOR> http://tsarandomizer.com <comment><USER2> Thanks! This is definitely going to be useful as soon as I open my own airport in the US.

<comment><USER2> I'm worried about security though - it uses external jQuery without mentioning its integrity hash in the HTML code.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you like a buddy/mentor/mentee for 2013? - <AUTHOR>

----IN SHORT-----
Would others on HN like to pair up/group up for the New Year (via email or in-person) to help each other out/hold each other to account throughout 2013? Tracking your buddy's progress, offering feedback on ideas and products, etc.
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
HN likes getting things done.
In the New Year I want to realise a no. ideas that I have been thinking about for while, and finish a couple of side projects.
But I am more productive when I am accountable to someone. Even---or especially when---I do not know the person.
Feeding back to someone every week, or so, keeps my mind on the project, so it does not fall by the wayside. Plus, neutral, honest feedback always makes for a better final product. Finally, I feel, rightly or wrongly, more motivated when I have someone rooting for me.
In college, friends and I would grab weekly coffees and talk through our progress on ideas/projects/essays/etc. Unfortunately/fortunately I have now graduated, I have moved to a new city, and I am living independently.
Would others on HN like to pair up/group up---digitally or in-person---in the New Year to hold each other to account throughout 2013?
Drop a brief description of your idea(s)/project(s) below alongside your location and email address; then, shoot potential matches an email.
(I wondered whether using a Google spreadsheet might be more effective, but I think we sometime unnecessarily complicate processes. Sometimes it's quicker to just get the ball rolling: MVP, etc, etc.) </comment><comment><USER2> It sounds like you are wanting to start a mastermind group

[https://www.google.com/search?q=mastermind+group&aq=f...](https://www.google.com/search?q=mastermind+group&aq=f&oq=mastermind+group&aqs=chrome.0.57j0l3j62l2.2428&sugexp=chrome,mod=3&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

I think it's closed to new members now, but when it re-opens I recommend the Dynamite Circle. It's a great community of entrepreneurs and there's several masterminds inside there.

<http://www.tropicalmba.com/innercircle/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Description: I want to found a small UK political mission group that lobbies for technology start-up entrepreneurs. Priorities incl.:

* Tax cuts for early stage technology investors;

* State-led investment into digital infrastructure, including high-speed fibre broadband in the North of England and Scotland;

* Government support for alternative funding methods, incl. peer-to-peer lending;

* Improving the provision of computer science education at primary and high school. Any syllabus redesigns should include success tech. entrepreneurs and representatives from the developer community.

* International promotion of UK as a start-up hub.

I'm currently in the process of writing an open letter to the tech. community and the relevant government departments.

At writing I work in higher education policy.

Skill set: writing, tax, design and typography, front-end programming, print media exposure, networking.

\-----

email: ekpyrotic [AT] gmail [DOT] com

location: London, UK

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love someone with a knowledge of cycling/retail/apparel to guide me with CycleLove (<http://www.cyclelove.net/>) in 2013

My primary skillset is graphic design/ux, and to a lesser extent, photography.</comment>


Show HN: Healthy Break Pro (iOS app) - <AUTHOR> http://apps.cerait.com/healthybreakpro/

<comment><AUTHOR> Healthy Break Pro app is designed to motivate you and remind you when time is to take a short break and do appropriate exercises. Instructions and pictures are provided for each exercise.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://apps.cerait.com/healthybreakpro/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting idea I must say.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks promising. I will try it and let you know my impressions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We will appreciate it of course.</comment></comment>