I moved back home and I am working 60 hours a week of manual, back breaking labor :( Saving money to move to the SF Bay Area this spring :)
Ask HN: What are you working on?
241–250 of 252 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#242http://frogmetrics.com/ - YC summer 2008. In my spare time, researching how to catalyze mass behavior change to improve society.
How does one catalyze mass behavior change to improve society?
That's the question I'm trying to answer. I see the answer as having two parts:
1. More rigorously define what "improve" means. Beliefs about what an ideal world would be varies drastically between people and cultures. To avoid the "colonize the savages / white man's burden" problem, we need a framework for discussing and evaluating goodness in a more rigorous way, especially one that is viewer independent, cultureless, and timeless. In the 14th century, people lit dogs and cats on fire for amusement. This sort of thing would be greeted with horror by many people today. I wonder what we're doing now that people from the future will view with similar disgust.
2. Identify the behaviors / beliefs / etc that prevent such a world from existing now. It seems likely to me that this will involve formulating a scientifically falsifiable model for how people adopt and change beliefs and behaviors. It's not clear how much precision will be attainable for a model this. It could be that we are only ever able to understand very generally which stimuli or environmental conditions will give a higher probability of shifting individuals towards certain behaviors and traits (eg, empowered analytical altruism). We can then identify the levers that cause this shift to occur, eg altering what children are taught at school.
In a nutshell:
1. [if possible] More rigorously define what good world(s) would look like.
2. [if possible] Figure out a model for belief and behavior selection that can be applied to causing / raising people to come to adopt behaviors and beliefs that bring about this better world.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#243My first Mac app: http://www.windowflow.com - it gives you keyboard shortcuts for moving, resizing and tiling app windows. I'm getting ready for a big new release today so if you try and it and it's not quite right for you, give it another go later.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#244http://np.ironhelmet.com "Neptune's Pride is a multiplayer game of Strategy, Intrigue and Galactic Conquest! Neptunes Pride is real-time, but games are played over several weeks. Players log in at any time of the day to check the progress of their fleets, view the results of battles and issue new orders. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. It's the game you know and love with a twist. A 4x Strategy game with it's…
I really like the artwork on the landing page. Love the style.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#245I'm working on a travel website: "Planning a vacation is hard. You know where you want to go. But what should you see once you're there? Which monuments, parks, cathedrals and museums should you visit when you're there? How do you get around? My website helps you plan your vacation by providing high quality itinerary suggestions, contributed by travelers like you." I hope to do a private release at the end of this mo…
I was thinking about this earlier today actually.. I know you posted this the other day so I may email it to you.
Before I go on a trip, I'll plan out where I need to go and usually copy the addresses into notes on my iphone or into google todos. When it's time to go there, I'll copy the address into google maps and go from there.
Perhaps I'm just doing it the hard way, but something that streamlined the process would be great. I was thinking something like, Google Calendar API + Google Maps + Todo list + iPhone App/Web App.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#246Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article I read was about one of these freeware applications (something starting with "G", and a green Logo or mascot I think, I can not remember unfortunately), which installs the spyware if the users does "Express Install". Buried in the TOS is "we may use your computing power". It was by a third company, which in turn is supposed to be used by 80legs. Perhaps 80legs is not even aware of the shady practices of t…
You're talking about Digsby. If you managed to follow the story to its conclusion, you'll see that they dramatically changed the install process to follow Plura's (our sister company) affiliate agreement.
I suppose I had read an older article. Thanks for the clarification!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#248Trying to find ways to attract more US-based mappers to OpenStreetMap. First stop: support my buddy Lars' map rendering to get this beautiful map http://toposm.com/ma/ to cover the entire United States. Anyone out there have some spare CPU cycles and/or memory to donate for the next couple weeks?
I am a co-founder of http://ridewithgps.com and we have been intending on integrating OSM support into our route planner, as well as figure out a way to funnel mapped routes back through to you all. We were thinking a cool way to vette cycle routes would be a heat map of sorts.
We have some more business related priorities (payed accounts and the like), but this is up there; I'd love to see those map tiles cover the entire US.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#249I've created a relational database that can horizontally scale and now I'm putting it to use.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on?
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't mind me asking, what do you do once you've invented new data structure? I think I have recently, too, but (besides thoroughly documenting it and posting a library based on it, soon), I'm kind of at a loss. I'm not in academia, so publishing in an academic journal isn't the clear choice. I've been trying to find prior art, but thus far haven't found anything similar. My e-mail address is in my profile.
To be blunt, I'm not sure. I've spoken with the head of computing at my nearest university and he seems quite excited by it. We may publish a joint paper - not least it will give him an Erdos Number of 3. Failing publication, I'll just write it up, put it on my web site, and announce it in a few place. What ever happens, I will announce it here for sure.
Haha funny I think I've invented a new fundemental data structure as well. Hopefully we haven't all three invented the same one! Mine is going into proprietary software; I don't know if I'll write a paper over it. It doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't do before, but it takes the best and worst case performance of a well known data structure and reverses the two. So it's useful in places where the other structure would perform poorly.
Good luck with yours, both of you.