Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Idea Sunday

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 209 posts

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#171

Post by wfn »

vsakos wrote: post #112

A browser-based chat where the messages are encrypted in the browser so that only the conversation participants can see the messages but not the server, it's just storing them. The messages would be encoded by AES and the key exchange can be done with RSA. The database would store the encription key for every user for every conversation but encrypted with for example the user's password or RSA private key, and the pr…

Something like https://crypto.cat/ ?

Supports multiparty OTR, etc.

Server doesn't see message contents. Ephemeral key exchange via OTR (hence supports perfect forward secrecy), though of course there's always the problem of trusting the fingerprint, i.e. someone (e.g. the server) can just MitM the whole thing.

So ideally, one should verify the OTR fingerprints of the other parties via some secondary channel.

You can also run the server on your own infrastructure.

P.S.

> key exchange can be done with RSA

any particular reason for RSA, and not ECDH key exchange?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#172

Post by anewhnaccount »

vsakos wrote: post #112

A browser-based chat where the messages are encrypted in the browser so that only the conversation participants can see the messages but not the server, it's just storing them. The messages would be encoded by AES and the key exchange can be done with RSA. The database would store the encription key for every user for every conversation but encrypted with for example the user's password or RSA private key, and the pr…

WebRTC

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#173

Post by jolt »

fragsworth wrote: post #53

DNS for the Post Office. When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain Name", but change the address associated to it. Once . Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their account settings.

A way to do this could be to use a kind of proxy address. That way you would not have to convince every postal service to adopt some new system. The problem with that, of cause, is that it most likely would take you mail much longer to arrive, and you have another 3rd party (4th party?) service provider involved to potentially make mistakes and compromise security.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#174

Post by bambax »

bradchoate wrote: post #132

If you like the movie reviews on The Incomparable podcast (the recent WarGames episode, for instance), perhaps you'll agree with me that there should be a web site/app that offers full-length, fan-created movie commentaries that can be played while viewing the movie. Business model should probably be subscription (who wants spot ads thrown into the middle of their movies?) or something simple like $1 per commentary.…

I don't know about movies (maybe) but for sports this sounds like a great idea; instead of listening to the same old commentators you could have your friends or inspired amateurs, or famous people or who knows who? commenting on the game.

Some kind of youtube-soundcloud-twitter mashup with a strong focus on realtime.

Not sure how it should work but there should be potential.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#175

Post by jolt »

bradchoate wrote: post #142

"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like Siri, but for your terminal. Ie: $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo $ please archive this directory into foo.zip $ please clone the bootstrap repo from github $ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar' Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't it time…

That is an excellent idea! Make it cross platform, and able to install missing tools, combine it with speech to text and you would be able to talk to any device regardless of the software installed on the device.

    please open presentation X from my dropbox

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#176

Post by jimktrains2 »

neilxdsouza wrote: post #17

A search engine for the legal system. I had sent this idea to YC 2013 and they asked me to submit a video, but I felt I don't have the creds to apply. Take each section of a country's law and convert it into prolog clauses. Queries can then be run on the legal engine. For defendants it gives you insights on how to build a case and for prosecution it identifies relevant sections and evidence that needs to be provided…

There was a company doing that in their first class. http://www.sonyalabs.com/ (not up anymore).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#177

Post by akovaski »

jes5199 wrote: post #97
neilxdsouza wrote: post #17

A search engine for the legal system. I had sent this idea to YC 2013 and they asked me to submit a video, but I felt I don't have the creds to apply. Take each section of a country's law and convert it into prolog clauses. Queries can then be run on the legal engine. For defendants it gives you insights on how to build a case and for prosecution it identifies relevant sections and evidence that needs to be provided…

I would be startled if existing legal code was sufficiently rigorously defined to be encoded into machine-readable forms. I really think it wouldn't work! Someone prove me wrong?

There already exists legal search engines. Notably to me is WestLawNext[0] which has a legal search engine, which I believe is sold to large legal firms. There also seems to be a direct competitor called LexisNexis.

[0]http://thomsonreuters.com/westlawnext/

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#178

Post by prawn »

dang wrote: post #147

Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes, this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post more of them. Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the answ…

I'd like to see it once a month. Half-baked (and better) ideas getting submitted piecemeal just don't get traction alone.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#179

Post by simondlr »

VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially]. I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).
Post reply on HN