[HN Gopher] Products I Wish Existed
___________________________________________________________________
Products I Wish Existed
Author : eladgil
Score : 432 points
Date : 2020-01-06 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.eladgil.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.eladgil.com)
| hailpixel wrote:
| > 1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers.
|
| [Boundless](https://boundlesshq.com/) is a startup that is
| tackling this exact problem through automating the entire
| "employe(e/r) of record" process.
| EamonLeonard wrote:
| Co-founder of Boundless here, thanks @hailpixel for the shout
| out.
|
| AMA! Here's a link to my soundcloud, we're hiring, thanks for
| coming to my TEDx talk.
|
| We _are_ hiring though.
| soneca wrote:
| Any jobs page? Couldn't find it on the site linked above.
|
| I am frontend developer looking for a remote position
| EamonLeonard wrote:
| Drop me a mail: eamon@boundlesshq.com
| klaudius wrote:
| https://papayaglobal.com/ is another one
| sytse wrote:
| Cool! I've had the same need since 2016
| https://sytse.com/2016/12/28/adyen-for-payrolling.html
| woodhull wrote:
| Excited that someone is working on this. It's a definite pain
| point for smaller remote software teams like ours who want to
| be able to hire talent globally while ensuring that everyone
| regardless of location has great benefits and is ticking all of
| their local compliance boxes.
| wyxuan wrote:
| Pollution tracking would be greatly appreciated. Maybe we could
| catch methane leaks faster, or respond more quickly to fires.
| Google backed firefly (the one that puts the billboards on top of
| lyfts and ubers) has air quality tracking; it needs more scaling.
| Zhyl wrote:
| >What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful
| discourse? Or at least the ability to more actively mute topics,
| threads, and groups of users while surfacing better content
| algorithmically?
|
| I would be interested in a parliament-like protocol for
| discussion, structured debate and reaching consensus.
|
| We currently have tools for proposing changes to text documents
| (such as pull requests) which could be applied to a community
| rules/laws or values system, but we don't have anything that can
| debate the changes, log objections, track resolutions and
| compromises in a structured way.
|
| I've seen places where community decision making is emergent
| (e.g. autobans when a users reputation drops below a certain
| threshold or votekick in games) but nothing that formalises the
| process, allows review of results, links decisions to overarching
| principles (or notes where a principle has _not_ been followed
| due to circumstances).
| busymom0 wrote:
| Won't votekicks lead to echo chambers?
| jonshariat wrote:
| To add to this concept, it would be great if the elements of a
| quality argument[1] (i.g. Claims, Counterclaims, Reasons,
| Evidence, etc.) were built in. Also people could flag a comment
| (or parts of it) with a specific logical fallacy[2].
|
| It would help guide people into arguing more fruitfully and
| better digesting what they read.
|
| 1. https://study.com/academy/lesson/parts-of-an-argument-
| claims... 2. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/
| aaavl2821 wrote:
| There are biotech startups working on all of those already
|
| There are a couple interesting gene therapy companies workout on
| hearing (akuous and decibel among others). Lots of ophthalmology
| gene therapy companies also, as well as more traditional
| companies. Hair regeneration has been a popular area of research
| for a while
|
| Most companies work on biomarkers as part of the drug dev
| process. However building a business around just biomarkers is
| hard -- you need to develop your own drugs based on those
| biomarkers. Diagnostics is really tough bc reimbursement and pop
| health is tough bc incentive alignment is nearly impossible in
| many contexts
| eladgil wrote:
| Which of these do you think are farthest along?
|
| Gene therapy seems to be working a little bit in ex-vivo
| approaches (you take cells out, modify them, and put them back
| in, largely in the immune system) but progress elsewhere is
| very limited.
| buldoeo wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but No 5 already exists?! I'm from
| Europe. I have an app on my phone that shows me the pollution in
| the city I am. I check on it every time I'm in different places.
| It's called AirVisual. I installed it from google play, I have
| android.
| dewey wrote:
| It's also directly integrated in Apple Maps already but it's
| probably about more information than just the AQI.
| bartkappenburg wrote:
| We have that, although not very granular, in the Netherlands:
| https://www.luchtmeetnet.nl/metingen/locatie/Groningen-Europ...
|
| Check the values (eg BM2.5) around new years eve due to
| fireworks...
| mdorazio wrote:
| I think he means a much more granular pollution map than what's
| available at the city level. Something like being able to get
| accurate pollution data at sub-kilometer precision, especially
| in suburb areas where monitoring stations tend to be sparse.
| 0ld wrote:
| When there are big air pollution problems, people and
| municipalities usually install their own monitors.
|
| Say, I live in a region with a very bad air quality in
| winter, and in the vicinity of my house there're at least 4
| devices I can (and do) check - 2 from airly.eu (within 200m,
| installed by the village) and 2 from luftdaten.info (within
| ~1km, installed by the locals) and one mine
| lisiado wrote:
| There is a project in Germany which collects the data of
| stations you can build yourself with an esp8266 and a sensor.
| https://luftdaten.info/
| hawski wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
|
| Users outside of Germany already use it. I think I will
| participate. For some time I was thinking about an amateur
| network of air pollution sensors, that seems to be it. Is
| there something with more reach in Europe or at least
| Poland (where I'm at)?
| ClarkMarx wrote:
| Unsure how many sensors they have in other metros, but here in
| the Salt Lake Valley, the Purple network does a great job of
| this.
|
| https://www.purpleair.com/map?opt=1/i/mAQI/a10/cC0#11.37/40....
| ckosidows wrote:
| #2. I've had an idea I've mulled around for a couple of years now
| about a new social network. One which limits your 'feed' to 25
| friends and that is it.
|
| 25 might even be too high (or potentially too low; the number is
| arbitrary), but the general idea is that in your life there are
| only a handful of people who you should really care to keep tabs
| on. You can "friend" more than 25 people but you can only see the
| activity of 25 of your friends and the others are relegated to
| essentially being contacts.
|
| I remember about two years ago Facebook was getting into a lot of
| trouble due to the amount of negative mental impact it had/has on
| its users and they did a study which found social media can have
| a negative impact on its users unless the user only follows a
| small circle of real-life friends and interacts with those people
| online. I don't have a source to this; I'm willing to accept
| there isn't real _evidence_ behind this claim.
|
| Anyway, I'm surprised social media has been around this long, has
| been the subject of such controversy and there haven't been any
| or many real, impactful changes to the nature of it. Facebook and
| Instagram are, in my opinion, trying to be too much. They want to
| combine personal and public spaces. This, of course, works from a
| business perspective. But what are the long-term consequences of
| these products on our mental health and society?
|
| We need a new social media focused on personal, tight-knit groups
| of people and interests. One that makes this the focus and
| doesn't stray for the purposes of profits. And, if that's not
| feasible in an economy that demands growth, we need better
| legislation demanding certain consumer protections are created
| for this sphere of products.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Can't that be achieved by simply Facebook offering an option
| for feeds of manually created group by you? Like you create a
| group called closefriends where you add your close friends and
| family upto 25 members. Then a feed for those people only shows
| up?
|
| Almost similar to where each user is a subreddit and you create
| a multireddit.
| bhl wrote:
| Isn't that the premise of twitter?
| ckosidows wrote:
| I do this right now on Facebook; you can unfollow anyone. I'm
| not following anyone and I have no feed. But the problem is
| people aren't going to voluntarily do this, and it's a big
| pain to unfollow hundreds of people.
|
| This needs to be baked-in to have any real impact.
| VLM wrote:
| Facebook is a video game where you honor the groupthink for
| max followers and upvotes; something like the 25 followers
| can be emulated but if you're the only person playing the new
| game, its not going to be a fun game because everyone else
| will have higher scores due to no made up limitations.
| [deleted]
| worldsayshi wrote:
| We need to separate the data layer from the app layer to allow
| free competition again.
|
| I don't think that Facebook will be replaced with something so
| similar. I think what we need is an open data-platform that can
| contain (in a controlled way) social media data along with
| other kinds of data and then allow building social media apps
| on top of it. Otherwise we'll always be stuck using whatever
| the biggest supplier builds for us.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| _One which limits your 'feed' to 25 friends and that is it._
|
| An ex-Googler (that never played defense![1]) tried that with
| the social network Path. I think the limit was 50 friends
| though. It failed.
|
| Edit: [1] Quote attribution: "I don't use a ring of any kind on
| my phone. This is so that I am always on offense and never
| defense." - Dave Morin
| freehunter wrote:
| To be fair, almost every non-Facebook social network has
| failed. I wouldn't consider that to be proof that a limited
| social network can't succeed but rather that social
| networking sites are difficult to produce.
| asdf21 wrote:
| Idk, I wanted to try path and never even got the chance
| because it never launched as far as I know (for the web at
| least?)
| ckosidows wrote:
| That's why this has remained an idea for me rather than
| anything I would consider attempting. Social networks have
| an enormous bar to entry. This is why I think this would
| most feasibly be applied as a restriction to
| Facebook/Instagram and it's probably something they will
| never implement unless forced.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| No disagreement here. I just recall that guy being
| comically pompous (see also his penchant for carrying both
| a "day iphone" and a "night iphone") at the time Path
| launched.
| wpietri wrote:
| Wow, what is it with anti-social people starting social
| networks? I long ago lost track of my collection of
| ridiculous quotes from the Friendster guy. But I still
| remember him being outraged that people were _using it
| wrong_ by creating profiles for abstract things they
| loved (cities, parks, stores, brands) and then friending
| them. Like, buddy, when your users find new ways to use
| your product, _run with it_. Instead, he just got big mad
| and banned a lot of people.
|
| Looking back, Friendster strikes me as the single biggest
| missed opportunity of that decade. He had a two-year lead
| on Facebook. In a network-effect business! But through
| careful focus and diligent effort, he managed to blow it.
| pbourke wrote:
| > We need a new social media focused on personal, tight-knit
| groups of people and interests
|
| Group chat: text/Messages/WhatsApp. The fewer frills, the
| better.
| Darkphibre wrote:
| IRC is still kicking in some communities!
| PlanetRenox wrote:
| I can already see it, imagine people who have their list full,
| removing people and replacing them would be a public passive
| aggressive "thing" people would do and the such drama that
| would follow. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I think this
| would actually be a selling point of the platform, however
| could possibly turn into a negative part of the social culture.
| joncrane wrote:
| While only a footnote, I like the nod to nuclear energy.
|
| I remember in the 1950s, there was a Popular Mechanics cover
| touting nuclear as a coming technology to power homes and even
| cars.
|
| Imagine the next Tesla-like company offering to install a small
| nuclear reactor in houses. Like solar, you can sell electricity
| back to the grid, charge your electric car with it, literally use
| it to heat your water....
|
| Also might be a very attractive option to going off-grid.
| Retric wrote:
| Nuclear reactors don't scale down very well. The economics
| really break down under about 10MW which is ~5,000 times more
| power than most homes need.
|
| Even ultra cost efficient full scale powerplants are a money
| losing proposition without huge subsidies. They are being
| squeezed between extremely cheap renewables, low cost natural
| gas, and rapidly advancing storage technology.
|
| Which is why nuclear was 17.6% of global electricity generation
| in the late 90's but has fallen to 10% in 2019.
| deadmetheny wrote:
| >Nuclear reactors don't scale down very well. The economics
| really break down under about 10MW which is ~5,000 times more
| power than most homes need.
|
| This is true and fully agreed. Home reactors are not really
| feasible or even a good idea.
|
| >Even ultra cost efficient full scale powerplants are a money
| losing proposition without huge subsidies. They are being
| squeezed between extremely cheap renewables, low cost natural
| gas, and rapidly advancing storage technology.
|
| Plants are expensive due to the regulation and insurance
| making them that way. Safety with nuclear is obviously
| paramount, but political and social pressure has expanded a
| lot of the requirements to quite a high degree. Additionally,
| renewable are also subsidized quite a lot and are not always
| viable in all locales. Storage tech is good for all forms of
| power generation.
|
| >Which is why nuclear was 17.6% of global electricity
| generation in the late 90's but has fallen to 10% in 2019.
|
| Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape around
| it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases new ones
| are not being built due to the cost of getting through all
| the red tape (getting approval from the feds down to local
| government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY lawsuits, etc).
| Renewables are the future, but we aren't fully in the future
| yet.
| Jedd wrote:
| > Nuclear also has a lot of fearmongering and red tape
| around it. Plants are reaching their EOL and in many cases
| new ones are not being built due to the cost of getting
| through all the red tape (getting approval from the feds
| down to local government, dealing with inevitable NIMBY
| lawsuits, etc). Renewables are the future, but we aren't
| fully in the future yet.
|
| This is a common trope.
|
| I can't work out where you live, but I do often see this
| line of reasoning put forward by residents of the USA, who
| overlook the fact that 'the feds' don't regulate what
| happens in the other 95% of the planet, and yet other parts
| of the world are equally disinterested in building more
| nuclear _fission_ plants.
|
| It may be that the problems -- federal / national
| governments red tape, NIMBY lawsuits, local gov / state gov
| / provinces / councils, 'fearmongering', etc -- are common
| and similar _everywhere_ , but this seems prima facie
| unlikely, certainly not demonstrated.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Nuclear professional here. It is true that economics for
| electricity-only plants have historically struggled to
| compete with conventional sources, actually below closer to
| 800 MWe.
|
| The Small Modular Reactor hypothesis is that economies of
| mass production could conceptually be built that overpower
| economies of scale. The small reactors of the past, including
| the ML-1 truck-mounted military microreactor were 10x too
| expensive even for the military in remote areas. Just
| building a few small reactors is a losing proposition. If you
| can get them to "go viral" before they've achieved economic
| parity, then there's a chance. That will only happen if you
| successfully market their 24/7 very-low-carbon, very-low
| land, very-low raw material footprints.
|
| I think for climage change purposes, we should focus on
| getting costs down on 500-1000 MWe plants. If it takes
| another round of small prototype non-LWR reactors to get
| there, then so be it. But large stations are what will
| displace most of the 84% of the world's energy that is fossil
| fueled.
|
| Regarding the competition, low-cost fracked natural gas has
| been deadly to nuclear. I don't think most people realize
| that fracked natural gas, while great in the deadly air
| pollution department, is just as bad as coal in the climate
| change department (when you factor in the methane leaks from
| wells and pipelines). So if markets can price carbon
| emissions, natural gas can be ruled out. If not, natural gas
| will continue to drive nuclear plants to closure and then
| replace them.
|
| Extremely cheap renewables are a friendly competition to
| nuclear in that if they're successful, the goals of the
| nuclear proponents are met: clean, plentiful, cheap energy
| 24/7. At the moment, the major issues of land use, raw
| material use, and intermittency are not causing much trouble
| for renewables. But as they scale up they may encounter more
| difficulties. All energy sources experience new troubles and
| regulations as they scale. Coal got scrubbers and filters
| (doubling+ capital costs), nuclear got the NRC, solar in
| California recently ran into NIMBY in San Bernardino county
| desert. Will that continue to get worse? Or are the positive
| attributes of renewables so good that people will continue to
| embrace at scale? I honestly don't know. I keep working on
| nuclear because it's a good high-density resource.
|
| TL;DR: Include carbon-free as valuable in markets and nuclear
| would do great.
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| I'm pretty sure my HOA has a clause against installing a
| personal nuclear reactor in our home :)
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| Today's modern reactors are night and day compared to
| Chernobyl/Fukushima era reactors - they're not even comparable.
| They're fail-safe rather than fail-deadly, and are much more
| compact and efficient, with better controls and containment.
| The size of the reaction chamber is basically that of a
| household washing machine.
|
| I'd gladly live next door to a modern plant.
| criddell wrote:
| What exactly do you mean by fail safe? Are there no
| catastrophic failure modes? So even if a group of people with
| malicious intent were to gain access, they couldn't do more
| damage than with a natural gas or coal burning plant?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Not parent commenter, but I'll repeat what I said above to
| someone else about what fail-safe means in terms of nuclear
| reactors:
|
| Fail-safe just means that if equipment breaks or a human
| does something wrong, the plant goes to low power and
| passive natural-circulation systems kick-in that keep the
| low-power shutdown mode from going to temperatures high
| enough to break the radiation containment structures.
|
| Recall that coal plants and oil emissions kill 4-6 million
| people per year from air pollution. Nuclear plants are
| crazy safe compared to that. And while natural gas is safe
| from an air pollution POV, the hazards of climate change
| from it are potentially large. Nuclear reactors are
| essentially carbon-free.
| ljhsiung wrote:
| Sorry for being pedantic, but do you mean fail-secure? Fail-
| safe = things inside the area can get out on failure. Fail-
| secure = things cannot get out i.e. catastrophe is contained
| (though people inside may die).
|
| I don't know much about reactor design, but I don't think I'd
| live next door to a fail-safe plant, but please correct me if
| I'm misguided because.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| In general, fossil kills 4-6 million people per year from
| air pollution. Nuclear has killed ~4000 total, ever. So
| nuclear plants are very, very safe compared to normal
| energy alternatives.
|
| Fail-safe just means that if equipment breaks or a human
| does something wrong, the plant goes to low power and
| passive natural-circulation systems kick-in that keep the
| low-power shutdown mode from going to temperatures high
| enough to break the radiation containment structures.
| [deleted]
| asdff wrote:
| I dream of the day when all the oil derricks and refineries
| hidden behind facades all over west Los Angeles would be
| replaced by nuclear energy, not to mention the inglewood oil
| field.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Current reactors are extremely safe compared to fossil if you
| look at the stats. 3 orders of magnitude safer in a
| deaths/TWh basis. The new designs (which are actually all
| revivals of 1960 designs) may be safer and cheaper but we
| have yet to prove that.
|
| I'm in the middle of writing an elaborate history of the
| quest for economical nuclear power to help with this
| discussion.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > 5. Neighborhood (and corporate?) pollution sensor networks.
|
| purpleair seems to do much of this.
| ejz wrote:
| Look at useparagon.com for #9
| arkanciscan wrote:
| I fail to see how TikTok is a "good reminder for the generational
| turnover of social products". Has an entire generation passed
| since Vine or Snapchat? If anything it's proof that securing an
| early lead in a new form of media (short form video in the
| aforementioned cases) doesn't guarantee success even for a
| generation. My takeaway is that young people are increasingly
| mercurial and disloyal. Chasing their attention seems like a
| recipe for disappointment.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| The lifecycle of a social media should be measured by some % of
| pairs of children and their parents both using it. It's an
| instant buzzkill.
| JohnFen wrote:
| And businesses.
|
| This rule still holds true today. When I talk to people in
| their 20s and younger these days about Facebook, for
| instance, the near universal reaction is "Facebook is for old
| people and companies". They're all using something else.
| asdff wrote:
| Snapchat is still extremely popular among people my age (20s).
| Vine only died because it was killed off, the community was
| thriving. If anything, tiktok shows that it was a mistake to
| kill off vine; functionally it's the same sort of content.
| dsalzman wrote:
| +100 "I would love to see the following analysis: A map of
| repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by
| function in the Fortune 500. Budget breakdown of current software
| spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500. A view of what
| Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over
| for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom
| consulting projects can be turned into SaaS software. A tougher
| analysis to do is to ask what internal software projects various
| tech companies are working on. If you can get the list from 3-4
| companies, you will undoubtedly see a few internal tool or
| product examples that should be built as a SaaS product for
| everyone."
| TrackerFF wrote:
| FWIW, robotic process automation (RPC) is very hot these days,
| and it's always a bespoke service - unless two companies happen
| to use the exact same software, and follow the exact same
| business logic.
|
| The RPC consultants, often titled AI / ML consultants, make
| money hand over fist traveling from site to site and
| implementing some automatic procedures.
|
| Same with chat bots. The past 2-3 years there's been an
| explosion in demand for chat bots, and these often take entire
| teams to implement and train. Again, lots of bespoke products.
|
| Who gets these gigs largely depends on networking and sales.
| The big companies (Accenture, etc.) are rolling in this, since
| they also have a good picture of company software from previous
| projects.
|
| The accounting industry is also desperate to get in on the ML
| revolution. I've lost count on how many times I've been
| contacted by recruiters in that space, who want magic ML pixie
| dust.
|
| The market is there, but it can be difficult to break into as
| an outsider, or smaller player - if you're planning in building
| some one-size fits all product. Best plan, IMO, would be to
| focus on some niche part of the process, and become the best at
| just that - and then pitch to the big companies that deal with
| actual F500 clients.
|
| There are of course exceptions, but a 5 man startup vs
| Accenture offering the same base product, Accenture is gonna
| walk away with the gig 99 out of 100 times.
|
| (But with that said, a lot of the startups that focus on these
| spaces, seem to be ex-consultants from said big consulting
| firms. Logical enough, as they have both seen the problems
| first hand, and built networks within the industry.)
| pedrocx486 wrote:
| Just a small correction (sorry if I sound pedantic), I think
| you meant RPA instead of RPC:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation
|
| I noticed that since I worked at the RPA team of my current
| employer. :-)
| masonhensley wrote:
| I've gone down this rabbit hole, it's amazing how often orgs
| reinvent the wheel. I don't fault them, there's not support and
| guidance on this sort of stuff & incentives aren't aligned for
| product & development teams to focus on their corp's primary
| value prop vs basic stuff like user management and customer
| service tooling.
|
| Hoping to get a white paper or at least a one-two pager in the
| next few weeks.
|
| Shameless plug, follow here for updates if this sort of stuff
| interests you: https://hipspec.com/
| 0xff00ffee wrote:
| ERP is hard. VERY hard.
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| It is, but there is also a lot of artificial complexity
| created for lock-in purposes.
|
| A lot of ERP systems move away from well-trodden programming
| tools to their own custom stuff. I know of ERP systems have
| their own source control version control systems. Why?
| They're often awful to use. The programmers that use them are
| often business-focused haven't really used stuff outside that
| ecosystem. So they don't know how bad it is.
|
| Most ERP implementations i've come across make little use of
| automated testing as well.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| or... they create their own internal DSLs - customers and
| internal people use those - and everyone spends years
| thinking about the 'custom DSL' way. Developing any sort of
| automated testing around your own custom language basically
| becomes impossible.
|
| I did some work for a place where, they embedded groovy as
| their 'write custom rules stuff from the UI' language -
| that was at least easier to reason about, and to debug/test
| offline (not automated, but somewhat easier than a DSL that
| only runs inside the system).
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Automated testing is becoming the norm, but I'd agree that
| otherwise ERP developers, on average, are either unaware,
| or simply not able to utilize most of the tools and
| practices from the wider market.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| >Global 2000 company IT needs.
|
| Splunk is a good example of this. I've worked at several public
| and private muti-billion dollar orgs, and they all rant and
| rave about how good Splunk is over whatever else they were
| using.
|
| So, build more splunks. Maybe something that aggregates
| monitoring multiple servers. A plug and play Status Dashboard
| for a company's internal apps. Like this:
| https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status
| weinzierl wrote:
| Splunk is good, but it is expensive too, and given how - as
| you wrote - widespread is seems to be in big corporations, it
| must be a gold mine.
| [deleted]
| AznHisoka wrote:
| If you knew the technologies/software that Fortune 2000
| companies are spending the most on, you should build
| complementary products, or similar things that solve the same
| problems those products are solving?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I think there's value in both. Consider Duo. They took a
| common problem - authenticating servers and services with
| 2FA - and made it easy to add to existing infrastructure.
| There's not really a consumer use for this product, aside
| from maybe a VPN, but there's absolutely a huge demand for
| it in business.
|
| I worked on many CRUD apps that had say 4 different groups
| of users. We made a library / system for determining what
| "level" a user is, based on what Active Directory roles the
| user is assigned. In the application, you can show or hide
| components based on this level. Making some sort of middle-
| ware that abstracts things for developers, so they don't
| have to think about things like AD, is a huge area of
| opportunity.
| bransonf wrote:
| Duo is awesome. I discovered it because it's the system
| my employer uses for 2FA and push notifications are so
| much nicer than having to enter codes.
|
| But similarly, I've found it convenient for all my other
| 2FA needs from GitHub to RuneScape. So even then, it has
| value to consumers.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| There's no way to determine the total spend for specific
| software/technologies for Fortune 2000 companies (unless
| you can somehow survey them, or have an insider).
|
| So what proxy method would you use to determine that
| Fortune 2000 companies are spending twice as much on
| Splunk as they do on New Relic (for instance)?
| dsalzman wrote:
| This goes back to my old quip of the easiest way to increase
| GDP to 5% would be to force everyone to learn how to actually
| use Excel. HT "You Suck at Excel" - JS
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
| btown wrote:
| I can imagine though, that there's a real chance that the
| "fear" of people having their jobs automated would cause them
| to cut back on spending, perhaps causing an immediate
| recession!
| wpietri wrote:
| Agreed! But the trouble for me with Excel is that it has an
| incredibly low ceiling. There are so many people out there
| doing what is essentially app development but with terrible
| tools. Tools that give them the wrong habits and mental
| models for working at scale.
|
| I would love to see the spreadsheet reinvented to be a)
| collaboration-oriented, and b) a good on-ramp to ever-growing
| programming skills. So that when Bob in the next department
| over makes that crucial internal spreadsheet, you can safely
| and usefully interact with it from _your_ crucial internal
| spreadsheet. Basically, to make every spreadsheet a potential
| microservice.
|
| I've spent some years failing to figure out how to make that
| work. So if anybody manages, please let me know.
| gkfasdfasdf wrote:
| Perhaps it should become a part of public middle school
| curriculum?
| Wistar wrote:
| ... along with how to write a good search query
| mattnewton wrote:
| Funny enough, I had a class on this in grade school,
| taught by the school librarian. It included quoting, AND,
| NOT and OR style stuff you could use in library search
| systems and it is pretty much all irrelevant now, but it
| was cool at the time and I wonder if it helped to be
| exposed to that kind of boolean logic early.
| Wistar wrote:
| I was thinking more about the thought process for how to
| come up with the right words to begin with and for
| refinements to make to yield better results rather than
| the boolean operators although I think they are good for
| the young minds, too.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The tricky part of that is the loading and mapping from the
| companies representation of the data to the SaaS representation
| of that data to run whatever analysis the product wants to
| deliver. That step can be almost as much work as just writing
| the application from scratch since now you may have 2 copies of
| the data you need to keep in sync, the actual copy the company
| uses and the copy used for the SaaS analysis (and often
| multiple different copies for each SaaS the company is trying
| to use to substitute for just writing the software themselves).
| Plyphon_ wrote:
| I worked briefly with a startup who's idea was to create an
| index of your entire corporate data (PDFs, powerpoints, docs,
| etc) and their product would intelligently serve up documents
| as you typed.
|
| So for example, if you would pen an email/slack talking about
| a slide deck from a recent meeting, in the widget the product
| would have already found the deck ready for you to drag and
| drop it into the message.
|
| It worked freakishly good, and saved a whole bunch of time
| trying to find a file in the mess that everyones Google Drive
| becomes.
|
| The problem they were having was no enterprise wanted to hand
| over an entire copy of their data for them to index.
| rtkwe wrote:
| That's another difficulty. Even if the actual transfer is
| relatively painless it is a risk every time your company
| has given a copy of customer data to another company.
|
| Using AWS for example all it takes is a misconfigured
| bucket to expose massive amounts of customer data.
| atwebb wrote:
| At least it is private by default now...but the point
| stands.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The problem they were having was no enterprise wanted to
| hand over an entire copy of their data for them to index.
|
| That sounds like a reasonable response. At least, I know
| that would be a showstopper for me, personally.
| nradov wrote:
| Google still offers an enterprise intranet search product
| which will index anything you let it access.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/products/search/
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Was there no self-hosted option?
| thdrdt wrote:
| I believe ERP SaaS would fall in the category "falsehoods
| programmers believe about how companies store their data".
|
| There is always this exception that makes a SaaS ERP not fit
| for a company.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| * I'd love to see that as well
|
| * At the same time:
|
| - A LOT of companies are uncomfortable making some of this data
| SaaS / external. I'm not saying they're right, but it's there
|
| - A LOT of companies are unique, or strongly believe they're
| unique, and that they need bespoke / highly customized
| software. I'm not saying they're right... ;)
|
| - I'm a techie, so it's taken me a decade to realize that
| implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company is
| one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds or
| more business process / transformation project. And the actual
| success / failure of these projects is almost entirely guided
| by the business transformation part.
|
| And when a company views ERP as a technical/IT project, it is
| most likely to not end well (small scale example: Sally in
| accounting refuses to change and _insists_ that the new fancy
| software, on-prem or SaaS, do things the way she 's done them
| for 2 decades in Excel, because that's "how their company does
| it"... no matter how inefficient or outdated they are. If
| you're seen as an IT project, it's your duty to accommodate
| Sally and now you're building the same thing over and over,
| compromising any value in your new ERP, SaaS or otherwise. If
| you're seen as business transformation project, you have _some_
| chance to make a difference and make things better...]
|
| - Therefore SaaS would reduce FAR less effort in ERP than many
| techies (including myself) feel. Basically, you'd still have a
| consulting company come in to (try) to do business
| transformation so your internal processes actually accept and
| match the SaaS processes; build interfaces; and then maintain
| and support.
|
| Disclosure/example: I'm in consulting part of IBM, and while
| I'm currently on a legacy ERP project, my colleagues in
| "Cloud/SaaS" (i.e. "let somebody else host it for you") side
| are no less busy than before. Mind you, they _are_ on average
| providing higher value services, so that 's a plus :)
| jariel wrote:
| " that implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting
| company is one third or less technical / IT project; and two
| thirds or more business process / transformation project"
|
| It's at least 50% sales.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| A cynical comment that has some roots in truth, but really
| needs some metrics defined to be useful :-)
|
| By time spent? Not on anything but the tiniest projects
| which are likely to be loss-leaders anyway.
|
| By value added? For consulting company, sure, that's one
| way to look at it; for the customer, probably not :P
|
| For the purposes of my post, pre-sales/sales/RFP/whatever
| were assumed to be done prior to start of implementation.
|
| Though I will agree that _how_ ERP project is pitched /sold
| may well have an impact on the delivery:
|
| - the IT vs BT categorization per above is likely
| implicitly or explicitly setup at these early stages
|
| - who the stakeholders/champions are / who signed off on
| purchase and why - the CIO because their previous product
| is EOL? The VP of functional department (HR/Finance/etc)
| because they want to realize value in changing processes?
| Etc
|
| - are the timelines and deliverables reasonable
|
| - is the goal / value realized / ROI well defined and
| agreed
|
| - are the requirements and scope well defined and agreed
|
| - etc
|
| (edited to change nested brackets into bullet points :P )
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > companies are uncomfortable making some of this data SaaS /
| external
|
| SaaS can be on-premises.
|
| > Sally in accounting refuses to change
|
| The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't need
| to adapt to the tool. That said, if there are obvious
| efficiency gains (e.g. you can stop typing "COMPLETED" three
| hundred times a day and just click a button that fills the
| field for you; even better, the _process_ marks it
| 'completed' once all the human verification has taken place)
| and the user is stubborn, well, maybe the tool should _offer_
| the efficient solution, allow the inefficient behavior, and
| log metrics on the whole thing. Management might take
| interest.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>SaaS can be on-premises.
|
| True; the distinction between SaaS and COTS becomes moot in
| practical terms then, and all of my comment still applies.
|
| >>The tools need to adapt to the user, the user shouldn't
| need to adapt to the tool.
|
| Again, that's:
|
| - True for an IT project whose goal is to support _whatever
| the user is currently doing_ (and what many of us are
| trained to do / think in current IT paradigm).
|
| - Not True for a business transformation project whose goal
| is to _change business processes_ for the better - and,
| basically _incidentally_ , deliver a COTS ERP to support
| them through an IT portion of the project.
|
| We are not talking about where the button is or how many
| times it takes to click or what the icon looks like. We are
| talking fundamental business processes and workflow, which
| are core to how a business operates internally.
|
| For business processes which are company's core business,
| _presumably_ they have them figured out. That 's great, and
| IT should support them.
|
| For back-office ERP, this is _not_ your company 's core
| business; you're probably _not_ a special snowflake; and
| the market 's average/best practices are likely _miles_
| ahead of your legacy over-complicated business processes.
| YOU need to change if you want to reap the benefits of
| shiny expensive new software.
|
| There is extremely limited point in implementing a new
| back-office ERP (HR, Financials, CRM, EPM, etc) if you're
| not willing to approach it as BT project; radically change
| how you do things; and expect a shiny new tool to make you
| more competitive automagically without your processes and
| maybe even culture/habits changing.
|
| My fundamental point remains: what the big consulting
| companies do with ERP / backoffice implementation (when
| done right) are primarily BT projects, and _incidentally_
| involve IT implementations; and treating them as IT
| projects, whether that 's Sally in accounting refusing to
| change or Bob the developer accommodating Sally thinking
| it's the right thing to do, will cause them to fail.
| (generalizations and oversimplifications abound in above
| statement; but it really takes a very very large and
| repeated application of a mental sledgehammer to dislodge
| some universally-good but specifically-counterproductive
| ideas and habits from the ERP space)
| ghaff wrote:
| Quite a few years ago, I was at a very small company and
| we made the decision to move from hosting our own
| Microsoft Exchange to Gmail--partly for cost reasons and
| partly because we had had a couple of serious mail
| outages.
|
| A couple of people at the time were _really_ unhappy
| about the change because there were some differences, at
| least at the time, in the ability to create nested
| folders /labels like they were accustomed to doing in
| Exchange. Basically, Gmail messed up the organizational
| scheme they were accustomed to for client and contracts.
|
| They were basically told to deal with it but the point is
| that even when going to some standard SaaS makes sense,
| people are very resistant to making changes in their
| standard tools.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| My mind thinks hierarchically in everything I do so I
| understand that Google's "Search, don't sort" is
| difficult to adopt to.
|
| (Note, FWIW, though I think we're on the same page - the
| "business processes" I'm talking about in relation to ERP
| are less interface/program-mechanic based, and more along
| the lines of "Who is authorized/must approve" "How do we
| run accounting" "What is our procurement workflow" "How
| do you calculate taxes" etc)
| ghaff wrote:
| I used to put a fair bit of effort into curating and
| filing emails, documents, etc. Over the past decade or
| so, aside from making sure that I put things I wanted to
| hang onto over the longer term into Archive folders so
| they didn't get deleted, I mostly stopped filing things
| and figured I'd just search for them if necessary.
|
| Doesn't always work especially if I don't remember quite
| what I'm looking for. But it's overall a reasonable
| tradeoff compared to filing a bunch of stuff, most of
| which I'll never look at again. It is a shift in mindset
| though.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Years ago, I developed a similar habit with email.
|
| I like to get emails out of my inbox as soon as I don't
| need them anymore (so my inbox always only contains the
| email that still requires my attention). But I don't do
| any sort of serious categorization/tagging/etc. -- the
| cost/benefit to doing that far too high.
|
| Instead, I have a folder for each entity that I exchange
| emails with, and move the emails into the appropriate
| folder when I'm done with them, with no further
| categorization.
|
| "one-off" emails (marketing, registration, etc.) just get
| deleted.
| polygotdomain wrote:
| >implementing a new backoffice suite by a consulting company
| is one third or less technical / IT project; and two thirds
| or more business process / transformation project. And the
| actual success / failure of these projects is almost entirely
| guided by the business transformation part.
|
| This 1000%. There's so much institutional friction with these
| projects for so many reasons; some of them political, some of
| them interpersonal, some of them just because someone doesn't
| want to. So many of these projects fail because people just
| don't want to work towards the goal, or simply do as little
| as possible and things move slower than molasses.
|
| People don't want or care to change their processes. They do
| things that way because they've always done things that way.
| They see tools not as a way to get more done or be efficient,
| but as something that's "moving their cheese" and they don't
| like it. It doesn't matter how overworked they are by
| remedial tasks that could be automated, until you show them
| everything finished, end-to-end, working flawlessly, they
| won't be interested in the slightest.
|
| The sad thing is that if there were some strong executive
| leadership behind these projects and they saw it as a
| positive thing, there could be better traction and better
| results. Instead, most execs look at these projects as
| mundane details and hand them off to whatever sad middle
| manager is going to take the heat for the project going
| south. The result is no teeth behind the initiative which
| even further exacerbates the issue of people not caring or
| lifting a finger.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > They see tools not as a way to get more done or be
| efficient, but as something that's "moving their cheese"
| and they don't like it.
|
| In all fairness, this perception of tools is often entirely
| rational. Changing workflows incurs a high cost, and any
| new tool must supply a benefit in excess of that cost. If
| it doesn't, then opposing the new tool can be the correct
| stance. And in my experience, at least half of the time,
| the new tools do not provide sufficient benefit.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Exactly. There's endless tooling out there, and you can
| contort software to whatever process.
|
| Some of tools make claims that, if trivial to implement,
| would provide huge huge benefits. Unfortunately, there's
| a cost to learning a new tool, and then to implementing
| its use. Since you don't know the tool yet, you can only
| make educated guesses as to whether it will be easy or
| hard to learn, easy or hard to implement, make your
| process better or worse, help sell your product or make
| you more efficient, etc. You can't know for sure (unless
| it seems so much like something you already DO
| understand, and in that case, why would you use someone
| else's tool)? And that's only for yourself.
|
| I'm not saying you shouldn't try new tools. To the
| contrary. It's just hard to know which ones are the right
| ones for your organization. Hence cargo-culting of tools
| that may or may not be a step backwards for your
| organization, or have all kinds of hidden-costs that are
| difficult or even impossible to foresee.
| amelius wrote:
| > I would love to see the following analysis: A map of
| repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by
| function in the Fortune 500.
|
| This is basically asking for a market gap in a potentially very
| profitable market. That's silly, everybody wants that.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| "Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by
| line, in the Fortune 500."
|
| Just curious if the OP wants this so he can build a product
| FROM this data, or if he just wants this data as a product,
| alone.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| Sometimes people reinvent the wheel simply because they need a
| new project to take credit for. Every link in the chain needs
| an accomplishment to point toward when justifying themselves to
| superiors.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Products I'm glad do NOT exist:
|
| _4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch._
|
| Ring is gross enough, thank you very much.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It already exists in apps for nosey neighbors like Nextdoor
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| I signed up to our Nextdoor (uk).
|
| There seems to be four things on here: - an avon lady over
| agressively spamming her stuff (blocked) - people asking for
| small job recommendations (who should I get to fix my garden
| gate, babysitter, tv ariel fitting) - some notices about
| local events (when / where fireworks, Remembrence, carolling)
| - group commiseration that one time some group was speeding
| all over town at midnight running red lights and keeping us
| up with their skidding and revving.
|
| Honestly pretty good. I see it maybe once a week.
| siffland wrote:
| I went to sign up for Nextdoor and it wanted full access to
| all my contacts in my phone. I looked on their site and
| that is so they can invite friends from my contacts. I
| didn't sign up, maybe i will later, leaves a bad taste in
| my mouth.
|
| https://help.nextdoor.com/s/article/About-android-app-
| permis...
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| I just checked my app, it had no permissions.
|
| I wouldn't allow it to do so, so I assume it asked, I
| said no, and we moved on.
| benglish11 wrote:
| I have the iphone app and it didn't require this
| permission or maybe it asked and I denied it. Is that not
| possible in android?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Aka: "I see a suspicious looking Black Guy in our suburban
| neighborhood. It looks like he is breaking into a house by
| using a remote to open a garage door and driving in."
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah, my Next-door has a lot of that. They aren't that
| obvious though. I like to call them out.
|
| "I saw a suspicious man walking down the street!"
|
| "What made him suspicious?"
|
| "He just doesn't look like he belongs here."
|
| "Why?"
|
| "He's black"
|
| "Being black isn't suspicious"
|
| I then I get an email from Next-door about my comments
| being reported!
| notJim wrote:
| Also: "why haven't the cops arrested all these homeless
| people yet?"
| chasd00 wrote:
| the one useful thing Nextdoor is good for is lost/found pets.
| Other than that, i've never liked it.
|
| I have a Ring and some of it is just downright funny.
|
| > "suspicious person on my porch, be on the look out!" >>
| "um, that's the mailman."
| _jal wrote:
| The only value Nextdoor provided me was making me aware that
| the asshole down the block is also a racist.
|
| Deleted that cesspool after confirming it was just another
| fear-inducer service for people who get off on that.
| dunkelan wrote:
| I think the key term is "consumer-centric". Ring and other home
| cams are necessary peace of mind for a lot of people.
| kec wrote:
| Consumers can be assholes as well. I was harassed by one of
| my neighbors and the police because their ring camera caught
| me walking through the parking lot in front of my building on
| the same afternoon this neighbors car was broken into.
| runjake wrote:
| Non-DIY plus subscriptions plus corporations rarely leads to
| "consumer-centric".
|
| More often it's almost solely profit-driven.
| criddell wrote:
| What's wrong with subscriptions? If you are getting an
| ongoing service (like Spotify, or HBO, or magazine
| delivery, etc...) it seems that an ongoing fee makes sense.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Products turning into services, that's what wrong. You
| stop paying, the devices stop working. Or, they decide
| they're bored with providing the service, and pivot or
| get acquihired (or just decide to prod you into
| upgrading), the devices stop working.
|
| Plus, it seems that the new breed of service companies
| isn't satisfied with just providing a service in exchange
| of money. They also use the opportunity to exfiltrate as
| much data about you as they can get.
| criddell wrote:
| You don't subscribe to cable tv or netflix?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I do, but a) problems of these businesses are well-known,
| and b) there's a difference between a subscription to
| entertainment and subscription to necessities (or at
| least things with higher impact on one's life).
|
| Also, in case of cable/Netflix, a lot of downsides are
| mitigated by piracy. There's no worry you'll be cut off
| from the entertainment you want, because you can always
| Torrent it if push comes to shove.
| mynegation wrote:
| That is fine. I am happily paying for Spotify as they
| provide me with tremendous value day over day. I spend
| much less on music than in the days of buying CDs and
| Have access to a huge catalogue, instantly.
| eladgil wrote:
| One could argue that for most non-engineers, non-DIY is
| crucial for most products.
|
| For example, in the 90s a lot of people thought everyone
| would host their own email servers. In reality, consumers
| flocked to Y! mail and later Gmail, since most people
| really can't or won't do this themselves.
|
| Most people also do not change the oil on their own car (at
| least in the USA) etc.
|
| In my mind the question is can you develop a great product
| in this area. It is possible (and sad) that Ring or Nest is
| as good as it gets (or have default won due to superior
| distribution). But I do think there are a lot of features I
| would want as a consumer that would make this experience
| better for me.
| asdff wrote:
| Eventually it's going to come to a head that these cams do
| little at all for security. I have a wyze cam that I use to
| watch my pet, but I'm well aware that even if it caught a
| burglar in the act that the LAPD isn't going to do anything
| with that video or the case.
| Falling3 wrote:
| I agree with you, but I think that particular example says
| more about our police than it does about the cameras.
| Wistar wrote:
| My ex-neighborhood (Magnolia in Seattle) has had Flock Safety
| install 6 "AI" camera systems, two at each of the three
| entry/exit point of the neighborhood. Each installation has a
| camera overseeing entering traffic and one overseeing exiting
| traffic. The cameras have license-plate recognition and object
| detection for car color/make/model, pedestrians, bicyclists and
| even animals. Flock Safety charges $2,000 per year per camera.
| Magnolia is one of about 10 Seattle-area neighborhoods with
| Flock Safety cameras installed. The Magnolia residents
| themselves pay for the cameras and service. They all can log in
| to a web service and see the footage and ALPR lists,
| timestamps, etc.
|
| Friends I have who live there are thrilled with the system
| although the Seattle police seem to have little interest in the
| system telling the residents that they are only interested in
| seeing footage that shows suspicious activities or is directly
| related to a crime.
|
| https://www.flocksafety.com/
|
| Porch pirates are so bad in my new neighborhood that I admit to
| wanting one of these on my dead-end culdesac and have
| investigated what it would take to build such a system myself.
| otoburb wrote:
| Eldertech ideas would be a welcome addition to this list. Gil
| might say that Eldertech is a specific vertical under the
| RPA/NoCode category, but I'd argue that it's a large enough
| market unto itself that will become more relevant after 1 or 2
| generational shifts.
| simplify wrote:
| For social networks, Manyverse is an interesting new player. It's
| p2p with no central server, and the app is open source.
|
| https://github.com/staltz/manyverse
| floatingatoll wrote:
| There's an unmet need in social networks for "identity verified
| and protected", wherein the social network proves to a
| reasonable^ degree of certainty that you are who you say you are,
| and then you are permitted to maintain an anonymous identity
| (which you may end and replace with a new one at any time).
|
| ^ Notarization, at $25/each, would be sufficient. Bank account
| verification and credit card verification would not be
| sufficient, nor would "upload a photo of your ID". There's no
| sidestepping the "human being evaluates your actual identity
| documents" stage.
| chrisbigelow wrote:
| Not a pharmacological intervention, but I'm currently in the
| process of building out a newsletter for "longevity basics":
| https://pareto.substack.com/
|
| I feel like too many people have gotten caught up in fringe
| science practices and "biohacking" the basic information that
| will keep us healthy and living long has been drowned out in the
| noise.
| abinaya_rl wrote:
| Regarding the remote work, companies have their own limitations
| like timezone requirements/tax complications in providing full-
| time jobs to the global workforce.
|
| We at Remote Leaf [1], helping people land remote jobs by
| curating the jobs that are relevant to them. We filter jobs based
| on the user's location and skills.
|
| [1] https://remoteleaf.com
| mintone wrote:
| For #4 I have had good experiences thus far with Simpli Safe.
| MH15 wrote:
| >2. New social network
|
| This already exists, in the form of private group chats. I am
| part of a few GroupMe and Snapchat group chats that function
| similarly to how social networks "should".
|
| I have an idea in this space- I'd like to implement a new webview
| or theme for Twitter that shows the most recent posts last,
| similar to how a DM functions. Once you scroll to the bottom of
| the list, you are done. No new content. Could alleviate some of
| the addictive features of the current methods.
| thrwaway69 wrote:
| > The rise of machine learning and machine vision as analytical
| tools opens up the door for a new contractor to emerge to
| challenge incumbents, and also to provide new applications not
| available in the pre-ML world.
|
| Actually, I was thinking of building detection system for taking
| down protests. Currently, government has a need to identify
| muslims, illegal immigrants and violent college students. Looking
| at whatever video is there, it seems you can find them with
| 60-70% accuracy. For taking down protests, I figure something
| like automated human warnings or high intensity sound could work.
| It can generate list of people found and match them against
| existing database, give proximity of where they might live. Long
| term, you can track movements and other uniquely identifying
| data. All stored in cloud so for every camera you install,
| accuracy should improve.
|
| I wonder if some kind long range radar would be able to detect
| protestors like activities.
|
| For the attention economy, someone needs to build a
| prioritization system. Something that can jam all notifications
| and only allow higher priority ones to go through, scheduling,
| hiding things I probably don't care about.
|
| example - taking care of unread emails by building a sorted list
| of them and removing junk based on how you interact with top
| ones.
|
| > Digital neighborhood watch
|
| Could be useful for various purposes like keeping away people on
| restraining orders with facial recognition, it should notify
| police with proof or observing fires, violence, and keeping away
| certain people you don't want near you.
|
| Human sounding warnings will scare off a lot of low noisy actors.
|
| Edit: Surveillance state = bad. I get it. I am against it too but
| are you not minority when most of your country doesn't care?
|
| If there is a market need for a product, what do you use for
| determining whether it is correct or not. You can kill people
| with knives or ropes (more people killed than security cameras)
| but that doesn't make those two unethical or wrong to supply. You
| can defer to legality but that is not a good vector probably.
| Ethics are subjective and based more on intentions than other
| variables.
|
| Just a genuine question, what if you are minority in a democratic
| state? Should you have power to impose your will on others
| despite whatever _they_ voted for? If someone is harassing me, I
| can legally remove him. Harassing someone is wrong but what if
| protests turn into harassment or destruction of your private
| property, should you use legal system to stop protests? Should
| you think about the whole country of billion when making a
| decision that is against you in terms of favorability?
|
| Is selling anything to state a crime now that they can use for
| violence or suppression of protestor? What makes detection
| systems so bad compared to other things people call 'ethical'?
| Causality1 wrote:
| I want a single service I can plug a bunch of creators and/or
| genres/interests into and get alerted about available new
| content. I don't care about book tours or interviews or someone
| leaving the band or twitter drama. Just tell me when one of my
| favorite authors releases a book for sale. Tell me when the album
| is out. Tell me when the game is on Steam. I don't care about
| your broken Kickstarter promises or your development updates or
| your Hugo Award nomination or that you've begun recording your
| new album.
| FajitaNachos wrote:
| I've thought about this some too. Almost like an "alert for
| anything" type service. Defining the schema seems tricky
| though.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/It...
| would be a good place to start
| dr-detroit wrote:
| There are no AAA social platforms without CIA backing from the
| start. It could never happen independently.
| [deleted]
| nrjames wrote:
| Purple Air hits on a bit of the neighborhood pollution sensor
| idea: https://www2.purpleair.com/
|
| I've used their API to look at California wildfire data.
| sillypuddy wrote:
| I think this data is integrated into weather underground app as
| well.
| modeless wrote:
| Their API is great. I found their site a little slow for
| something I want to check regularly so I built a faster one
| based on the API:
|
| https://aqi.today
|
| If there's a PurpleAir sensor near you, it will show you the
| reading instantly. It also updates the favicon so you can leave
| it open in the background and check the reading just by
| glancing at the tab.
| asdff wrote:
| This is great! saved to home screen on iOS for convenience
| Patrick_Devine wrote:
| Purple Air has been extremely popular in our community due to
| the wild fires here in California. There are quite a few
| sensors around town, and it gives you a good idea about how to
| prepare the kids for school and whether we should be riding
| bicycles.
| asdff wrote:
| How do you act on the air quality info? Seems to me that
| riding a bike or driving a car you'd be breathing the same
| air.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Nuclear is a strong potential solution for climate change but is
| politically unpopular. Could something be done to address this
|
| No. There are no political champions for nuclear, and most
| environmentalists are actively hostile to it. And to be fair,
| starting reinvestment in nuclear infrastructure in light of how
| inexpensive natural gas is, would be expensive. Nuclear also
| doesn't play well with solar and wind, while natural gas is a
| perfect complement to renewables.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| > 4. ADT 2.0: Digital neighborhood watch.
|
| That this is not only a market, but a "wish" which seems to get
| traction even here on HN confirms to me that the old joke "1984
| is not a manual" is more relevant than ever, and scarily not only
| in regards to the usual suspects, corporate and nation states,
| but people themselves.
|
| Can anyone explain to me why _anyone_ would advocate a profit-
| driven, systematic eradication of soul and character around each
| and every human residence?
|
| Why would you trade the vibrancy of your young urban block or the
| sense of trust and community in your suburb against prevention of
| low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs?
|
| Why would you surrender your home, not only your safe haven in
| life but also your gateway to low effort exploration of your
| surroundings to wide-spanning AI surveillance and automated purge
| of any nuisance?
|
| Maybe I am just weird or out of touch but I can absolutely not
| get in my head how people surrender to such a dull dystopia based
| on an apparent fetish for weaponized gossip and abnormal levels
| of fear of petty crimes...
| bredren wrote:
| I played with this idea some with a startup called Perch, which
| intended to turn old smartphones into security cameras or
| modern webcams.
|
| While some users were interested in deterring crime, others
| just like to watch webcams. Sometimes weird and noteworthy
| stuff happens, though I found not nearly often enough. Also
| low-cost application specific cameras like wyze emerged that
| were easier to setup than old phones.
|
| Anyhow, Petty crimes are currently very interesting to people
| to catch in this sort of age of online shaming. This is
| evidenced by the stolen package bomb videos.
|
| Importantly, adding more surveillance does not mean you can go
| out now and not assume you're being recorded or that your
| actions in public might turn up on a social network. We passed
| this as an assumption years ago.
|
| However, it is still possible to do terrible things in broad
| daylight and get away with it. We had, I believe two unsolved
| daytime pedestrian hit and runs in inner Portland in December!
| Hard to imagine but there is still relatively low or even no
| useful video coverage in some areas. And it isn't always a
| great thing.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/e5kr7q/woman_and_...
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| > I played with this idea some with a startup called Perch,
| which intended to turn old smartphones into security cameras
| or modern webcams.
|
| > Petty crimes are currently very interesting to people to
| catch in this sort of age of online shaming. This is
| evidenced by the stolen package bomb videos.
|
| I hope you do not take this as a personal attack, but I
| consider this line of thinking...well, fucked up. Just
| because an idea is remotely viable in an economic sense it
| seems to be instantly within the Overton window of serious
| consideration.
|
| > However, it is still possible to do terrible things in
| broad daylight and get away with it.
|
| Like manipulating the self-assigned greatest democracy in the
| world as a foreign actor via, you guessed it, mass
| surveillance and analysis. I would rather prevent that
| instead of pleasing some digital mop and peoples craving for
| "vengeance" on criminals, but oh well.
| tclancy wrote:
| It's one of the gaps/ downsides to tech development. We see
| anything not yet in existence in as an "underserved market",
| design a product and assume everyone thinks like we do.
|
| The whole time I was reading that section all I heard was,
| "Let's move from individual neighbor racism tools to group
| chat!"
| munmaek wrote:
| That's pretty much what NextDoor is for my neighborhood.
| gumby wrote:
| Such a system could be designed in a privacy-preserving fashion
| which might be a customer-valued property. Even better if it
| could avoid the toxic crap fed by Nextdoor.
|
| For example: I considered writing an app that verified that a
| caller did indeed work for the company they claimed (have a
| facial recognition digest, send to company, get a thumb
| up/down, then _discard_ the local data on thumb up).
|
| There's nothing to stop me from remembering the faces of people
| I've met; what's creepy is that the machines know essentially
| everybody's face. But the opposite can be true to: we could
| make machines that discard everything inessential. There's just
| no customer demand for that yet.
| zone411 wrote:
| Ask that to one of the ~6 million victims of burglaries per
| year (2.5 mil burglaries/year). How are those black swan
| events? How are they low impact?
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| What can a start-up driven cloud mass surveilance do in that
| regard what a 1950-tech alarm system can not?
|
| Why not look into the countless measures other nations with
| far less crime or individuals have successfuly done which
| coincidentally also are _not_ opening an attack surface for
| sinister activities as large as Alaska?
| bokbok8379 wrote:
| >What can a start-up driven cloud mass surveillance do in
| that regard what a 1950-tech alarm system can not?
|
| One word: tranquilizer dart
| z3t4 wrote:
| Its difficult to argue against safety. For some people there
| are no pros and cons, just black or white. 10% more safety vs
| 0% more safety. They dont want to do hard work to solve the
| problem. They just want short time fixes of the symptoms.
| scarejunba wrote:
| Because the normal result of this for people isn't that they
| have to go perform two minutes hate or praise Big Brother; it's
| that their packages don't get stolen. And the downside?
| Nothing. In fact, the expression of "I could be watched at any
| time but no one will" is a greater expression of trust.
|
| People live their lives very differently from the universe
| you're talking about. They enforce things through trust
| networks. My friends and I have Find my Friends access to each
| other. That's right. If I wanted I could sit there and spy on
| one of them. But she knows I won't. I know I won't. That's how
| a sense of trust works.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Well, 300 million people are currently living under an
| administration whose election was most likely heavily
| influenced by mass data collection and analysis.
|
| Nobody cares if you and your friend read each others diaries
| or whatever. The problem is the metaphorical diary being
| owned by a global entity, along with two billion other
| diaries. Locked behind shoddy security and regarded as
| sellable for the right price at any point in time.
|
| As a German I was thoroughly (and rightfully IMO) teached to
| treat the opinion of "haha personally I just don't look
| further than a few meters beyond my nose and the world looks
| quite fine now" as danger, not as an excuse and your
| statement are falls quite clearly in that category. Just
| because you don't see nothing doesn't mean nothing is
| happening.
| scarejunba wrote:
| It doesn't have to be sellable and it doesn't have to be
| shoddy security. Those don't come inherently with the
| product.
|
| Nothing inherently wrong with mass data collection and
| analysis and nothing inherently wrong with an election
| being heavily influenced by that. If there were falsehoods
| advertised then the problem is the falsehoods.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| > 300 million people are currently living under an
| administration whose election was most likely heavily
| influenced by mass data collection and analysis
|
| There's has been little to no evidence any of the data
| collection/analysis done by the Trump campaign influenced
| anyone.
| amatecha wrote:
| Sadly, this seems to be literally already happening, right?
| Nest and Wyze home surveillance cams, etc... all cloud-based...
| :\
| enobrev wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with this. I bought a house with a front
| porch, and for three seasons of the year my wife and I sit out
| there almost every day. It's mind-blowing to me how few of our
| neighbors sit in front of their houses. They're all nice. They
| say hello as they walk their dogs and strollers. But then they
| go back inside and hide from the world.
|
| Not many packages get taken on my block, though they seem to on
| others. I'm not saying it's because of us, but I assume being
| outside and neighborly helps. It seems we've collectively lost
| that sense somehow.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| > systematic eradication of soul and character around each and
| every human residence? Why would you trade the vibrancy of your
| young urban block or the sense of trust and community in your
| suburb against prevention of low-impact black-swan events like
| serial packet thiefs?
|
| Why would the "soul" and "vibrancy" of a neighborhood die with
| some kind of digital neighborhood watch? Seems like a flawed
| premise.
|
| There's also something to be said about the hypocrisy of
| accusing others of having abnormal levels of fear of crimes
| that occur every day, while assuming that your neighbors
| installing a security camera on their porch will inevitably
| lead to a surveillance state dystopia on par with 1984.
| vageli wrote:
| > > systematic eradication of soul and character around each
| and every human residence? Why would you trade the vibrancy
| of your young urban block or the sense of trust and community
| in your suburb against prevention of low-impact black-swan
| events like serial packet thiefs?
|
| > Why would the "soul" and "vibrancy" of a neighborhood die
| with some kind of digital neighborhood watch? Seems like a
| flawed premise.
|
| People act very differently when they are being filmed. Go to
| the nearest largest city and start filming passerby in an
| obvious fashion. People will not appreciate it and act
| differently towards you (likely visibly hostile). That
| reaction supports the notion that something of value is lost
| when you blanket-surveil a society.
| tomlagier wrote:
| > People act very differently when they are being filmed.
| Go to the nearest largest city and start filming passerby
| in an obvious fashion. People will not appreciate it and
| act differently towards you (likely visibly hostile). That
| reaction supports the notion that something of value is
| lost when you blanket-surveil a society.
|
| I don't agree with this premise. People act very
| differently _when they don't know why they are being
| filmed_. (Almost) every retail store in the world has had
| CCTV for 40 years now and people are not alarmed. They know
| why the filming is happening - as a deterrent to theft. I'd
| argue that the same principle applies to dashcams,
| stoplight cameras, helmet cams on bicycles, and, yes, porch
| or doorbell cams.
|
| Once you start filming people _without_ an obvious reason,
| then they start acting differently.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you buy or rent an old enough house you might still have the
| vestiges of a coal chute somewhere on the side of the house.
| Unfortunately, I don't think today you could leave that much
| external access for a 'package chute'.
|
| Amazon tried to solve this by making your front door the
| package chute. And we laughed and laughed. Maybe there's
| something in between, but it's not as simple a solution as
| replacing the doorknob and lock.
| munificent wrote:
| I agree with your overall point. However:
|
| _> low-impact black-swan events like serial packet thiefs?_
|
| I live in Seattle. Package theft is a white swan event here.
| Everyone I know has had packages stolen. Most people are forced
| to come up with some strategy to deal with it: get things
| shipped to work, use Amazon lockers, get a camera on your porch
| and make sure to bring the package inside as soon as it shows
| up, etc.
|
| You are right that materially it is a low-impact event.
| However, psychologically it isn't. It _sucks_ having shit
| stolen from in front of your own home. It immediately
| undermines that "sense of trust and community" you mention. My
| home no longer feels like a sanctuary, and random people
| ambling down my street no longer feel like friendly neighbors.
| Any of them could be a thief scoping out porches and the
| evidence is clear that at least _some_ of them are.
|
| It is a maddeningly disempowering feeling to _know_ that I am
| unable to prevent someone from stealing shit from my own
| property. Worse, I know the police won 't do a thing about it
| either. I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my
| porch, but can do nothing about it.
|
| I think it is that feeling of helplnessness that leads people
| to buy security systems.
| celticmusic wrote:
| On the point about package Theft.
|
| This is going to be a bit ranty, so be warned...
|
| I think people in general are kind of dumb in terms of useful
| vs shiny.
|
| When I first heard about Amazon wanting to unlock your door
| to prevent theft, my immediate response was roughly: "It'll
| be a cold day in hell before I ever give control of my home
| access to any company".
|
| I then went on to describe what I WOULD do, and that is
| purchase a box with a lock on it, chained to something. But
| here's the thing. There are so many low-tech ways to solve
| this problem.
|
| - The aforementioned box with a child-safety lock on it and a
| plate on the inside lid that immediately disables the lock
| and _springs_ the box open.
|
| - An alcove in the side of your house that does essentially
| the same thing as the box, but looks more like a mail slot
| but for packages.
|
| - The same thing as above, only in your garage door.
|
| What these things all have in common is that they're low tech
| and effective, which isn't the new shiny. People are so
| goddamned dumb about this stuff that they would rather string
| up cameras everywhere, or give control of their home access
| to a company and allow strangers into their home. It blows my
| fucking mind.
|
| And so many people haven't picked up on the fact that Amazon
| didn't go for the low tech solution because it doesn't lock
| you in. Your local chinese restaurant can just as readily use
| that box as Amazon can, whereas, if they haven't already
| started doing it, they're going to start giving other
| companies access to those doors and charging for it. They're
| going to start charging the grocery store delivery service to
| open that door for them, and that delivery service is going
| to pass that on to you. You're literally going to be paying
| amazon to open your goddamned door.
|
| I feel like a sane person in a sea of crazy.
| gradstudent wrote:
| Do US postal services offer a shipping option where you need
| to sign for the parcel? I'd try and opt for something like
| that, if possible, rather than trusting the courier to leave
| the package on my doorstep.
|
| What I'm saying is, the problem isn't people stealing your
| packages. It's that you leave valuable property outside.
| Perhaps a good analogy is locking your door.
| RussianCow wrote:
| They do, but the sender would have to pay extra for a
| signature requirement, so this is not something the
| receiver can do anything about.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my
| porch, but can do nothing about it.
|
| In that case, what is the security system really doing for
| you?
| munificent wrote:
| Mainly it helps with my wife's anxiety. We didn't get it
| for package theft specifically. We have had a drug addict
| get into our fenced-in backyard and wander around for a
| while, others shit in the alley, and we sometimes hear
| screaming matches from addicts or mentally ill people.
| Having the cameras helps her feel a little safer from those
| kinds of people.
|
| (Whether we are materially safer is a separate question.
| But given that I think we are actually quite safe in
| general, the product is worth it to us in terms of peace of
| mind alone.)
| freepor wrote:
| Imagine if it uses facial recognition to tell you when the
| guy is next entering the neighborhood. Dystopian, but it
| could work.
| vageli wrote:
| > Imagine if it uses facial recognition to tell you when
| the guy is next entering the neighborhood. Dystopian, but
| it could work.
|
| And if it misidentifies the person?
| svieira wrote:
| Hey, he probably deserved to be beaten up anyway.
| </sarcasm>
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yeah, as long as the AI consistently applies the same
| biases humans do, everybody's happy right? /s
| mnm1 wrote:
| I think we should address the root of the problem. Why are
| package delivery companies just leaving these packages
| outside, unattended anyway? Of course they're going to get
| stolen in a city. Any city. That's beyond absurd and they
| should be held liable for their missing packages. I don't
| leave a thousand dollars in cash in an envelope on my porch
| unguarded. How about properly securing valuables first before
| blanketing the neighborhood in surveillance that you know
| doesn't work? This would possibly require an act of congress,
| literally, to force carriers to accept liability for their
| actions. As is, by having a package delivered, you're
| tempting people to steal it and hoping that human nature will
| not prevail. It's hard to have empathy for such a negligent
| action that's so full of ignorance about human nature.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Fair enough, but as you literally state yourself, the
| security system _does not even help_. I repeat, it does
| nothing.
|
| > I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my
| porch, but can do nothing about it.
|
| The only thing all this security theater does is aiding super
| convoluted scenarios where your neighbors system informs you
| to take your package in, if you have one currently out, and
| are fast enough, and are at home. In the long run, all this
| does for prevention is creating an arms race easily won by
| covering up your face and randomizing routes as the thief...
|
| So: Make a startup selling big-ass secure post boxes.
| Minimize crime by, you know, education and financial aid.
| Kill this excessive package-delivery culture which is super
| damaging anyways somehow. Make the police force more
| efficient. Make small package-taking centrals. Whatever. I
| understand. But this cloud-based security is the absolute
| worst thing you can do.
|
| edit: spelling
| treis wrote:
| >Fair enough, but as you literally state yourself, the
| security system does not even help. I repeat, it does
| nothing.
|
| Because it's a single system and not part of a network. If
| it were part of a network then, theoretically, the thief
| could be tracked back to their car/home and arrested.
| Hackernews loves to jump to the dystopian when it comes to
| public surveillance but somehow has a blind spot for the
| utopian possibilities. A sufficiently broad and
| technologically advanced public surveillance system would
| essentially eliminate crime in public. Why steal a package
| off a porch if you're going to be immediately identified
| and then automatically tracked via camera until it's
| convenient for the police to arrest you?
| munificent wrote:
| _> but as you literally state yourself, the security system
| does not even help. I repeat, it does nothing._
|
| My first sentence said I agree with your overall point.
|
| In my case, the main reason we have the cameras is because
| my wife felt they would help her feel more secure. They
| have been somewhat useful and/or worthwhile for other
| things:
|
| * We can see who's at the door and ignore them if they are
| solicitors.
|
| * When we're not home and someone knocks on the door, we
| can respond to them since the camera also has a speaker.
| When our friends dropped off a few Christmas presents while
| we were out at dinner, it was cool to be able to say thanks
| right then.
|
| * On the off chance a more serious crime is committed, we
| may have footage of it. The police don't care about package
| theft, but they are likely to investigate trespassing,
| breaking and entering, etc.
|
| * Sometimes we see bunnies and baby raccoons meandering
| around the alley, which is always cute.
|
| I'm not a big fan of the system, but it is occasionally
| handy or rewarding to have access to a live camera around
| my house.
| triceratops wrote:
| > get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers,
|
| These seem like reasonable solutions. Why not just do them?
|
| > I literally have video of the dude grabbing shit off my
| porch, but can do nothing about it.
|
| So what will more surveillance technology do? Maybe the
| innovation needed is apartment-community style mailboxes or
| dropboxes where only the mailperson and the tenant can have
| access, but scaled to single-family-home use.
| coldtea wrote:
| >> _> get things shipped to work, use Amazon lockers,_ >
| _These seem like reasonable solutions. Why not just do
| them?_
|
| Because that's bending broken backwards to accept a broken
| neighbourhood and society.
|
| Where this stops? "Drive-by's are a thing, accept it and
| just were a bulletproof vest, it's a sensible solution"?
| triceratops wrote:
| Needing to safeguard your possessions lest they get
| stolen is a sign of a broken society? By that yardstick,
| _every_ human society past and present is broken. Leaving
| aside small sleepy towns, everyone locks up their house,
| car, bicycles, and other possessions, even the people
| complaining about stolen packages. That 's not considered
| an unreasonable burden, but the minute unattended
| packages get taken off porches everyone loses their
| minds.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Needing to safeguard your possessions lest they get
| stolen is a sign of a broken society?_
|
| Yes. You are just probably too used to it to notice.
|
| Decades before it didn't happen as often in places it
| does now (yes, it did happen in other places. No excuse
| for a neighbourhood to go bad though, e.g. through tons
| of meth/opioid addicted piling to the crime rate).
|
| In nicer neighbourhoods it doesn't happen still.
|
| In whole countries (like Japan) it's unthinkable.
|
| > _Leaving aside small sleepy towns, everyone locks up
| their house, car, bicycles, and other possessions, even
| the people complaining about stolen packages_
|
| In my place (like in places like Tokyo or Singapore today
| still) we used to sleep with open windows, and had no
| problems even living cars unlocked. So there's that.
| ithkuil wrote:
| In other countries (like Italy where I currently live)
| leaving a package unattended is unthinkable. If there is
| nobody home they leave a slip of paper that says there
| will be another attempt at delivery the next day or else
| you have to fetch the package in some remote dispatch
| center (things are getting better now and many couriers
| are now taking their time to call you on the phone a few
| minutes before they drop by; sometimes you can ask them
| to drop the package at neighbors or at some small shop
| nearby, if the owner is willing)
| chillacy wrote:
| Sure there are police in every society but even in cities
| some neighborhoods have bars on their first floor windows
| while others don't. And if you go out of the country, you
| could leave a wallet on the street or bicycle unlocked in
| cities in Japan or Singapore.
| reroute1 wrote:
| > By that yardstick, every human society past and present
| is broken.
|
| Just because a yardstick gives you undesirable results
| doesn't mean that it's a faulty measuring tool.
| take_a_breath wrote:
| If package theft is the problem, maybe the real solution is
| something closer to "Package Theft Insurance" than "Cloud-
| based Neighborhood Surveillance."
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Package theft is not just about the money. If I buy
| something, I want that something, not my money back. Not
| mentioning that some of the things I receive may be
| "priceless" (understand: much more valuable than the price
| tag the insurance will use as a reference).
|
| Furthermore, insurance companies don't like to lose money,
| and they are likely the ones to encourage you to install a
| surveillance network. If anything, to make sure that you
| aren't stealing your own packages.
| take_a_breath wrote:
| ==Not mentioning that some of the things I receive may be
| "priceless" (understand: much more valuable than the
| price tag the insurance will use as a reference).==
|
| These are the types of deliveries that should require a
| signature for drop-off.
|
| ==Furthermore, insurance companies don't like to lose
| money, and they are likely the ones to encourage you to
| install a surveillance network.==
|
| Profitability depends on the pricing strategy. If police
| departments don't act on these videos anyway (as stated
| prior), more of them would likely just act as a visual
| deterrent. No different than taping an old cell-phone to
| your front door.
|
| ==If anything, to make sure that you aren't stealing your
| own packages. ==
|
| Fraud exists in every industry insurance companies serve.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| How do security cameras remove the "vibrancy of your young
| urban block" or "the sense of trust and community in your
| suburb"?
|
| Do the locks on your door accomplish the same incredible feat?
| wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote:
| There are gentrifying city streets that I, a white male, will
| not walk down because the entire street is new construction
| with builder included Ring systems. I don't want to walk down
| a street and have literally 30 people get notifications on
| their phones that I'm there.
|
| I can't imagine how the local PoC that are getting pushed
| back feel about that. Existing neighborhood watch networks
| already have people crying wolf at the smallest things. This
| is how the culture of the area dies.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I guarantee you whatever route you take in a city, you will
| fall under the gaze of at least one security camera.
|
| It doesn't appear you have any evidence for your
| viewpoints, just vague fears, topped off with a standard
| appeal of "what about PoCs?"
| wDcBKgt66V8WDs wrote:
| Yeah but there's a difference between an entire street of
| personal security systems accompanied by apps and social
| networks built on fear mongering.
|
| "just vague fears" they're called opinions which I'm
| allowed to have and voice in a public forum. Sorry for
| trying to consider the well being of the less privileged
| overly targeted people getting aggressively kicked out of
| their neighborhood.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| No, because my lock does not monitor?
|
| You can seriously not see how the the entanglement of
| psychological effects of being watched, mob justice,
| alienation, gossip, public shaming and threatening and first
| and foremost real or imagined social scoring breeds dull
| monoculture?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Security cameras generally don't actively monitor either -
| they merely record and let someone go back and look at the
| footage if they feel there is a reason to
|
| So you list every possible bad thing that possibly _could_
| happen, and that is reason enough to not even bother with
| something? Have these horror scenarios played out in any
| place that actually is heavily surveiled?
|
| Are there no young vibrant urban blocks in London? No sense
| of trust in Islington?
| umvi wrote:
| 1984 is only a manual if the state or federal government
| implements it. If an HOA implements it, I don't see how that is
| 1984. If I turn my house into my own surveillance state, that's
| not 1984 either, that's me automating tedious things like
| looking out the window for suspicious characters or events.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| > only if government implements it
|
| I suspect that if a non-government implementation becomes
| widespread the authorities will require access. A bit like
| grabbing the feeds from Facebook etc.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| There's good odds that the HOA won't home-grow this - I'm
| sure that if this product did exist, it'd either come from or
| end up being scooped up by one of the usual suspects of the
| information gathering and advertising age. I don't think that
| corporations helpfully defining what sort of crime was
| committed for the local HOA is any less dystopian, it just
| makes it potentially more subtle.
| slg wrote:
| The problem is that in a capitalist society, the surveillance
| options that provide the best combination of price and
| feature set are likely going to come from a company that has
| other revenue streams such as connecting all those cameras
| together and monetizing the entire customer network. Enter
| Ring.
| ctdonath wrote:
| HOAs are practically incorporated hamlets - local
| governments. There is a government (board) which imposes
| taxed (dues) and imposes zoning & other laws (rules), and can
| impose debilitating punishments (liens) against subjects
| (residents). Some are little more than friendly neighbors
| trying to keep neighborhood home values stable, others are
| wannabe tyrannical dictatorships.
|
| I could certainly see an HOA installing (increasingly cheap!)
| license plate & face recognition to monitor local activity
| "for security reasons"; seems innocuous enough if actually
| used sparingly to help police solve real crimes, but could
| quickly become obnoxious/oppressive when meddling board
| members with hyperactive imaginations start "looking for
| trouble before it starts".
|
| Yes, "HOA going 1984" is not full blown 1984, but it can
| terrorize & harm locals until they manage to move (i.e.:
| persuade someone else to move into a place locals are fleeing
| for reasons), and if less problematic still proceeds to
| normalize progression of 1984-ish governance.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| HOAs in most states cannot issue liens for unpaid fines,
| only for unpaid dues or assessments.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Some form of enforcement must be available to the HOA.
| Otherwise I'd sow wheat in my yard and raise a gaggle of
| chickens starting tomorrow.
| umvi wrote:
| My neighbors (Maryland) have had a broken down car in
| front of their house for 2 years now. I see HOA violation
| notices on it every once in a while threatening to get it
| towed if they don't fix it, but nothing ever comes of it.
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Fully agreeing within your premise. Digitalizing the grandman
| standing at her window 25/7 does not change the world.
|
| But you missed the part where not you (or your HOA)
| implements it:
|
| > Services model. Part of the purchase includes a technician
| showing up and doing the installation. There would be no DIY
| component.
|
| > Subscription only. The product would be a
| hardware/software/services bundle with an up front fee and
| ongoing subscription as default.
|
| So, you have scale. Someone owns all the data. Or three
| companies, same difference. The state of the "art" security
| in this sector is beyond laughable (Xiamoi camera showing
| feed from other peoples camera [0]) and even if not, just buy
| the dataset. And then the real shit begins.
|
| Give me _that_ dataset of say 20% of the Americans and a
| decent laptop and I blow Cambridge and their silly facebook
| data out of the water.
|
| Recognizing people gets ridiculously easy - instead of 7
| billion people I only have to identify you out of maybe 100
| persons frequenting an area. Cue all the low hanging fruits
| like your affairs, about all disabilities affecting gait,
| your bedtime regularity. Let me assume the role of a big
| store chain: I can not only see plants and garden equipment
| you buy, but also how you use it and how often you break
| stuff or let your grass grow brown. Nice!
|
| All these habits, unfiltered, unlike in the internets! How
| regular is your daily routine? Are you up to some risks due
| to little sunlight and sport? Your insurer would like to
| know! Your other insurer would also like to know, should you
| be considered a traffic risk considering how angry you take
| your driveway sometimes? But your other insurer has already
| pattern matched: Is probably an anger management issue. Your
| future job interviewer thanks you for this red flag!
|
| But hey, you _did_ avoid getting your electric pepper mill
| stolen that one time, probably!
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/cache-issue-
| causes-x...
| ksdale wrote:
| Since HOAs are much less capable of doing violence to people,
| it's certainly not as harmful for them to implement this
| technology as it is for the state to do so, but I think the
| impulse to view every single person passing through the
| neighborhood as a potential threat can create a very
| dystopian vibe.
|
| There's always a house or two for sale in our neighborhood,
| and naturally people will slowly drive by the houses to check
| them out, and without fail, someone will post on the HOA FB
| page to watch out for such and such sketchy vehicle.
|
| The house we bought was vacant for a short time and some kids
| came along and threw rocks at some of the windows, but for a
| few weeks after we bought the house, people would ask us if
| we knew about the "break-in."
|
| We live in one of the nicest neighborhoods I've ever seen and
| it's some combination of the news and technology like this
| that makes people think they're about to get Purged every
| night.
|
| I don't think the technology is the problem so much as the
| attitude it creates toward the world, and I think the
| technology can be quite useful, but when everyone believes it
| is necessary, it creates a 1984 vibe without government
| intervention. No government involvement is necessary for us
| to be suspicious and mean toward each other.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Less capable of violence, yes, but still able to low-level
| terrorize or cause serious financial problems.
| ksdale wrote:
| Yeah I agree, I thought the parent overstated the
| difference between governments and HOAs. A lot of HOAs
| are basically just the very local-est of local
| government, being responsible for roads and utilities,
| even approximating some functions of super small town law
| enforcement in the form of that guy who open carries
| really conspicuously.
| skosch wrote:
| I'm with you, but then again I currently live in a nice
| neighbourhood where something like "serial packet thiefs" are
| considered a "low-impact black-swan event", as you say.
|
| Not everyone is so lucky, and I'd wager that many folks would
| be happy to "automatically purge nuisances" if all it costs
| them is some sidewalk privacy. I would certainly make that
| trade-off if I lived in a dodgier environment.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I'd rather people actually got involved in their
| neighborhoods and formed or joined a real Neighborhood Watch
| group, rather than letting some AI handle it badly, or
| outsource it to some faceless company.
|
| At least if your neighbors screw it up, there is an avenue of
| redress. Plus, outside of TV shows, few bad things come from
| neighbors getting involved in their neighborhood.
| [deleted]
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Why would you trade the vibrancy of your young urban block
| or the sense of trust and community in your suburb against
| prevention of low-impact black-swan events like serial packet
| thiefs?_
|
| It's a big and a privileged assumption that the worse that
| happens in neighbours is "low-impact black-swan events like
| serial packet thiefs" or that otherwise they resemble a
| "vibrant young urban block".
| trevyn wrote:
| > _Can anyone explain to me why anyone would advocate a profit-
| driven, systematic eradication of soul and character around
| each and every human residence?_
|
| The more money you make, the more effort you spend cementing
| your position and systematically eradicating soul and
| character. See: Gated communities.
| bfung wrote:
| In China, this already happened with smart cameras everywhere
| to monitor traffic and people. It's only a matter of time other
| sensors are added. And only a small slippery slope away from a
| US city gov/municipality to think it's a good idea to install
| for the whole community. When 5g comes online...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _In China, this already happened with smart cameras
| everywhere to monitor traffic and people_
|
| And once the Chinese market starts to look saturated, the
| companies that make these systems will target Western
| governments. Hard.
| jariel wrote:
| #4 is disturbing.
|
| Humans in large swaths (most?) of the world live without stealing
| from one another.
|
| Safe communities are not built on policing and monitoring (or
| guns), they're built by people who have basic communitarian
| values, basic education, who are conscientious, honest etc..
|
| Obviously, macro issues are important (jobs, economy, credible
| judicial/civic systems) and that's part of the equation.
|
| But none of this is new, it's downright ancient - and I'm wary to
| think of any technology that can be directly applicable. We have
| to raise our kids well, and there won't be any software to do
| that for us.
| runjake wrote:
| #4 is a no-go in my book.
|
| Things like Ring, Nextdoor, and Facebook already exist. Nextdoor
| and Facebook are riddled with inanity, from political rants to
| dumb jokes to hoaxes to common scams to law enforcement rants.
|
| I don't want more information from my neighbors -- 99% of it is
| garbage. I want highly-filtered information. Basically, a
| neighborhood watch but with an aggressive spam filter. Right now
| I glance at the various neighborhood feeds with one eye closed,
| sifting through the intense stupidity, trying to capture valuable
| intelligence.
|
| Of course, all of this may be a dumb corporate-run idea and maybe
| people should really focus on forming good relationships with
| their neighbors in meatspace and talk to them in person aka
| HUMINT.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > Of course, all of this may be a dumb corporate-run idea and
| maybe people should really focus on forming good relationships
| with their neighbors in meatspace and talk to them in person
| aka HUMINT.
|
| But then how do we filter out the political rants, insanity,
| dumb jokes, hoaxes, and common scams?
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Thankfully, people usually do a decent job of filtering
| themselves in meatspace. At least, they are better at it in
| person than they are online.
| cgriswald wrote:
| There are also social cues and the lack of an ever present
| mob. A lot of people who are political activists online are
| not actually that confident in their views and absent the
| audience and ready defenders, won't express their views
| because they know they can't back it up in a one-on-one
| conversation.
|
| Our city did a traffic survey of a local street that is the
| primary route for everyone going from surrounding
| neighborhoods to downtown and found the average speed was
| ~2 mph over the posted limit, with the 85th percentile at
| ~5 mph over the speed limit. These are reasonable speed for
| such a wide road. The city then added several 'safety'
| features to it, and found in a subsequent survey that the
| changes actually did little to slow traffic. One feature is
| a pair of speed bumps. Some drivers slow to about 5 mph to
| go over the bumps, increasing the risk of rear end
| accidents. Other drivers veer into the bike lanes to go
| partially around them without slowing down. Everyone else
| slows down a reasonable amount, but then subsequently
| accelerate back up to the speed limit on a block where
| jaywalking is common. Some of the features they added are,
| in my opinion, beneficial, like turning a side street into
| a one way road after frequent accidents from people turning
| left out of it.
|
| But you can't talk about it on Nextdoor. The second you
| criticize the speed bumps you'll be ignored (if you're
| lucky) or attacked. Nuance is not allowed. You're either
| for all the changes, even the dangerous ones, or you're a
| crazy speed demon. Meanwhile, if you post about 'the
| children' who you are afraid for (even though no one has
| any evidence of a child ever being hurt by a driver on this
| road), you're going to get upvoted a lot within the first
| ten minutes.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Heh, a road to my parents' used to be riddled with
| potholes and uneven sewer grates (Canadian winters +
| drainage issues probably).
|
| The city spent months ripping it up and paving it nice
| and smooth.
|
| Then a couple months later they put up speed bumps.
|
| We spent a lot of money to get back to the speeds people
| already drove.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I once lived on a street that was incredibly badly
| maintained. The city informed the residents that they
| would be repaving the street and the residents campaigned
| hard for the city not to do that, for precisely the
| reasons you're talking about here.
|
| Their campaign was successful, in no small measure
| because a poll of the residents showed 95% of them
| opposed the repaving, and that the local paper wrote a
| big story about the whole affair.
| asdff wrote:
| I hate how pervasive this degenerate thinking is in local
| politics. "we don't want a nice thing because then people
| would use it."
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's not the thinking at all, though. The thinking is
| that the road being in rough shape means that everyone is
| forced to drive at a sane speed through a residential
| street where children are frequently playing.
|
| In other words, the "nice thing" isn't actually so nice
| in terms of the things that the people on that street
| really care about.
| cgriswald wrote:
| People on the next street over (it's a grid) are on
| Nextdoor complaining about all the traffic coming down
| their street now. And I'm sure it's the worst of the
| traffic that's going over there to avoid the features.
| I'm not sure how the city will fob off spending money on
| that street after spending the money on this one.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > focus on forming good relationships with their neighbors in
| meatspace
|
| Remember that garbage you mentioned. We don't want to deal with
| other people's garbage in meatspace any more than we do online.
| wffurr wrote:
| Many people self-censor to a much greater degree in person
| interactions vs what they post publicly online.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds horrible... if it is anything like Nextdoor,
| there will be three posts a day about "There was a black guy
| sitting in his car!"
| blackbrokkoli wrote:
| Nah, you are thinking way to short-term.
|
| The AI will flag the black person himself as often associated
| with complaints and posts tagged "danger". Thus barring him
| from job interviews and loans by other automated services
| (Uber, but for HR!) who bought the data set "to elevate user
| experience".
|
| Creeping right back to apartheid, but I would say entirely
| worth it if it means I can get a notification that my
| cappuccino creamer was stolen 5 minutes ago by an
| unidentifiable person! /s
| blackearl wrote:
| He was sitting there...menacingly!
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| The "SaaS-ification" of security cameras should also worry us.
| Ring -- not its customers -- controls the videos taken with
| their cameras, creating a video surveillance network that the
| police can access without needing a warrant. They've partnered
| with 400 police forces to give them access to that data [1].
| Although they claim to let customers deny police requests for
| footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video over
| to police if they deem the request "reasonable".
|
| And it's not just Ring customers that are affected, it's anyone
| in the general vicinity. If your house is in the field of view
| of a neighbor's Ring camera, you're being surveilled too.
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...
| lancesells wrote:
| Things like Ring are really worrying because it's Amazon.
| Fear is the motivator in security camera sales. With Ring
| you've got a parent company whose CEO owns a national news
| organization(Washington Post) and a large media
| company(Amazon). Amazon is so aggressively pursuing being in
| every part of your life that the fear motivator is going to
| be really easy to manipulate.
| secabeen wrote:
| > Although they claim to let customers deny police requests
| for footage, their terms of service allow them to hand video
| over to police if they deem the request "reasonable".
|
| Defining what is a "reasonable government request" is a valid
| question, but it's really just not that high of a bar to get
| a records subpoena/search warrant for video like this. Courts
| sign off on those routinely, so I don't think you can really
| expect Ring or any company that holds your records to deny
| police requests for very long.
|
| The system they have seems pretty balanced. The police look
| at the ring website to see who has cameras (they could figure
| that out by walking the neighborhood), they ask for the
| footage (instead of knocking on the door), they get turned
| down (or not), they get a warrant, the footage is released.
| Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but they're
| not enabling mass surveillance or building AI systems that
| track suspicious people across multiple ring devices.
|
| Is there something I'm missing here? If you record video of
| your front yard, and the police want to see it, they have a
| right to, subject to the normal judicial review.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> Is there something I 'm missing here? If you record
| video of your front yard, and the police want to see it,
| they have a right to, subject to the normal judicial
| review._
|
| The issue is that Ring's terms specifically allow them to
| circumvent "normal judicial review" if the request is
| "reasonable". From the same WaPo article:
|
| _> Ring users consent to the company giving recorded video
| to "law enforcement authorities, government officials and
| /or third parties" if the company believes it's necessary
| to comply with "legal process or reasonable government
| request," its terms of service state._
|
| I'm fine with the police having access to video after
| obtaining a warrant or subpoena, even if it's not a
| particularly high bar to clear. _But that should still be
| the bar_. We shouldn 't expect Ring to refuse police
| requests even after being served, but we _should_ expect
| them to hold out _until_ that point -- and unfortunately,
| we can 't trust them to do that.
| eropple wrote:
| _> Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but
| they 're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI
| systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring
| devices._
|
| Are you sure?
|
| How can we as citizens verify it?
| secabeen wrote:
| > Are you sure?
|
| I'm not. Do I think it's likely that they are? No.
|
| > How can we as citizens verify it?
|
| The same way we verify that Google isn't producing broad-
| scale AI systems looking for specific subsets of people
| across the GMail data. Investigative reporting, whistle-
| blowers, regulation/lawmaking, and looking closely at the
| evidence presented when the government acts. This is why
| parallel construction is pernicious, as it prevents
| meaningful oversight of government malfeasance.
|
| End-to-end encryption, and user ownership/encryption of
| data is also great, but it's not widely available, and
| many use cases don't work when the service provider can't
| see the data they're storing. Even when the data is
| encrypted, you can get a lot of valuable intelligence
| from metadata.
| dhimes wrote:
| Although I find your answer upsetting, I also find it
| reasonable. +1.
| JohnFen wrote:
| So, in other words, citizens can't verify anything.
| Instead, all we can do is hope that any abuse will
| eventually be noticed and reported by some random
| whistleblower somewhere.
|
| That's hardly sufficient, and especially not with a
| company like Amazon.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Ring is reducing the overhead of asking somewhat, but
| they're not enabling mass surveillance or building AI
| systems that track suspicious people across multiple ring
| devices.
|
| It really looks to me like this is exactly what they're
| building.
| emayljames wrote:
| In the UK, you can't lawfully film another persons dwelling,
| in that you would break the law by having any of a neighbours
| property in view.
| matthewheath wrote:
| No, this is wrong. There is no law that explicitly
| prohibits filming the public realm (e.g. the pavement) or
| incidentally capturing your neighbour's property.
|
| There is a code of practice: the Surveillance Camera Code
| of Practice (SCCoP). There are also requirements to follow
| under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the
| Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA).
|
| The consequences of not following the SCCoP, the GDPR, and
| the DPA may result in regulatory action being taken against
| you by the Information Commissioner's Office as well as
| private legal action by the affected individuals, but it is
| not _per se_ against the law to film those areas.
| sjg007 wrote:
| My ring is basically useless for surveillance, at night
| especially. It can't see across the street and barely gets
| beyond my front stoop. This is even with the lights on and a
| street light nearby. Likewise for my Arlos, useless at night.
| During the day they are a bit better but the resolution isn't
| anything special and it'd be impossible to catch a license
| plate. Make, model and color but that's about it.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I cancelled my Nextdoor account in part because I got tired of
| all the paranoia and inevitable devolvement into political
| bickering, but also in part as a protest against Nextdoor that
| they need to police this kind of activity. It was only
| afterwards that I realized that Nextdoor _wants_ this activity.
| Like Facebook, they see it as encouraging engagement thus
| traffic they can use to sell ads.
|
| It confirms to me that cancelling was the right move for me but
| it also saddens me that we've gotten ourselves into a state in
| technology where the business model is to get people riled up
| and then profit from that discord.
| munmaek wrote:
| NextDoor is great because I can learn who is and isn't racist
| in my South Carolina suburban neighborhood.
| aj7 wrote:
| Everyone wants good editing and content as product feature. You
| can pay...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Are there other rundown like this? I appreciate the concept more
| than the content.
| paulgb wrote:
| There are a handful out there under the name "request for
| startups" (popularized by YC, I believe)
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22request+for+startups%22&t=fpas&...
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Less focused on business ideas and more on digital tools, but I
| wrote something similar a month or so ago:
|
| https://jborichevskiy.com/posts/digital-tools/
| soneca wrote:
| About new social networks, I am building one that I am calling _"
| a quiet social network"_.
|
| Copy/pasting from my landing what it means:
|
| A personal journal and a social network that will provide a quiet
| space to reflect about yourself and also to nurture your long
| term relationships with the people that you care about.
|
| _Why "quiet"?_
|
| Because this social network won't have the frenetic rhythm of
| news and updates of all other social networks.
|
| A quiet space is just as quiet as the quietest sound. Quid Sentio
| is being designed so you will only listen to your voice and the
| voice of your close ones. A digital space to cultivate
| conversations more meaningful than the loud noise of social media
| and more long-lasting than the unsearchable small talk of instant
| messengers.
|
| Quid Sentio is for you if you want to...
|
| Avoid the deafening rumble of the crowds. You will only see
| public entries from people that have both being included in your
| list and included you in their list. No stranges following you
| (or even knowing you have an account).
|
| Avoid the tiresome grumble of the acquaintances. There will be no
| way to search for people on the site or to see a list of your
| friends' friends. Also, there will be a limit of people you can
| add to your list without reciprocity, so no way to spam everyone
| in your contact list.
|
| Avoid the popularity contests of perfect lives. There will be no
| way to like entries, only conversations. Also, there will be no
| way to share content outside of the list of who posted. So no way
| to go viral and no instant rewards.
|
| Avoid the manipulative tricks of addiction dealers. All the
| design decisions above already point to a social network with
| less activity. Adding to that, you won't see any advertising on
| the site, so there is no incentive to keep you aimless wandering
| around here. Stay as long as you need to connect with your
| family, your close friends, and yourself. Then leave.
|
| Avoid the news, the memes, the FOMO. As the posts all follow the
| same design of journal entries, with no images and no special
| treatment for external links, you will probably won't see much
| news or click-baity articles, unless a close friend wants to
| comment on them. Also, no company accounts either.
|
| If you are interested: https://www.quidsentio.com
| dehugger wrote:
| Your web site isn't loading at all for me. Glancing at the
| console it looks like you have a timeout error, and the loading
| gif just runs forever.
|
| Chrome Version 79.0.3945.88 (Official Build) (64-bit)
| soneca wrote:
| Thanks! If it is the same bug that I experienced, if you
| refresh the page it will probably work.
|
| I am a 3-week vacation right now, away from my development
| laptop, but I will investigate this bug better and solve it
| once I'm back
| [deleted]
| PhilippGille wrote:
| "The tab has crashed" after clicking on the "new entry" button.
| soneca wrote:
| Apparently it is not ready for primetime yet :( Thanks for
| letting me know!
| jayrwren wrote:
| #4: vivint smart home already has #4, including an app called
| streetwatch which does the multi-camera with neighbors grouping.
|
| #10: a mouse is a mammal. perhaps author meant apes?
| eladgil wrote:
| Thanks - #10 was a typo. Updated to "human". :)
| contravariant wrote:
| The author seems to have put more thought into what _can_ exists,
| as opposed to what _ought_ to exist.
| eladgil wrote:
| This is purposeful. These are just some products I want.
|
| There are a lot of things that _should_ exist but are harder to
| do: -Safe, cheap nuclear power -Longevity drugs (I am involved
| with two companies in that area) -Independent journalism school
| /foundation -Pioneer on steroids (how to identify and nurture
| the top global talent for every area of human endeavor) -Etc.
|
| But that is perhaps another post / different topic.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I think GP's point is that some things on that list _ought
| not_ to exist. Personally, I have some reservations about the
| neighbourhood watch thing.
| eladgil wrote:
| Ah - you are right. Thanks for catching the
| misinterpretation on my end.
| jcadam wrote:
| > 7. Software-only defense contractor.
|
| Yea, I keep thinking of doing this but there's so much red tape
| in starting a defense company, it's seriously daunting. I'm a
| software developer in the defense industry, btw.
|
| > ...be focused on a more SaaS-centric software-driven model...
|
| Actually, I think the time may _finally_ be right for something
| like this in my industry.
| brixon wrote:
| Take more normal stuff that exists and host it in FedRAMP and
| DOD IL4+ environments. I work for a DOD contractor and we can
| only use a few SaaS solutions, most are not secure enough. We
| have to host most stuff in-house and it's becoming harder to
| find software that we can either host in-house or is of a
| security level approved by the gov.
| imjha wrote:
| We specialize in helping organizations seeking FedRAMP
| accreditation. https://stackarmor.com/solutions-2/devops/
| Please reach out if interested.
| spoon16 wrote:
| Checkout Rebellion Defense https://rebelliondefense.com/
| jcadam wrote:
| Bah, of course someone is already trying it :)
| brenden2 wrote:
| None of these are particularly interesting to me. Seems like an
| observation-based list, based on what's currently trendy.
| davedx wrote:
| > NoCode/LowCode (letting anyone build an app with a spreadsheet
| as a database representation)
|
| AirTable has made huge inroads here. I'm also building something
| in this area (https://lightsheets.app/), turning slightly back
| towards spreadsheets instead of databases but then building
| enhancements and modern integrations on top. I think there's
| still lots of potential in this area, despite spreadsheets being
| 50 years old.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Airtable did some great work on the UX. Introducing people to
| table schemas with typed columns is pretty awesome, and the
| creative way they've leveraged that with the little tab that
| comes out of the side for either a nice view over the data
| (e.g. a map for an address column) or for showing Pivot
| Tables/Aggregations. They deserve some design awards for those
| ideas.
|
| But it's not a great alternative to a DB. It's really expensive
| per seat (twice the cost of Google Apps and you only get one
| app). The row limits on tables are too low. And I'd really like
| native webhook support to ingest row updates.
|
| I'd be very interested an Airtable clone that I can run locally
| on-top of Postgres or Mongo or something like that. My main
| use-case would be to replace expensive-to-build internal CRUD
| apps that really should just be spreadsheets but require
| bespoke integrations with other internal systems.
| nojvek wrote:
| Awesome. Thanks for Validating. I'm going to spend the next
| year of my life building exactly that. Right now I've just
| put it a manifesto with some ideas at http://orows.com, but
| will be coming out with a proof of concept very soon.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Cool! I'll add one more thought that I think might be
| particularly useful
|
| > Granular permissions not only at row level but field
| level too. You can share parts of data with others for
| editing or have it view-only with ability for commenting
| and accepting suggestions
|
| In my org (and I suspect many), many of the
| Sales/Operations people maintain Google Sheets with links
| into our internal apps. Generally it's TODO lists or other
| little organizational/workflow type stuff
|
| What I think makes Airtable so powerful is that foreign-
| keys are first class. You can create a table and include
| references to rows from other tables. This allows the end
| user to create tables to support their workflows directly
| in the same tool they use to manage the data, and means I
| don't have to build that same functionality into the CRUD
| app (and until you're deep in a workflow it's hard to get
| it perfect, so there's always back-and-forth).
|
| A good permission system would allow me to create a set of
| "core tables" that I tightly control the schema of, but
| allow others to still create tables which reference this
| one.
| mmckelvy wrote:
| I think building apps with spreadsheets makes sense, but to me
| the spreadsheet works better as the UI, not the database. In
| other words, you still store your data in a plain RDBMS, but
| you access and manipulate that data via spreadsheet formulas or
| custom functions.
| davedx wrote:
| Maybe... but a regular spreadsheet doesn't map very well to a
| RDBMS due to its variable and flat structure. It might map to
| a column data store like Cassandra I guess, wonder if anyone
| has looked at that?
|
| What I'm working on though is more about taking the core of
| existing spreadsheets and building powerful integrations on
| top of it. Like in the sibling comments, building a webapp,
| or something else. I really think this has huge potential.
| czzarr wrote:
| AwesomeTable too
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Glide apps also falls into this realm. You make an app from a
| Google Sheet. Found out about it from HN
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081
|
| https://www.glideapps.com/
| Lucadg wrote:
| > 1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers
|
| Dao software such as Aragon and Daostack may be the ones which
| make this real. A lot of the complexity in running distributed
| teams is connected to the sorry state of international payments.
| A vast majority of the potential employees is simply not able to
| participate to the global economy today.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I wish there was a genuinely excellent, highly configurable, and
| privacy-supporting browser.
| aj7 wrote:
| Infer from the most secret corporate software projects problem
| commonalities and build a huge company devoted to these is not a
| realistic product proposal.
| melling wrote:
| " function that dramatically improves lots of people's quality of
| life. Examples would include eyesight and hearing. For example,
| many people start to get blurry vision in their 40s, due to a
| variety of factors including the mix of proteins in the lens of
| the eye causing hardening and potentially the muscle holding the
| lens aging. Could a simple approach like rapamycin droplets in
| the eye reverse aspects of aging and therefore eyesight? "
|
| Yeah, I've heard about the protein buildup problem for twenty
| years now. Hopefully, someday...
|
| Here's an August 2000 article from the NYT that discusses the
| problem:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/health/reading-glasses-as...
|
| Well into the 21st Century, and I must say I'm a little
| disappointed. After that second DARPA Grand Challenge, I'd have
| said "no way we don't have self-driving cars by 2020"
| eladgil wrote:
| It is surprising how little has been done here. A failure of
| the pharma/academic model perhaps. I am going to write more on
| why biotech does not innovate as much as it could, in another
| post.
| arkanciscan wrote:
| Hard Disagree on "subscription only" "network driven" security
| cameras. I have no interest in sharing when I come and go from my
| house with the entire world, let alone all the employees of a
| corporation like Amazon.
| reasonattlm wrote:
| I can't say as I like his take on the longevity industry. It is
| the take that will produce few meaningful advances, the "looking
| under the lamp because that's where the light is" way of
| approaching life. Just more marginally better drugs that do a
| little bit more than those of 10 years ago.
|
| Sadly investors probably care very little from a financial
| position as to whether a drug works or not, as their exit usually
| happens somewhere between trials at Phase 1 and Phase 2. Earlier
| in the longevity market because it is hot.
|
| I've put together Request for Startup lists for the longevity
| industry for the past few years, based on fairly detailed insight
| into the state of the science.
|
| https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/02/request-for-star...
|
| https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/12/request-for-star...
|
| https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2016/12/request-for-star...
|
| Because things move slowly in biotech, just about everything in
| these documents except for more senolytics is still valid.
| hobofan wrote:
| Love your blog! Recently got interested in longevity research,
| as I was surprised how much closer to reality it is than I
| imagined, and also as a possible future industry to work in,
| and your blog has been one of the best resources to both get up
| to speed on the topic and also keep up to date!
|
| As you are as familiar as few people are with the topic, I'd
| like to ask you for some advice, if possible: What do you think
| is the best way for someone like me (currently biochem
| undergrad, with ~7 years broad software engineering
| experience), to have an impact in the field?
| carapace wrote:
| Dude, you are _on it!_ Congratulations.
|
| (FWIW, I think that space colonization will only be practical
| if we develop either FTL or longevity (live to 1000+) and the
| latter seems way more doable than the former, eh?)
| vld wrote:
| I'd love a service that puts me in touch (for a fee) with an
| engineer/someone above level 1-2 support from Google/Amazon/huge
| corps
|
| When dealing with companies that are above a certain size, it
| takes days or weeks to get to someone that can fix issues, but if
| you're lucky and you have a friend that knows someone who works
| there he can expedite your ticket. This service would work like
| that, a friend that puts you in touch with people hired at big
| corps.
|
| I'm aware this service would have a number of potential issues,
| such as how to get employees on the platform without annoying
| their employers, or how to prevent abuse/bribes, but if somebody
| find a way..
| hntddt1 wrote:
| Check for the latest biotech https://www.neuralink.com/
| joshpadnick wrote:
| #1. Trinet for full-time remote/distributed workers. I've spent
| countless hours researching Global PEOs and reviewing their often
| poorly written contracts. If a reputable service existed that
| allowed us to hire in any country without having to form our own
| corporate entity in that country, we'd be ready to sign
| yesterday. Unfortunately, all existing services are either:
|
| * Too new (There are promising upstarts, but they usually don't
| operate their own entities and it seems risky to route all our IP
| ownership assignments through a tiny company)
|
| * Too expensive (massive markups on what should be a standardized
| service)
|
| * Too incompetent (One PEO sent us a contract for a Canadian
| employee that assigned their IP in accordance with US law. It's
| facepalm-bad sometimes).
| Kiro wrote:
| What does PEO mean and what existing services have you found?
| joshpadnick wrote:
| PEO stands for "Professional Employer Organization" and is an
| American term for a company that serves as the legal employer
| for the people you want to hire. For example, see
| https://justworks.com/. When an employee joins our company,
| they legally become an employee of JustWorks, but we're the
| practical employers. It's purely a legal relationship.
|
| This is welcome the USA government because they know these
| companies help us achieve compliance better than we could on
| our own. JustWorks has been great, but only employs people in
| the USA. When we want to employ someone outside the USA, we
| therefore need to find a "global PEO." These companies are
| sometimes called "Employers of Record."
|
| Popular Global PEOs are:
|
| - Globalization Partners
|
| - Elements Global
|
| - Capital GES
|
| - Pilot.co
|
| - Lots more.
|
| But it's a highly fragmented market and has been a pain to
| engage.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Elad Gil is a really smart investor (his list of Unicorn
| investments is probably larger than any other angel), but -- with
| the exception of (11) and (12) -- this doesn't strike me as a
| very ambitious list.
| eladgil wrote:
| Agreed on not crazy ambitious for most of these. Honestly, this
| really is just a list of products I would like to use (with 1
| or 2 exceptions).
|
| There are a lot of things that _should_ exist but are harder to
| do: -Safe, cheap nuclear power -Longevity drugs (I am involved
| with two companies in that area) -Independent journalism school
| /foundation -Pioneer on steroids (how to identify and nurture
| the top global talent for every area of human endeavor) -Etc.
|
| But that is perhaps another post / different topic?
|
| What else would you add?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| "Unlike Palantir, which seems to have a services-centric model,
| this new company would be focused on a more SaaS-centric
| software-driven model."
|
| I thought Palantir was extremely software-driven. Could someone
| clear up what the above sentence means?
| ndarwincorn wrote:
| Judging off Glassdoor reviews, most of their devs are embedded
| ('forward-deployed' in their militaristic lingo).
|
| From that and my own short interview experience a few years
| ago, a lot of their revenue comes from bespoke ETL for clients
| into an on-prem software deployment and there's no concrete
| push to move to something more off-the-shelf.
| scarejunba wrote:
| Palantir does really well for what they do, but this article is
| as true today as it was in 2016 in terms of what they are
| https://simplystatistics.org/2016/05/11/palantir-struggles/
|
| They're almost just a consultancy.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| For #2, the fediverse is lively and growing every day.
|
| One of the easiest ways to join is through a mastodon[1]
| instance. Alternatively, there are other[2] clients available.
|
| I know many of these are similar to existing social networks, and
| thus might not be different enough to fit the criteria of the
| article. But the federated aspect of it-- seeing small pocket
| communities form-- adds something to it.
|
| [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://fediverse.party/
| Lucadg wrote:
| > What would be a network which allowed for more thoughtful
| discourse
|
| We used to have this and it was called forum (phpbb and such).
| They have been oblitared and we moved to Facebook apparently
| leaving our brains behind.
|
| In reality we are victims of armies of psychologists optimizing
| for engagement.
|
| I have the feeling forums will come back though.
| mjpuser wrote:
| I would say reddit is a forum, and you can have good discourse
| on there, but can also have straight comfort internet trash.
| Basically I think its more nuanced than just having a forum...
| asdff wrote:
| We didn't leave our brains behind, this is just the internet
| without heavy handed moderators keeping subforums organized,
| discussions on topic, and putting the brakes on flame wars. Of
| course things crash and burn in an environment of total anarchy
| like what is seen on social media websites, image boards have
| taught us that decades ago.
| bhl wrote:
| #2. With Discord, I would love to have it move in the other
| direction, from being a game-centric network to more of interest-
| centric network. Parts of this already exist -- there's a way to
| search through open invite communities -- but it's not as
| explicit as I'd like: most of times to find a niche discord
| group, you first have to visit its respective subreddit and find
| the invite link beneath all the clutter. Sometimes, there isn't
| even a direct subreddit: to find a summer intern group, I had to
| dig through numerous threads of r/cscq. The downside of this type
| of network is moderation: subreddits now can self moderate but
| with chat, it's higher volume and no filter by upvoting enabled.
| erichurkman wrote:
| My challenge with Discord is that when you enter any
| established community, it's information overload. Established
| servers have a dozen or more channels, a slew of bot commands,
| sometimes mandatory rule review or approval requirements, and
| it can be hard to judge how healthy the community is.
| ndespres wrote:
| "A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building
| over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of
| these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS
| software."
|
| I love the idea of figuring out how we can stop reinventing the
| wheel. Too much of this work really has no benefit to society yet
| keeps getting done, over and over. I wish for a way to pull the
| brakes and re-evaluate what it is that we are all doing exactly,
| and for whose benefit.
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