This is something I have had at the back of my mind for a few years now - a website that lets people upload hypotheses and link evidence that supports or rejects the hypothesis.
Such a website would allow people to gain insights, by gathering individual bits of evidence observed in various news articles, research papers, etc. and linking them together to form a larger picture.
> I would love to see this baked into a social network as a substrate for semi-structured debate.
Gaining insight and collecting disparate facts to form a bigger picture, an "argument map", with the ability for others to collaborate--that's exactly it.
However in addition to all the great use cases you've outlined, I also see potential for personal use, particularly in making structured decisions.
For example, purchasing decisions: researching to buy or not to buy widget X (in my case recently, sentiment analysis on stocks). With the creation of a simple browser plugin that allows you to highlight text and quickly add it to the map, it would make it easy to centralize all misc pieces of information supporting/rejecting a decision. Supporting "evidence" added this way will automatically link to the source, and optionally snapshot the page to ensure context of the particular supporting evidence is never lost.
I think it would be a fun project to create. If you ever think to actually work on this, or if you're interested in working on this together, let me know!
Me too! I would also love to build this, and I've actually been thinking about it for ~5 years! This is one of the projects I was always planning to work on if I didn't need to worry about money. I don't want to monetize the site with ads, and I also didn't want to worry about chasing after donations. I was thinking that the core product could possibly be monetized for businesses to make better decisions, but that would be too risky (since most startups fail), and it would also dilute the vision (Wikipedia-scale fact database with weighted nodes and edges, to find answers and probabilities for humanity's biggest questions.) I should have really started working on it a long time ago.
I actually just started seriously thinking about it again over the last few weeks, so this HN comment thread is really surprising! I'm definitely interested in helping with development, and maybe sponsorship at some point in the future.
EDIT: This HN thread was the kick I needed to get started, although I don't know how much time I'll be able to spend on it. I'm really busy with my startup, so this will have to be an evening/weekend project for now. I've just registered FactGraph.org. (I'm not 100% sure about the name, but I haven't been able to think of any better names.)
Hey, I've just started a Discord group for people who are interested in this kind of project. Please send me an email if you would like to join! (In my profile.)
Hello, I've just started a Discord group for people who might be interested in this kind of project. Please send me an email if you would like to join! (In my profile.)
One advantage of Personal Kanban is that it is a native app, so there is no latency between writing something down, moving tasks across boards. Sadly, it is not open source.
I understand that is how object oriented databases work. For example, you can define the equation for a financial derivative, then change the price of one of the components and derivative price is updated automatically.
It sounds similiar to the classic "anarchy trap/paradox". What is there to prevent the establishment of rules without any rules in place? In this case it is "What stops someone from using software freedom to reduce software freedom?"
I doubt there is one aside from social norms that nobody would use such things.
I periodically help to organize meetups with invited speakers and am looking for a solution that would help me manage communication with all guests + event attendees.
I would like to track - which guests have been confirmed, which have not yet. With whom we have had an pre-event call, etc. Would Indico work for this? Are there better tools?
We (https://chatbird.io) are trying to solve mainly that - networking between attendees, communication between organizer and attendees before, during and after the event. Happy to talk more about it and to understand your use case, my email is in my profile.
Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)
Only within the set of predefined functionality that can be specified in the dry.io JSON config file. If you want anything outside of that you'll still need a developer. I guess it's possible dry.io will have thousands of components that covers 90% of what each and every app does eventually, but until then most people who try it will bump up against it's limitations very quickly. The hard part will be keeping them on the platform.
Many apps we won't be able to handle at first can easily be handled by our approach with more work.
For some capabilities, we will have ways of filling gaps in the platform. We have some easy-to-use and fairly flexible hooks where you can add a lot of UI customization. We've also discussed mechanisms for catching events in dry and triggering external code developers can write. But that's almost certainly not going to make v1.
> Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)
I've heard that promise before, from BPMS vendors. I don't think it ever pans out, and usually results in a hobbled system that usually still require developers to actually deliver the desired functionality. I think developing software requires a specific mental skillset that can't be replaced by technology, and promises to the contrary are snake oil.
Every developer I know has a friend or family member who wants them to write some software for them. The friends and family think it will take a few hours, but it really takes us weeks and skills we often don't have. So the software never gets written. Dry is intended to fix that, and so therefore to help developers be more productive.
In our company, business analysts are relatively technical - they know their way around databases and understand SQL better than most developers. They do create complicated data workflows as ETL jobs, but they are not developers.
Is it a stretch to say that dry.io would enable these people to take on simple development tasks that would be currently done by programmers?
To do some advanced customization of how an app looks would require some javascript, but if they are happy with the UI we provide by default, then they could build some nontrivial stuff.
That's a really interesting idea. I know there are lots of generators out there for worldbuilding purposes and I have made my own on the go for things like conceptual art or short fiction. But to your question, you might ask at /r/worldbuilding on Reddit, which has some really neat stuff going on a lot of the time. /r/rpg might also be helpful.
I hope this doesn't end up opening a horrid can of worms. What are the implications if the worlds and concepts overlap ?
At a personal level, I would be be very interested in learning/finding out such things though. Even more so if it is possible to automate this "discovery"
Resolving overlap might be the fun part, depending on your psychology. For these types of people there's really no use for predictive anticipation as it can spoil the opportunity to solve unique problems :-)
BTW I "automatically" created a planet while sitting in a boring church meeting last Sunday. I used a kind of "dice gradient" method with the dice app on my phone. "How hospitable is this planet?" OK, so a 2. Not very. What's the temperature? 2 again. Geez, it's freezing.
Anyway after about 15 rolls the planet turned out to be used as some sort of ancient computing device, channeling surface air as a cooling method. The ~20 person exploration team was struggling to get past even the most rudimentary underground security, with indications that the past custodians of this world had significant leverage over physical objects, perhaps through technological means.
Thanks, I just skimmed the Wikipedia summary out of curiosity. It looks like an interesting and pretty intense story!
My own idea was that the planet I rolled up hosted a sort of cargo-cult experiment, where the beings that hosted the computing infrastructure were using it for really basic tasks that were easily perceptible to their sensing skills, not understanding what it was, really. Their technological skills included rudimentary large-mass manipulation, and after making a place for this equipment and securing it, they had long since died out, while their "data center" was still flourishing and had stored extremely valuable data.
Oooh that’s real nice. I use a lot of those themes in fiction I write / blueprint (probing the limits of understanding, the interpretation of legacy by the inadequate living, etc)
The RPG game "Traveller" [sic] has a method for creating fictional worlds using a variety of dice rolls. The original game was created in the early 80s, but the multiple editions since have created system of remarkable depth. One supplement even was able to generate biomes mapped to a dodecahedral sphere.
Size, Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Population, Government, Law level, Technology, all would dictate the kind of goods available, the political structures, the economics.
It was so easy to generate systems that the game came up with an Atlas of the Imperium which featured thousands of stars. I can confirm that a sufficiently motivated nerd could rustle up a RPG subsector (with 20-40 planetary systems) in an hour.
