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Showing posts from September, 2017

Show HN: piCards- Computer vision based audience polling solution for classrooms http://ift.tt/2wqk2sm

Show HN: piCards- Computer vision based audience polling solution for classrooms We have created a computer vision and smartphone based audience polling solution that promises all the benefits of clicker devices at minimal cost and that too without the students requiring any electronic devices. Use of continuous feedback systems like clicker devices is proven to improve learning outcomes in classrooms and such devices are widely used in Universities. BUT such devices are costly and hence cannot be used in mid-low income setups. Also, carrying devices in bulk is a problem. In our solution, we replace the clicker devices with normal sheets of paper with QR Code like patterns printed on them(We call the sheet — piCard). The four orientations of the sheet translate to options A, B, C and D. Each student gets one such sheet. The teacher asks a question and students rotate and lift up their sheets and show it to the teacher who has our scanning app running in his/her smartphone. The app scan

Launch HN: PlatoHQ (YC W16) – Mentorship for Engineers http://ift.tt/2wU641B

Launch HN: PlatoHQ (YC W16) – Mentorship for Engineers Hi HN! We are the cofounders of PlatoHQ ( https://www.platohq.com ) and we come from an Engineering Background. After having graduated from college, with two of my engineers friends, we decided to build our own company (the name of our company was Birdly). We made a lot of mistakes along the way; and one of the biggest was to hire too soon a bunch of engineers. We were all three technical cofounders so we could have built the MVP ourselves. But instead of that, we decided that two cofounders over three would do the “Product management” and “Marketing", and that we should hire 3 engineers (including 2 interns) to code the product for us. That was before YC. YC could have prevented us from making that mistake. And this had been our worst mistake. We transitioned from “Individual Contributor” to “Engineering Managers”. We happened to spend more time doing “management” than building the product and optimizing for product-market fi

Launch HN: Peergrade (YC S17) – Student to Student Feedback http://ift.tt/2wgZCSN

Launch HN: Peergrade (YC S17) – Student to Student Feedback I am David of Peergrade ( http://ift.tt/1qWHJov ). Peergrade is a tool for educators to run peer feedback and peer assessment sessions with their students. Peer feedback is a way to train skills like critical thinking, constructing arguments and how to give and receive feedback - all skills that we believe will be even more important in the job market of the future. I teach a university course in data science at The Technical University of Denmark. Two years ago my course suddenly grew from 20 to 150 students (I changed the title to include "big data"). To overcome the sudden explosion in students, I started working on Peergrade. The idea was that I could save some time on grading papers, the students could write better feedback than me since they had more time per paper, they would learn from reading and assessing each others work and I could reallocate the time I saved to more impactful things like mentoring studen

Show HN: I'm building a IMDB for tech events and tech speakers http://ift.tt/2weeDVp

Show HN: I'm building a IMDB for tech events and tech speakers Eventil [1] is a (yet another) website that lists tech events [2] and their participants: attendees, speakers & organizers [3]. You can filter events by topic [4] & location [5]. You can find events where Call for Papers (CFP) is open [6]. Speakers can list their talks [7] along with slides & video [8]. Users can access this data via a RESTful API [9] as JSON (I'm working on GraphQL implementation). If you're an event organizer, you can create an event page and enable CFP form. You can follow people to see their event activity (as attendee, speaker or organizer) as weekly email. It's a side-project. I've been working on it almost 2 years. In my spare time I organize various tech events myself. I'm most proud of PolyConf [10]. I've created Eventil to solve my own problems with tech event organization. There are many organizer features that help me be more efficient. My focus is on spea

Show HN: Meric's Test of Consciousness of an AGI http://ift.tt/2jSgYDI

Show HN: Meric's Test of Consciousness of an AGI I've investigated philosophy, spirituality and religion for a while, and came up with my way to test whether an artificial construct is conscious or not, i.e., whether it matches the definition of "strong AI". meric's Test of Consciousness Let the AGI be placed into an artificial simulated universe. (e.g. some kind of really advanced, Escape Velocity-like universe[1]) Assuming the AGI can fulfil its needs in the artificial simulated universe and maintain its existence - When the AGI can realise the following, and not on blind faith, it can be said to be conscious: 1. The reality the AGI experiences is not the Reality . 2. Any reality the AGI can experience is merely illusory. 3. The Reality is not like any reality the AGI can experience - i.e. it's not artificially simulated. 4. The AGI cannot with any precision describe The Reality as it actually is, besides knowing it's somehow infinitely more in some way.

Launch HN: ScopeAI (W17) – extract insights from customer conversations http://ift.tt/2f8DtiE

Launch HN: ScopeAI (W17) – extract insights from customer conversations I'm Luciano, co-founder and CTO of ScopeAI ( http://ift.tt/2wE6N6X ). We’ve built a product that automates the process of extracting and communicating user insights to product and operation teams. To extract product insights, we integrate with support channels such as Zendesk, Intercom and desk.com and use NLP to automatically tag, categorize and cluster support tickets. Customer support teams currently spend hours manually tagging customer support tickets to track trends in user feedback. The process is inefficient, lacks consistency and is reported retrospectively. This process typically fails to capture the granular insights requested by product and operation teams. Natalie, our CEO is a former UX researcher. In that world, the process for extracting trends from user interviews was completely manual. It involved codifying the conversations and counting how frequently certain feedback was mentioned. It was de

Show HN: Telescope, a news reader app http://ift.tt/2xk6JfW

Show HN: Telescope, a news reader app I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks! September 19, 2017 at 10:09PM

Show HN: “serve” your local directory very nicely with go http://ift.tt/2eVE9LE

Show HN: “serve” your local directory very nicely with go http://ift.tt/2xW9hzi I got tired of the huge list of static asset server options out there. Python's built in one, various ruby gems, piles of npm commands... So naturally I added another (the best!) one. It is written in go, so that helps portability, speed. It's name is just 'serve'. No options or flags are required for invoking. It looks pretty. It supports hitting Command/Control-c gracefully. Hopefully this is useful to some people. Feedback welcome! Thanks! September 9, 2017 at 03:21PM

Show HN: A coloring book of data structures and algorithms http://ift.tt/2gPknOW

Show HN: A coloring book of data structures and algorithms I'm making a coloring book of data structures and algorithms for programmers and students. So far I have a prototype page for a sorting algorithm (albeit a rather simple one). Here the Selection Sort coloring pages you can print. http://ift.tt/2wELGmk And here is how I colored mine. http://ift.tt/2vIPw0S A coloring book is not quite enough to teach algorithms on its own, but I really get a lot from visual reinforcement of what I learn from books/lectures. Do you think having coloring pages like this could be a helpful addition to the usual studying approach of textbooks, lectures and online coding practice? Or is it just a fun little break from coding without too much educational value? September 8, 2017 at 09:17PM

Show HN: Shut up and take my money..or F-U, Pay Me http://ift.tt/2wOg9yz

Show HN: Shut up and take my money..or F-U, Pay Me We recently launched an adblocking product which saves you data on your cellular and Wifi plans. As we were working on Datajoy, we also understood that for creative people, adblocking sucks big time. The more people block ads, the less ad revenue websites make. Well, we at Datajoy figured we would try to play fair by paying for content we currently view for free. We are calling it the "F-U, Pay Me" model (FUPM). You can set yourself up to receive payments from users of Datajoy with minimal effort (NO profile creation necessary!) by following the instructions on the FUPM page ( http://ift.tt/2wcPSbq ). As our users visit your site, we will PayPal you for every visit at 1c/visit on the 1st of every month. Once you do that, it would be great if you could come back this post and let us know that you have set yourself up for FUPM. Thanks! September 8, 2017 at 09:06AM

Show HN: HiDimensional – senior engineers recommend candidates to startups http://ift.tt/2wcEcW3

Show HN: HiDimensional – senior engineers recommend candidates to startups Hi HN! We’re excited to share with you the public beta launch of our startup, HiDimensional (http://ift.tt/2x9SRW8). We are a platform consisting of senior engineering leaders who interview candidates and provide recommendations of the best candidates and their strengths. We then use the recommendations to refer these candidates to founders of startups that match their strengths and interests. The recommendation serves as a personal referral from the interviewer, so for candidates, it amplifies their application and fast-tracks them through the process. And for companies, they are receiving pre-vetted candidates endorsed by someone they can trust. That last point is key - our interviewers are established senior engineers (e.g., former Head of ML @ Quora, former VP @ Addepar, former Head of Newsfeed @ Facebook, etc.) and technical founders and hiring managers, so we believe their word carries weight. We have over

Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of your voice http://ift.tt/2xayWan

Launch HN: Lyrebird (YC S17) – Create a digital copy of your voice Hi HN! We are the co-founders of Lyrebird ( https://lyrebird.ai/ ) and PhD students in AI at University of Montreal. We are building speech synthesis technologies to improve the way we communicate with computers. Right now, our key innovation is that we can copy the voice of someone else and make it say anything. The tech is still at its early stage but we believe that it is eventually going to make possible a wide range of new applications such as: - reading loud text messages with the voice of the sender, - reading audiobooks with the voice of your choice, - giving a personalized digital voice to people who lost their voice due to a disease, - allowing video game makers to have more customized dialogs generated on the fly, or avatars of their players, - allowing movie makers to freeze the voice of their actors so that they can still use it if the actor ages or dies. Yesterday we launched a beta version of our voice-cl

Show HN: DataHub, open source datasets for Artificial Intelligence http://ift.tt/2wwa0qC

Show HN: DataHub, open source datasets for Artificial Intelligence Hi HN! I am an undergrad student trying to build interesting things with AI. Recently, I was looking for a dataset I could use for a new project. I realized that it is really frustrating to go through all the government websites (with terrible UX) just to find some usable dataset. I set out to build a GitHub for datasets, named DataHub. Right now, we have more than 1000 datasets from Montréal and New York City, with more cities coming soon (and possible government agencies). All of this is wrapped into a powerful search. It's a breeze to find a dataset to work on. I'd be interested to know what you guys are looking at when searching for datasets and if DataHub could be of any help! https://datahub.now.sh/ September 2, 2017 at 05:24PM