bhavin

Dear HN,

I recently worked in my spare time to develop something for the fun of it – A desktop software that can monitor the current activity on a given machine for all the web browsers, including incognito modes.

Basically, the software continuously runs silently in the background, uses screencap, image processing and OCR to resolve what is being accessed, hence it can work on all browsers (and potentially on anything else). The CPU usage is quite negligible due to series of optimizations. It currently works for Linux, I am working on a windows version.

I am not sure if there is a commercial potential to it, and if so, how do I go about realizing it? Can you think of anything in your field where something like this could be useful?

Any help would be much much appreciated. Thank you! :)

Just realized I am unable to downvote a comment or flag a post anymore. Is there a change in threshold/policy for that?

May be I am one of the very few people who check UseTheSource for jobs anymore, but I still check it every now and then for jobs and I've noticed there has hardly been any postings there in a while.

I wish it would revive. Is there any other place I could look for HN jobs (except monthly)?

At each successive facebook backlash, I find myself asking why there are no non-profit social networks? A quick search revealed that there are a few attempts at this, but none exceeding 50k users. And that looks to be pretty much it.

Does anybody have a greater insight as to why there are no non-profit projects in Social Networking domain such as in others (e.g. wikimedia, craigslist etc). Not counting Diaspora since its a technology, not a hosted Social Network + its not complete (and there are doubts being raised whether it ever will be).

As far as I can think, there are 2 major costs involved:

1) Infrastructure and bandwidth: It could be from few thousand dollars to several million depending on number of users. From response to Diaspora's kickstarter, one can infer that people are definitely willing to donate for a 'noble' social network. And donations would be in proportion of user-base, so this doesn't look like that big an issue (feel free to correct).

2) People cost: The salaries etc. Since there are many developers out there who would love to get involved in such a project, doesn't look like there will be shortage of people willing to contribute (I know I am one). When it comes at hiring full time employees, this can be run much like a startup (minus equity). I am sure there are many developers even here on HN who would work on such a project without asking for any equity.

I guess people would trust a non-profit Social Network more than they do any commercial one. I find it surprising that there have been no attempts at this. If anybody is willing to work on this, I would more than love to contribute/co-found.