govind201's comments

Been here. I'm currently going on 2 months without a phone, since Google is still processing my warranty replacement (they promised 3-5 business days at the outset). As a friend of mine says "it's a monopoly issue. Usually if you're not well served you stop buying a service, not the case with Google." https://twitter.com/govind201/status/804559006551244800

Amazon is part of the list of sites being tracked. Any reason you felt otherwise?

Top discounts by product category: http://blackfriday.semantics3.com/dashboards/RJ7EP446XUIOLEU... Might aid the discount hunting process, if not the decision making process.

And so is the platform status page: https://developers.facebook.com/status/

Uber has invested >$500 million in India, so perception within India matters too, regardless of what Western media chooses to say

That was refreshing. Congratulations on the journey and the exit Lanyrd!

I sure will!

Noted. I'm curious about the motivating factor though - would you like the graphs to validate the depth of the data, get you excited with potential possibilities? Or something else?

Thanks for pointing that out. We're fixing it now!

We don't have books yet. That's been a common request, so we'll be launching with books by the end of the month. If you'd like, I can notify you as soon as we do.

1. Right now, we're focusing on the US. But we've made room for expanding internationally (the "currency" and "geo" fields are in place with this in mind).

2. We're analyzing used and refurbished products as well. Each offer is tagged with a "condition" field that conveys this.

3. The question of whether a price of a product is right or wrong is, we realized with time, subjective. Yes, $1,000,000,000,000.00 is very unlikely, but where does one drawn the line? Hence, we don't mark something as bad data and remove it from the database at the data layer. But we do handle this problem at the search layer - we internally rank products based on factors such as their (estimated) genuineness, popularity and so on. For the user, what this means is that when you query the API, only the most relevant products will be returned. The ranking system is constantly learning, so the vision is that it'll get better with time and data.

Thanks for your words about the pricing. Each API query returns upto 10 products; the free plan provides 1000 API queries a day. So you could retrieve upto 10000 products each day. Hope that clarifies. Glad you find the API useful - I'd love to know more about how you plan to use it!

The guideline behind the free plan was to provide enough calls and functionality for any developer to build, launch and maintain a moderately sized app. Shout-out aghi from Mashape for helping us with the pricing.

In addition, I wanted to point out another chief reason for building the API in-house. Based on my understanding of the pricing models of 3rd party API providers, our recurring expenses would almost have been a double-digit percentage of our revenue in the long run. This is excluding server costs, marketing costs etc. For the high volume traffic that we aim for, the numbers just didn't add up.

This article resonates with me on so many levels. When I started working on Semantics3 early this year, I spent many a day frustrated that I was barely achieving 50% of the productivity that I was capable of and I felt quite miserable about it. Here are a few things I did to get things back on track:

1) Moved Closer to Work: Daily long journeys are massive downers. When I awake in the morning, I often feel the urge to hit my laptop right away and channel all the early morning enthusiasm towards work. College years were ideal on this front because there was never anywhere to be (I wasn't too inclined towards attending classes ;)). Anyway, now, I live 20 mins away from work.

2) Stopped Listening to Music (especially during the few hours after I awake): I'm a music buff and perennially have music in my ears. But I find that music often blocks useful thoughts; letting the mind wander leads me down interesting channels, be it more ideas for my startup or even bugs in my code that I discover by merely thinking about the previous day's work (Rob Pike's "Best Programming Advice" comes to mind). Few things are more satisfying than stumbling on these nuggets! These days, I restrict music to certain times of day, such as my ride home or during certain phases during the work day.

3) Found Time at Work Alone: I like getting to work a couple of hours before everyone else, before any distractions kick in. For some of you, staying at work an hour after everyone leaves, lunchtime, or even spending an hour at home to finish things up might do the trick. Those power-charged hours make me feel like I've given that extra bit to my day. On a related note, check out PGs "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" (www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

Highlighting police stations and business density was on our minds. With regards to street lighting, I guess we'll have to search for the data for a bit.

Hmm, I see your point regarding conveying a "false sense of security". If the research that I spoke of turns out to be encouraging, I'll be sure to add explicit warnings and instructions. A private beta to test users' perceptions is on the cards too.

If there's anyone out there with experience in sociology, I'd be glad to have a chat.

The app was born out of personal experience. Within a month of moving to Philadelphia, I was assaulted on two occasions, including once on my very first day there. I put that down to my lack of knowledge of the area; I later discovered that a more knowledgable person wouldn't have accidentally wandered off at that time of evening to that particular area. Turns out, some of my neighbors had had similar experiences in the past in the very same area. I was later warned by local authorities that the area was known for the phenomenon of "gentrification".

Personally, I was scared out of my wits after those two incidents and landed up staying home many evenings for fear of a repeat incident. I think such an app could've really helped the general quality of my life in terms of reducing my apprehension.

I do see your point. To be honest, I didn't give the macroscopic windfalls excessive consideration. I had focused rather on the gains to individuals who stand to face the same situations that I did.

The app has not been released publicly so I think I'll do read a bit about crime patterns and their correlation to demography before taking any further step. Thanks for brining this to attention.

I identify with what you're saying. I've been in such situations too and I've hoped for more practical alternatives to paying a bribe. I have my fingers crossed for a good Lokpal bill myself. Rise of the middle class is increasingly playing a role too.

That said, I don't think one single approach is going to solve this problem. Nor is it fair to label this as a homogeneous problem. There are many forms of corruption and I do believe that CorruptionTrak is relevant to a significant number of them.

Interesting. An informal channel for customer feedback, you mean? A review site without the emphasis on the negativity of the acts? Hmm.

Here are my two cents on why we started CorruptionTrak.

Corruption seems like an insurmountable problem because it is sociological in nature; it’s difficult for the common man to envision social change because it doesn't happen instantaneously. But here’s how social change can and has been engendered:

1) Fear of Censure - Corruption flourishes, at least in India, because people aren't worried about being caught. You can, as one user of our service put it "show [your] dirty pan-chewed teeth and shamelessly put [your] hand forth for bakhsheesh" (baksheesh = bribe) and not have a worry in the world because your act has no chance of being traced. I speak here, of course, of petty or day-to-day corruption.

Note that I don’t imply “fear” in “big brother” terms. I speak of the fear required to maintain law and order. This works in the same way that the fear of a policeman pulling you over or a radar camera catching you in the act makes you keep to road rules at all times. Here’s where we think technology has a vital role to play.

It’s difficult to have an honest policeman stationed at every street corner for obvious reasons, hence, through increasingly ubiquitous technology, we are hoping to tap into the honesty of the common man. By giving everybody the ability to make such transactions traceable, we are hoping to instill this element of fear of being traced. If the idea of citizen policing takes off, then we hope the fear of watchful eyes will make people think twice before demanding a bribe, if at all.

Of course, gathering this data is only one albeit essential step. Fear will truly come into play if people are actually caught. To facilitate this, we have several plans, including those that involve the media (sting operations etc) and the law (political allegiances aside, we eagerly await some of the provisions of the Jan Lokpal proposals, some of which institute official bodies that we hope to channel such data to).

2) Shame – Corruption, although often blatant, is still frowned upon by most sections of society. Nobody wants to be identified as being “corrupt”. The possibility of being shamed can be a massive deterrent. While this idea of an entire society being consumed by fear of a website seems a bit presumptuous at first, we think that this can be done by targeting constituent fragments of society. If you belong to a specific community, say a group of salesmen, which abides by this service religiously, you might not pay a bribe to the peon to get ahead in line at the next customer office you visit for fear of being shamed in front of your peer group. After all, the members of your group could at any time access this service and learn of your corrupt ways; even if the occurrence of such practices was previously left unsaid, the uneasy calm is likely to be shaken through validation from an external source such as this.

We have spent several months pondering the right ecosystem to realize the above goals. For instance, the above method of “being shamed by your peer group” could just as easily be used by a jealous member to slander someone else. Hence, we’re looking to leave specific names out of our system and rather, target this evil by location and by nature of crime, to shift the burden of self-governance (due to collective shame) to small fragments of society.

We are looking to strike the right balance of the various factors in play, hence this initial post on HN – our prior experiences have shown this to be the ideal ground for gaining good feedback and suggestions. If you have your own vision on how this idea should be molded, feel free to post here or contact us at [email protected] , no matter what your country of origin or professional background.