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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

• jonsen 13y ago
  Downloadable sounds for electric cars. Electric cars must make noise under new EU rules: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26857743 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26857743
  • lukasm 13y ago
    blink and sound when the pedestrian is detected is way better for him/her and the driver.
    • jonsen 13y ago
      Would really make an impression passing along a crowded sidewalk :)
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • otibom 13y ago
    That's an April's fool, right?
    • greenyoda 13y ago
      Cars that are so quiet you can't hear them are very dangerous for blind people trying to cross streets, for example.
  • jarofgreen 13y ago
    For blind people, they must make a sound that person recognises as a car. So they can't download their favourite bands latest single. From the article: > MEPs agreed that in future the vehicles must be fitted with devices to make them "sound similar" to cars with combustion engines. So you'll have a limited choice to choose from. But personally I'm hoping they can make them a bit less rough and more of that smooth "Hummmm" you associate with luxury cars.
  • fineline 13y ago
    Aesthetics is another (arguably more marketable) aspect of car sound. Have you seen The Dilemma? About two guys (tech founder and business founder) working on a system for giving traditional muscle car sound to electric cars. (And some romantic comedy type stuff too.) When I saw it I thought - that idea would really fly. Whilst silent cars may be great for the majority (especially those living near busy roads), there is still a sizeable group that will pay extra for a great engine/exhaust note combo. See also recent criticism about the sound of the new hybrid Formula 1 engines, including from world champ Sebastian Vettel "sound like sh*t". There's a definite market there, but obviously depends on the electric car market itself.
  • locusm 13y ago
    All those fart app developers will have a new home!
  • itsadok 13y ago
    Michael Stipe had that idea back in 2004: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/electric_car_ringtones/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/electric_car_rington...
• meistro 13y ago
  A cheap hardwire device that I can take to the gym and not worry about breaking it. There are lot's of great workout tracking apps but I won't risk having my expensive smart phone smashed in order to record my workouts. I see more people using pen and paper even with all the amazing apps out there.
  • gfodor 13y ago
    this is probably a core use case for smartwatches. i'd probably lift with a smartwatch on.
• mattmanser 13y ago
  Baby near me Amenities near by with baby facilities, possibly with user ratings. All of my recently baby-ied friends complain about finding places to go, especially groups of recent mothers meeting up in the middle of the day.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • kclay 13y ago
    For some reason I like this idea, not sure why but seems like something that could help my wife immensely as well as other mothers.
  • avalaunch 13y ago
    As a (relatively) new dad, I would find this very useful. There doesn't seem to be a central repository of such places and the ones in my city (Cincinnati) are really badly organized, maintained, ect...
    • maxerickson 13y ago
      There is room in OpenStreetMap for this sort of data. Parks and playgrounds are already frequently marked (along with stuff like museums), and there are at least a few people trying to figure out things like changing tables. I guess it would take a while before people were chasing details like kids menus.
  • tgandrews 13y ago
    There is Wow dad, and there is mum version called Wow Mum (maybe Wow Mom). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.wowdad.ui https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.wowdad.ui
    • Madsn 13y ago
      It really bugs me that this is restricted to ireland, UK and USA. :( If anybody is interested in working on something like this let me know :)
• rokhayakebe 13y ago
  Keep Writing. I, sometimes, would like to write on a subject but I fear no one will read the material. If I had X people simply suggest to "keep writing" I would be more willing. Keep writing is something like Medium but it allows someone to post text (news, fiction, stories, anything) that is not complete. Writers set a (hidden) number of votes they should reach before they keep going then they publish what they currently have.
  • panther2k 13y ago
    While it doesn't address the problem of not having an audience, you might be interested in the Iron Blogger concept: http://blog.lazerwalker.com/blog/2013/12/24/one-post-a-week-running-an-iron-blogger-challenge/ http://blog.lazerwalker.com/blog/2013/12/24/one-post-a-week-...
  • netcan 13y ago
    That's a fantastic idea. It might be tricky to find a balanced reader/writer dynamic but it if it worked it would be very cool.
  • namanyayg 13y ago
    I'm interested, but where would an author get people to vote on the piece? While a fiction story could get votes from various communities, I imagine it would fail for specific posts? Feel free to email, mail at namanyayg dot com
    • rokhayakebe 13y ago
      I think it could be a simple like button, hence it could be anywhere. You could also build the platform to write and publish if you wanted, but regardless of where it is it would work the same. I will email you.
    • netcan 13y ago
      Maybe you could nominate the minimum number of reviews or votes you want and then "owe" that number of reviews to the community.
  • 13y ago
• Mankhool 13y ago
  Create an RFID and/or NFC (Near Field Communication) READER that can mount on a DSLR and dump read data into an IPTC field.
  • rch 13y ago
    I could imagine a variety of services to go along with modular, open hardware for proximity communication. My impression is that this is a relatively unaddressed market.
    • Mankhool 13y ago
      Yes it is. I'm a Media Asset Manager / Digital Archivist and there is no EASY way to collect metadata about people (from their name tags for example, that could hold name, company, title etc.) or environments.
      • wando 13y ago
        Can i talk more with you about this? You can email me at oeyr at uci dot edu
• asselinpaul 13y ago
  Two for today: -a site to upload Evernote notebooks to share/view online. -a service that saves all your snapchat stories on the cloud
• salgernon 13y ago
  Waiforpaperback.com Informs you when alternatives printings are available could monetize by showing similar titles in monthly summary emails
  • andrewtbham 13y ago
    i am often interested to find out when kindle version is available. amazon should implement this.
  • perlgeek 13y ago
    I've been thinking about a much more general idea recently: basically twitter, but for data (in JSON format), not just text. A company could simply announce all new publications, and you could subscribe to that stream, filtering for paperback (and possibly authors you are interested in). Of course, there are hundreds of alternative use cases. (Interested in doing the project with me? drop me an email moritz@faui2k3.org).
    • lukeholder 13y ago
      so rss?
    • RexM 13y ago
      I've had this sitting on my idea list for a couple of years. It almost seems like this is what app.net is supposed to be. It also seems like this is how applications would talk to each other with https://tent.io/ https://tent.io/
  • seizethecheese 13y ago
    I guess the question is how big of a market is there for this service? You could have alerts for Kindle version, audiobook and/or paperback. The monetization would be simple through Amazon affiliates, and implementation could just scan Amazon periodically.
  • jarofgreen 13y ago
    I think http://luzme.com/ http://luzme.com/ can do this? Not sure if it's E-book only tho
• postsantum 13y ago
  A notepad that can send my handwritten notes to the cloud. It should have a mini-scaner embedded into the top cover so when I want to backup a note, I just close the notepad, push the cover, remove the first page, close, push again. None of these ipad apps can substitute the good old pencil drawings
  • BraveNewCurency 13y ago
    This might be relevant: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mimototech/mimoto-smart-pen https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mimototech/mimoto-smart...
  • melloclello 13y ago
    Why not just photograph your notepad with your smartphone?
    • gfodor 13y ago
      the point seems to be to have your handwritten notes uploaded automatically. that's the product.
      • melloclello 13y ago
        meh @ that 'product'
  • wpietri 13y ago
    Instead of a magic notebook cover, people do this with a magic pen: http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/ http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/
  • andrewryno 13y ago
    You have to mail it in, but http://modnotebooks.com/ http://modnotebooks.com/ will scan your notebook and digitize the contents for you.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 13y ago
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• adamzerner 13y ago
  TaskRabbit for businesses
  • sunir 13y ago
    Intriguing. I have some immediate questions. What is wrong with using taskrabbit itself? What tasks do you envision? What about virtual assistants like Zirtual.com?
    • coolsunglasses 13y ago
      TaskRabbit is a pain in the fucking arse to get something done. I don't want to negotiate, I want a quote and a yes/no decision on the quote. That's it. Period. End of story. --- has tried to use TaskRabbit on three different occasions to get something done, all failed, two were to get lunch for an office. (so, business) Never using TaskRabbit again.
    • adamzerner 13y ago
      1) Businesses have tasks that they need to get done. Many of which are probably too low-skill to make it worthwhile to give to a talented employee. 2) There are prospective employees trying to build their resumes, who would do the task to a) get experience, b) explore a field, and/or c) display their talents. I don't know enough about businesses to know what sorts of tasks would be good for this.
  • lhh 13y ago
    hourlynerd.com
  • dcpdx 13y ago
    Funny you mention that. There was an article a few days ago that TaskRabbit quietly shuttered their 'for business' offering and rolled it into the general service. http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/01/taskrabbit-for-business-service-portal-quietly-disappears/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/01/taskrabbit-for-business-ser...
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    Something maybe related to this that I think would be cool would be something like fiverr but much more structured / open. So people could like something like I will do x for you for $y amount, all I need is you to fill out this template / give me this info. So automate it as much as possible, and know how much it would cost. Break big tasks down into small ones. For example, someone may offer to find you the cheapest place to buy tires in your area. All they need is <city>, <any necessary details on tires>. Something like that.
• gamegoblin 13y ago
  A programmer social network. I find myself with two distinct sets of friends on Facebook: my tech friends and my normal friends. With my tech friends, I just want to post neat snippets of code as statuses and share github gists on walls and whatnot. So I'd like basically github with more social elements thrown in. Imagine seeing a cool repo, then being able to friend the owner, and open a chat box to have a quick chat about it right there on the page rather than having to go to another communication method. EDIT: I know this super similar to github. Really I just want github to implement the equivalent of friends, chats, and public profiles people can post things to (a la facebook wall).
  • mcdougle 13y ago
    Dude. I've often thought about doing exactly this, but I felt like there was probably something already out there and just haven't taken the time to research whether that's true or not. If there's not, and there still isn't by the time I finish launching my current project, I might just look into taking this on next!
  • ArtDev 13y ago
    http://forrst.com/ http://forrst.com/
    • pearjuice 13y ago
      Only dead trees there. It used to be a great place, but after it got acquired, acquired, sold and then acquired again, all of the community was long gone. It had its peek under Kyle Bragger when he was actually running a community with staff full-time on it, but after he sold it, it went downhill. Fast. There's some recent attempts to bring back the community and improve all sorts of things, but it's just renovating and feeding a rotten tree. Sure, it will live for a long time but it will never be as beautiful as a real living tree fed by nature.
  • damonpace 13y ago
    I built something like this about 4 years ago called BigStartups.com. It was built to help network the startup community and was moderately successful. Unfortunately, there were co-founder issues and we shut it down. I often think about what it could be in todays world if we kept working on it. Oh well...
• shsteimer 13y ago
  A mobile app that combines flight info with airport food listings and reviews. Let's you put in your flight numbers for a connection and will make recommendations based on the time if your layover, gates you are flying into and out of, etc.
  • ladybro 13y ago
    Hmm, great thought. I found myself looking for something exactly like this earlier this year.
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    I don't think it does exactly what you want but it somewhat useful: GatesGuru (by tripadvisor). Can see a map of the airport and what they have to eat etc.
• rkuykendall-com 13y ago
  Just for developers: Something that allowed you to change the IP your request resolves to with a modified URL instead of editing the hosts file, like this: 127.0.0.1::http://mysite.com/ http://mysite.com/ Benefits: Not as much work, not as permanent, you can use multiple at once, you can easily see where you are connecting. I think this is something web developers would pay a few bucks for. I know I would.
  • gberger 13y ago
    Is this possible with a Chrome Extension?
  • gberger 13y ago
    Is this possible with a Chrome Extension?
  • gberger 13y ago
    Is this possible with a Chrome Extension?
  • catshirt 13y ago
    is virtualhostx [0] what you want? personally i ditched it many years ago in favor of editing the hosts file. it really doesn't get easier than that. not sure i'm on the right track though because the benefits you list seem contrived. "not as permanent"? "not as much work"? we're talking about editing a single line in a short file. [0] http://clickontyler.com/virtualhostx/ http://clickontyler.com/virtualhostx/
  • imakesnowflakes 13y ago
    like this, http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html ?
  • izietto 13y ago
    I use HostAdmin: Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hostadmin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hostadmin/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hostadmin/oklkidkfohahankieehkeenbillligdn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hostadmin/oklkidkf...
• antr 13y ago
  A Dribbble for video creators/animators.
  • gregbarbosa 13y ago
    Doesn't Vimeo do pretty damn well with this? Or are you looking more for snippets of animation/shots, instead of Vimeo's YouTube length videos?
    • antr 13y ago
      Vimeo is Youtube for great, quality video productions. I'm looking more for snippets and/or past work. The reason I say this is because in the past week I started looking for video animators/designers (I don't even know what the right name is) who can design/create a 5-10 sec intro + ending animations/videos, and Google isn't the best option. I'd love to browse through dozens of snippets a la Dribbble in order to contact those companies/freelancers I find their work appealing.
  • srmostro 13y ago
    http://www.startupvideoawards.com http://www.startupvideoawards.com is something similar of Awwwards for video startups
• covercash 13y ago
  Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap. edit: Seems like there is some interest in this. If anyone wants to discuss this more, email my username at me.com
  • Eleutheria 13y ago
    This a million times. Parents all over the world approve this idea.
  • donohoe 13y ago
    1 million more... Given the source is open, it may be more like curating a list of children's programming torrents and providing a delivery system for people to add their own child appropriate work. I wouldn't be opposed to ads but not the sort you currently find on kids tv hawking toys
    • covercash 13y ago
      What if it was a Spotify-like model. ~$4.99/mo unlimited streaming, money is pooled and then pay out a % to content owners based on # of plays each video gets? The more popular episodes earn more of the money.
      • csears 13y ago
        That seems to be the direction Amazon is going with Kindle FreeTime Unlimited, also includes books and apps. Not the best library of content just yet, but it seems to have potential. http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000863021 http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?&docId=1000863021
  • rokhayakebe 13y ago
    This extends to regular quality programming as well. Sometimes I spend 30 minutes looking for a good movie before giving up and watching The Bourne Supremacy again because at least I know I won't regret the 2 hours I invest in it. I would pay $1 bounty every time someone just recommended a good movie that I end up liking.
• benlm 13y ago
  examine.com meets google scholar Place for all scientific studies to be elucidated with plain english explanations, analysis, information on shortcomings, links to related studies, open questions, links to further information. Would be community created content, but needs some sort of community voting/moderation system to surface the best content and empower the most knowledgable/trusted contributors. Ideally this would be where you go when you see sensationalist headlines in popular science magazines -- here you can find out what the study actually means. Anything like this out there?
  • juretriglav 13y ago
    I'm trying with http://www.sciencegist.com http://www.sciencegist.com The difficult part is getting contributions and building anything sustainable around this idea. You can reach me at info@sciencegist.com if you want to chat. There's also http://usefulscience.org/ http://usefulscience.org/ and http://sciworthy.com/ http://sciworthy.com/ but I think they both have staff to write content.
• rgbrgb 13y ago
  stop-the-data-orgy.com: A service that makes it easy (2 clicks) to migrate my email storage from gmail/googleapps to to s3/dropbox.
  • icebraining 13y ago
    CloudHQ (not affiliated, never used it) makes it seem pretty easy[1]. Not two clicks, but that's mostly due to authentication. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/cloudHQ/backup-gmail-to-dropbox http://www.slideshare.net/cloudHQ/backup-gmail-to-dropbox
    • rgbrgb 13y ago
      Thanks but that just does backup. I have a domain I use with google apps. I'd like to move that to a non-ad-driven email server that doesn't mine/sell my data and preferably that I can own.
• paul7986 13y ago
  Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo system!
  • gregbarbosa 13y ago
    I wonder if using iOS 7's mesh networking feature, if this would be more easily feasible (discoverability of other devices).
  • alxndr 13y ago
    Wayne Coyne (of the Flaming Lips) sorta did that in the 90s with car stereos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaireeka#The_Parking_Lot_Experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaireeka#The_Parking_Lot_Exper...
  • peterwwillis 13y ago
    Two issues: distribution and synchronization. First off, you must either have all clients have a full copy of the song, or have a remote site with the full song available for seeking-and-streaming. If you stream it, you have to be able to seek to the position in the song that everyone else is at so you can add more devices dynamically. You couldn't just stream whatever your phone is listening to (e.g. pandora) because it would add latency to the other clients' players and it would sound out of sync. The exception is if your player actually cached the sound data coming out of pandora, created a 10 second buffer, and started playing it "late", so the other clients would have enough lead time to buffer the song and start playing in sync. Once you have resolved how to distribute the sound, you have to establish synchronization with all the clients. Ways to do that: * Ship an ntp client with the app. Downside: network latency, firewalls. * Synchronize nearby players by playing a loud tone four times, allowing clients to sync to the tone. Downside: latency of speed of sound, can only do once (otherwise someone has to play tones in the middle of your song to sync a new client) * Listen to a track already playing, analyze own song's structure, find that point in the song, start from there. Downside: must already have decent portion (or all of) the song to seek to the correct positions. (Possible solution: implementation of rolling checksum/deltas?) * Child clients buffer the song data from the parent client. Assuming the parent has slept N time before playing, communicate with the parent to discover what point the parent is streaming from now, download its 10 second buffer, and start playing at the correct point once synced with parent. Downside: must do all of that (network establishment, sync with parent, download buffer, start play) within 10 seconds or the buffer will be out of sync. Possibly do a 60 second buffer? If your remote host just has all the song data, you could also just record a few seconds of whatever's playing around you, discover the song in your remote host's database, sync to the sound you're hearing, and seek, stream and play it. That would probably be the easiest thing, assuming your remote server had whatever song was playing. Possible to index local songs too.
• gorax 13y ago
  - Movie Quote Search - Search for a movie quote and it brings up the part of the movie where the quote starts. User can then adjust the length of the clip they wish to share. No longer than 30 seconds. - Mobile App - Timed Deals for local businesses. Company registers their deal and how many they wish to offer. A potential customer who follows certain types of products may get the promotion, The catch is, Promotion only last 30 seconds(max) and you have to buy it right then. Anyone wants to help me with any of these I'd love the help.
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    I am trying to make something similar to the Movie quote search. I am focusing more on making an easy way to share your favourite clips from shows. I made a tool to do selection screen recordings that record the system audio. Makes it really easy to record clips from youtube/netflix etc: https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter I am working on a simple website to host the clips as well. cuts.io (live again soon). I want that as a hassle free alternative to youtube, for short clips!
    • Jonovono 13y ago
      Update. Not sure why it's not letting me edit the post? The site is running now. Here is an example of a clip I made with the tool from Netflix. All the clips on the site feature Ted Mosby. Example: http://cuts.io/c/gJl6x_L2o http://cuts.io/c/gJl6x_L2o
  • kzisme 13y ago
    The time deals one seems interesting.
• rdl 13y ago
  An IaaS provider which meets "paranoid" security requirements -- essentially, being able to remotely provision a box in a trustworthy way, and know you "own" that box at least as much as if you'd carried it to colo yourself. Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo) against tampering short of powering them off. (tech details: Intel TXT, TCG TPM, cheap HSMs, Intel SGX, etc.)
  • anonymousDan 13y ago
    Hey, interesting, I'm a researcher working in this area as it happens. Have you any particular classes of application you'd want to use this for? What level of performance hit would you be willing to take? Would you be happy to just have a mechanism that enables you to determine after the fact that you've been hacked or data has leaked due to a misconfiguration, or would you mainly be interested in mechanisms for preventing such issues ever happening?
    • natdempk 13y ago
      I have been wanting this for a while as well. Performance is not a huge issue in this scenario for me, as security is the really the reason anyone would use this. I would want to prevent data from leaking completely if possible. My ideal scenario is that an adversary/host could take down my box, but they couldn't get at the content inside without my authentication. I don't want my instance to be clonable/rootable by the FBI, NSA, the hosting provider, or anyone else. Ideally I should be able to set up a Tor host in this instance, no one should be able to see inside under any condition, and I should have some proof/verification that it is secure from outsiders as claimed. If they realize that something undesirable is going on, I have no problem with the instance being shut down, but I don't want my privacy/security compromised.
      • anonymousDan 13y ago
        So you don't ask for much then :). As I'm sure you're aware, even with TPMs/TXT/SGX/Trustzone etc, once your threat model includes a capable adversary like the NSA with physical access to your box, it's hard to see how you can provide bullet-proof guarantees. I'm excluding fully homomorphic encryption based systems on the grounds of practicality here (although there are interesting 'somewhat homomorphic' systems out there that achieve practicality by restricting what kind of operations you can perform on the data).
• jw2013 13y ago
  Many people on hacker news have explicitly asked for this: a platform for listing your open-source project that needs contributors. I tried here: https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really appreciate it.
  • catshirt 13y ago
    for what it's worth http://solvers.io http://solvers.io was featured on HN recently and seems quite similar.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 13y ago
    The monthly "who's hiring" guy should post "which open source project need help" as well.
    • NoodleIncident 13y ago
      It's a bot, but agreed :)
  • benlm 13y ago
    http://www.codetriage.com/ http://www.codetriage.com/
  • HarshaThota 13y ago
    http://up-for-grabs.net/ http://up-for-grabs.net/ is trying to make it so that new contributors can easily find projects that they can contribute to.
  • Blahah 13y ago
    http://solvers.io http://solvers.io is this for charitable and scientific ideas (by me and davedx) https://openhatch.org/ https://openhatch.org/ is this for open source software in general
  • lixon 13y ago
    http://collabfinder.com/ http://collabfinder.com/
• zgm 13y ago
  There was a discussion on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401) about bringing App Stores to servers. Would people use and/or pay for something like this?
  • msteinert 13y ago
    Bitnami [1] does something like this. I've used their Gitlab installer and virtual appliance with success. [1]: https://bitnami.com/ https://bitnami.com/
  • telot 13y ago
    Untangle is a firewall with its own app store, and it works great! It's hard to imagine a firewall app store, but once you start using it, it just makes sense.
  • zgm 13y ago
    Interesting. I'll definitely look into these. Thanks!
• raldi 13y ago
  A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a little voting widget next to each message: +------------------------------------+ | 4,376 people received this message | | | | [Cool, it was ] [It was a waste] | | [important and] [of my time to ] | | [worthy of our] [ read this ] | | [ time ] [ message ] | | | +------------------------------------+ Then, as votes are collected, the sender (and maybe everyone else) gets some kind of feedback on how their message was received. Maybe the report could include a total of how much time was spent reading it: "Your coworkers spent a total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in employee time. Sending it was therefore a moderately bad use of company resources" .. or, if the voting was favorable, "1722 of your coworkers enjoyed reading your message. When you were deciding whether to hit Send or Discard, you made the right choice in clicking Send." Edit: As I've said in the past when posting ideas on HN, if you think this is worth doing, please run with it! I make no claim on "owning" the idea, and all I ask is that if it makes you a billionaire, you commission of bust of me to install in your parlor. (Bronze or marble only, please.)
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • natch 13y ago
    I love this idea, except that the conclusion about something being a moderately bad use of company resources doesn't necessarily follow. The benefits of things like team rapport are hard to quantify, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed as waste. The same goes for things that certain individuals feel are a waste. Taking jokes, just one subset of such emails, as an example: For you, a particular joke may be a waste, but having the team culture be such that it is open to jokes, may provide benefits beyond each individual joke. Still, great idea, and maybe the objections I raise could be overcome just by the right wording.
    • shubb 13y ago
      That is true, but at a very large multinational, I used to recieve over 100 send to all emails a day, and three real ones. Some of the 'send to all' emails were pretty important, so I had to read them, but a lot of them added nothing, and were sent to 400'000 people. I think each inappropriate global send to all cost $1000+, assuming people disgarded it pretty quickly. +Low estimate, assuming it takes 1 second to disgard the email, everyone reads it, and gets paid minimum wage.
• lukasm 13y ago
  Spotify released iOS SDK. Can someone make an app that will just have one button? Just play the goddamn music. I think Spotify works on the wrong level of abstraction. It should work exactly like a radio. Many people just want to listen some good music for running, relaxing etc. They couldn't care less about following artists and making playlists. Also, I'd like to be able to play it while I'm on a train. Pre-fech 30min of music to play when I'm underground and I have no internet connection. If there is a hacker (London-based ideally) that want to work on that idea give me a shout on lukasz.madon at gmail. https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-ios-sdk/ https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-ios-sdk/
  • grinich 13y ago
    Songza is pretty great for this. http://songza.com/ http://songza.com/ iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/songza/id453111583?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/songza/id453111583?mt=8
    • lukasm 13y ago
      iOS app is US only and the website is broken. When I click on the play button it redirects to the home page.
      • grinich 13y ago
        Working or me right now in Chrome...
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    Check out http://molli.es http://molli.es! I made this only for EDM music right now, but ya I just wanted the very basic site that plays music, and trying to bring back visualisations. Miss those from the Winamp days!
  • adigar 13y ago
    Recently came across Noon Pacific that does exactly this. Loving the service: http://noonpacific.com/ http://noonpacific.com/
• quaunaut 13y ago
  This is less an idea, more something for someone to think about. We need to figure out how to defeat the internet echo chamber effect. Notice how often, when a community gets started between a small group of people(such as early Reddit or HN), it's a place of intelligent, productive discussion, where people measure what they say instead of just spouting extreme rhetoric? Yet, once these communities grow, you inevitably see the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem, where it seems like the point of discussion is more to get the most approval instead of trying to argue a point, and where anyone with a disagreeing opinion feels unwelcome even if they're willing to put a lot of effort into their response? I haven't quite figured out how to solve it, but I really want to. I've been a part of several online communities like that now, and it always ends up the same way. Once it gets big enough, finding good conversation gets very rare.
  • adam419 13y ago
    You can't. Not without banning those responsible for that kind of behavior or severely dis-incentivizing them somehow from coming to the community. I think more generally, if I understand what you mean correctly, that that is really nothing more than water-cooler talk. Talk meant to be pleasant rather than investigative. I also think with that said, it's really only a property of small communities because once it reaches a certain size, the amount of substantive things to discuss and hash out doesn't scale with the number of users.
  • Houshalter 13y ago
    I don't think you can solve it because it's not the platform, it's the userbase. Although voting systems to highly encourage downvoting/upvoting based on whether you agree or not. An idea I've had is to rank all content separately for each user, by predicting what content they will upvote or downvote. At first it sounds like this would exaggerate the echo chamber effect, but I think it would do the exact opposite. There's no reason to downvote or upvote things because you agree or disagree, downvotes only affect what you see in the future and no one else sees them. And instead of different ideologies being pushed away into different communities, they all exist in the same place, occasionally interacting with each other and mixing.
  • grimtrigger 13y ago
• psycr 13y ago
  A web API that consumes phone camera captured photos of nutritional labels, and spits back a structured JSON response of the data. Primary consumers would be developers who're building products that depend on the user inputting this type of data - or warehouse logistics companies who could catalog this sort of data and middleman it to everyone else.
  • guscost 13y ago
    This would make my idea for a mobile app that renders pictures of the sugar/salt/fat content in foods by OCRing the label a trivial problem, and it could lead to many other applications like a shopping assistant for diabetics, athletes, etc. https://assemblymade.com/golden-fleece https://assemblymade.com/golden-fleece
    • coolsunglasses 13y ago
      This was the startup I was CTO at. We organized peoples' whole diets and we used the barcodes rather than OCR to get the nutrition facts of labeled products. The product recommended home-cooked meals (web-only), found the healthiest restaurant dishes near you (mobile and web), and evaluated the nutritional fit of labeled food products in stores (mobile-only). The recommendation algorithm was all backend. Too bad we got acqui-hired. I didn't follow the acqui-hire and went on to work for a genetics startup. Email me if you want more info or to see about making it exist again. We had an alpha test group of some very happy users :)
  • karangoeluw 13y ago
    Dibs. I'll start working on it. If anyone wants to help out, message me or email me karan[at]goel.im
    • napoleond 13y ago
      (Apologies if you're an OCR guru and this is a stupid comment, but...) I wonder if it would be easier to get an MVP together using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A quick Google search reveals that there are lots of commercial products providing OCR on nutrition labels, but getting open source OCR to work reliably with phone-quality images (poor lighting, curvature of containers, etc) is tricky. Either way, I think OCR-as-a-service would be really useful, and nutrition labels are probably a great place to start. I think there's lots of room for improvement in the nutrition/meal planning space.
• nemo1618 13y ago
  I have a strange fascination with knowing exactly how I discovered a particular artist, film, website, etc. I'd really love a browser extension that could keep track of how the user reached a given site. Then they could go back later and input, say, a YouTube URL, and it would show exactly what lead them to that song. I started writing such an extension myself, but I was clearly out of my element. So when Mozilla shut down their Firefox Add-on Builder, I lost motivation completely. For someone with experience created extensions, though, I imagine this would be pretty straightforward. EDIT: no, using the browser history is not good enough. Browsing is a non-linear activity (especially with multiple tabs open), and to visualize your path through the web you need a graph, not just a list of sites.
  • MrMeker 13y ago
    This already exists for most browsers. Pressing Ctrl+H should take you right to it.
    • fragmede 13y ago
      Yes, but it sucks - if you browse using tabs (and everyone I does), then the simple time-order list that comes by defaults on Firefox and Chrome just doesn't cut it. You can poke around and find the right history eventually but we've come to demand more of computers these days.
  • Blahah 13y ago
    This is a very cool idea - for me the application would be more in research, when quite often I stumble across an idea, or go back to read an open tab, or read my Pocket, and when I want to see how I discovered it, can't figure out how I got there. Just a simple graph of history chains would be great.
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    > "I'd really love a browser extension that could keep track of how the user reached a given site." I used to love to have this. I called it "browser history", but then Mozilla decided it made the browser so terribly slow that you can now no longer really configure how long history is retained. After a while it just disappears. I used to have my history all the way back from 2006...
• Houshalter 13y ago
  An idea originally by sdrothrock which I've been thinking about for the past few days: An app which can be trained to recognize certain sounds. You record a few examples of that sound and then it listens and gives an alert when it hears it. Another idea, allow deaf people to "visualize" sounds. Just displaying the raw sound wave is too redundant and difficult to interpret. But what if you could display a higher level representation, perhaps obtained by unsupervised learning. Even cooler if you can attach rough labels to the sound like is done by some object recognition systems (example: http://i.imgur.com/anp7RY9.png http://i.imgur.com/anp7RY9.png). The second idea is probably unrealistic but the first is possible.
• jacabado 13y ago
  This adresses a pain that I suffer: An app to easily compare SQL execution plans. I believe the better way would be graphical. I have needed this on MS SQL Server, SQL Sentry Plan Explorer has helped but lacks this comparison. Today I do it by diffin execution plans on XML format. On my wildest dreams I would have a REPL accepting a DSL that would allow me to query the different DMV's (those are SQL Server data management views which give you insight on the inner state of SQL Server, Red Gate has a nice site on them http://sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com http://sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com). If it already exist is some form or platform please share.
• 3rd3 13y ago
  How about a program that watches for certain input patterns, takes calendar, location and maybe camera data to determine the best times to deliver push and email notifications without interrupting. Maybe one could figure out moments at which the user would be interrupted the most, for example shortly after opening a new window or tab, or shortly after switching programs, since these moments are risky for forgetting things (if the same psychology applies): http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571267#.Uz60U8cve2w http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571... It would probably make sense to prohibit interruptions during intense writing. I also thought about an option to blacklist certain apps or websites like Skype, Facetime etc. and to whitelist activities that don’t require focus like browsing news websites or playing a game.
• zvanness 13y ago
  A search engine for knowledge and facts. I think there's huge value in a search engine of knowledge and facts, where all sources are verified. A search engine that is objective and contains no opinions, crappy blogs or tweets, content farms. A search engine where you can't game your rankings through SEO techniques or through higher add spend. Google is amazing. Google Search is going to be here for a long time. I doubt anyone will be able to come up with a solid replacement. But one of the current problems with Google is that they have too much information. So far, i've put together a tiny version of this concept, which i've found very useful when i'm trying to learn new things or do some research. I would love to see some smarter people turn it into something more.
  • raving-richard 13y ago
    It's been done. Wolfram Alpha[1] specifically. Also look up "linked data" (I'm not sure if DDG uses linked data or not[2]). [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+speak+Basque%3F http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+speak+B... [2] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=linked+data https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=linked+data edit: so "Hacker News" doesn't allow even basic HTML? Meh meh meh.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    • aaronem 13y ago
      > "Hacker News" doesn't allow even basic HTML? I think that's to try to keep the focus on content rather than presentation, and also because parsing user-submitted HTML to pick out the safe bits is a pain in the neck. If you absolutely need presentation features you can't get on HN, then turn your comment into a blog post or a webpage and link to it from here. (But you probably don't need those features, and HN's formatter is easy to get used to.)
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    This would require a full blown company, and a big one at that, to get it right. Not really a hackable idea that a reader could do in a few months of spare time.
• hooande 13y ago
  A solution for the "too many tabs open" problem. Need a way to save my history in an organized and interactive manner, with a nice looking UI. Sort of like the old WebMynd (http://webmynd.com http://webmynd.com). I find that most of my tabs are open as a form of reminder. If I close it, I'll forget it and might as well not have seen it. Same if I hide it away in some kind of bookmarking app. I think it would be best to apply a UI layer over my entire history in a way that makes it easy to search and recall things that I found interesting int he past. Need to store all data locally for privacy reasons, and have a way to logically group urls by content and bring them back to the front occasionally (maybe with some kind of gamification?) so they don't disappear.
  • cinjon 13y ago
    I made something that addresses this: www.seekaizen.com. I haven't advertised it before and it's mostly just friends/me that use it, but it seems like you might like it. Let me know if it fits your use case.
  • dcpdx 13y ago
    Have you tried Onetab for Chrome? It has some of the functionality you're looking for in that it pulls all of your open tabs into one tab and vertically orders them on the page for you to go back and access later. Neat tool, I use it quite a bit. http://www.one-tab.com/ http://www.one-tab.com/
  • robobro 13y ago
    How about tab grouping? Or multiple windows?
  • rattray 13y ago
    perhaps a followupthen for tabs?
    • klous 13y ago
      Along these lines, what if the tabs could pop back up at a certain day/time or if you could just snooze tabs? I see people use tabs as a pseudo todo list. Reminding you to do, schedule, research, or buy something. What if you could continue to use tabs that way, yet not clog up your computer, use up memory, or distract you from getting stuff done with open tabs.
• adam419 13y ago
  A way to submit any legal document, and for a fee have it returned but explained in plain english. What do you guys think about this? And what do you think are the most common use cases/legal documents?
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    I've actually been working on this. Dutch, unfortunately, but here you go: http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/en%20dan%20nu%20in%20het%20Nederlands.htm http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/en%20dan%20nu%20in%20het%20Nederland... Quick translation of the text on the page: Title: And now in plain Dutch Intro paragraph: Contracts are always written in a very cryptic manner. So what do they say in short, plain old Dutch? Status of the project: beta. I've "translated" 2 out of 38 paragraphs from one contract I've received, and that was a lot of work already. Those paragraphs work fine now, but it still needs a lot more work.
    • adam419 13y ago
      Couple questions. Have you had any customers? What type of legal docs do you think are best to target? Are you trying to generate summaries programmatically?
      • lucb1e 13y ago
        > "Have you had any customers?" No, no, it's nothing like that. It's just a small Javascript thingy that tries to convert legal nonsense into sense. I got a contract in Dutch that I found took way longer to read than it should (like, really read and understand all implications), made this script and threw it online. It's in a directory with dozens of unfinished scripts that I wrote. So yes, summaries are generated programmatically. They have no legal value but provide a much better read of what is written in the contract.
        • adam419 13y ago
          How does it translate any legal writing into a simpler form? That sounds like a damn nearly impossible language processing feat.
• jedberg 13y ago
  I like live shows. I would like a website that lists all the live shows in my area. Like "show me all shows at Shoreline". I haven't found a single site that tells me this.
  • perlgeek 13y ago
    I've recently started something like this, but so far it's in German only, and only recognizes zip codes from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (it does a proximity search, not strict search by city). The main problem is getting the data. I thought that ticket affiliate programs would give me the data in machine readable form, but so far no luck (one of them does, but it's far too expensive). In case you're still interested, it's http://konzertgeek.de/ http://konzertgeek.de/ (source at https://github.com/moritz/soonish-p5 https://github.com/moritz/soonish-p5 ). If anybody has ideas where to get the data from, please tell me!
  • ztnewman 13y ago
    Songkick?
  • tcpekin 13y ago
    I spend a significant amount of time looking up live shows, but what about the Ticketmaster website for Shoreline doesn't do this? As far as I know, everything at Shoreline has to go through Ticketmaster/Live Nation. If the venue doesn't have their own calendar, most of the time Ticketmaster/Live Nation does. My personal solution is just to go through all the venues individually that I'm interested in. In the bay area that's about 15 spots for me. Are you looking for a "show me all shows in San Francisco"? I haven't found a good solution to that either, and things like Eventful, Pollstar aren't the greatest as they simply show too much. http://www.ticketmaster.com/Shoreline-Amphitheatre-tickets-Mountain-View/venue/229414 http://www.ticketmaster.com/Shoreline-Amphitheatre-tickets-M...
    • jedberg 13y ago
      Yes, I should have said "Show me all events near San Francisco", because as you aptly point out a single venue is easy to search. The problem is that I have to find all the venues, do all the searches, and then do it again as they add more shows! So yeah, a single site, maybe one where I can upload my iTunes song list or link to my Pandora or something so it can sort by why I like, would be awesome.
• rahilsondhi 13y ago
  A website for employees in a company to share SQL queries and their results, like Heroku Dataclips. You can write your query in your browser, the results will be shown, and you can just copy/paste the URL to a coworker for him/her to see the results. I'm already working on this, contact me if you're interested!
  • yahelc 13y ago
    +1. very interested in using it. http://sqlfiddle.com/ http://sqlfiddle.com/ sort of does this, but not in the way Dataclips does.
  • straws 13y ago
    There's the excellent https://github.com/epantry/django-sql-explorer https://github.com/epantry/django-sql-explorer if you're running a Django app.
  • rokhayakebe 13y ago
    Rahil, have you thought about extending this idea to a place where you would post a DB schema and SQL queries and let the community optimize it. Companies will use this to tap into the expertise of many database engineers.
    • rahilsondhi 13y ago
      This sounds pretty out of scope for what I'm thinking of. I'm trying to solve the problem of people sharing data within an organization. I'm not trying to make a social community of database engineers. Cool idea though! Feel free to contact me if you'd like to chat more.
• edw519 13y ago
  - When will the next bus/train be at this spot? - a non-DRM ebook reader with Project Gutenburg installed - auto convert from client/server to webapp or phoneapp - grocery delivery for us not in SV,Seattle,etc - reservation-only restaurants that have tables avail now - auto turn cell phone to vibrate in certain locations - auto forward cell phone to close land line (work/home) - old Google maps - a no wifi or cell Palm Pilot replacement - cell phone direct to .txt email for all but certain callers - mini-blogging platform: 400 chars < every post < 800 chars - yelp you can actually believe - forum software that filters trolls - forum software that filters idiots - salad bar locator - buffet locator - televisionless / audioless restaurant locater - chess with n moves forward/back what if - shock nearby driver on cell phone not paying attention - missing commercial airliner locator
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    > - When will the next bus/train be at this spot? I think Oona Räisänen solved that already: http://www.windytan.com/2013/11/decoding-radio-controlled-bus-stop.html http://www.windytan.com/2013/11/decoding-radio-controlled-bu... > auto convert from client/server to webapp or phoneapp What? Client/server is a network model, webapp and phoneapp are applications. You mean like a web/phone app that you can use to talk to random server applications or something? > old Google maps More specific..? > auto turn cell phone to vibrate in certain locations There's an app for that > auto forward cell phone to close land line (work/home) You can do that with VoIP. > forum software that filters idiots That would be a major breakthrough. Hellbanning probably does a good job already though. > shock nearby driver on cell phone not paying attention The police calls that a Taser.
  • napoleond 13y ago
    cell phone direct to .txt email for all but certain callers How much would you pay for such a service?
    • bruceboughton 13y ago
      HulloMail does this for your voicemail.
• plaxis 13y ago
  Search function for browser tabs. So hard to find pandora in the haystack, and I need a short cut to search through all the interesting things.
  • ivank 13y ago
    In Firefox, type "% query" into the URL bar. That will search just open tab titles and URLs. Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history. Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks. Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged. Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs. Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed. Add # to search for matches in page titles. Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs). https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-bookmarks-history-and-tabs#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...
  • earless1 13y ago
    Firefox already has this built-in to the tab groups view http://imgur.com/1060tx7 http://imgur.com/1060tx7
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    http://www.getferro.com/ http://www.getferro.com/ or http://vimium.github.io/ http://vimium.github.io/
  • greggman 13y ago
    I would also like a search function for browsing history. Most browsers let me search titles but I want to search content as in "show me the page I read 3 days ago with the words 'foo bar baz'".
  • joshwa 13y ago
    for chrome, "Switch To Tab": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switch-to-tab/gbfhhcljihbgcobpfnceegfmooomhhli https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switch-to-tab/gbfh...
• joshmn 13y ago
  A demo mode for browsers. Incognito / private mode kind of solves this, but form autocompletes, and browser history when I enter a URL doesn't always contain stuff I want to show in front of my clients.
  • lucb1e 13y ago
    Doesn't Chrome have a guest session kinda thing? And Firefox Mobile?
  • timdorr 13y ago
    If you're using Chrome (and I believe Firefox can do this too), if you go to the settings, there is a section for Users. You can add a new user to the browser and use that account for demo purposes. Our sales guys do the exact same thing.
    • flusensieb 13y ago
      You can use Firefox Profile Manager and create a new profile for demonstration purposes. ($ firefox -ProfileManager)
• wwwwwwwwww 13y ago
  A way for me to organize hundreds of gb of porn. Seriously, porn organization is the 1 thing I haven't been able to master over the years. A way to detect what your current preferences are and map them to a video or image set would be revolutionary.
  • sparkie 13y ago
    A way to organize anything at all would be a nice start. The real problem is people trying to force arbitrary relationships into hierarchical models always results in mediocre solutions. When are we going to start taking graph databases seriously? (+ Graph filesystems)
    • mrlase 13y ago
      I'm really interested in this idea as I suffer from the same problem on my local disk in addition to having years worth of documents across a DropBox account, SkyDrive, and two Google Drive accounts. What are your biggest gripes? What model would you like to see? A tag based filesystem? Arbitrary graph? Would love to talk to people such as yourself who have this problem.
      • Jonovono 13y ago
        I am working on a project to categorise your files/code projects. You can give them tags, comments, and then sort them in that way. I want to see something like this for any type of data, and I think graph databases would be a good thing to explore! It's not quite done, and I will be making demo videos eventually but if you are curious check it out! https://github.com/Jonovono/um https://github.com/Jonovono/um
      • sparkie 13y ago
        I'd like to see arbitrary graph based systems where there's no restriction on the relationships you can create - although doing so takes more work than dumping things into hierarchies. Tag based systems are useful for making the transition to graphs, but they're really just "patching" graph-like semantics onto trees - as are things like symbolic links in file systems. Relationships are largely arbitrary, and what is meaningful to one person may not be to another. In order to have an effective system, I think it would need both a distributed and local component, such that there is this large, distributed graph of knowledge of relationships, which you can download and cache parts of selectively - and which you can add your own relationships to, and chose which of those you wish to share. By collectively sharing relationship, we can form consensus models which converge around specific kinds of ontologies - which could be used to optimise storage and querying for local caches of such boundaries. My biggest gripe is perhaps this idea of bottom-up-schema creation, in which we try to conjure up a model of relationships which may work based on our limited knowledge of the models we want to express. Instead, the graph based approach gives us a top-down-approach, where all the relationships are visible, but where we focus on specific relationships to build an ontology, then optimise our problem around it. Filesystems in the traditional sense are far too limiting in that they already push a bottom-up schema on you - that of files, and much of the data you want to organize isn't files anyway. The filesystem is useful though, and necessary to remain compatible with existing systems - but I think it should take the top-down approach, where for example, you'd have some FUSE module which accesses part of a larger graph database, and only cares about the file specific relationships or ontologies. I'm no expert on graph theory, and I've only played around with the ideas a bit using existing graph databases (Titan, Orient, rel etc) and querying languages like Gremlin and Datalog. I also have a few dozen databases I've made with Postgres in order to map the relations I care about with refeences to external information sources (e.g musicbrainz) - some of which are not "open" in the sense that you'd want them in a distributed system, because they require sign-ups to central services in order to manipulate them. I've also looked at various attempts to build systems like this, but the majority are proprietary systems, or centralized in some way or another, and I've not discovered a sane way to locally cache the data I want without taking whole copies of the databases. At present there's just too much for me to learn and research, and not the time or motivation to do it - partly because I feel it would need to be a collaborative, free software project, as the profit motive is largely incompatible with the need for a distributed system - and I'm too focused on making a living right now.
• jrvarela56 13y ago
  Im having trouble organising the information I consume. I have tried using a mix of Google Bookmarks, Youtube's watch later, GDocs, Evernote, Pocket, Dropbox (for pdfs/books) and tldr.io. There has to be something that encompasses the full 'learning process': find content, read/watch/listen it, summarise its most important points, list actionables, revisit it in the future... This maybe too personal to standardise, but even a 'convention over configuration' approach would keep people like me from feeling stuck.
  • jamesisaac 13y ago
    This sounds like the problem I had, which I'm trying to solve with https://nachapp.com https://nachapp.com - instead of my attention being split between several apps which focus on specific TYPES of content (i.e. everything you listed), it focuses on a specific WORKFLOW - acting as a central high-level hub, based on the core concept of achieving personal goals (which I think would be the same thing you mean with "learning process"). It isn't trying to completely replicate the storage of everything you have in the apps you listed. Instead, it's trying to focus your attention to what your real goals in life are, so you hopefully end up with quite a minimalist approach, where you're discarding a lot of info that's essentially a distraction, and really able to focus on only saving the stuff which is relevant to your goals, and keeping a hierarchical list of actionables as your method of recall for the content, instead of it being scattered randomly across a dozen apps. If this sounds like an attractive solution to you, would be great to talk about this a bit more (you can reach me through the site's contact form), because I want to work out ways to make the app smarter for covering that exact workflow you're talking about (discovery -> actionables). Note that the app may look pretty "simple" from the landing page, but it is also very much aimed at power-users (I personally have a couple of hundred active steps+goals).
• marmano 13y ago
  A voting system based on the Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System behind Bitcoin. The major reasons votes couldn't be conducted electronically is because of trust issues and today we have a technology that solves that. I think this could potentially disrupt voting if properly executed.
  • ams6110 13y ago
    Unfortunately all the bitcoin fiascos lately do nothing to engender public support and confidence in a voting system that "works like bitcoin."
  • jarofgreen 13y ago
    Can't really see a way of doing this without all votes being public, which is sometimes wanted but often not?
    • mrfusion 13y ago
      Well you'd register to vote just like you do now, by mail or online, and get returned a wallet instead of a little certificate. You'd just need a law that the voting center can't track the wallets I guess.
  • aaronem 13y ago
    When transaction malleability kills.
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    I have not looked too much into this project but I think this is the goal it is after: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/projects/commitcoin/ http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/projects/commitcoin/
  • ozgung 13y ago
    I see this idea very promising. This problem is a very good research topic for academics. I'm sure the current shortcomings can be fixed. The main problem is that all the transactions should be public, but the individual votes should be kept as private. We may overcome this problem by a 2 level system, just like in the traditional offline elections. 1. Ballot box level. Each 'digital ballot box' has a certain amount of voting coins. Voters go to a voting site, prove their identities and are given a key for a single transaction. This transaction transfers one voting coin from the ballot box to one of the recipient wallets (each wallet representing a candidate or a decision). 2. Network level. All transactions from ballot boxes to candidate accounts are public and verifiable using bitcoin protocol. At the end of the voting period all the remaining unused coins must be transferred to a common wallet representing empty votes. So these numbers must mach: Number of coins = number of voters = sum of coins in all wallets Candidate with the most coins wins. The main benefit of bitcoin voting is that it's not a centralized system. It's open, online and verifiable.
• Eleutheria 13y ago
  Open University. A massive repository of all books needed for any career. No teachers, no videos, no homework, nothing, just the books, free, forever.
  • karangoeluw 13y ago
    http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/?
    • Eleutheria 13y ago
      Nop. Not a single Law School, Medicine, Computer Science, Civil engineer book in that listing. It should be organized like an university with all the programs by semester and their respective books. Btw, I don't care about diplomas, I care about knowledge.
  • justplay 13y ago
    something like wikipedia? 1. where quality doesn't compromised, 2. company runs by donation and 3. keep growing with volunteer support. That sounds like excellent idea. I don't have too much time but i would love to be part of something like this.
  • terminus 13y ago
    Try saylor.org.
  • alex8022 13y ago
    http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page I'm not sure what the quality of the books are overall, or the consistency between books, but I've had some luck with introductory level info. It looks like a good start and seems to be the same basic concept as what you describe.
  • guru1206 13y ago
    http://lib.freescienceengineering.org/ http://lib.freescienceengineering.org/
  • 13y ago
• billen 13y ago
  There is an easy platform for this. http://ideas.ozonebit.com/ http://ideas.ozonebit.com/ Check it out!
  • avalaunch 13y ago
    I was hoping this would be a better platform with more relevant features than HN for browsing/submitting ideas, but it actually has less features. Commenting, I think, is a must have feature. Being able to tag and search by tags would be nice as well.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• SuperChihuahua 13y ago
  All shaving machines are crap. I also need to stop biting my nails.
• bambax 13y ago
  A device that would let people sleep in public while letting other people around them think they're awake (business meetings, boring lectures, etc.) This could either be glasses with realistic eyes painted on them, or opaque contact lenses (that would then require the bearer to be able to sleep with their eyes opened -- but if no light enters the eye it should be quite possible). There are many situations when you can't really leave the room to take a nap and yet you feel as though you'll die if you resist sleep a minute more.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • awshepard 13y ago
    Someone just recently sent me a low-tech version of this - http://imgur.com/gallery/MekVijC http://imgur.com/gallery/MekVijC
• elchief 13y ago
  1. License Tesla or Prius chassis/drive-trains and put Golden Oldie car shells on top of them and sell them to retiring boomers (think Pink Cadillac). Industrial Design IP of exteriors should be expired. 2. A commercial version of PostgreSQL server that has row-level security and natively replicates with SQLIte over HTTP(S). Easy offline mobile apps.
  • buss 13y ago
    > A commercial version of PostgreSQL server that has row-level security and natively replicates with SQLIte over HTTP(S). Easy offline mobile apps. This, if done well, could be awesome. How you would effectively guarantee row-level security? One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is a database whose rows are only readable by the users that generated the data in those rows. Essentially, the data in each row is encrypted with a key that's generated from the password of the user. Data breaches are bad because, among other reasons, nothing in the database is encrypted. If each row was encrypted with a key only recoverable from a user's password it would solve a lot of problems.
    • eurleif 13y ago
      How would you combine that with indexing? Seems like data needs to be unencrypted to be indexed. And if you're not doing any indexing, isn't it as simple as converting the user's data to JSON, and encrypting the JSON?
      • buss 13y ago
        Aye, there's the rub. Lots of nice features disappear when you're only storing encrypted data. I suspect that it's not possible to create an index of the data (before encrypting it) that doesn't leak information and thus ruin the encryption (but IANACryptologist). It would really only be useful for data you're not joining on or searching over, and then you've got more of a dumb data store than a database.
        • eurleif 13y ago
• Spittie 13y ago
  I've been having this in my mind for a while: A nice way to organize & share my knowledge. I know that lots of people have a self-hosted wiki or similar where they write nice tricks, something that they learned about and might be useful in the future, nice ideas... Well, I'd like something like this, but more "social". Pages could be shared (or public), anyone could write a comments on something (I'd love to see comments a-la Medium), and it would be nifty to have a way to "fork" and submit a pull request for every page. I guess it could also have the usual "follow user" that will show all of his pages in a dashboard, a "trending pages" for the most seen pages and similar.
  • samsonr 13y ago
    Did you take a look at https://coderwall.com/ https://coderwall.com/ ?
    • Spittie 13y ago
      I didn't, thanks, it looks pretty similar to what I meant. I would like it to be "more wiki", coderwall seems more a social profile where you can share small tips, not a wiki where you can write whatever you want. It's also missing the "git" stuff, which I think could be huge (or maybe it's just silly, but it sounds good in my head). And I also don't really like the "closeness" of the site. for example I can't even see every tip shared by an user without having an account (it just show the first ones and then a blurry mess, a-la Quora).
  • rokhayakebe 13y ago
    This falls under the "Why didn't anyone think/built of this yet?" Where is the global knowledge base? I am sorry, but it is not wikipedia. Wikipedia is what all us know/think to be XYZ? What you are describing is a place for you to share everything you know about a subject, and I can use to find what 200 other people know about it. This is simple and extremely powerful.
    • Spittie 13y ago
      I'm happy you're liking it. I've posted this over HN exactly because I like it, and hope someone will pick it up (I might think about doing it myself, but I'm not exactly a good coder, so who knows if I'd manage). I know this thread is old, but if anyone is interested and want to talk about it a bit, my email is in my profile :) (also spittie over freenode)
• gfosco 13y ago
  I want to search for furniture, and other products, based on dimensions. My girlfriend and I furnished a new apartment recently, and had to be space conscious.. This spot next to the couch could fit a 10" wide table. It's not easy to search for that, yet the information is there. My original plan was going to use the Amazon API and take a search term and page through looking for dimensions that fit. I still think it's a great idea, but obviously not huge, and I don't really have time to build it. If you do, hook me up.
  • guptaneil 13y ago
    In college, I won a business pitch competition with the idea of using a digital laser measure to measure the dimensions of any space, and then only show you furniture that fits within that space. It had some other aspects, but that was the gist of the idea. It looks like Ikea and others are slowly working their way towards that ease of use, but it's still a ways away.
    • BruceIV 13y ago
      Related concept: when I moved cross-country for grad school I found my landlord on Internet classifieds and got him to send me a floor plan of the apartment; I then measured all my furniture, used LibreOffice Draw to make circles and rectangles that I could print at the same scale (that was surprisingly time-consuming - it would be neat if someone could make that easy), then printed and cut them all out and virtually re-decorated the apartment until I found a layout I was happy with. It was a neat way to do it, but rather labour intensive.
      • EwanG 13y ago
        Actually it would be useful if it included measurements of your doors so that items you aren't going to be able to get into the house unless disassembled first can also be appropriately filtered.
  • d0m 13y ago
    Taking a pic of your room and seeing nice furniture virtually added so you can easily test different styles.
• svetha 13y ago
  Tracked changes for gmail. So instead of replying to an email in text and then changing the color/font/size of words, tracked changes will do it for you similar to how it does in Word.
• duvok 13y ago
  A data driven and personalized alternative to credit scores. Credit scores lack transparency, usability, and are often inaccurate representation's of a person's financial health/responsibility. Especially regarding student loans, credit scores are useless...all a 20 year old's credit score tells you is how much his parents planned his financial life for him
• dalacv 13y ago
  Crowd meets Class Action Lawsuits. A mobile or web app that shows many class action lawsuits in one place. I'd like to be able to go to one place and see a large list of pending class action lawsuits and their corresponding meta-data (deadline for joining lawsuit, company, details, link to website with more details, etc)
  • nthomson 13y ago
    http://www.classactionrebates.com/ http://www.classactionrebates.com/
• rsa 13y ago
  awesome idea!
• dalacv 13y ago
  Homework Tutor App - App that allows kids to take a picture of a homework problem and submit a question about it. Then the picture and question get submitted over to MTurk. 3-5 answers come back within minutes from folks on MTurk.
  • petersouth 13y ago
    you try the Yahoo answers homework helper? The questions in the algebra & geometry math section were getting answered within a couple mins. I'd have to race to answer them or someone would get them before me. Were you thinking primary school stuff or college?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• bennesvig 13y ago
  A way to get notified of new book reviews for my book across Amazon, Audile, iTunes, and GoodReads. Even better if it could also track sales from Amazon, CreateSpace, and Audible in one place.
  • EwanG 13y ago
    You can sort of do this now (at least the sales) if you're willing to use Draft2Digital and let them submit you to all those places. They get a cut of each sale however, so you'd have to decide if the centralized reporting and letting them do a bit of the leg work is worth the price.
• bboston7 13y ago
  I wish there was an easier way to peal oranges
  • Mz 13y ago
    If you don't know, these are awesome: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=peel+oranges+tool&FORM=HDRSC2#view=detail&id=DAD537B240CBD030342BF526F052366580CFFE40&selectedIndex=4 http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=peel+oranges+tool&FORM=H... Also: There is a musical joke in there somewhere (but I am not musical). (Not intended to harsh on you. I just find the typo funny. Carry on.)
    • bboston7 13y ago
      Whoops! Thanks for the link though, I may have to pick one of those up.
• dalacv 13y ago
  A video game that looks like this: http://www.jonasginter.de/360-grad-video-mit-6-gopro-kameras/ http://www.jonasginter.de/360-grad-video-mit-6-gopro-kameras...
• mrfusion 13y ago
  Put a drain at the top of toilets to prevent overflows (like sinks already have)
  • jtregunna 13y ago
    And where exactly would it drain to? Your toilet's output is plugged, thus causing the overflow, remember?
    • uptown 13y ago
      oh, crap.
    • jorts 13y ago
      I'd imagine it would be somewhere beyond where your toilet is typically clogged. That would handle most overflow situations.
    • wpietri 13y ago
      A more practical approach might be a way to stop water from going into the bowl. E.g., you lift up on the handle to close the tank flap. Or maybe there's a stop button next to the flush button. That would be almost as good as an overflow drain, but wouldn't require adding second sewer pipe.
      • maxerickson 13y ago
        A solid linkage between the handle and flap is available. (The toilet in the room a little ways from where I'm sitting has one)
    • petersouth 13y ago
      my bathtub is like 1" lower than the rim of my toilet
    • PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Behold! http://postimg.org/image/ecyg84yof/ http://postimg.org/image/ecyg84yof/
• mrfusion 13y ago
  Use ultrasound to measure shoe size and also see how we'll shoes fit. Sell to shoe stores. (I heard they used to do this with X-rays before people knew better. )
• dome82 13y ago
  An easy way for mole mapping at home and having an personal electronic journal about it. It should be possible to share a link with your dermatologist containing your mole mapping.
  • aaronem 13y ago
    Dibs! Melanoma runs in my family; it never occurred to me to build something like this, but I can certainly see the benefit. Thanks for the idea!
  • prawn 13y ago
    Mole checking over the net. I am never enthused about having to make an appointment and strip down for a full check, but I'd pay a few bucks to get one mole checked.
• dgregd 13y ago
  Office package for Internet and open source era. MS Office concept was good in 1990. Google Docs just replaced local drive with cloud drive. Tools for developers are really good. IDEs and DVCS are pleasure to work with. But try to work on a spec, RfP, Offer, etc. with Word and Outlook. Online wikis are quite good but it is not possible to send them via email to a third party. My idea for a text editor: * storage: wiki text files + embedded git repo * save all to a single file, but with possibility to access and edit the contents via web server / web app * possibility to squash all edits and send a clean copy (branch) as an attachment * possibility to incorporate changes sent back, thanks to DVCS * two edit modes: WYSIWYG and markdown style for experts * two client modes: standalone with thick client (based on Webkit) and html5 client * possibility to access and modify the contents via APIs (Java, Ruby, ...) * optimized for screens, not for A4 / US letter pages You get the idea. Corporations would love something like this.
• manuelflara 13y ago
  A place where developers can post their already launched projects, and business/marketing/sales people can get in touch with them if they're interested in becoming a cofounder . I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets all excited about building and launching new stuff, but after that, I'm kind of clueless about what to do, so I move on to the next.
  • highace 13y ago
    This sounds good. As a developer I frequently churn out stuff that I have no idea how to sell or grow. Let the sales guys look through a list of stuff that has been made by developers, and if they find something they think they can add value to then a connection can be made.
  • nonsens3 13y ago
    Same problem here. Sideprojectors tries to solve this, but hasn't worked for me so far. http://www.sideprojectors.com http://www.sideprojectors.com
    • manuelflara 13y ago
      Any particular ideas about what's wrong with it?
  • dzink 13y ago
    Have you tried DoerHub? We're three hackers and we're building it to bridge doers across disciplines via the projects they are working on. It's free. It's connected people who would have never ever met otherwise (surgeons, hackers, researchers in pharma, commercializers, farmers, activists). It's built by doers for doers, and you are welcome to join us, contribute, provide feedback, or help in any other way.
  • capaxinfinity 13y ago
    Biz/Marketing guy here: I'd actively use this for multiple motivations. -Financial support, especially if project has potential for eventually passive returns. -Growth marketing portfolio, for leverage on future marketing projects and consulting work. -Positive impact, dependent on nature of project. -Cofounder pre-trial: work together with smart hackers with potential to collaborate on future projects if fit is good. Thinking of ways to position this and sources to share it already. Really: if someone were interested in building something like this out and able to seed initial dev projects, I'd be happy to help.
• digisth 13y ago
  A real, smart browser bookmarking system. One that looks at your bookmarks, and based on content (and/or other factors) categorizes and organizes your bookmarks for you without intervention. Due to issues around privacy, should either run locally or be part of a large, anonymized data set if it needs to use a SaaS. Even better would be a real standard for tagging URLs that bookmarking system could just use on their own (kind of like CDDB music genres or similar.)
• systematical 13y ago
  I had an idea for a "plug and play" tor relay. This would be suitable for computer literate folks who are committed to privacy and such, but not necessarily up to installing linux and tor. Trick would likely be keeping this to around $50 or less. Thoughts?
  • gelstudios 13y ago
    One such appliance/distro is the "Personal Onion Router To Assure Liberty", there's even a raspberry pi version: https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi https://github.com/grugq/PORTALofPi
  • Qworg 13y ago
    Possible but likely not enough overhead to make a business out of it.
• larrys 13y ago
  An app that allows you to have a meeting with someone anytime both of you're available for the meeting. So it's schedule-less. Example: You want to talk to Paul. Paul wants to talk to you. But not as much. Paul is ranked "a1" in your book and you are ranked "b5" in Paul's book. Paul notes that he is in a "b5 and above" time period. Maybe he just got done exercise so he is more interested in talking to anyone (you are a b5 after all). Or maybe he is sitting in the dentists waiting room and has time to kill and is ok if he has to stop the conversation right away abruptly. In your book Paul is an "a1" so he can call in the middle of the night and you will take the call. Paul marks his availability as "b5 and above" and then app proceeds to start to contact anyone who matches. Someone else is ahead of you at b3 so they get the first call. Next guy is at b4 but he doesn't answer. So you are next at b5 and your phone rings and it's Paul. You have your conversation. Advantage: No need to schedule calls by time. They happen by importance. With granularity on both sides. Why I like this: I can make the most efficient use of time. Some people are more important and you want to take the call anytime anyplace. Others are less important and you are more picky. Also ability to use time that normally goes to waste. And prevents you from having to think "I've got a minute who should I call".
  • kybernetikos 13y ago
    I really like this idea, although I'd be unlikely to mark my availability often. Maybe have a 'get me a meeting now' button, which raises your availability until a meeting matches.
    • larrys 13y ago
      That's part of the idea. You don't map anything out. You hit a button that says literally "get me a meeting now" but further you can give it an idea of the level of importance of the meeting you want "now". Using the example I have given elsewhere if you are waiting for a plane that might take off in 10 minutes you don't want to call someone that you can't quickly get off the phone with. (You don't want to be rude to someone important). Otoh the person pitching you or the local realtor that you know that you need to check in with is the type that you can say "hey have to catch my plane talk to you later" (or your aunt). Or the guy at Home Depot with the size of the garden hose.
• nroets 13y ago
  An app that shows me where my friends and family are. (Like Google Latitude used to do)
  • yellowbkpk 13y ago
    This functionality was moved to the Google Plus app. At least on Android, you can fire up the Google+ app and go to "Locations". Invite people to see your location and ask them to let you view their location, etc.
  • wcummings 13y ago
    Find My Friends
• andrewcooke 13y ago
  a simple, motion-sensitive sleep alarm. i just tried to find one, but they all require a phone or tablet. they're nothing simple and stand-alone with a very basic interface.
  • aaronem 13y ago
    What is a "motion-sensitive sleep alarm"? One of those widgets that wakes you up at the most advantageous part of your sleep cycle that falls within a given bracket of time? ISTR seeing one of those a while back, in production, which was built on the wristwatch form factor and didn't need to integrate with an external device; if indeed that's what you're looking for, I'll see if I can turn it up and post info about it here.
    • andrewcooke 13y ago
      yeah, one of those (thanks). edit - knowing it was a watch i've found this - http://www.sleeptracker.com/ http://www.sleeptracker.com/ but if you have something simpler / less expensive / more attractive to my partner (less nerdy looking) i'd be interested. edi2 - ah, also http://www.axbo.com/pages/shop http://www.axbo.com/pages/shop so i guess to correct my original post - something more like a simple, traditional alarm clock. with less obvious tech. but that somehow works this same way. basically just a clock display and some buttons to set the alarm time, and i guess some kind of wearable sensor.
      • aaronem 13y ago
        The Zeo Sleep Manager Pro [1] looks like probably your best bet. Unfortunately, Zeo closed its doors about a year ago, which may make it difficult both to find the product available for purchase in the first place, and to get support for it once purchased. That said, phone integration appears to be otherwise ubiquitous in the field, at least judging from the few minutes I've spent poking around Google and Amazon; that being the case, your choices may well reduce to either accepting phone integration and making the best of it, or finding a way to get your hands on an orphaned product and making the best of that. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Zeo-ZEOBP01-Personal-Sleep-Manager/dp/B002IY65V4 http://www.amazon.com/Zeo-ZEOBP01-Personal-Sleep-Manager/dp/...
• sparkie 13y ago
  A social network where the users get paid for the advertising they do.
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    Can you expand on what you mean by this?
    • sparkie 13y ago
      I mean, we're practically all advertisers in some way or another - every time we share a promotion with our friends, or even just discuss a new product we're interested in. Most of the time we're not advertising for the sake of profit, but just sharing interests with like-minded people. Social media outlets attempt to tap into our general ignorance of advertising profitability - and they act as the middle-man between companies wishing to advertise, and the people who're sharing with friends - but facebook take all of the profit by inserting themselves between these relationships, and the users who are sharing don't notice they done a large part of the advertising work, for free. Facebook can obviously provide some usefulness, because it knows where you are, what your interests are, and your recent activities - so it can target you for specific promotions. A recent video by Vertitasium[1] showed how this isn't without problems though, and does not directly correspond to ROI for advertisers. (Likewise with many advertising models, there's always people trying to game them to earn a quick buck). Facebook provide the "advertising seed", by predicting who is likely to share. I see a different potential model that could arise with the gaining popularity of cryptocurrencies and electronic transactions though - one where advertisers only pay when it results in a direct ROI, by tracing electronic signatures through a public, distributed ledger. If a company wants to promote a product, and they offer a $10 advertising bounty for every advertisement which results in a direct sale. They initially create two digital signatures using "cryptocurrency X" and pass them to advertising agencies A and B. A advertises the product with "Get $5 back off your purchase when you register your product using X", in which they make this guarantee by creating a transaction whereby the original input transaction from the company is used as the input, and the output is split in half between the buyer and A. When the buyer then registers their product with the advertising company, they release the $10 into the public ledger, which propagates $5 to A, and $5 back to the buyer. B is greedy and wants all of the $10 for themselves, but fails to make any direct sale, and thus, is not paid anything. In this way, there can be any number of middle-men between the company and the buyer, and each party can agree on the fees they wish to have for each direct sale that results. By having a public ledger of who is making the sales, companies and advertisers alike can use analytics to discover the best routes to sales, and narrow down their advertising strategies, and agree on the most reasonable fees for each of the parties involved. The social media aspect is to have this technology encoded into the social platform, such that it is mostly invisible to users - they simply "promote" an existing post which has a bounty attached to it, and if those re-posts eventually result in direct sales, their wallet starts to grow. The part where users need to actively know about the system is when they purchase and register their purchase, such as to trigger the release of the advertising fees through the chain in the public ledger. These are only rough ideas and I have no idea how they'd be implemented effectively, including issues around anonymity and ensuring the system cannot be gamed by registering a product then returning it, for example, but I think there's infinite potential for such ideas to replace the advertising empires - so that literally anyone can become a paid-advertiser, and where ones effectiveness as an advertiser results in profit. This wouldn't make facebook et al obsolete, only distribute the profit a bit more - and it would help to improve the AI which is behind FB's advertising, as it would be inefficient to promote things which aren't likely to result in direct sales. Everyone wins, although facebook's profits may decline a bit. [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g
• sferoze 13y ago
  I think 'Ask HN: Idea Sunday' is a great idea, I am definitely looking for a project to work on and this is very helpful. Look forward to seeing this continue.
• phantom_oracle 13y ago
  Something to keep in mind whilst sharing your idea: Your idea may be great and may appeal to a science/tech community on HN, but be wary of building something where the audience is very small (if you plan on commercializing it). Although quite a few of the ideas have some "mass appeal", some of them also seem so narrow that you'd be better off building them as OSS projects and releasing them into the wild (as they'd never achieve huge commercial success). Just for the sake of guidance, plan on what you will do with any ideas you follow through with (go commercial or open-source it).
• d0m 13y ago
  Idea: Airbnb for food. An app where you buy meals cooked by your neighbors. I see two big trends these days. 1) People seems more willing to connect back with their neighbors and community. 2) People have less time but want to eat more healthy. Imagine this scenario: While going back home, a student could check on the app what's available to eat for tonight. Next to his place, there's a family willing to sell the extra tacos for a few bucks. The student would then just stop by and pick them up. Obviously, there would be quality rating and the possibility to reserve a few days in advance.
  • PanMan 13y ago
    In the Netherlands, this exists. Thuisafgehaald.nl
  • ThePhysicist 13y ago
    Wish granted: cookening.com
    • d0m 13y ago
      I would say it's a bit different, it's more akin to going to a restaurant and grabbing something to it, rather than eating with the family.
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    hah. I am surprised you have not heard of any of these!! http://www.quora.com/Food-Tech-Startups/What-companies-are-doing-or-have-done-Airbnb-for-food http://www.quora.com/Food-Tech-Startups/What-companies-are-d...
    • dmarble 13y ago
      Wow, quite the list! Now I feel compelled to read through some posts tagged "AirBnB for X". Interesting discussion on whether this model can succeed: http://www.quora.com/Will-Airbnb-for-food-be-a-successful-business-model http://www.quora.com/Will-Airbnb-for-food-be-a-successful-bu... And I just stumbled onto another one of these last week: http://cozymeal.com/ http://cozymeal.com/
• andrey-p 13y ago
  A wiki-style spoiler-free website for catching up with TV series/books. For instance, you've only watched Game of Thrones up to series 2, episode 3. You're about to start watching it again but can't remember what Daenerys was getting up to. You go to the Game of Thrones page on that website, pick your series and episode, and choose "Daenerys" as a tag filter. It brings up all the major plot points relating to her up to S2E3.
  • total 13y ago
    This does seem like a rather interesting idea. However, how might one implement this while remaining concise? For example, say a user tells the Wiki they are in S1E02; the Wiki would provide a synopsis of the events relating to the specified tag up till that point in the series. However, imagine a user tells the Wiki that they want the same specified tag up until S3E10. That surely complicates things as far more major plot points are likely to have occurred. How would this be handled? Would it just be what the user at S1E02 was told plus everything after and up until S3E10 tacked on to the end? To further illustrate this idea, consider the following: User receives two (2) plot points when selecting S1E02 User receives seven (7) plot points when selecting S2E07 User receives (13) plot points when selecting S3E01 ... It would be interesting if the synopsis provided could summarize dynamically based on what point the user was caught up to in the given series. I've no clue how that would be implemented, though, short of someone going in and writing a response that would keep it concise for every episode that a user could select. (This isn't my most concise comment on the internet. I'm sorry.)
    • andrey-p 13y ago
      That's pretty much what I was thinking, yeah. A detailed plot synopsis is provided in chunks of information of 1-2 sentences. Each of them is tagged as being at a certain point in the text/series, as well as extra tags about the characters/settings that they deal with. Each query that a user sends would just display a subset of the complete plot synopsis. So user at S3E10 would see all the things that user at S1E02 will be shown, and then the rest of seasons 1, 2 and 3. The character/setting filtering is just a way of filtering down things further. If you're just interested in what character A has been doing, you don't need to pore through information about characters B, C and D.
• glenstein 13y ago
  I would like to see something like PhotoSynth applied to video. PhotoSynth is a program that infers three dimensional objects from two dimensional photographs. In particular I'd like to see this applied to public events, like sports. I'd love to re-create, say, a music show or a live football game in 3D based on livestream video coming from people's phones.
• sakunthala 13y ago
  A more accessible desktop client program for "Bitcoin IPOs". Useful for crowdfunding. Kind of like this but less messy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133147.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133147.0
• findwork 13y ago
  Considering this is Idea Sunday, would anybody be interested in validating my idea? It was originally posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7519592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7519592 The idea is simple: +++Create an invite-only jobs mailing list similar to HN-standards+++ Companies want the best and talented workers wants to find the most rewarding work, so why not keep the 2 well-maintained with the best firms and the best workers? If you're interested, read my thread above or simply go here and help me validate the idea: https://www.surveymoz.com/s/109791NPJFT https://www.surveymoz.com/s/109791NPJFT All feedback welcome and I will reply to anyone that has any feedback (good or bad) on the idea.
• kybernetikos 13y ago
  A service for blind/partially sighted people where they can use a smart phone to connect to a service where volunteers (if any are connected) describe what they can see from the video streamed from the smart phone. The volunteers are given ratings afterwards, and their video streams checked against their descriptions by other volunteers. Monetized later via a paid service where the person is reliably connected to trained describers rather than volunteers.
  • khebbie 13y ago
    Have a look at bemyeyes.org it is just that its in public beta: https://beta.bemyeyes.org https://beta.bemyeyes.org
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• gfodor 13y ago
  - Browser plugin that lets you have private group conversations around other peoples' posts. Pure evil, I won't do it due to pesky ethics. (Think "people gossiping about how ugly someone is in their selfie behind their back" as primary use case.) UX would be injecting thread inline on major sites, first would obv be Facebook. - Better wedding planning software - Tool to go through LinkedIn "Who You Might Know" recommendations to assist in job hunt
  • wcummings 13y ago
    I love the first idea, and I might just be catty enough to implement it. I'll be sure to follow up w/ you if I do (:
  • cousin_it 13y ago
    Your first idea is basically whytheluckystiff's "hoodwink'd".
  • gopi 13y ago
    Your first idea was done before and FB shut it down http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/miss-being-able-to-comment-anonymously-on-techcrunch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/miss-being-able-to-comment-... http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-threatens-to-sue-techcrunch-commenter/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-threatens-to-sue-t...
• DanBC 13y ago
  Something like a Yubikey but: 1) with a battery or supercapacitor or something, so it can have a proper real time clock 2) with a much much better website. Yubikey needs to split the site into Enterprise users, individual users, and developers. The documentation for enterprise and individuals needs ro be much shorter and easier to understand. The documentation for developers should be as good as possible, including permissively licensed sample code in sensible languages. I really hate the current password set up. I want to carry my token with me and use that, and a passphrase, to unlock everything. Log into my computer, decrypt the drive, open email, perform root level actions, etc etc. i want it to work on my windows, linux, and max OSs. Across browsers. Etc.
• benjamincburns 13y ago
  Fair warning, I'm kind of a sarcastic person, and most of my ideas tend to reflect that... If you actually want to work on one of these, go for it! Just please let me know as I'd like to hear about it (and if you'd like, maybe help out where I can). Contact details in my profile page. My three latest ideas with variations: #1: Kitty cooker social game (please don't actually build this): Basically Cow Clicker meets prisoner's dilemma. Everyone gets a cute little kitten. In order to earn in-game currency (find a synonym for "cat poop" for a currency name, please), you must cook your friends' kittens. Your friends cannot cook your kitten if you have cooked theirs first. If all of your friends decide to abstain from kitten cooking for the day - you either all get gold, or all of your kitties get cooked anyway. In game currency can be used to buy cat clothes, cooking paraphernalia, recipes, etc. Recipes are a tradable item, effect earnings, might cost resources to use, and have a "cool down" period. Variant: Puppy kicker. #2: A toolbox of satirical marriage help apps. I really don't have a lot of tool candidates, but they're easy to think up. For instance, "argument score keeper." #3: Rent-a-sheep (name taken, needs something else): Presale of wool from individual New Zealand sheep. I live in New Zealand. There are lots of sheep here. Imagine a site where the landing page is a paddock of little fluffy sheep trotting around (SouthPark style animation, maybe?). When you click on a sheep, up pops a bio showing a photo of an actual sheep, from an actual farm in New Zealand. For a fee, you can "rent" this sheep, thereby receiving its wool production from that year. In the mean time, you'll get little auto-generated notifications about your sheep, perhaps including photos. You should also be able to choose how the wool is processed. That is, scouring, dying, spinning. All to be done in small batches. Much easier variant: Small-batch customized supply chain for New Zealand yarn sold to yarn stores in the USA (aka create your store's own brand of yarn). Interface looks a bit like a slot machine - choose type of wool, then choose scourer/washer, then choose either/both dying service and spinning service. Both variants should be very "connection" focused. That is, if you're renting a sheep, the site should do everything in its power to make you feel a connection with that sheep. If you're a yarn store owner, you should know a bit about the people who are performing each of the services, and you should hopefully have a window into how they're processing your yarn.
  • tomcam 13y ago
    #3: Do farmers have the time or inclination to photo, name, and update the status of individual sheep?
• miguelrochefort 13y ago
  A single interface/application that can be used to do anything. An actual implementation of http://zombo.com http://zombo.com. I don't want an account on 1000 different sites, nor do I want 100 apps on my smartphone. It can be done. Just not through incremental changes.
• DanBC 13y ago
  "Pay for friendly email". I would pay for faked friendly emails and messages. You'd need to price it low enough to be sensible. There would have to be strict no sex rules; and protection against scamming. I imagine it workin a bit like camming does now - there's a "menu" of available people with mini biographies and the user picks one and selects what kind of service they want (early morning motivational; late night inquisitive; etc) and pays up front for X messages. The message writer sends the messages and the site takes a cut of the payment. This is a service, it is not an i troduction or dating or real friend site.
• lukencode 13y ago
  A screencast app (or browser extension) specifically to create those short gifs showing product interactions that have been showing up recently.
  • karangoeluw 13y ago
    LICEcap [1] does this beautifully. > LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or .LCF. [1] http://www.cockos.com/licecap/ http://www.cockos.com/licecap/
  • Jonovono 13y ago
    I making something sort of like this for Mac. It's for recording a selection of your screen with the system audio. I have not made it so it can convert to Gif or WebM, but that is in the plans! https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter https://github.com/Jonovono/cutter.
• DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  I don't know if this already exists or not, but I'd like an app for iOs/droid that shows all of my installed apps and what permissions they need -- in a comparison/grid format. It's easy to agree to all kinds of stupid permissions when you're first looking at an app, but later on, having dogFood 3.0 phone home all the time when it's never used is not-so-good. I'd like to go back periodically and look at all of my apps, at one time, from a permissions standpoint.
• callmeed 13y ago
  API documentation tool: If you have a REST(ish) API, the tool would allow you to: * Describe the authentication * Enter all the objects, methods, URL endpoints, and parameters of your API The tool would then: * Generate pretty documentation, including example requests/responses * Include a working web-based API console (like Mashery has) * Auto-generates client libraries in Ruby, Python, PHP, Node, Obj-C, etc. and keep them updated in GitHub Bonus points for bootstrapping the API information from your Rails routes file.
  • intelekshual 13y ago
    RAML promises most of this: http://raml.org/ http://raml.org/ Specifically, check out the projects section, which includes: an API designer, an API console and a documentation generator.
  • sunir 13y ago
    Like http://apiary.io http://apiary.io ?
    • dabernathy89 13y ago
      Holy crap, that looks fantastic.
  • dcposch 13y ago
    I like Apiary a lot so far
• sage_joch 13y ago
  A service that facilitates company matching of employee donations to non-political charities. Ideally, the service should make it as effortless as possible for all participants: employee, company, charity. This could be generalized into a kind of philanthropic social network.
  • kareemm 13y ago
    www.chimp.net does this in Canada (been a client of mine for several years and counting).
• mzemel 13y ago
  A website that lets you watch the second episode of many television shows. The pilot episode, I feel, is usually not indicative of the direction/feeling of the show, or is concerned with setting up the backstory, whereas the second episode sets the direction for where the show is going.
  • jansanchez 13y ago
    Couldn't you already do this with Netflix or Hulu? Just start with the 2nd episode?
    • kzisme 13y ago
      Yeah you can just select the second, or whatever episode you want to watch. I'm not seeing the point of this.
• pixelcort 13y ago
  Smartphone Email Client with Chat UX For Mac, http://www.uniboxapp.com/ http://www.uniboxapp.com/ comes close, but basically an a app for my phone for Email, grouped by sender, sorted by last message received per sender. Most personal email nowadays are one-liners, so this UX would work well for them. Expanding, senders could be organized into groups, etc.
• eli 13y ago
  An ESP (email service provider) geared towards people publishing content instead of marketers. Marketers are certainly the bigger & better market, but they have hundreds of options to choose from. Almost no one targets publishers. (ping me if interested... I know more than anyone should about email)
  • slig 13y ago
    I think Tiny Letter <https://tinyletter.com/> https://tinyletter.com/> does what you want.
• eli 13y ago
  An automated "backup" service for your website that crawls around and builds a static copy of all the pages it can see. If the site goes does (or if you push a maintenance mode button) it switches to the static site, maybe with a small warning message. You'd probably need to run the DNS or integrate with DNS services to make that easy to implement. The key is it needs to be stupidly easy to set up. (ping me if you actually start working on this)
  • workhere-io 13y ago
    wget has a mirror option that can do the crawling part for you.
    • eli 13y ago
      Yep. In my experience it tends to miss a fair bit of stuff, though. I think you'd want to be more aggressive about sniffing out files loaded by javascript or linked from CSS. Wget could probably serve as part of an MVP though. I don't think the crawler is actually that hard. The killer feature would be the execution and the UX. It should be usable by anyone.
  • liyanchang 13y ago
    Very similar, but not exactly: Cloudflare. Takes over your dns routes and will detect when you are down and tries to continue serving.
    • eli 13y ago
      Yeah, they offer something similar (and in some ways better since it proxies all the requests, it knows what files to save). But it's not quite what I want. Also there's a lot more you could do. For example, versioning: show me what the site looked like last thursday. For people using crappy or nonexistent CMSes this could be huge.
• eli 13y ago
  Heroku add-on for hosted Varnish (the freakin' awesome reverse caching proxy). You'd be able to speed up people's sites and potentially even save them money by allowing them to run with fewer dynos. Ideally you'd be able to tweak the config and view stats/graphs through a web interface. (ping me if you actually start working on this)
• EwanG 13y ago
  Telepresence for travel. One use case is that I don't have time to travel to location X, but would like to be part of a group who is hiking, etc there. Could see this being quadcopters with cameras with dual controls (remote for me and possible to be overridden by someone on site if there is an issue). Second use case is my disabled daughter who I can bring back videos of places to, but it's not quite the same as sharing the moment, and of course would give her a sense of freedom to be able to zoom in and look at something I might not have thought to capture. Given connectivity issues to many of the places I know "I" would like to be able to go to virtually, I suspect part of the problem will be convincing folks that it doesn't ruin their wilderness experience to let other folks attend virtually. Given that you would then have fewer travelers impacting the environment I would consider this a net win.
  • prawn 13y ago
    I did wonder if anyone would watch real-time first-person hiking. Bit like the slow TV movement. My brother has done a few hikes with a GoPro set to capture a photo every few seconds and the results can be quite cool. With storage and power, you could probably capture something. Streaming would be a lot harder in even slightly remote areas.
• josephjrobison 13y ago
  A matchmaking service for business owners to digital marketing and/or web development companies. A business owner is not going to know everything that the digital company is explaining to them or selling to them, and since there's no large digital companies that are the gold standard, but just a very fractured industry, it's hard for them to really know what they're getting. The matchmaking company would advocate for the business owner. The matchmaking company would really understand the web development and digital marketing landscape, but they are not selling the services themselves. They would ask the potential agencies the really hard questions that the business owners wouldn't know to ask on their own.
• josephjrobison 13y ago
  Uber for delivery via drones. Kind of reaching, and I know it's not practical yet, but the general concept is cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Uber did it themselves first since they have a knack for trying weird delivery stuff like ice cream or flowers or whatever. You would open your Uberish app, punch in the weight of what you need delivered and where to deliver it to, it would give you an estimate, and come to your house to pick it up and make the delivery. Really not that far off, I believe the FAA has or is relaxing the rules on commercial drone flight below 400ft and the Parrot drones are capable of following waypoints on their own to a destination, and coming right back home when they're done.
  • lukeholder 13y ago
    so http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011 http://www.amazon.com/b?node=8037720011 ?
    • josephjrobison 13y ago
      I was thinking more of sending stuff peer to peer than purchasing something from Amazon! Or a system to help small businesses to do so.
• olalonde 13y ago
  A package/dependency manager for C/C++. In my limited experience working with C/C++ projects, the most painful part was always getting the project to actually build (downloading all dependencies, figuring out how the Makefile works, etc.). In other words, a npm/brew for C/C++.
  • milani 13y ago
    For anyone who wants to see how it can be built: CocoaPods does it for xcode and objc.
• EwanG 13y ago
  One more pain point I'd like to solve. Something that can process my pictures, and tell me what wildflower(s) are in them. Sitting down with a guidebook is tedious, and sometimes it's hard to tell which version from a book or site is closer to the picture you have because of the angle. So I end up adding meta data that it's a picture with blue flowers. Not to mention that there are some longer term ecological studies that could be done if I can see how often flowers or plants turned up in a certain area 10 years ago compared to now...
• artur_makly 13y ago
  Back when we were in an accelerator, I was blown away by how many tools were being used by the other startups ( over 300 teams ) that i've never heard of. So i came up with http://Vettted.com http://Vettted.com as a way to harness that data..and ideally create conversations about how each team used each tool specifically.( that part still needs work ) Any takers?
• crablar 13y ago
  "FootTraffic.com", a social network/foot traffic planning site. The idea is that brick-and-mortar stores/restaurants/hairstylists/etc that are located close to one another can communicate and coordinate days of the year (or month) when everyone in the area who is participating offers some sort of discount or sample. It incentivizes consumers to make a day out of going to an area of town that might not otherwise get a ton of business. Could lead to an interesting community of people travel around the world exploring and going to FootTraffic days.
• epeterson19 13y ago
  Anyone been to an airport lately? All open outlets are swarmed upon by people charging and keeping watch on their phones to make sure they don't get stolen. How about mini lockers with miniusb and apple chargers in each locker. People swipe a credit card and can rent a mini locker to charge their phone is. I realize how low tech this is but it's less so than people babysitting charging phones.
  • rythie 13y ago
    We have these in few places in the UK, including some of the airports.
  • GBond 13y ago
    http://gochargenow.com/locker.html http://gochargenow.com/locker.html
• cglee 13y ago
  odesk for physical low/no skill physical labor. Some things just require muscle: moving, yardwork, lifting large furniture, etc. Would be nice to be able to see who's near you and hirable on an hourly basis. Bonus points for verified background checks, etc.
  • lixon 13y ago
    http://www.taskrabbit.com/ http://www.taskrabbit.com/
    • cglee 13y ago
      I've used taskrabbit and it's very close to the idea I mentioned, though what I had in mind is more pure physical labor related. The premise of the idea is to remove middlemen like moving companies, landscaping contractors, etc who do nothing more than organize laborers.
      • lawncheer 13y ago
        Hey, I am putting the finishing touches on lawncheer.com, will be launching in a couple weeks, hope to meet the mowing/landscaping need.
• edvinmemet 13y ago
  Crowdbetting/Crowdtrading (etc) A sports betting website that uses crowdsourcing to make the best bets. As a user, you predict the outcome of some match, but your final bet isn't necessarily what you chose, but what the crowd data indicates is the best bet. Much like the CIA found crowdsourcing to be very effective in forecasting global events (http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-...), I think there's a good chance you could successfully crowdsource things such as betting on sport results. The way the CIA thing works, I assume (the article doesn't get into much detail), is you have 3,000 people, you ask them to make some predictions, and in the end you select the top 1%. When you compare the future predictions of these top forecasters with those of CIA analysts, you find that the average Joes tend to be more correct (even though they have less information than the CIA analysts). So you can do something similar with sports betting. You have a group of top forecasters and their predictions for some game assume some probability distribution (like, 30% bet on the home side, and so on). By comparing this distribution with the average odds set by the major brokers, you can identify where the odds have been set incorrectly (according to your crowd) and exploit these weaknesses. For example, let's say that your crowd says that the odds of the Away team winning should be 2:1, but the brokers set the odds at 4:1. Then, this would be a good bet to place, assuming the crowd is 'more right' than the brokers.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• zarify 13y ago
  Manual route planning for walkers/runners/cyclers. My idea was that there are lots of fitness style apps that track where you've gone, how fast and so on, but I haven't seen anything that lets you plan your route out beforehand, see how long it'll be and then estimate how long it will take. I was thinking drawing a simple overlay on a map interface. I recently got back into walking/running and wanted to slowly ramp up what I did, but wanted a route I could get all the way through (not run until I can't, then have to still get back) so wanted to plan ahead, and also allow for cuts through parks, bush trails and so on.
  • graup 13y ago
    Also, add elevation information. Especially for cycling, would be great to see how a slightly longer route compares to a shorter one with bigger ascents. Wrote this, googled it and actually found something fairly useful: http://www.doogal.co.uk/RouteElevation.php http://www.doogal.co.uk/RouteElevation.php
    • zarify 13y ago
      I figured there'd be some traditional route planning already done. The problem with a lot of this is it's looking for the most efficient route, rather than the route someone actually wants (eg if I want to do a circuit from my house). Agreed that elevation is a good thing too though.
  • jalonso510 13y ago
    have you tried something like www.gmap-pedometer.com? that's how i plan my routes and I've been pretty happy with it.
    • zarify 13y ago
      I hadn't, that actually looks pretty good. Thanks :)
  • xelfer 13y ago
    Garmin connect can do this, as can runkeeper: http://runkeeper.com/search/routes http://runkeeper.com/search/routes. I'm sure mapmyrun and others allow it as well? you point and click along the route and it calculates the distance for you, garmin even tells you expected time to complete.
• mikejarema 13y ago
  I'd like a way to skim through videos. Playing at 2x or 4x doesn't really do the trick. For contrast, if I'm skimming through an article, I can quickly scan for keywords, look for paragraph breaks & sentence breaks to get the gist of what a particular section of the text is describing. How can I skim a video the same way? I'm more interested in a solution for a 30 or 60 minute recorded lecture or conference keynote than something that let's me skim a music video or blockbuster movie. So the solution here may be more suited to one form of video than another. https://skimo.tv/ https://skimo.tv/ seems to be trying to hit the mark, but from what I've seen, they've got a long way to go. And I'm not 100% sure that pulling a few short video segments out of a long video is the solution.
  • milani 13y ago
    For audio there is an app called Recordium ( recordiumapp.com ). It is a great tool for lecture noting and skimming the audio later. Someone should do the same for video.
  • Spittie 13y ago
    One possible way I could think is to have the video and the transcript side by side. Then you could skim around the transcript, and clicking on a phrase should bring you to that point in the video.
• yread 13y ago
  A device that sits in your toilet (under the water level) and detects trace amounts of blood or other stuff that shouldn't be in urine or stool
  • mavdi 13y ago
    This is an excellent idea. Lot's of cancers can be prevented this way.
    • paulkaplan 13y ago
      Citation needed?
      • yread 13y ago
        I think mavdi really meant "diagnosed sooner". Or perhaps cancer deaths could be prevented? Either way, just google "cancer blood in urine" or stool and you get the idea.
        • mavdi 13y ago
          yes indeed, sorry I meant cancer deaths prevented
  • icebraining 13y ago
    Toto is way ahead of you; their patents has already been issued and expired: https://www.google.com/patents/US5111539?pg=PA25&dq=5111539&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0XFCU4rtNdCDhQeaoICYCw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA https://www.google.com/patents/US5111539?pg=PA25&dq=5111539&...
• khebbie 13y ago
  Hey how about "problem monday" then. It is said that often times you should not start with an idea, but rather with a problem. So maybe posting problems could lead to great ideas...
  • RivieraKid 13y ago
    Many (most) good ideas don't solve problems but improve something, create new way to have fun etc. For example, I wouldn't say that Minecraft solves a problem (unless you define "problem" in a weird way).
• frankus 13y ago
  A "Movies I've been meaning to watch" queue. Sort of like Netflix's queue, but not limited to a particular provider's catalog. For each movie, show the cheapest (legal) way to stream/rent/buy it. Add price drop alerts. Monetize through commissions and/or ads.
  • taitems 13y ago
    http://goodfil.ms http://goodfil.ms does a pretty good job of this.
• jansanchez 13y ago
  Netflix for Sports. But not quite the same. There wouldn't be just 1 subscription were you get all. You would be able to pay per game and as well a pass for all games of a certain team. You would be able to watch any games live or any other time of your convenience. It would be cool also to have just 'a show main highlights of the game'. Prices per game should be relatively cheap, like 1.99 or 2.99; except some cases like championship finals. I would try first to secure the rights to show some of the European soccer leagues and championships as they should be easier to get than any of the main American leagues. Hopefully none of the US networks have an exclusivity agreement.
  • jon-wood 13y ago
    > I would try first to secure the rights to show some of the European soccer leagues and championships as they should be easier to get than any of the main American leagues. Maybe the Lithuanian 3rd Division. European soccer leagues cost a fortune to get rights for: UK Premiership: £1.78bn [1] UK Third Division: £88mn [2] Annoyingly I couldn't find actual costs on much else, but my point is that European soccer is huge, and you won't pick up the rights cheaply. [1] http://www.premierleague.com/en-gb/fans/faqs/how-much-clubs-receive-broadcast-money.html http://www.premierleague.com/en-gb/fans/faqs/how-much-clubs-... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_League_Championship#Broadcasting_rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_League_Championship#Br...
    • jansanchez 13y ago
      While the Premier League rights seem to be quite expensive, I wouldn't go to the Lithuanian 3rd Division :) Bundesliga seems much more approachable [1]. Rights costs are €70 million in the current cycle, and close to €150 million in the next. I am sure that the portuguese and italian leagues would also be more affordable. It would be quite interesting to know costs for La Liga (Spanish). One may also be able to approach the rights owner with some more interesting ideas, like instead of paying all upfront, they will get a high % per user that purchased a match. Not sure how would that go. Anyway this is just an idea, and it would take someone with good financial resources to undertake this project. [1] http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/bundesliga_to_double_international_rights_fees_with_fox_deal/ http://www.sportspromedia.com/news/bundesliga_to_double_inte...
• ghiculescu 13y ago
  I use Spotify for listening to music, it pushes data through to Last.fm, but I suck at actually checking Last.fm for its (very good) new music recommendations. So take one of those recommendations from the Last.fm API and email it to me each week. Add affiliate links (iTunes, Amazon, etc.) and take a little cut each time I buy something I discover through this. Better yet, if Last.fm just implemented this themselves I'd be so happy.
  • slazaro 13y ago
    There's a Last.fm app inside Spotify, maybe that would make it easier / more likely for you to check it regularly.
• mavdi 13y ago
  Do this for me and I will subscribe. I will send a box full of my letters in month to you, you scan them and make them searchable online for me and send the box back with a label. Later when I need something, I can search online and know which box it is in.
• afshinmeh 13y ago
  I'm in!
• larrydag 13y ago
  A peer-to-peer broadband solution to replace ISP dependence. Perhaps this could be used on a small scale at first for hacker communities and then grow from there. Challenges would be on interconnecting between p2p community centers without relying on major ISPs. A hyrid approach might be needed at first to establish connectivity. Previous efforts: Netsukuku - http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-internet-network-the-netsukuku-idea/ http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-i... P2P Foundation Blog - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/ http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/
• dopplesoldner 13y ago
  A sentiment search engine. Suppose you type the name of a restaurant or a camera or a protein supplement - you get condensed view of "sentiments" with scores in different categories. Data is scraped from individual reviews, shopping sites etc. Additionally you get information about the original source of information so you can carry further research if you want to.
• cweiss 13y ago
  A really good iTunes/MP3 de-duper. Should have the following all in one package: - Talks to the iTunes library file (IE - doesn't just edit the filesystem) - Undo/non-destructive final delete. - Smart/fast search that reflects how iTunes handles duplicates. Should smartly leverage the following: - Filename compare: filename/filename-1/filename-2 - Files with identical sizes, then binary compare - Metadata compare (title, album, time) - Allow auditioning of tracks - Smart delete options - Select all lower bitrate duplicates, select all filename-1, select all duplicates from path X. - Preserve/combine metadata from duplicates (IE - combine play counts, ratings, copy tag if tag in target is missing, etc). - Clean out missing items from iTunes library. - Vast amounts of idiot-proofing (list files/entries to be changed, confirmation dialogs for any modifications, etc.) I've yet to find an iTunes manager that has all of the above - Most fail at the smart de-dupe search so when I get pages of results, I still have to audit each entry.
• cweiss 13y ago
  GetMeHome - A non-driving-centric nav system for the 2am crowd to safely get home from a night out. Requirements: - UI geared for too-drunk-to-read - Big buttons, no text entry, large-type text, low clutter images. - One button actions/options - "Go home", "Find open bathroom", "Find hotel", "Prefer Train" "Cab OK" - EASY turn-by turn navigation for walking (large font street names with "turn left in 2 blocks"). Always update auto-routing. Bonus points for avoiding sketchy areas or using obvious landmarks ("Turn left at Bob's Transmission Shop"). - Location/time alerts for mass transit "Get off here" or "Wait here for 1:30am Blue Line Train to Hillsboro" - Alarms for "Time to leave the club for next train" - Loud/big alarm for "Leave now for last train!" - Since most phones seem to die around 2am, steps should be taken to be as battery conservative as possible - Walking = less frequent server polling. Also cache simple directions locally and turn off network features altogether if battery life is super low. (edited for readability)
• Jemaclus 13y ago
  * Hearing aids that can run off body heat. Not even sure if this is possible, but I've heard of watches that can recharge their batteries from body heat. You know how expensive and annoying it is to buy batteries for a hearing aid? * A better credit report system than Experian/TransUnion/etc. The current system is flawed on a number of levels -- not the least being that someone can file a claim against you and you have very little recourse. Something with a little more accountability and a little less emphasis on distant history. For instance, if two years ago I lost my job and fell behind on bills, but now I've had a steady job for a year and have been paying down my debt, that shouldn't rule me out for buying a car or a house. In other words, just because I might have been financially unstable in the past does not mean I'm financially unstable now. * a HUD for subtitles/closed captioning on TVs, so hearing people don't have to see subtitles while deaf/hard of hearing people can see them. This would be especially awesome in movie theaters. * A Fitbit clone that actually figures out what I'm doing, rather than just counting steps. (For example, it knows my height/weight/gender, and it knows that I took X steps in Y minutes, so it should be able to calculate Z pace and conclude that I'm running.) * Something that makes tracking caloric consumption EASY. For instance, I'm at a friend's house and we have some mac 'n cheese. I open up my LoseIt app, and I see several options: Kraft Mac 'n Cheese, Velveeta Mac 'n Cheese, KFC Mac 'n Cheese. Well, you know, we made this mac 'n cheese from scratch. Which one of these is the most analogous to what I just ate? At this point, I'm just guessing, right? So make an app that makes those guesses for me. "What'd you eat today, Jemaclus? On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being super healthy, how healthy do you consider what you just ate?" Then check out all the values for macaroni and cheese, identify the options that most closely match the health scale I gave, run some calculations, and come back with an estimate on what I ate. If at the end of the day you say "You ate somewhere between 1900 and 2150 calories today," that's better than saying "You ate exactly 1937 calories today," when honestly, I was just guessing about those portions to begin with.
• shadowcats 13y ago
  FWIW, my list of ideas: http://firespotting.com/submitted?id=shadowcats http://firespotting.com/submitted?id=shadowcats
• samelawrence 13y ago
  I will slowly update this over time: https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas
• lixon 13y ago
  a service for creating simple wedding invitation pages with a unique URL. no ads or sponsored links