8 ms·

Ask HN: Idea Sunday

219 points by jw2013 12y ago

Kick start the first Idea Sunday of May. (PLEASE upvote if you like this post to be seen by more people, as someone in the previous Idea Sunday mentioned the post with less points than number of comments will be penalized in ranking. Thanks.)

mjnaus 12y ago
A service combining the flexibility and ease of use of a CMS site (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) with the speed and security of a static HTML site. The CMS version would be a private site (not accessible by the general public) which is compiled into a static HTML site which is publicly accessible. There should be a way to deal with formerly dynamic elements, such as contact/comment forms, site search, etc. (possibly using third party APIs) There also should be a way to deal with updates to the CMS version of the site, so that these changes are detected, compiled and processed into the static version of the site.
- johnbender 12y ago
  I'm not sure if this fits all your needs but there seems to be at least some meaningful overlap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-for-github/ http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content...
- ilyanep 12y ago
  This might also be similar to what you're looking for? http://jekyllrb.com/ http://jekyllrb.com/ EDIT: Oh sorry, I didn't realize that Prose was based on Jekyll! I guess this suggestion is a bit redundant, but this way you don't need Github if you have your own server, I guess.
- gamegoblin 12y ago
  I'm currently working on a Haskell web framework that allows one to easily define all of the possible values dynamic content can take, generate all permutations of content (assuming the values are finite), and load them all into an in-memory cache to be fired off, pre-baked. Inspired by the idea of a pure function -- that is, a function that is given the same arguments should always return the same result (and have no side effects). More general than a CMS, but the idea is similar.
- mjnaus 12y ago
  These solutions seem to, kinda, take a stab at the concept, but what we're really after is something way simpler. Think a simple text field into which you type a URL. Then this service would visit, crawl and compile the entire site into a static HTML site (with options to enhance the final version of the static site). This would have to work independently of the platform used to build the original site and ideally the service would also provide a means of getting the newly created static site onto it's hosting platform (be it Dropbox, Digital Ocean or whatever other platform you want to host the static site).
  - dukedougal 12y ago
    Httrack does this.
    - mjnaus 12y ago
      Yep, they do. However not as a service. With Httrack, I'd need to download their software first, and then run it whenever the site's been updated. I'd like a online service that handles it all for me.
      - dukedougal 12y ago
        It would be trivially easy to put the front end on HT track.
  - lazylizard 12y ago
    wget --convert-links -r http://www.gnu.org/ http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog ?
- syerram2 12y ago
  Are you thinking of something similar to http://cloudcannon.com/ http://cloudcannon.com/?
  - mjnaus 12y ago
    No, not really. CloudCannon allows you to build static websites on Dropbox (if I'm not mistaken). What I'm after is means of building and maintaing a site using your CMS of choice (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) and then have this site compiled into a static HTML site (on request or using some sort of timer/interval) and uploaded to wherever I'm planning to host it. Looking to get away from the speed and security issues of CMS based sites but still having the flexibility and ease of use when building/maintaining a site. Basically using any CMS to build and deploy static HTML web sites.
- alecsmart1 12y ago
  It's been on my mind to create a WP plugin which allows you to upload a static version of the entire site to another location. Do you think that would do the trick?
  - mjnaus 12y ago
    It kinda would, however it would be limited to Wordpress. I'd like something that works with whatever CMS/platform the site's build on.
- lukejduncan 12y ago
  I think Movable Type does this http://movabletype.org/ http://movabletype.org/
- AustinDizzy 12y ago
  Maybe try looking into Grow? http://preview.growsdk.org/ http://preview.growsdk.org/
  - mjnaus 12y ago
    Although Grow looks very cool, it doesn't allow me to use any given CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) to build static HTML sites.
- simplyinfinity 12y ago
  I'm building a service that's something like that. Ping me if you are interested in a demo hi @ !dotfinity! . !eu!
karangoeluw 12y ago
You're early for a Sunday.
- suhastech 12y ago
  Unless you're in the east
- icebraining 12y ago
  Nope, it's been almost five hours since 00:00 UTC :)
- gamegoblin 12y ago
  Not everyone lives in the Bay ;) But I see you're from WashU (howdy from Arkansas!), so I guess it was still early for you. We should all just go by UTC, I guess.
doubt_me 12y ago
Hacker news 2.0 An actual tech news column with reporters and a sleek website and or maybe a podcast here and there I mean seriously why hasn't that happened yet
- daturkel 12y ago
  I would contribute to this, both in terms of donating to see this happen but also to the content and/or the community. Silly as it sounds, my least favorite thing about HN is the startup content---i don't care about agile this or lean that or pivoting or whatever, I'm interested in people "hacking" on passion projects, making cool tools, and breaking stuff.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  The reason it hasn't happened yet is because that's a full time job, the initial costs are high for AV, the profit margins are razor-thin. (or, at the least, the money a person with the skills to write quality tech journalism would always be far less than the money they could earn by applying the tech skills for technical tasks)
- Huhty 12y ago
  Try http://tech.snapzu.com http://tech.snapzu.com
- rcfox 12y ago
  Aren't you just describing VentureBeat and TechCrunch, etc?
zercool 12y ago
A site with free, open, community driven practice problems and solutions. Sort of like a wikipedia for questions. I could imagine this being a key ingredient in the future of OER. Would be cool to see something like this integrated with http://metacademy.org http://metacademy.org
- jwcrux 12y ago
  Don't the stack exchange sites already serve for something like this?
  - zercool 12y ago
    Good point, actively contributing answers certainly helps practice a skill area. But I can't imagine thinking, "I need to practice tree traversal algorithms: to Stack Overflow!"
  - zodiac 12y ago
    I think his focus was on the "practice" in "practice problems and solutions. I can't really practice problems on SE.
- alagu 12y ago
  You could try http://www.hackerrank.com/ http://www.hackerrank.com/
  - zercool 12y ago
    Nice! Can I create questions myself? Also, is it only CS?
mauricio-OH 12y ago
A payment form that supports subscriptions and one time payments. It has options for taxes and it comes in English French and Spanish. Moonclerk but with taxes and languages. Chargify with a beautiful form and languages.
pubby 12y ago
An MMO where all content is created by players using a wiki-like interface. Editing privilege is tied to a "creation skill" that levels up with each approved editing action.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  Worldbuilding as a game mechanic could be amazing. I have this totally evidenced belief that there are tons of people who are master worldbuilders and are poor at writing fiction/narrative or dislike doing so. I'd love to find a way to open up content creation to such a demographic.
  - lukejduncan 12y ago
    Didn't Neal Stephenson try something like this? Google is failing me on this, but I swear he tried doing some wiki based community built world.
    - yzzxy 12y ago
      I believe you may be thinking of the The Mongoliad[0], which was a communal narrative effort he founded/was in involved in. I'm not totally sure of the original format of the storybuilding process, but I do know they are now available as ebooks. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mongoliad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mongoliad (Wikipedia because I think it better explains the nature of the project than the homepage)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jes5199 12y ago
  I daydream about this periodically, but I can't quite picture how the community keeps the game rules balanced enough for there to be a game
- blazespin 12y ago
  Second Life is like this. It works well, but the tool set could always be more improved and focused on MMO.
neilxdsouza 12y ago
A search engine for the legal system. I had sent this idea to YC 2013 and they asked me to submit a video, but I felt I don't have the creds to apply. Take each section of a country's law and convert it into prolog clauses. Queries can then be run on the legal engine. For defendants it gives you insights on how to build a case and for prosecution it identifies relevant sections and evidence that needs to be provided to have a successful conviction. The same can be applied to divorce, patents, property etc. My idea was to use an Erlang map reduce system to help fan out the queries which are dispatched to an underlying Prolog knowledge base (Erlang supports something like Channels/Ports). I have a bias towards ideas which have a social impact. The business case is: In a country like India there are over 20 million pending cases in courts. Imagine both sides of lawyers and the judge all having access to a system like this - cases could be resolved a lot faster and time spent building defense/prosecution would be a significantly smaller. Implemented right, this could somewhat level the playing field and allow poorer people have access to some sort of legal advice, which today they would not be able to afford. Monetizing the system could be charging for queries as you probe deeper and deeper into the system/advertising for lawyers. I think commoditizing law has immense potential and should have a very large business potential. I always wanted to implement and Idea like this as Open Source, but here in India nobody would fund ideas like this. I'm putting it out there as I believe it's time has come.
- zodiac 12y ago
  Lots of what lawyers and judges do involve interpreting and arguing for a certain interpretation of laws - eg, whether Aero is merely renting an antenna to individual consumers or performing a work publicly to all of them as a whole. Case law also sets all sorts of legal "tests" that involve human judgement (eg proportionate force in response, what a reasonable person would believe). How will your search engine deal with this?
  - neilxdsouza 12y ago
    So at this early stage, I am not talking about replacing lawyers. Their interpretation would still be required. However if there are 5 possible interpretations, the engine should present all 5 possibilities to the lawyer. This will help her prepare for the case better.
shawnps 12y ago
A code review tool specifically for Golang projects based on many of the contribution guidelines listed here http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html A few months ago when I made some contributions to Go I realized I like their code review process and tools much more than the typical GitHub PR workflow.
GavinB 12y ago
A service that sits between my bank account and subscription services that only accepts charges that I've preapproved. This would let me keep track of the services that I have so I don't end up with subscriptions to sites or services that I've forgotten about. It would also let me revoke permission to charge the account at any time. No need to cancel a card if one won't cancel or changes the fees--you just revoke their permission individually.
- blazespin 12y ago
  Or sits between any charge, sends you alerts and genuinely manages fraud risk better than banks. Also provides community information on chargebacks. Basically, a service that works for the consumer rather than the companies paying the fees. Uses contextual advertising based on what you are buying.
- drsim 12y ago
  Direct Debit in the UK does this. You can cancel any instruction at any time, usually through your online banking where all instructions and charges are listed. It is widespread and the norm for subscriptions.
  - smsm42 12y ago
    In Israel, the same arrangement exists. I was very surprised when I learned that in the US you give to the company your account number and they basically can initiate money pulls any time they like and the bank does not have a list where you say who is approved and who is not. That seems to be kind of backwards and insecure. I know there are probably ample reasons for that but I'd feel much better if it was arranged like that. Paypal and Amazon Payments and other systems like this provide partial solutions but why banks wouldn't do that? Looks like something that belongs there.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Same here in Portugal. And we also have free virtual CCs with predefined limits.
- chuinard 12y ago
elij 12y ago
A site to discover content using an algorithm that ignores metrics we have begun to game (likes and viewings) and instead builds rankings based on pairwise comparisons. Would allow discovery of new good content that hasn't employed growth hacks and will also differentiate between equally rated content. https://aeolipyle.co https://aeolipyle.co (algorithm complete -- need to find good use for it.)
- michaelmior 12y ago
  I'm curious: pairwise comparisons of what? It's not clear to me what your algorithm does.
  - elij 12y ago
    After you view content (ideally immutable content like a film, music, books or computer games) -- when you offer to rate you are instead promoted on how it faired vs a previous experience. "You've just seen Terminator 2 -- how is it compared to The Matrix?) In terms of algorithm it's got around issues of merging incomplete Condorcet elections (as not everyone will compare or rank every item) and clustering. Turning these partial elections into a single order ranking.
  - rcfox 12y ago
    If I understand correctly, this sounds like an idea that I've been thinking about for a little while. Essentially, you do binary search-insertion into a list, where the comparison function is a prompt to the user asking "Is A better than B?" (If it's too difficult to judge "betterness" between two items, you could just as easily swap in a different comparison. "Is A funnier than B?") One thing that people always ask when I mention this is: "What if A and B are equal?" Well, then you answer no, because A is not better than B. If your answers are consistent, then A and B will end up next to each other in the list.
    - elij 12y ago
      yup -- I believe this is a better user experience in terms of capturing ratings (by capitalising on the availability heuristic) What you're describing technically would work when each person compares every item (and would fall into the domain of condorcet methods). However in practice the election becomes a graph (rather than list or x/y table) with cyclical dependencies and conflicting comparisons -- it becomes quite hard to resolve -- but it can be.
Fizzer 12y ago
A/B testing for the masses. Here's an example: Say a someone is deciding which shirt to wear. They whip out their smartphone, launch the A/B app, takes a picture of themselves wearing each of two shirts. Within 30 seconds, they have an answer of which shirt hundreds of people liked better. While they're waiting for the reply, they're prompted to rate other people's pictures. This is as simple as seeing two pictures and tapping the one that they like more. The number of use cases is endless. You could be shopping for eyeglasses and trying to figure out which look better - just try on both right there in the store and get a response from the A/B app. It's not limited to fashion, as people could use it for any subjective comparison.
- KnightHawk3 12y ago
  What happens if both of them are told they are bad? (or you are just not very attractive)
  - Fizzer 12y ago
    Voters just select which picture is better, so the only thing being tested is the difference between the two photos.
    - trentmb 12y ago
      Eating two turds is worse than eating one turd. I'd rather not eat any turds at all.
- lpolovets 12y ago
  One of my friends started a website that mostly fits what you're describing: http://www.pickfu.com/ http://www.pickfu.com/
  - Fizzer 12y ago
    It does seem somewhat similar. However Pickfu is going for written feedback from a one (or a small number) of people, whereas the A/B testing idea would simply compare two photos and aggregate the results within seconds. Pickfu also charges for their service, which I don't think would work for someone wanting to simply choose their wardrobe. It'd have to monetize in other ways (ads, or charging for getting gender/age breakdowns of the results, more results, allowing to compare more than 2 photos, etc.)
blazespin 12y ago
Hack Raid - world of warcraft raids meet hackathon. Visual raid management tools allows raid leader to manage teams on quick projects to prove out interesting hacks that could form the basis of real companies. Contributors pick from raids they want to join based on the merit the leadership and idea. Time period for raid is compressed but very focused.
cheetos 12y ago
I'd like some way to listen to Hacker News. I know that's ambiguous, and I'm not sure how it'd be implemented. But I often listen to podcasts when working from home and often wish for a way to consume Hacker News in the same way.
- lukejduncan 12y ago
  a16z has a great podcast. It's not listening to HN, but it's in the same spirit =)
goshx 12y ago
- a "Prezi-like" software for software documentation. You can navigate, zoom out to the project specs, zoom in for the code; - think about how google maps show you the time a given route would take in the current traffic. What I want is the possibility to see what the time would be in a future date and time, based on historical data (no, google maps does not have this);
- RMacy 12y ago
  this, but for diagrams
covercash 12y ago
My idea is to make Idea Sunday and Screenshot Saturday monthly posts instead of weekly. Maybe the second weekend of each month so as not to crowd the hiring/freelance posts at the start of the month? Also have them posted by an "official" account so it doesn't turn into a karma grab.
JacobJans 12y ago
Think about how many cool videos are made with the Go Pro. Snowboarding videos, skydiving videos, etc. Now think about how cool it would be to have the type of frozen fly-around video that you see in moves like The Matrix. In fact, it should be super easy to create such a thing. Instead of just a photo, why can't we have a frozen moment in time, virtually in 3d? In fact, I first thought of this idea in terms of wedding photography (an industry in need of a lot of innovation, btw.) What I propose is a "string of cameras" that you can easily place anywhere, and will simultaneously shoot a photo. All of those photos are then instantly turned into a video. Cameras have become low-cost enough that a product like this could be produced at a mass market price. Yes, it is a niche product, but so is the Go Pro. But, the best argument for this idea is that it would be really damn fun to play with one. Someone, please steal this idea. All I ask is that you make it happen.
- goshx 12y ago
  Here is a very good example of the use of what you are describing: http://bigfreeze.com/demo/ http://bigfreeze.com/demo/
- lukejduncan 12y ago
  It'd be pretty sweet combined with something like Oculus.
- nmikz 12y ago
  This came to my mind when I read your post (360 pics taken with many phones): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD26Mrf1mck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD26Mrf1mck
fragsworth 12y ago
DNS for the Post Office. When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain Name", but change the address associated to it. Once. Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their account settings.
- goshx 12y ago
  Isn't that what your own name does? I guess the point here is a database lookup before the mail is delivered.
  - fragsworth 12y ago
    > Isn't that what your own name does? I've never heard of anyone being able to send mail to a person using only their name on an envelope. You would have a unique "ID" which you can assign to any physical address. This is all you ever give out. If you move, you update one record, and your mail will come to the right place.
    - mcot2 12y ago
      I see what you are saying and I like it a lot. I think you would still need a way to have people discover the current state you live in. One thing that comes to mind is taxes that differ per state. If I told amazon to ship my package to bob@foo.bar they would still need to know where I live.
      - User9821 12y ago
        You give Amazon your ID number. They do a lookup on the ID when you place an order to receive the current mailing address. It would apply to everything, so you give all of your friends and family your mailing ID. Anytime they want to send you something, they run a lookup on the ID (enter it into a website) and get your current address. It's similar to a website. If HN moves to another server, everyone doesn't have to update their bookmarks to point to a new IP address. Instead, they visit the same URL as always, and it automatically sends everyone to the new IP.
theseoafs 12y ago
Relational binary data serialization. Cap'n Proto is a great piece of engineering that got quite a lot of things right. (For those who aren't familiar, Cap'n Proto is a data serialization format that is able to be very fast by encoding data in the same way modern processors encode data normally - with fixed width data types and pointers.) I think it would be nice to have a data serialization protocol that uses the same general concepts, but addresses a couple limitations in that format, including: - Cap'n Proto doesn't allow you to edit messages in a robust way. You can't change the size of a list/string in a message, you can't replace one object with another without leaking "garbage", etc. The data model is simply not designed with fast editing in mind. - The data model is document based so it is inconvenient or impossible to capture certain kinds of relationships with a schema. My idea is to address these limitations using the battle tested relational model and the massive amount of knowledge that's been accumulated about how to efficiently implement relational systems. In this serialization format, a message would be a veritable relational dataset, complete with a schema and multiple tables. Messages would be organized into pages, each page representing a node in a b tree, as in a normal rdbms. You can add, edit, and delete rows as necessary, and just send the binary encoding of the database over the wire directly. The utility of this system is obvious: a client could, for example, read an entire database from one server, add a row to a table (without parsing the rest of the message, which are in other tables on other pages), and forward the new database directly to another server. Being able to quickly edit even large datasets in this way would be a huge boon.
amjd 12y ago
Links to previous weeks' Idea Sunday posts for reference: Last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910 3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077 4 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601
- blazespin 12y ago
  Up voted .. karma grab, yeah, but I was just looking for this.
  - amjd 12y ago
    I was looking for it too. I posted it so it would help others. Not necessarily for karma. :)
samelawrence 12y ago
I continue to keep this updated over time: https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas
fudged71 12y ago
A/B testing for physical products, making hardware more agile. Market validation and iterative development for hardware can take a long time. Product developers are jealous of the fast iterations involved with software development. I've recently learned that despite being lower quality, people value the novelty of 3D printed goods. And we know that consumers value co-creation [1]. We know that early adopters tend to be early adopters of multiple kinds of technology. So if your user base for a new physical product also largely have 3D printers, you could bring your users into your prototyping process. Send out 2+ versions of your product without them knowing which version they received. You can ask for feedback within 2 days of pushing out a design with real users. From the feedback you can start a new iteration, which you can then push out to your users as a tangible update within a week. You could even pay for the small cost of material used. This platform could start with STL files, and then in the future use a common 3D printing API such as the one we're building called PrintToPeer. Early adopters would even be incentivized to get a 3D printer to be a part of the development cycle of new products. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
cyanbane 12y ago
A service that sits on top of/aggregates sports clips and learns from the clips that I watch/view/like/share to determine if a sports clip is relevant for me, irregardless of source (even if just providing links to third parties).
- cyanbane 12y ago
  Not sure why I was down-voted on this. I assume someone is doing this and isn't looking for competition? ;)
noisy_boy 12y ago
A stackexchange like site for personal finance.
- saryant 12y ago
  You mean like the personal finance Stack Exchange site? http://money.stackexchange.com/ http://money.stackexchange.com/
- travisfischer 12y ago
  You mean something like http://money.stackexchange.com/ http://money.stackexchange.com/? :)
SatyajitSarangi 12y ago
A meta-data file over VLC player where people can add additional information about a movie so that others watching the movie can skip right to that part. Say, a movie has a few funny scenes, or action or even sex, and you only are bothered to watch those parts. Then you can use this file to see at which time period these scenes exist in the movie, and jump right into it. Not exactly a startup idea, but something that can be useful, eh?
drham 12y ago
A website that allows maintainers of open-source projects to flag/create tickets where it would be helpful for others to help out. I personally want to make more OSS contributions, but often I find it hard to find projects where I can contribute meaningfully. Meaning specifically that they are projects that have problems that match my expertise, are actively maintained (my patches will be appreciated), and have unresolved tickets where assistance would be useful (they are looking for outside help). I imagine there are at-least some OSS maintainers who would like to recruit more contributors as well, and a site that would help match both would be beneficial for everyone.
- jarofgreen 12y ago
  Get started: https://openhatch.org/ https://openhatch.org/ :-)
Sephr 12y ago
What's stopping us from making something like http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/ http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/? Samsung came out with a phone in 2010 with an e-ink keyboard (Samsung Zeal). Are there any unsolved obstacles preventing this kind of keyboard from becoming a reality? I would imagine such a keyboard, even at a $300 price point, would be massively more successful than the Optimus Maximus ever was. To entice users even more, it could probably be made water resistant by not including any ports and using appropriate switches. It could come with a USB-powered inductive charging matt that you place the keyboard on top of to charge.
- sakuraiben 12y ago
  Something like this? http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-keyboards-keypads/razer-deathstalker-ultimate http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-keyboards-keypads/razer-deat...
  - pmx 12y ago
    That is one insane prince! (£229)
  - Sephr 12y ago
    The main benefit of e-ink is that the display only needs to be powered when you change the content. This enables you to greatly conserve battery life much more than the active displays on that Razer keyboard allow (if it was wireless). From the description, it seems like the keys do not use displays and only the interface on the right uses displays.
- User9821 12y ago
  One problem. People what spend $300 on a keyboard are quite familiar with computers. This is the same group of people that types and uses shortcuts without ever looking at their keyboard, so the benefit is highly reduced.
nhebb 12y ago
An online organizational space for HOA's. It would allow HOA members to view the budget, see the monthly meeting agenda, file proxy votes, see any open issues, and vote on board members. I have the feeling (based on personal experience) that some HOA managers prefer to operate in obscurity, so it may be tough to market.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Damn good idea, but as you suggest I can't see the managers being too keen on it.
  - nhebb 12y ago
    I saw a suggestion on reddit once that you can canvas your neighborhood to get proxy votes for any HOA meeting. Using the proxies, you can bring forth a motion, second it with one of the proxies, and then (typically) win the vote. So the marketing campaign could push this idea to frustrated HOA members.
- callmeed 12y ago
  I rented a house in a gated, golf-course development last year and my neighbor asked me to build something like this (he was on the board). I think it could work–could be tough to sell, though.
thecooluser 12y ago
I'd love the LeechBlock extension for Firefox to be recreated as a Mac application. There are similar distraction-blocking tools but none that allow you to set time-based rules for the blocking to take place.
blazespin 12y ago
Collapse this for HN. I know this is redditty, but I sorely need it when I see an idea that spans a conversation longer than the page. Can't even tell by indent if I have got to the next idea. Sort by new would be nice as well so I can look for new ideas posted.
- rahij 12y ago
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... It does the job (and some more nice features) pretty well.
- tikwidd 12y ago
  It looks like there's already a Chrome extension for this - "Hacker News Collapse".
- cosmok 12y ago
  I created a bookmarklet many years ago that does this and a little bit more: https://github.com/cosmok/HackerNews_Sorter https://github.com/cosmok/HackerNews_Sorter
- zwegner 12y ago
  This was discussed a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606310 Long story short, there's browser extensions for this.
caseyash2 12y ago
With the growth of electronic commerce and mobile commerce, fraud is going to be a factor for all businesses that have a web presence. Online fraud takes a variety of forms but charge-backs appear to be the most preventable. Using a multi-layer strategy of various prevention and detection methods (fraud scoring model, device profiling, new type of authentication), merchants install a plug-in and do not have to worry about monitoring transactions for fraud. Based on a few sources, fraud has been staying around 1% of e-commerce revenues.
- instoftech 12y ago
  Like this? http://siftscience.com http://siftscience.com
vsakos 12y ago
A browser-based chat where the messages are encrypted in the browser so that only the conversation participants can see the messages but not the server, it's just storing them. The messages would be encoded by AES and the key exchange can be done with RSA. The database would store the encription key for every user for every conversation but encrypted with for example the user's password or RSA private key, and the private key would be also encrypted the same way, and when these keys are needed, the server sends them to the browser, the javascript decodes them with the user's account password and voilá. So it would be a browser-based Skype with Mega-like encryption.
- wfn 12y ago
  Something like https://crypto.cat/ https://crypto.cat/ ? Supports multiparty OTR, etc. Server doesn't see message contents. Ephemeral key exchange via OTR (hence supports perfect forward secrecy), though of course there's always the problem of trusting the fingerprint, i.e. someone (e.g. the server) can just MitM the whole thing. So ideally, one should verify the OTR fingerprints of the other parties via some secondary channel. You can also run the server on your own infrastructure. P.S. > key exchange can be done with RSA any particular reason for RSA, and not ECDH key exchange?
  - wfn 12y ago
    [hrr, can't edit my own message anymore, it seems] errata: mpOTR (as implemented by cryptocat) does not seem to support PFS right now, which is quite a big deal.
- anewhnaccount 12y ago
  WebRTC
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personlurking 12y ago
A few Idea Sundays ago I suggested an idea [1] for a location-based city guide for tourists (with comment voting and based on discoverability). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048 Here's another such idea (based on finding answers)... ____ A clean, dead-simple search engine that connects to information from Q&A data about the city you're in. So it's a Q&A site (again, with comment voting) regarding tourist-type questions and answers. The user can ask a new question ahead of their trip and hope for answers but the real use case is where the Q&A database is extensive enough that most questions are asked and answered already. Ex. - Enter the Paris section. Type in the search field "hours Louvre" and the first and best answer would be the opening and closing times of the famous museum. No other clutter on the page. Ex. 2 - If GPS-enabled, type in "bus Louvre" and it'd bring up the most relevant answer. "Take the 765. Every 30 min. Next one at 9am." Short, sweet and simple. Only thing is, it'd need a Wikipedia-style editor allowing for corrections when answer is no longer current.
iamwithnail 12y ago
I bought "thecoffeeprophecy.com" On a whim a while ago... Suggestions so far have included a straight to kindle thriller, tripadvisor for coffee shops, and a service where I cover myself in coffee grounds on webcam and predict things for people. Suggestions welcome...
- roryokane 12y ago
  Predict, based on the spread rate of Starbucks franchises, how long it will take for a new Starbucks, closer to your home than the current nearest, will be built.
callmeed 12y ago
I was inspired by Marc Andreessen's post this weekend about news/journalism [1]. So, here's my idea for an editorial news site: The site would be called "5 ON 5" and every post would be based on a current news topic. In each post, 2 writers/bloggers would argue opposing views of the topic (point/counterpoint). BUT each argument must be written in a BuzzFeed listicle style format. For example: 5 ON 5: UKRAINE "5 reasons Obama needs to stay out of the Ukraine/Russia crisis" vs. "5 things Obama needs to do for Ukraine right now" and 5 ON 5: FACEBOOK F8 CONFERENCE "You should put Facebook's anonymous login in your app. Here's 5 reasons why." vs. "5 reasons Facebook's new anonymous login is bad for developers" I like it because it could work for any news category, it could be for analysis and prognostication, you could presumably get great guest writers, and it's "smart" spin on the viral crap BuzzFeed/Gawker puts out. [1] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreesen-why-im-bullish-on-the-news-105921.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreese...
kevbam 12y ago
Food inventory for the ordinary home. A synced cross platform app that allows a normal home to monitor: 1)What food has been bought? 2)What the expiration date is? Warnings when food is going out of date. 3)What meals can be made based on the food “in stock”? I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what food is at home and to reduce the amount of food wastage in our home. I think an app that allows you to scan shopping receipts, the contents of which are automatically loaded into a database and synced across multiple apps would be very useful. It could be monetized using the freemium model, e.g. more complex functionality the more you pay and also by integrating with online shopping engines such as instacart. Any feedback on this greatly appreciated.
- thebenedict 12y ago
  I've thought about something similar but get hung up on data entry. How do you make it not miserable to get food purchase data into the app, given that food doesn't have an RFID tag in it, and not everything (produce) has a barcode? I like the receipt idea - partner with grocery stores to print a qr-code with a machine readable list of items and (maybe) expiration dates. Having to do any kind of manual scan on each item I bring home from the store feels like too much behavior change to become part of my everyday routine. Maybe there's an opportunity to do it for institutional kitchens where inventory is required by default? It would be fun to build the fitbit and basis integrations. Also, Randall Munroe offered a different approach: http://xkcd.com/1109/ http://xkcd.com/1109/ :)
  - kevbam 12y ago
    Yes, data entry is the gap. I have been thinking about that and it seems like there are a number of solutions that would allow you to read the text from a photo, vivino.com is an example of an app that does this very well with wine labels. I wonder if you could take a high quality photo of the receipt and the app would add the contents of the receipt to the db based on this? I know its not going to be seamless and may take a bit of manual work at the beginning. Partnering with a grocery store or multiple when the solution picks up traction could also simplify things significantly.
bradchoate 12y ago
If you like the movie reviews on The Incomparable podcast (the recent WarGames episode, for instance), perhaps you'll agree with me that there should be a web site/app that offers full-length, fan-created movie commentaries that can be played while viewing the movie. Business model should probably be subscription (who wants spot ads thrown into the middle of their movies?) or something simple like $1 per commentary. The service should seek out talent to create the commentary tracks and pay them for their work.
- hitlin37 12y ago
  not that interesting. It distracts the focus from the content. plus there are tons of such stuff people do on youtube.
- bambax 12y ago
  I don't know about movies (maybe) but for sports this sounds like a great idea; instead of listening to the same old commentators you could have your friends or inspired amateurs, or famous people or who knows who? commenting on the game. Some kind of youtube-soundcloud-twitter mashup with a strong focus on realtime. Not sure how it should work but there should be potential.
  - tibu 12y ago
    I like the sports idea. The question is where do you get the content from.
thebenedict 12y ago
An issue tracker for freelancers and small teams that is designed to be used collaboratively with clients, without burdening clients with unnecessary detail. Clients see a list of user stories or other deliverables and can discuss, and file issues and bugs against them. Developers can track their own bugs, finer-grained tasks and issues privately. These two sides of the software are linked for the developer, i.e. as a developer I can add detail and break down a client request into smaller stories without exposing the client to the gritty details, and keep track of which client request(s) different issues and stories are related to. Also useful for filing issues the client doesn't need to know about, say, bugs I find before they do :) The problem this solves is that I have to maintain two issue trackers, one focused on user stories and features (usually a google spreadsheet), and another for more technical tasks and bugs (usually pivotal tracker). I want to keep it all in one place. I would be surprised if this doesn't already exist, but I haven't been able to find it.
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pirer 12y ago
An anonymous linkedin My only interaction with other people if it there's a business/freelance opportunity. Invite only and where names appear when the deal is real.
bradchoate 12y ago
"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like Siri, but for your terminal. Ie: $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo $ please archive this directory into foo.zip $ please clone the bootstrap repo from github $ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar' Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't it time we had an interface layer that abstracts away all of the fiddly switches and just did what we said? It would offer a pluggable interface for extending its capability and vocabulary.
- wingerlang 12y ago
  I'd wager that ANY person who actually uses CLI tools to do things does not want, nor need, to write full sentences to do these things. Everyone that uses CLI tools always says they do so because it is the fastest way possible to do X. That point becomes moot once you have to write sentences.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I don't know - I live in the terminal, and I definitively wouldn't use it for regular commands (sed, grep, tar, etc), but if it was smart enough, I could see myself using it for software that I rarely use and which has complicated options. For example, I'd rather type please convert movie.avi to h264 at 720p with subtitles from movie.srt than having to read the man page of avconv each time. Bonus points if it could print the translated command before running it - it'd double as a learning tool.
    - anewhnaccount 12y ago
      Or even if it'd only output the translate command line. Like a better apropos. A nice idea for sure.
- jolt 12y ago
  That is an excellent idea! Make it cross platform, and able to install missing tools, combine it with speech to text and you would be able to talk to any device regardless of the software installed on the device. please open presentation X from my dropbox
dang 12y ago
Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes, this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post more of them. Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the answer is no. Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to have gotten less interesting as they've become more regular. I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize HN for curiosity and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938
- DanBC 12y ago
  I agree about the frustration of having multiple threads posted by different people. These threads should be killed. A once per month thread would be useful to me. Would it be possible to accommodate that?
  - dang 12y ago
    I'm not adamantly opposed to it, but it seems rote to me. As I've tried to explain, if there isn't a clear 'yes' then the default answer should be 'no'. I wonder if there's a different path to getting the valuable part of it? It seems to me that instead of rushing to embalm experiments as regular features, we should just do more experiments.
  - krapp 12y ago
    It seems to me that the ability to merge threads (either automatically or through moderator action) would benefit this, and the problem of multiple posts on the same subject in general. Although I don't agree with seeing popular, user generated content as a negative, but it's not my sandbox. I think it's at least better than yet another Techcrunch post or ceaseless bickering about class warfare and internecine SV politics. Also, perhaps these threads should automatically expire weekly.
udayadds 12y ago
A Bitcoin like protocol for sending/receiving real money (USD, INR). Why to pay 2% to banks and card processors when we can use blockchain for the same.
dannyking 12y ago
A Google-reader like service for your YouTube channels subscriptions. I'd like to have a list of videos from my subscriptions I can turn into a video magazine I can e.g. watch each Sunday. It's super annoying that to keep up with your subscriptions on YouTube you have to click on each channel and manually work out which videos you've seen and which you haven't.
- hashtag 12y ago
  You can subscribe to Youtube feeds with any RSS reader. I've been doing it for a long time now. The built-in Youtube subscription blows hardcore.
hashtag 12y ago
A single site that aggregates and live demo or video demo of open source projects... Skimming through and reading each open source project to figure out exactly what it does or having to read code, install it, or run it in some form just to get a better idea is a pain in the ass (personal opinion). It would be awesome to have a way to go through projects fast and _see_ what they're about before starring at their repo. Reading descriptions is not as awesome as seeing the product when possible.
simondlr 12y ago
VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially]. I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).
nl5874 12y ago
I've been working on a kind of reversed wetransfer. You'll claim a domain, and others can drop files at your personal url. It have been opensourced on github (https://github.com/dutchcoders/dropit https://github.com/dutchcoders/dropit). And running at https://dropit.io/ https://dropit.io/.
nl5874 12y ago
Created an opensource plugin architecture for currently Chrome, but can be Firefox as well. Consists of repositories and plugins you can enable and disable. These plugins will add extra functionality to an existing website, or change layout for example. https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome
nl5874 12y ago
With StackTray (opensource) you can manage all your EC2 instances from the OSX statusbar. Currently only Amazon AWS is supported, but planning to extend with PaaS, but also DigitalOceaan, Google Compute Engine and Azure. https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray
mokkol 12y ago
I don't know if it already exist but a password tool that automatically changes your passwords and syncs it with your mobile/desktop every day. (password for example: gmail, twitter facebook etc.) something like 1Password but automatically changing the passwords every day/week/month
pallavkaushish 12y ago
I'm starting to work on a marketing tool which will be a combination of displaying popups like Bounce Exchange(http://bounceexchange.com/ http://bounceexchange.com/) and Tweetganic(http://www.tweetganic.com/ http://www.tweetganic.com/) or http://snip.ly/ http://snip.ly/. Currently Social Media Management tools like Hootsuite provide a link shortner so it's relatively easier for them to integrate a service like http://snip.ly/ http://snip.ly/ however they don't. The product I'm thinking to create will allow anyone to manage, split test their pop ups and promote themselves using a service like snip.ly. An analytics module will accompany the product so all the data can be meaningfully used to enhance the campaigns. Hope I was able to clearly explain my idea. Would detail out some more if anyone is interested.

Ask HN: Idea Sunday

219 points by jw2013 12y ago

mjnaus 12y ago

A service combining the flexibility and ease of use of a CMS site (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) with the speed and security of a static HTML site. The CMS version would be a private site (not accessible by the general public) which is compiled into a static HTML site which is publicly accessible. There should be a way to deal with formerly dynamic elements, such as contact/comment forms, site search, etc. (possibly using third party APIs) There also should be a way to deal with updates to the CMS version of the site, so that these changes are detected, compiled and processed into the static version of the site.

johnbender 12y ago
I'm not sure if this fits all your needs but there seems to be at least some meaningful overlap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content-editor-for-github/ http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content...
ilyanep 12y ago
This might also be similar to what you're looking for? http://jekyllrb.com/ http://jekyllrb.com/ EDIT: Oh sorry, I didn't realize that Prose was based on Jekyll! I guess this suggestion is a bit redundant, but this way you don't need Github if you have your own server, I guess.
gamegoblin 12y ago
I'm currently working on a Haskell web framework that allows one to easily define all of the possible values dynamic content can take, generate all permutations of content (assuming the values are finite), and load them all into an in-memory cache to be fired off, pre-baked. Inspired by the idea of a pure function -- that is, a function that is given the same arguments should always return the same result (and have no side effects). More general than a CMS, but the idea is similar.
mjnaus 12y ago
These solutions seem to, kinda, take a stab at the concept, but what we're really after is something way simpler. Think a simple text field into which you type a URL. Then this service would visit, crawl and compile the entire site into a static HTML site (with options to enhance the final version of the static site). This would have to work independently of the platform used to build the original site and ideally the service would also provide a means of getting the newly created static site onto it's hosting platform (be it Dropbox, Digital Ocean or whatever other platform you want to host the static site).
- dukedougal 12y ago
  Httrack does this.
  - mjnaus 12y ago
    Yep, they do. However not as a service. With Httrack, I'd need to download their software first, and then run it whenever the site's been updated. I'd like a online service that handles it all for me.
    - dukedougal 12y ago
      It would be trivially easy to put the front end on HT track.
- lazylizard 12y ago
  wget --convert-links -r http://www.gnu.org/ http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog ?
syerram2 12y ago
Are you thinking of something similar to http://cloudcannon.com/ http://cloudcannon.com/?
- mjnaus 12y ago
  No, not really. CloudCannon allows you to build static websites on Dropbox (if I'm not mistaken). What I'm after is means of building and maintaing a site using your CMS of choice (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) and then have this site compiled into a static HTML site (on request or using some sort of timer/interval) and uploaded to wherever I'm planning to host it. Looking to get away from the speed and security issues of CMS based sites but still having the flexibility and ease of use when building/maintaining a site. Basically using any CMS to build and deploy static HTML web sites.
alecsmart1 12y ago
It's been on my mind to create a WP plugin which allows you to upload a static version of the entire site to another location. Do you think that would do the trick?
- mjnaus 12y ago
  It kinda would, however it would be limited to Wordpress. I'd like something that works with whatever CMS/platform the site's build on.
lukejduncan 12y ago
I think Movable Type does this http://movabletype.org/ http://movabletype.org/
AustinDizzy 12y ago
Maybe try looking into Grow? http://preview.growsdk.org/ http://preview.growsdk.org/
- mjnaus 12y ago
  Although Grow looks very cool, it doesn't allow me to use any given CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, etc) to build static HTML sites.
simplyinfinity 12y ago
I'm building a service that's something like that. Ping me if you are interested in a demo hi @ !dotfinity! . !eu!

karangoeluw 12y ago

You're early for a Sunday.

suhastech 12y ago
Unless you're in the east
icebraining 12y ago
Nope, it's been almost five hours since 00:00 UTC :)
gamegoblin 12y ago
Not everyone lives in the Bay ;) But I see you're from WashU (howdy from Arkansas!), so I guess it was still early for you. We should all just go by UTC, I guess.

doubt_me 12y ago

Hacker news 2.0 An actual tech news column with reporters and a sleek website and or maybe a podcast here and there I mean seriously why hasn't that happened yet

daturkel 12y ago
I would contribute to this, both in terms of donating to see this happen but also to the content and/or the community. Silly as it sounds, my least favorite thing about HN is the startup content---i don't care about agile this or lean that or pivoting or whatever, I'm interested in people "hacking" on passion projects, making cool tools, and breaking stuff.
minimaxir 12y ago
The reason it hasn't happened yet is because that's a full time job, the initial costs are high for AV, the profit margins are razor-thin. (or, at the least, the money a person with the skills to write quality tech journalism would always be far less than the money they could earn by applying the tech skills for technical tasks)
Huhty 12y ago
Try http://tech.snapzu.com http://tech.snapzu.com
rcfox 12y ago
Aren't you just describing VentureBeat and TechCrunch, etc?

zercool 12y ago

A site with free, open, community driven practice problems and solutions. Sort of like a wikipedia for questions. I could imagine this being a key ingredient in the future of OER. Would be cool to see something like this integrated with http://metacademy.org http://metacademy.org

jwcrux 12y ago
Don't the stack exchange sites already serve for something like this?
- zercool 12y ago
  Good point, actively contributing answers certainly helps practice a skill area. But I can't imagine thinking, "I need to practice tree traversal algorithms: to Stack Overflow!"
- zodiac 12y ago
  I think his focus was on the "practice" in "practice problems and solutions. I can't really practice problems on SE.
alagu 12y ago
You could try http://www.hackerrank.com/ http://www.hackerrank.com/
- zercool 12y ago
  Nice! Can I create questions myself? Also, is it only CS?

mauricio-OH 12y ago

A payment form that supports subscriptions and one time payments. It has options for taxes and it comes in English French and Spanish. Moonclerk but with taxes and languages. Chargify with a beautiful form and languages.

pubby 12y ago

An MMO where all content is created by players using a wiki-like interface. Editing privilege is tied to a "creation skill" that levels up with each approved editing action.

yzzxy 12y ago
Worldbuilding as a game mechanic could be amazing. I have this totally evidenced belief that there are tons of people who are master worldbuilders and are poor at writing fiction/narrative or dislike doing so. I'd love to find a way to open up content creation to such a demographic.
- lukejduncan 12y ago
  Didn't Neal Stephenson try something like this? Google is failing me on this, but I swear he tried doing some wiki based community built world.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    I believe you may be thinking of the The Mongoliad[0], which was a communal narrative effort he founded/was in involved in. I'm not totally sure of the original format of the storybuilding process, but I do know they are now available as ebooks. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mongoliad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mongoliad (Wikipedia because I think it better explains the nature of the project than the homepage)
deleted 12y ago
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jes5199 12y ago
I daydream about this periodically, but I can't quite picture how the community keeps the game rules balanced enough for there to be a game
blazespin 12y ago
Second Life is like this. It works well, but the tool set could always be more improved and focused on MMO.

neilxdsouza 12y ago

A search engine for the legal system. I had sent this idea to YC 2013 and they asked me to submit a video, but I felt I don't have the creds to apply. Take each section of a country's law and convert it into prolog clauses. Queries can then be run on the legal engine. For defendants it gives you insights on how to build a case and for prosecution it identifies relevant sections and evidence that needs to be provided to have a successful conviction. The same can be applied to divorce, patents, property etc. My idea was to use an Erlang map reduce system to help fan out the queries which are dispatched to an underlying Prolog knowledge base (Erlang supports something like Channels/Ports). I have a bias towards ideas which have a social impact. The business case is: In a country like India there are over 20 million pending cases in courts. Imagine both sides of lawyers and the judge all having access to a system like this - cases could be resolved a lot faster and time spent building defense/prosecution would be a significantly smaller. Implemented right, this could somewhat level the playing field and allow poorer people have access to some sort of legal advice, which today they would not be able to afford. Monetizing the system could be charging for queries as you probe deeper and deeper into the system/advertising for lawyers. I think commoditizing law has immense potential and should have a very large business potential. I always wanted to implement and Idea like this as Open Source, but here in India nobody would fund ideas like this. I'm putting it out there as I believe it's time has come.

zodiac 12y ago
Lots of what lawyers and judges do involve interpreting and arguing for a certain interpretation of laws - eg, whether Aero is merely renting an antenna to individual consumers or performing a work publicly to all of them as a whole. Case law also sets all sorts of legal "tests" that involve human judgement (eg proportionate force in response, what a reasonable person would believe). How will your search engine deal with this?
- neilxdsouza 12y ago
  So at this early stage, I am not talking about replacing lawyers. Their interpretation would still be required. However if there are 5 possible interpretations, the engine should present all 5 possibilities to the lawyer. This will help her prepare for the case better.

shawnps 12y ago

A code review tool specifically for Golang projects based on many of the contribution guidelines listed here http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html A few months ago when I made some contributions to Go I realized I like their code review process and tools much more than the typical GitHub PR workflow.

GavinB 12y ago

A service that sits between my bank account and subscription services that only accepts charges that I've preapproved. This would let me keep track of the services that I have so I don't end up with subscriptions to sites or services that I've forgotten about. It would also let me revoke permission to charge the account at any time. No need to cancel a card if one won't cancel or changes the fees--you just revoke their permission individually.

blazespin 12y ago
Or sits between any charge, sends you alerts and genuinely manages fraud risk better than banks. Also provides community information on chargebacks. Basically, a service that works for the consumer rather than the companies paying the fees. Uses contextual advertising based on what you are buying.
drsim 12y ago
Direct Debit in the UK does this. You can cancel any instruction at any time, usually through your online banking where all instructions and charges are listed. It is widespread and the norm for subscriptions.
- smsm42 12y ago
  In Israel, the same arrangement exists. I was very surprised when I learned that in the US you give to the company your account number and they basically can initiate money pulls any time they like and the bank does not have a list where you say who is approved and who is not. That seems to be kind of backwards and insecure. I know there are probably ample reasons for that but I'd feel much better if it was arranged like that. Paypal and Amazon Payments and other systems like this provide partial solutions but why banks wouldn't do that? Looks like something that belongs there.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Same here in Portugal. And we also have free virtual CCs with predefined limits.
chuinard 12y ago

elij 12y ago

A site to discover content using an algorithm that ignores metrics we have begun to game (likes and viewings) and instead builds rankings based on pairwise comparisons. Would allow discovery of new good content that hasn't employed growth hacks and will also differentiate between equally rated content. https://aeolipyle.co https://aeolipyle.co (algorithm complete -- need to find good use for it.)

michaelmior 12y ago
I'm curious: pairwise comparisons of what? It's not clear to me what your algorithm does.
- elij 12y ago
  After you view content (ideally immutable content like a film, music, books or computer games) -- when you offer to rate you are instead promoted on how it faired vs a previous experience. "You've just seen Terminator 2 -- how is it compared to The Matrix?) In terms of algorithm it's got around issues of merging incomplete Condorcet elections (as not everyone will compare or rank every item) and clustering. Turning these partial elections into a single order ranking.
- rcfox 12y ago
  If I understand correctly, this sounds like an idea that I've been thinking about for a little while. Essentially, you do binary search-insertion into a list, where the comparison function is a prompt to the user asking "Is A better than B?" (If it's too difficult to judge "betterness" between two items, you could just as easily swap in a different comparison. "Is A funnier than B?") One thing that people always ask when I mention this is: "What if A and B are equal?" Well, then you answer no, because A is not better than B. If your answers are consistent, then A and B will end up next to each other in the list.
  - elij 12y ago
    yup -- I believe this is a better user experience in terms of capturing ratings (by capitalising on the availability heuristic) What you're describing technically would work when each person compares every item (and would fall into the domain of condorcet methods). However in practice the election becomes a graph (rather than list or x/y table) with cyclical dependencies and conflicting comparisons -- it becomes quite hard to resolve -- but it can be.

Fizzer 12y ago

A/B testing for the masses. Here's an example: Say a someone is deciding which shirt to wear. They whip out their smartphone, launch the A/B app, takes a picture of themselves wearing each of two shirts. Within 30 seconds, they have an answer of which shirt hundreds of people liked better. While they're waiting for the reply, they're prompted to rate other people's pictures. This is as simple as seeing two pictures and tapping the one that they like more. The number of use cases is endless. You could be shopping for eyeglasses and trying to figure out which look better - just try on both right there in the store and get a response from the A/B app. It's not limited to fashion, as people could use it for any subjective comparison.

KnightHawk3 12y ago
What happens if both of them are told they are bad? (or you are just not very attractive)
- Fizzer 12y ago
  Voters just select which picture is better, so the only thing being tested is the difference between the two photos.
  - trentmb 12y ago
    Eating two turds is worse than eating one turd. I'd rather not eat any turds at all.
lpolovets 12y ago
One of my friends started a website that mostly fits what you're describing: http://www.pickfu.com/ http://www.pickfu.com/
- Fizzer 12y ago
  It does seem somewhat similar. However Pickfu is going for written feedback from a one (or a small number) of people, whereas the A/B testing idea would simply compare two photos and aggregate the results within seconds. Pickfu also charges for their service, which I don't think would work for someone wanting to simply choose their wardrobe. It'd have to monetize in other ways (ads, or charging for getting gender/age breakdowns of the results, more results, allowing to compare more than 2 photos, etc.)

blazespin 12y ago

Hack Raid - world of warcraft raids meet hackathon. Visual raid management tools allows raid leader to manage teams on quick projects to prove out interesting hacks that could form the basis of real companies. Contributors pick from raids they want to join based on the merit the leadership and idea. Time period for raid is compressed but very focused.

cheetos 12y ago

I'd like some way to listen to Hacker News. I know that's ambiguous, and I'm not sure how it'd be implemented. But I often listen to podcasts when working from home and often wish for a way to consume Hacker News in the same way.

lukejduncan 12y ago
a16z has a great podcast. It's not listening to HN, but it's in the same spirit =)

goshx 12y ago

- a "Prezi-like" software for software documentation. You can navigate, zoom out to the project specs, zoom in for the code; - think about how google maps show you the time a given route would take in the current traffic. What I want is the possibility to see what the time would be in a future date and time, based on historical data (no, google maps does not have this);

RMacy 12y ago
this, but for diagrams

covercash 12y ago

My idea is to make Idea Sunday and Screenshot Saturday monthly posts instead of weekly. Maybe the second weekend of each month so as not to crowd the hiring/freelance posts at the start of the month? Also have them posted by an "official" account so it doesn't turn into a karma grab.

JacobJans 12y ago

Think about how many cool videos are made with the Go Pro. Snowboarding videos, skydiving videos, etc. Now think about how cool it would be to have the type of frozen fly-around video that you see in moves like The Matrix. In fact, it should be super easy to create such a thing. Instead of just a photo, why can't we have a frozen moment in time, virtually in 3d? In fact, I first thought of this idea in terms of wedding photography (an industry in need of a lot of innovation, btw.) What I propose is a "string of cameras" that you can easily place anywhere, and will simultaneously shoot a photo. All of those photos are then instantly turned into a video. Cameras have become low-cost enough that a product like this could be produced at a mass market price. Yes, it is a niche product, but so is the Go Pro. But, the best argument for this idea is that it would be really damn fun to play with one. Someone, please steal this idea. All I ask is that you make it happen.

goshx 12y ago
Here is a very good example of the use of what you are describing: http://bigfreeze.com/demo/ http://bigfreeze.com/demo/
lukejduncan 12y ago
It'd be pretty sweet combined with something like Oculus.
nmikz 12y ago
This came to my mind when I read your post (360 pics taken with many phones): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD26Mrf1mck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD26Mrf1mck

fragsworth 12y ago

DNS for the Post Office. When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain Name", but change the address associated to it. Once. Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their account settings.

goshx 12y ago
Isn't that what your own name does? I guess the point here is a database lookup before the mail is delivered.
- fragsworth 12y ago
  > Isn't that what your own name does? I've never heard of anyone being able to send mail to a person using only their name on an envelope. You would have a unique "ID" which you can assign to any physical address. This is all you ever give out. If you move, you update one record, and your mail will come to the right place.
  - mcot2 12y ago
    I see what you are saying and I like it a lot. I think you would still need a way to have people discover the current state you live in. One thing that comes to mind is taxes that differ per state. If I told amazon to ship my package to bob@foo.bar they would still need to know where I live.
    - User9821 12y ago
      You give Amazon your ID number. They do a lookup on the ID when you place an order to receive the current mailing address. It would apply to everything, so you give all of your friends and family your mailing ID. Anytime they want to send you something, they run a lookup on the ID (enter it into a website) and get your current address. It's similar to a website. If HN moves to another server, everyone doesn't have to update their bookmarks to point to a new IP address. Instead, they visit the same URL as always, and it automatically sends everyone to the new IP.

theseoafs 12y ago

Relational binary data serialization. Cap'n Proto is a great piece of engineering that got quite a lot of things right. (For those who aren't familiar, Cap'n Proto is a data serialization format that is able to be very fast by encoding data in the same way modern processors encode data normally - with fixed width data types and pointers.) I think it would be nice to have a data serialization protocol that uses the same general concepts, but addresses a couple limitations in that format, including: - Cap'n Proto doesn't allow you to edit messages in a robust way. You can't change the size of a list/string in a message, you can't replace one object with another without leaking "garbage", etc. The data model is simply not designed with fast editing in mind. - The data model is document based so it is inconvenient or impossible to capture certain kinds of relationships with a schema. My idea is to address these limitations using the battle tested relational model and the massive amount of knowledge that's been accumulated about how to efficiently implement relational systems. In this serialization format, a message would be a veritable relational dataset, complete with a schema and multiple tables. Messages would be organized into pages, each page representing a node in a b tree, as in a normal rdbms. You can add, edit, and delete rows as necessary, and just send the binary encoding of the database over the wire directly. The utility of this system is obvious: a client could, for example, read an entire database from one server, add a row to a table (without parsing the rest of the message, which are in other tables on other pages), and forward the new database directly to another server. Being able to quickly edit even large datasets in this way would be a huge boon.

amjd 12y ago

Links to previous weeks' Idea Sunday posts for reference: Last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910 3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077 4 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601

blazespin 12y ago
Up voted .. karma grab, yeah, but I was just looking for this.
- amjd 12y ago
  I was looking for it too. I posted it so it would help others. Not necessarily for karma. :)

samelawrence 12y ago

I continue to keep this updated over time: https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas

fudged71 12y ago

A/B testing for physical products, making hardware more agile. Market validation and iterative development for hardware can take a long time. Product developers are jealous of the fast iterations involved with software development. I've recently learned that despite being lower quality, people value the novelty of 3D printed goods. And we know that consumers value co-creation [1]. We know that early adopters tend to be early adopters of multiple kinds of technology. So if your user base for a new physical product also largely have 3D printers, you could bring your users into your prototyping process. Send out 2+ versions of your product without them knowing which version they received. You can ask for feedback within 2 days of pushing out a design with real users. From the feedback you can start a new iteration, which you can then push out to your users as a tangible update within a week. You could even pay for the small cost of material used. This platform could start with STL files, and then in the future use a common 3D printing API such as the one we're building called PrintToPeer. Early adopters would even be incentivized to get a 3D printer to be a part of the development cycle of new products. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

cyanbane 12y ago

A service that sits on top of/aggregates sports clips and learns from the clips that I watch/view/like/share to determine if a sports clip is relevant for me, irregardless of source (even if just providing links to third parties).

cyanbane 12y ago
Not sure why I was down-voted on this. I assume someone is doing this and isn't looking for competition? ;)

noisy_boy 12y ago

A stackexchange like site for personal finance.

saryant 12y ago
You mean like the personal finance Stack Exchange site? http://money.stackexchange.com/ http://money.stackexchange.com/
travisfischer 12y ago
You mean something like http://money.stackexchange.com/ http://money.stackexchange.com/? :)

SatyajitSarangi 12y ago

A meta-data file over VLC player where people can add additional information about a movie so that others watching the movie can skip right to that part. Say, a movie has a few funny scenes, or action or even sex, and you only are bothered to watch those parts. Then you can use this file to see at which time period these scenes exist in the movie, and jump right into it. Not exactly a startup idea, but something that can be useful, eh?

drham 12y ago

A website that allows maintainers of open-source projects to flag/create tickets where it would be helpful for others to help out. I personally want to make more OSS contributions, but often I find it hard to find projects where I can contribute meaningfully. Meaning specifically that they are projects that have problems that match my expertise, are actively maintained (my patches will be appreciated), and have unresolved tickets where assistance would be useful (they are looking for outside help). I imagine there are at-least some OSS maintainers who would like to recruit more contributors as well, and a site that would help match both would be beneficial for everyone.

jarofgreen 12y ago
Get started: https://openhatch.org/ https://openhatch.org/ :-)

Sephr 12y ago

What's stopping us from making something like http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/ http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/? Samsung came out with a phone in 2010 with an e-ink keyboard (Samsung Zeal). Are there any unsolved obstacles preventing this kind of keyboard from becoming a reality? I would imagine such a keyboard, even at a $300 price point, would be massively more successful than the Optimus Maximus ever was. To entice users even more, it could probably be made water resistant by not including any ports and using appropriate switches. It could come with a USB-powered inductive charging matt that you place the keyboard on top of to charge.

sakuraiben 12y ago
Something like this? http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-keyboards-keypads/razer-deathstalker-ultimate http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-keyboards-keypads/razer-deat...
- pmx 12y ago
  That is one insane prince! (£229)
- Sephr 12y ago
  The main benefit of e-ink is that the display only needs to be powered when you change the content. This enables you to greatly conserve battery life much more than the active displays on that Razer keyboard allow (if it was wireless). From the description, it seems like the keys do not use displays and only the interface on the right uses displays.
User9821 12y ago
One problem. People what spend $300 on a keyboard are quite familiar with computers. This is the same group of people that types and uses shortcuts without ever looking at their keyboard, so the benefit is highly reduced.

nhebb 12y ago

An online organizational space for HOA's. It would allow HOA members to view the budget, see the monthly meeting agenda, file proxy votes, see any open issues, and vote on board members. I have the feeling (based on personal experience) that some HOA managers prefer to operate in obscurity, so it may be tough to market.

danieltillett 12y ago
Damn good idea, but as you suggest I can't see the managers being too keen on it.
- nhebb 12y ago
  I saw a suggestion on reddit once that you can canvas your neighborhood to get proxy votes for any HOA meeting. Using the proxies, you can bring forth a motion, second it with one of the proxies, and then (typically) win the vote. So the marketing campaign could push this idea to frustrated HOA members.
callmeed 12y ago
I rented a house in a gated, golf-course development last year and my neighbor asked me to build something like this (he was on the board). I think it could work–could be tough to sell, though.

thecooluser 12y ago

I'd love the LeechBlock extension for Firefox to be recreated as a Mac application. There are similar distraction-blocking tools but none that allow you to set time-based rules for the blocking to take place.

blazespin 12y ago

Collapse this for HN. I know this is redditty, but I sorely need it when I see an idea that spans a conversation longer than the page. Can't even tell by indent if I have got to the next idea. Sort by new would be nice as well so I can look for new ideas posted.

rahij 12y ago
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc... It does the job (and some more nice features) pretty well.
tikwidd 12y ago
It looks like there's already a Chrome extension for this - "Hacker News Collapse".
cosmok 12y ago
I created a bookmarklet many years ago that does this and a little bit more: https://github.com/cosmok/HackerNews_Sorter https://github.com/cosmok/HackerNews_Sorter
zwegner 12y ago
This was discussed a couple weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606310 Long story short, there's browser extensions for this.

caseyash2 12y ago

With the growth of electronic commerce and mobile commerce, fraud is going to be a factor for all businesses that have a web presence. Online fraud takes a variety of forms but charge-backs appear to be the most preventable. Using a multi-layer strategy of various prevention and detection methods (fraud scoring model, device profiling, new type of authentication), merchants install a plug-in and do not have to worry about monitoring transactions for fraud. Based on a few sources, fraud has been staying around 1% of e-commerce revenues.

instoftech 12y ago
Like this? http://siftscience.com http://siftscience.com

vsakos 12y ago

A browser-based chat where the messages are encrypted in the browser so that only the conversation participants can see the messages but not the server, it's just storing them. The messages would be encoded by AES and the key exchange can be done with RSA. The database would store the encription key for every user for every conversation but encrypted with for example the user's password or RSA private key, and the private key would be also encrypted the same way, and when these keys are needed, the server sends them to the browser, the javascript decodes them with the user's account password and voilá. So it would be a browser-based Skype with Mega-like encryption.

wfn 12y ago
Something like https://crypto.cat/ https://crypto.cat/ ? Supports multiparty OTR, etc. Server doesn't see message contents. Ephemeral key exchange via OTR (hence supports perfect forward secrecy), though of course there's always the problem of trusting the fingerprint, i.e. someone (e.g. the server) can just MitM the whole thing. So ideally, one should verify the OTR fingerprints of the other parties via some secondary channel. You can also run the server on your own infrastructure. P.S. > key exchange can be done with RSA any particular reason for RSA, and not ECDH key exchange?
- wfn 12y ago
  [hrr, can't edit my own message anymore, it seems] errata: mpOTR (as implemented by cryptocat) does not seem to support PFS right now, which is quite a big deal.
anewhnaccount 12y ago
WebRTC

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

personlurking 12y ago

A few Idea Sundays ago I suggested an idea [1] for a location-based city guide for tourists (with comment voting and based on discoverability). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048 Here's another such idea (based on finding answers)... ____ A clean, dead-simple search engine that connects to information from Q&A data about the city you're in. So it's a Q&A site (again, with comment voting) regarding tourist-type questions and answers. The user can ask a new question ahead of their trip and hope for answers but the real use case is where the Q&A database is extensive enough that most questions are asked and answered already. Ex. - Enter the Paris section. Type in the search field "hours Louvre" and the first and best answer would be the opening and closing times of the famous museum. No other clutter on the page. Ex. 2 - If GPS-enabled, type in "bus Louvre" and it'd bring up the most relevant answer. "Take the 765. Every 30 min. Next one at 9am." Short, sweet and simple. Only thing is, it'd need a Wikipedia-style editor allowing for corrections when answer is no longer current.

iamwithnail 12y ago

I bought "thecoffeeprophecy.com" On a whim a while ago... Suggestions so far have included a straight to kindle thriller, tripadvisor for coffee shops, and a service where I cover myself in coffee grounds on webcam and predict things for people. Suggestions welcome...

roryokane 12y ago
Predict, based on the spread rate of Starbucks franchises, how long it will take for a new Starbucks, closer to your home than the current nearest, will be built.

callmeed 12y ago

I was inspired by Marc Andreessen's post this weekend about news/journalism [1]. So, here's my idea for an editorial news site: The site would be called "5 ON 5" and every post would be based on a current news topic. In each post, 2 writers/bloggers would argue opposing views of the topic (point/counterpoint). BUT each argument must be written in a BuzzFeed listicle style format. For example: 5 ON 5: UKRAINE "5 reasons Obama needs to stay out of the Ukraine/Russia crisis" vs. "5 things Obama needs to do for Ukraine right now" and 5 ON 5: FACEBOOK F8 CONFERENCE "You should put Facebook's anonymous login in your app. Here's 5 reasons why." vs. "5 reasons Facebook's new anonymous login is bad for developers" I like it because it could work for any news category, it could be for analysis and prognostication, you could presumably get great guest writers, and it's "smart" spin on the viral crap BuzzFeed/Gawker puts out. [1] http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreesen-why-im-bullish-on-the-news-105921.html http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreese...

kevbam 12y ago

Food inventory for the ordinary home. A synced cross platform app that allows a normal home to monitor: 1)What food has been bought? 2)What the expiration date is? Warnings when food is going out of date. 3)What meals can be made based on the food “in stock”? I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what food is at home and to reduce the amount of food wastage in our home. I think an app that allows you to scan shopping receipts, the contents of which are automatically loaded into a database and synced across multiple apps would be very useful. It could be monetized using the freemium model, e.g. more complex functionality the more you pay and also by integrating with online shopping engines such as instacart. Any feedback on this greatly appreciated.

thebenedict 12y ago
I've thought about something similar but get hung up on data entry. How do you make it not miserable to get food purchase data into the app, given that food doesn't have an RFID tag in it, and not everything (produce) has a barcode? I like the receipt idea - partner with grocery stores to print a qr-code with a machine readable list of items and (maybe) expiration dates. Having to do any kind of manual scan on each item I bring home from the store feels like too much behavior change to become part of my everyday routine. Maybe there's an opportunity to do it for institutional kitchens where inventory is required by default? It would be fun to build the fitbit and basis integrations. Also, Randall Munroe offered a different approach: http://xkcd.com/1109/ http://xkcd.com/1109/ :)
- kevbam 12y ago
  Yes, data entry is the gap. I have been thinking about that and it seems like there are a number of solutions that would allow you to read the text from a photo, vivino.com is an example of an app that does this very well with wine labels. I wonder if you could take a high quality photo of the receipt and the app would add the contents of the receipt to the db based on this? I know its not going to be seamless and may take a bit of manual work at the beginning. Partnering with a grocery store or multiple when the solution picks up traction could also simplify things significantly.

bradchoate 12y ago

If you like the movie reviews on The Incomparable podcast (the recent WarGames episode, for instance), perhaps you'll agree with me that there should be a web site/app that offers full-length, fan-created movie commentaries that can be played while viewing the movie. Business model should probably be subscription (who wants spot ads thrown into the middle of their movies?) or something simple like $1 per commentary. The service should seek out talent to create the commentary tracks and pay them for their work.

hitlin37 12y ago
not that interesting. It distracts the focus from the content. plus there are tons of such stuff people do on youtube.
bambax 12y ago
I don't know about movies (maybe) but for sports this sounds like a great idea; instead of listening to the same old commentators you could have your friends or inspired amateurs, or famous people or who knows who? commenting on the game. Some kind of youtube-soundcloud-twitter mashup with a strong focus on realtime. Not sure how it should work but there should be potential.
- tibu 12y ago
  I like the sports idea. The question is where do you get the content from.

thebenedict 12y ago

An issue tracker for freelancers and small teams that is designed to be used collaboratively with clients, without burdening clients with unnecessary detail. Clients see a list of user stories or other deliverables and can discuss, and file issues and bugs against them. Developers can track their own bugs, finer-grained tasks and issues privately. These two sides of the software are linked for the developer, i.e. as a developer I can add detail and break down a client request into smaller stories without exposing the client to the gritty details, and keep track of which client request(s) different issues and stories are related to. Also useful for filing issues the client doesn't need to know about, say, bugs I find before they do :) The problem this solves is that I have to maintain two issue trackers, one focused on user stories and features (usually a google spreadsheet), and another for more technical tasks and bugs (usually pivotal tracker). I want to keep it all in one place. I would be surprised if this doesn't already exist, but I haven't been able to find it.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pirer 12y ago

An anonymous linkedin My only interaction with other people if it there's a business/freelance opportunity. Invite only and where names appear when the deal is real.

bradchoate 12y ago

"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like Siri, but for your terminal. Ie: $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo $ please archive this directory into foo.zip $ please clone the bootstrap repo from github $ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar' Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't it time we had an interface layer that abstracts away all of the fiddly switches and just did what we said? It would offer a pluggable interface for extending its capability and vocabulary.

wingerlang 12y ago
I'd wager that ANY person who actually uses CLI tools to do things does not want, nor need, to write full sentences to do these things. Everyone that uses CLI tools always says they do so because it is the fastest way possible to do X. That point becomes moot once you have to write sentences.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I don't know - I live in the terminal, and I definitively wouldn't use it for regular commands (sed, grep, tar, etc), but if it was smart enough, I could see myself using it for software that I rarely use and which has complicated options. For example, I'd rather type please convert movie.avi to h264 at 720p with subtitles from movie.srt than having to read the man page of avconv each time. Bonus points if it could print the translated command before running it - it'd double as a learning tool.
  - anewhnaccount 12y ago
    Or even if it'd only output the translate command line. Like a better apropos. A nice idea for sure.
jolt 12y ago
That is an excellent idea! Make it cross platform, and able to install missing tools, combine it with speech to text and you would be able to talk to any device regardless of the software installed on the device. please open presentation X from my dropbox

dang 12y ago

Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes, this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you all not to post more of them. Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the answer is no. Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Having all these ideas in one place makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to have gotten less interesting as they've become more regular. I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize HN for curiosity and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather than try to organize an idea-fest. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938

DanBC 12y ago
I agree about the frustration of having multiple threads posted by different people. These threads should be killed. A once per month thread would be useful to me. Would it be possible to accommodate that?
- dang 12y ago
  I'm not adamantly opposed to it, but it seems rote to me. As I've tried to explain, if there isn't a clear 'yes' then the default answer should be 'no'. I wonder if there's a different path to getting the valuable part of it? It seems to me that instead of rushing to embalm experiments as regular features, we should just do more experiments.
- krapp 12y ago
  It seems to me that the ability to merge threads (either automatically or through moderator action) would benefit this, and the problem of multiple posts on the same subject in general. Although I don't agree with seeing popular, user generated content as a negative, but it's not my sandbox. I think it's at least better than yet another Techcrunch post or ceaseless bickering about class warfare and internecine SV politics. Also, perhaps these threads should automatically expire weekly.

udayadds 12y ago

A Bitcoin like protocol for sending/receiving real money (USD, INR). Why to pay 2% to banks and card processors when we can use blockchain for the same.

dannyking 12y ago

A Google-reader like service for your YouTube channels subscriptions. I'd like to have a list of videos from my subscriptions I can turn into a video magazine I can e.g. watch each Sunday. It's super annoying that to keep up with your subscriptions on YouTube you have to click on each channel and manually work out which videos you've seen and which you haven't.

hashtag 12y ago
You can subscribe to Youtube feeds with any RSS reader. I've been doing it for a long time now. The built-in Youtube subscription blows hardcore.

hashtag 12y ago

A single site that aggregates and live demo or video demo of open source projects... Skimming through and reading each open source project to figure out exactly what it does or having to read code, install it, or run it in some form just to get a better idea is a pain in the ass (personal opinion). It would be awesome to have a way to go through projects fast and _see_ what they're about before starring at their repo. Reading descriptions is not as awesome as seeing the product when possible.

simondlr 12y ago

VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially]. I think once VR takes off there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be costly to do so).

nl5874 12y ago

I've been working on a kind of reversed wetransfer. You'll claim a domain, and others can drop files at your personal url. It have been opensourced on github (https://github.com/dutchcoders/dropit https://github.com/dutchcoders/dropit). And running at https://dropit.io/ https://dropit.io/.

nl5874 12y ago

Created an opensource plugin architecture for currently Chrome, but can be Firefox as well. Consists of repositories and plugins you can enable and disable. These plugins will add extra functionality to an existing website, or change layout for example. https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome

nl5874 12y ago

With StackTray (opensource) you can manage all your EC2 instances from the OSX statusbar. Currently only Amazon AWS is supported, but planning to extend with PaaS, but also DigitalOceaan, Google Compute Engine and Azure. https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray

mokkol 12y ago

I don't know if it already exist but a password tool that automatically changes your passwords and syncs it with your mobile/desktop every day. (password for example: gmail, twitter facebook etc.) something like 1Password but automatically changing the passwords every day/week/month

pallavkaushish 12y ago

I'm starting to work on a marketing tool which will be a combination of displaying popups like Bounce Exchange(http://bounceexchange.com/ http://bounceexchange.com/) and Tweetganic(http://www.tweetganic.com/ http://www.tweetganic.com/) or http://snip.ly/ http://snip.ly/. Currently Social Media Management tools like Hootsuite provide a link shortner so it's relatively easier for them to integrate a service like http://snip.ly/ http://snip.ly/ however they don't. The product I'm thinking to create will allow anyone to manage, split test their pop ups and promote themselves using a service like snip.ly. An analytics module will accompany the product so all the data can be meaningfully used to enhance the campaigns. Hope I was able to clearly explain my idea. Would detail out some more if anyone is interested.