Ask HN: Idea Sunday - <AUTHOR> Continuing the series! Go...<p>A small HN experiment. Every Sunday, a thread will be started to share product ideas. Why? Because many people have ideas they will simply not have the time to implement, and many need product ideas to work on. <comment><USER7> Why are recipes linear and textual? I'm surprised the recipe-book metaphor sticked with us for that long.

I want a social cooking platform where the only way to represent a recipe is with a diagram.

[http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancak...](http://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/156044/2247517/Pancake- recipe-crop.jpg)

You're a cooking master? No need to explain you how to make a roux or how to blanch vegetables.

Don't have butter? We'll substitute the step where you need butter by the steps to make it.

Allergic to peanut? These nuts are a good alternative.

Let's build a semantic recipe platform that's not linear and add a functional twist to ingredients (the part where you can substitute an ingredient by the function that returns one).

<comment><USER8> I'm on a side project right now that involves indexing recipes by ingredients and the like, making an api could make the jump to substitutions and other meta-like mods.

<comment><USER9> Have you tried [http://foodpair.com/](http://foodpair.com/) ?? it scrapes recipes from different sites and indexes them ingredient and lets you search recipes by just telling it what ingredients you have. You can also click each ingredient in a recipe to find out general substitutions for it (not recipe- specific).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A major pain point in my life is house maintenance and repair. I really miss having a (good) landlord. That's what I want - a single point of contact to manage the upkeep of and fix any issues related to my home.

There's so much friction in the process of finding the various contractors needed to keep a home in good order. First you have to search on craigslist, angieslist, or google for contractors that service your area. Then you play phone tag with each. Then you schedule a time for each to come out and give an estimate, which can be a major interruption to your week. Then you schedule a time for the chosen contractor to actually complete the work. And then you cross your fingers that you chose well, because if you didn't, you'll have an even bigger headache on your hands.

Ideally I would pay a large monthly fee (500-1k) and absolutely everything would be covered. Regular maintenance would simply get done without requiring anything of me. My lawn would get cut when it needs it. My driveway would be cleared when it snows. My gutters would be cleaned as needed. My home would be cleaned twice a month. And so on. When ever anything else needs fixing, I'd have a single point of contact (an app, maybe) where I could open a ticket. I'd then be offered a selection of times when an expert could come fix the issue and after selecting a time that works for me, an expert would actually show up at that time and fix the problem. A little more friction could be removed if I could preselect times when it's acceptable for maintenance personnel to enter my home. Ideally I wouldn't even have to be home. The service would also have permission to deal with my insurance company as needed since that's also a major pain point. They'd cover anything not covered by the insurance. Or perhaps I could do away with my existing home insurance in favor of this full service home insurance company.

To begin the service, someone would have to perform a full home inspection to uncover preexisting issues which wouldn't be covered. The service could help take care of those issues but it'd have to be on an a la carte basis. Once the home was up to snuff, then the monthly fee would kick in and cover any new issues, as well as regular maintenance.

A simpler version of the idea, which wouldn't be as good but would have a lot less risk would be to offer maintenance only: lawn cutting, regular cleanings, ect... I'd still pay good money for that.

<comment><USER11> Property management companies take care of this for rental units.

Why not just find a good one that operates in your area and pitch the idea to them? Normally they operate for a percentage of rents but I'm sure you could find one who would do it for flat rate.

Your problem with the insurance company thing is you might have to give them Power of Attorney (which you really don't want to do) to make insurance claims on your behalf.

The Property Management company would already have the liability insurance that any company working in this space would need to do this for you.

<comment><USER10> For some reason I cannot edit my comment so I'll reply again.

I've been researching property management companies in Cincinnati (where I live) and I've come to a few conclusions:

1\. There are no good property management companies in Cincinnati. At least, there are no highly reviewed property management companies - only those with negative reviews or no reviews at all.

2\. Owners looking to rent their homes might be a great demographic for this idea. While most of the property management companies state that they do regular maintenance checkups, they really aren't incentivized to do so and from the reviews I read they typically don't. They're really only incentivized to keep the renter renting so that they continue to get their cut. As it stands, owners and tenants are often at odds when it comes to "needed" repairs because the property management companies charge the owners $50/hour plus parts for any repairs beyond the most routine of maintenance. Basically the property management companies have stuck themselves between a rock and a hard place where it's almost impossible to make both the owner and tenant happy. If, however, the owners were paying a larger monthly fee that covered all repairs, they'd no longer be at odds with the tenant. Of course, the problem of "tenant abuse" would then fall on us. Hopefully by being proactive with regular maintenance the abuse could be mitigated somewhat.

I'm going to call a few property management companies tomorrow to get a better idea of what exactly is and isn't covered under their plans.

<comment><USER11> Seeing as though I live in Hilton Head, I'm probably in the ideal market to try a scheme like this (#2).

There are a ton of remote homeowners renting out their property here without using a property manager or without using a good one. Unfortunately the homeowners I mention here tend to be extremely greedy people and don't have property managers because they don't want to pay anyone. They do things like advertise their units have cable TV and free wifi and have the cheapest, worst tier of service and constantly call the cable provider every month trying to get credits for fictional outages.

There's probably some money to be made here but I'm not sure I'd want to be the cog that keeps their greed-machine running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just going to throw this one out there. I live in Lisbon, it's tourist-central (I'm from SF and I've never seen so many tourists). Since I see a ton of lost people every single day there should be a way to digitally leave comments on things and places and a free one-stop shop to find such info (like Wikitravel). This info, although having a central repository, should be pushed out to an app that connects to one's phone (in particular, GPS) so that when you need help with figuring out where you are, what statue you're standing in front of, etc, you can open the app and it tell you (no entering anything...only if you want to get to another location).

By entering what you want to do beforehand, the app would know where you are and have a list of places you said you want to go, and tell you how to get to the next closest place, or alert you if one on your list is about to close for the day. Perhaps each city version is done by locals and in case of bad actors, there can be a voting system so the right info goes to the top. Plus, there could be integration with Google Maps so you can see if you're going the right way.

<comment><USER13> Reddit for real places rather than links? Upvotes and downvotes, comments (with upvotes and downvotes). A search function (that actually works) laid over Google Maps rather than textual links? Interesting.

<comment><USER14> I thought reddit fixed its search function sometime in, like, 2010. What have you searched for recently that didn't give the results you were looking for?

<comment><USER14> (sound of crickets)

<comment><USER13> You are right. I was unjustly unfair, and my information is outdated. As a longtime user of the site, I suppose old biases die hard. Thanks for all you've done to improve things over there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Basically Yelp for transgender surgeons.

I've been working on making the decision as to who I'll get to sculpt new genitals for me, and researching this on the web is a mess - every site comparing them is out of date, triggers my mental sketchy spam site detectors, or both.

It'd be great to be able to go to a nice-looking site and say "all I'm interested in right now is MtF genital surgery", then see doctors who do that, and crowd-sourced reviews if their work. (Other people may be interested in FtM genital surgery, breast augumentation/removal, orichectomy, you get the idea - various manipulations of genitals and secondary gender cues.)

I think there's probably less than a hundred people who offer these kinds of services in the world, so it's not exactly a huge database to worry about.

<comment><USER16> I feel like this is a symptom of a far larger problem, the need for yelp for medical care in general. Its kind of shitty that there is absolutely no way to quality and price compare medical providers.

Also, good luck with the transition, I have a friend going through something similar, its definitely not an easy thing.

<comment><USER17> ZocDoc?

<comment><USER16> Its a start. I feel like zocdoc is good for looking up doctors who take your insurance but because the healthcare system itself is so massively broken, they can't tell you how much a procedure would cost and success rates. I may be wrong though and hope I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This might be fairly simple, but I can't find a good solution - A replacement for Google Groups.

More specifically, a better UI to use Mailing Lists. Perhaps like vBulletin or other advance forum software. Maybe even built-in support in my email client?

For the life of me, I can't find a good way to use Mailing Lists. I don't like receiving 40+ messages every day, but I don't find digest mode good enough either. Google Groups is clunky, and it gives me no good motivation to return to it. The readability is also not all that great imo. The whole ajaxy thing it has going for it is also bad. I want to read static text on a functional and beautiful UI. It's not too much to ask for. :(

<comment><USER19> In my opinion, discussions were handled better in the old Usenet days. How about running a private NNTP server and use one of the programs that forwards the mailing list to the NNTP server? There are still lots of good NNTP clients out there like XNews

<comment><USER20> I can't agree more and what I absolutely loved about Usenet discussions was, every reply contains a subject line. And it was expected etiquette to change your subject line if your reply deviates from the parent.

With usenet, I could easily tell what I haven't read and if a branch deviates from what I'm interested in discussing, I can just ignore that entire branch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Build a company around creating a best in class development environment that they can sell to other tech companies. This would involve everything from repository management (on top of git) to build & compilation tooling to automated testing and probably more than that eventually.

Once companies reach a certain scale they inevitably expend some of their resources on building internal development tools. At Foursquare we have 1 person (on a team of ~80) doing this fulltime. Google has spent a ton of effort on this with blaze. Facebook & Twitter have done similar work. But it's all fragmented and it's all reinventing the wheel.

A company should do this right for everyone. If it was good enough I'd happily write very very large checks to use it.

Honestly I think this is what GitHub should be doing, but they don't appear to have their shit together enough to innovate so someone else should do it.

<comment><USER22> How about Phabricator- [http://phabricator.org/](http://phabricator.org/)

<comment><USER21> That's part of the puzzle, but it's (AFAIK) mostly for code review and bug tracking. I'm very much interested in the build tooling & automated testing (& probably also deployment) pieces.

<comment><USER23> This stuff is still in beta and not generally useful, but we have Harbormaster (Build/CI), Drydock (software resource management) and Releeph (release management) in the pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts.

For those of you who develop using powerful IDEs (such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, ...), it's hard to imagine going back to a basic notepad.

Most people, most of the time, don't write software. They exchange ideas, express wishes, share their feelings. And to do that, they use tools that are not more powerful than a basic notepad.

This forces them to be explicit, to explain what they mean, to repeat ideas, to think linearly.

I believe it's time for the average person to have access to tools that are just as expressive (if not more) than the ones developers have been using for years. It's time to break the speech metaphor and develop a completely new way to communicate. It's time for a UI-driven, computer-assisted, general-purpose language.

What I suggest we build is an IDE for ideas. Intellisense for thoughts.

<comment> andrey-p Interesting idea, but could you elaborate on the practical side of this?

Here's my take on this, in the form a ramble:

Intellisense works really well for code because there's a finite set of, for instance, methods you can call on a certain object - so I'm assuming you mean something that's more than just autocompletion.

I'm not really sure language on its own is powerful enough to handle ideas. When I think of organising thoughts and ideas I normally think of a mind map type of thing.

However, mind map software is too restrictive in terms of what you can create. A sheet of paper + pen is an excellent tool for noting down ideas and thoughts, but paper is finite and ink is irreversible: you can't move around/delete stuff.

I also sometimes have trouble with situations where idea A and idea B are related, but are situated at two completely ends of a mind map graph. So this might mean dispensing with two-dimensional mind maps entirely, but I struggle to imagine a non-annoying way of displaying a mind map in 3D.

<comment><USER7> "Thought" might be a better term than "ideas". The purpose of such a tool is not to brainstorm, but to communicate.

We communicate using natural languages. If you check Twitter, you'll see people write down all kind of thoughts and information. But this information is not semantic, and only a human (or NLP) can make sense of what is said.

When people communicate, it's either to make a statement about the past ("I ate sushis"), about the present ("I'm in Las Vegas"), or about the future ("I want to watch Terminator 2").

The past and present (which actually are the same) are simple declaration about reality. The future is all about wishes and intents.

Of course, you could add another dimension/mode (reality/fiction). In fiction, past/present could be "I wish Hitler wasn't born" and the future could be "I want to work at Google". In reality, you would say "Dinosaurs existed" (past/present) and "There will be an hurricane tomorrow" (future). The difference is that the future is no longer a wish, but a prediction (as we're dealing with reality).

I want people to be able to communicate the following ideas without just relying on boring text:

\- The Lego Movie was great.

\- I want to be in NYC by noon.

\- I'm interested in Bitcoin.

\- Lock my house's doors.

\- I want to wake up at 7AM every monday.

\- I'd love to attent to the next Metallica concert in Barcelona.

\- It's rainy in Vancouver.

\- Where is my car?

\- Turn on the oven to high.

The above statements should be purely semantic. I should be able to click on "Metallica" and get more information about them. I should be able to click on "event" and see where and when it takes place. I should be able to click on "car" and see exactly what car he's referring to. I want statements to be elevated to a level where they have meaning, and that text only is a single representation of these ideas.

You're in Vancouver? You won't see "It's rainy in Vancouver". You'll see "It's rainy (here)". If you don't know what Bitcoin is, you might see "John Doe is interested in [insert a short summary about what Bitcoin is]". If you're metallica, you'll probably see "3723 people want to see you in Barcelona". If you're the oven, you'll probably understand "Heat up to 500 F".

Now, the above statements are simple and don't show why someone would need an IDE for thoughts (NLP + manual confirmation would be enough in many cases). But people shouldn't limit what they think to 140 characters either. They should be able to express complex ideas such as (a product review):

        "iphone" -> "Do you mean iPhone 5S ..." -> Yes

        "display" -> "Are you referring to the display of the iPhone ..." -> Yes

        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>
        - Too Dim             ->     Yes
        - <USER4>

        ...

As you can see above, it's not easy to express complex interactions with text. But the idea is that you can input any keyword representing a "thing" (object, attribute, value), and continue adding nodes by searching for them with keywords until you have the elements you want to refer to. Then, you can drag relations between them and see suggestions based on likeliness and what not. It would of course infer things based on past statements and what it knows about you.

When writing a product review, people don't always know where to start, and often repeat things that other have said. By being able to refer to specific aspects of a product, see what others have said and confirm/infirm their statement (upvote/downvote), as well as build on top of it is probably a better way to converge meaning than to ask potential buyers to read through all of them manually. Maybe this should have his own idea thread.

Basically, I want a semantic version of Twitter that can suggest me things I can say about things I want to talk about, and let me endorse an existing statement instead of repeating it.

<comment><USER24> I see it doing reverse stemming so that the nouns and verbs in the AST are more simple, like annotating verbs and nouns with a temporal tag.

You type in english, and it generates an AST on the fly. This would allow conversations to line up and be searchable by content rather than just text.

If the software isn't continually improved I could see it dumbing down the grammar that the group uses. It could enforce a defacto double-speak.

Another nice side effect, is that you could search by concept. I find this very very difficult with current search tools.

<comment><USER7> That's the plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A file naming convention (lightweight markup) that would allow us to store structured (meta)data right inside file names. Obviously inspired by Markdown and CSV.

We could then build lean, database-less asset management applications, while the user data (i.e. the files and their metadata) would always be portable, across platforms.

Take for example:

      J.M.W. Turner | Rain, Steam and Speed | ···· 1844.jpg
      W. Blake ···· | Newton ·············· | 1795–1805.jpg

as compared to the clutter we now must deal with:

      _IMG00123.JPG
      Turner_-_Rain%2C_Steam_and_Speed_-_National_Gallery_file.jpg

My practical use case: take snapshots of my incoming receipts, bills, etc., name the jpgs using the proposed file naming convention (including fields for VAT, net amount, etc.), put them in Dropbox, build a parser and accompanying GUI to edit file names (and their corresponding metadata; have total amounts etc. being calculated in real time), drop a link to that (web app) interface to my accountant.

It's just an idea for HN Idea Sunday; I did a somewhat more detailed write-up:

[https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629](https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629)

<comment><USER26> I like this. I've often had a similar issue in computational physics when handling lots of different calculation input/output files with variations in parameters. I've tended to automatically generate directory hierarchies, e.g.

rc=1.0/ecut=60/kp=4,4,4/

rc=1.0/ecut=80/kp=4,4,4/

rc=2.0/ecut=60/kp=4,4,4/

rc=2.0/ecut=80/kp=4,4,4/

but some standard way of expressing it in the file name would be great, and nicer to parse out later. There are filesystems that allow metadata, but I've never seen one really being used for that purpose. You could make some associated command line tools that are equivalent to 'ls' that allow splitting/slicing the files down different parameters.

<comment><USER27> Take a look at hdf5.

<comment><USER26> Thanks, I'll take a look, but it seems like I'd have to change the format of the files, right? Unfortunately that's not really feasible, since their format is determined by the scientific codes I use -- that's why I was attracted to the idea of using the file name. I can, however, have a go at HDF5 for code that I write myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Web filter. I love F1 and there is a race today, so I can't look at 99% of the internet as they will show the result. I will watch the race later when the kids have gone to bed.

This problem is so big that i have to avoid facebook becaue they also show trending news.

So a filter that filters F1 or any selectable sports news. Then when i turn it off after watching the race the filter shows me a list of what news it found and filtered for me.

Added extra, while i'm watching the race it could show me tweets in real time, but back shifted so as to make sense with the race.

My football loving buddie also agrees he'd pay for this filter.

<comment><USER29> I don't have HBO, so filtering all Game of Thrones references every Sunday and Monday would be fantastic.

Not sure I'd pay for that service since it's probably easier to just pay for HBO and watch it "live" like everyone else.

<comment><USER30> I thought the same thing, but unfortunately a lot of spoilers come in the form of images. Or maybe fortunately, since it adds an interesting layer of complexity to this idea.

<comment><USER31> ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc

<comment><USER32> Sometimes, I wonder if there really are cats and dogs messing around with computers...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sell anything in a snap.

1\. Find something you want to sell

2\. Snap a picture (or a short video)

3\. Tap "list for sale"

4\. Let mechanical turk + computer vision identify the object

5\. Let the system pick a value (based on sales history, location, demand)

6\. Contact the seller when a serious buyer made a deposit

7\. Proceed to demo + sale

I shouldn't have to write down any spec when selling something as ubiquitous as an Xbox 360. I shouldn't have to go through 100 different ways to describe an iPhone 4S when looking to buy one.

Delegating item identification to a third party is how you reduce the friction of listing items for sale and improve semantics.

And to think that this system only applies to selling items is naive. The possibilities are endless.

<comment><USER33> Already done:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6660089)

[http://i.imgur.com/mmPAztu.png](http://i.imgur.com/mmPAztu.png)

I didn't get much interest so I didn't bother building it :)

<comment><USER7> I built a prototype too: thingsy.co

It finds all the pictures on Instagram with the hashtag #forsale, post them on Craigslist, and contact the seller through Instagram when a buyer emails the Craigslist contact info.

Craigslist killed it.

<comment><USER34> there is a lot of activity in this sector right now, including some VC funded startups, the approach they are taking is to grab instagram #forsale pics then post it on their own storefront site

<comment><USER7> Really? Do you have any example?

<comment><USER34> this is the best one I seen - [https://10s.ec](https://10s.ec)

a few others

[http://new.soldsie.com/instagram-selling/](http://new.soldsie.com/instagram- selling/)

[https://paytagz.com](https://paytagz.com) (Member of [http://boost.vc](http://boost.vc))

<comment><USER7> Cool thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unlike "Who is hiring?" posts, which are ephemeral, "Idea Sunday" posts continue being useful for a long time. Therefore, consider posting a link at the end of each one allowing readers to jump to the previous one.

<comment><USER35> Linking to a search might do!

[https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/0/%22ask%20hn%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/#!/story/sort_by_date/0/%22ask%20hn%20idea%20sunday%22)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A bit lame maybe but here it goes:

The "Ready for Battle alarm clock". An alarm clock that wakes you up with your favourite quotes from video games or movies such as:

\- Rise and shine, Mister Freeman. Rise and... shine. Not that I... wish to imply you have been sleeping on the job. No one is more deserving of a rest, and all the effort in the world would have gone to waste until... well, let's just say your hour has... come again. (or part of this one).

\- It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum... and I'm all outta gum

This idea would work best when you always wear your Google Glass like device. Then the audio can be combined with a nice visual of for instance the G-Man.

For now, without the glass integration, it's easy to do make this with your own phone. A nice service could be to personalize the message, i.e. "Wake up Mr. Bootvis...".

The big problem here is that just copying these audio samples isn't allowed and so it will be hard to build a company out of this.

<comment><USER37> that would be cool, but wearing glasses while sleeping is not recommended.

<comment><USER38> Contacts and cochlear implants.

<comment><USER39> Contacts are worse (..other than the ones you can sleep in). Seriously though, sleeping with your alarm clock makes it too easy to snooze anyway - we should just project the image and go hologram later. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been sitting on this gem for a while. I present to you: The Bruce Wayne Gap Year.

Wealthy people with desires to become Batman can more-or-less do so.

First they sign a waiver and an NDA, removing any liability from the Bruce Wayne Gap Year company. Then they'll pay the company tens of thousands of dollars to pay for what is to come.

They'll be put into a real criminal gang [1], and taken around the world getting involved in all sorts of illegal [2] activities.

Sooner or later they'll be subtly led to the Himalayas, where they'll join a monastery, lead a simple life of celibacy and minimalism and slowly learn to meditate and fully understand themselves and their body.

After a while, they'll be groomed by a man [3] claiming to be working for a mysterious and powerful leader of a guild of assassins, and taught all kinds of martial arts over months and months, culminating in a complex battle which determines their eligibility. At that point, they will be asked to do something their morals will not allow (this will be determined in a psychological screening), and end up betraying and destroying [4] the guild.

Then they return home, better for the experience.

It can't fail. A friend of mine also suggested it be re-implemented for all sorts of action hero/film type situations. James Bond, Die Hard, Rambo, etc. It's essentially a very expensive, realistic roleplaying experience.

[1]: Actually, very highly paid and well-trained actors. We don't tell them that though.

[2]: Mostly not illegal, but they're made to believe that these things are illegal. Some things will be borderline (they may accidentally end up threatening people who are not part of the ruse, for example), hence the NDA.

[3]: Also an actor. A very good, very well paid actor. Possibly we'll just get Liam Neeson, and he'll act so well that he'll convince them that he's not Liam Neeson.

[4]: Not really. The martial artists will never be allowed to be worse than the client, and will also be stunt-trained and capable of faking death.

<comment><USER41> Wealthy people who are in a physical condition to do this, don't have time.

Wealthy people who have time, don't have health.

And those who have both, won't even talk to you.

<comment><USER42> Mainly because they are already Batman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's a lot of parallel conversations on Reddit / HN / etc. for various articles.

Would about pulling high rated, top-level conversations from multiple sources for a quick digest? Sort of like Google News for commentary.

<comment><USER44> As someone who often appreciates the comments as much or more than the content - yes! I often come across articles in places other than Reddit or HN and wish I could do a "reverse lookup" to see where it might have been submitted just so I can read the comments.

<comment><USER45> There's a Chrome add-on which uses the Algolia API to do this. It adds a pop- out side bar showing the HN comments for the page/article you're currently reading. You must be on the page submitted, rather than on a comments page, though.

<comment><USER10> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- sideba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- sidebar/ngljhffenbmdjobakjplnlbfkeabbpma/related?hl=en-US)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Airbnb, but paid with labor.

Many travelers are short on cash but would love to trade services for a night's stay. Me, I would be happy to host a guest for free provided they did my dishes or laundry.

Many homeowners, especially empty-nesters, have homes with plenty of space that they still have to maintain. This would provide benefits to both parties.

<comment><USER37> hm, this could have some legal / human rights issues potentially.

<comment><USER47> So does Airbnb...

<comment><USER37> afaik, airbnb requests that the travelers pay using fiat money, not labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Here's what I want: A cheap text ssh terminal with wifi,or cellular, nice keyboard hardware, with extremely long battery life (or solar powered), which i can just throw it in my car and forget it. Whenever I am away of my computer I can always log in to my cloud server and write codes or do some quick fixes.

<comment><USER49> This should be possible with a Kindle. The basic Kindle costs $50 or so. And it is a fork of Android. And has a month of battery life. There are some Kindle-roots [Search "root a kindle"]. Would something like this work for you? The keyboard will still be the kindle-keyboard.

The other option is a cheap ipad with a bluetooth keyboard. If you turn off all the unnecessary apps and notifications and put it on airplane mode - <USER5> should last a couple of weeks. You turn it on only when you need it. You will still need to get an ssh app [many available].

<comment><USER50> The basic Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite don't use Android. It's only the higher end models like Kindle Fire that use the Android fork.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Idea: Tree of knowledge

Ever been interested in a topic that once you google you end up with explanations(quite often on wikipedia) that rely on foundational knowledge you didn't even know you should have? And then you started working your way back by googling things you didn't know until you hit something you do know and from that point you try to inch your way forward to the original topic just to get discouraged a few hours in? I know I have and it's a pain!

A well built knowledge map that would graph the relationships between different topics in a field would help alleviate this problem. Take for example linear algebra. You've heard about this fancy thing called singular value decomposition but barely know what a matrix is. You type SVD into a search box, and it generates a breadth first tree with all the topics you need to know to be able to understand SVD up to a certain depth. And then you just work from the leafs that you do understand up to the topic you are interested. This saves hours or sometimes days of just trying to understand the ordering in which you should be learning things. It essentially builds a curriculum for the user on the fly for a topic they are interested.

I would propose this as a community wiki so knowledge maps could be crowdsourced and curated as they would be time consuming and difficult to build for a single person. Would also suggest adding the ability to let users create accounts and mark off topics they feel confident they know.

Potential problems: The two big problems with this idea are 1) generating a proper knowledge map: There will be ambiguities in the edges and even the nodes of a map. Sometimes (often) you will need to be clever how you organize the information. For example, your have a dependency listing like: Matrix <\- Rotation Matrix, but in reality it might be better to have something like Matrix <\- Linear Transform <\- Rotation Matrix. Linear transforms would act as an intermediary node for rotation, scaling, shearing, w/e.

2) a topics can be studied in different frameworks: E.g. linear algebra can be studied with or without using vector spaces. Once again, deciding how to create the knowledge graph will be difficult.

Solution: Have multiple types of edges. You can have edges to signify hard dependencies, soft dependencies, generalizations, and extensions. Maybe other types of edges. You will still need to be clever, but having a way to signify the relationship between topics will help resolve the problem.

<comment><USER52> You mean something like this

[https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard](https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard)

but for all knowledge?

<comment><USER51> Yes, but as a wiki and with the additional edge information + breadth first listing as I mentioned. It doesn't have to be as finely split up as this one but maybe it should.

I have to say I'm really impressed by their progress since the last time I checked their knowledge map (~2 years ago).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> A kind of task rabbit that will connect expats ( who don't speak the language) with locals. The idea is that the local will help the expat in small tasks like understanding an insurance policy, housing contract, employment receipt.

<comment><USER54> Sounds interesting!

But would the company be able to build brand? First, to find expats would be somewhat difficult as they tend to blend in! Second, the company would need to be careful which people they hired, so they might be able to start at the top end of the market (high rates, high quality service) and work down from there...

That gives me the idea that it could start from an already existing service- oriented company, whether that's landscaping, security, legal services, accounting, etc. and they could just add translation and a more taskrabbit- like approach (phone app, etc.)

<comment><USER53> Yea you got a point. However, I think you should pay a small fee, let's say 10 euros for the help. I used to live in the netherlands and it happened to me many times that I didnt understand contracts, bills, etc and I got tired to ask friends/coworkers to help me with that. I would pay a small fee to have an external part to do it. I think it would work better targetting high skilled expats in European cities with lot of them where the native language is not English like Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> == Dying Skills, Lost Tech ==

I knew a chap who could roof a home with Cotswold stone. He knew how the stone was quarried (but he didn't do that bit) and how it was made into roof tiles (but he didn't do that bit very often) and he knew how to roof a house using those tiles. There are not that many people who can do that anymore.

There's a meme about the NASA Saturn V rockets that says we've lost the paperwork and thus re-making them would be cery hard, and could involve rediscovering technology.

The Domesday project is sometimes used as an example of digital obselesance [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project)

And here's an example of someone looking for Cray software and code and documentation [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464546)

So, this would be a site that interviews people (using crowdsourced interviews) to glean information about how they do or did things, and why, with video if possible of them demonstrating the techniques and equipment and methods.

This would be a teeny bit like the Endangered Language Project. [http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/](http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/)

There would need to be some way to control for truth and accuracy[1] and also some suggestions for what is a good interview.

[1] my dad used to tell quite a few lies. One of these (well, one set) was about his diabetes diagnosis and treatment. He claimed he had been diagnosed as a child while still at school, and that he had to sharpen his syringe on the stone floor. Utter cobblers, but somehow it found its way to an academic site. I sent them a polite email and they made their disclaimers about uncorroborated etc a bit clearer.

<comment><USER56> This sounds similar to the BBC Mastercrafts series:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvrcj/episodes/guide](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qvrcj/episodes/guide)

It came highly recommended to me, and the six episodes are sitting on my disk, but I haven't gotten around to watching any yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A system to compose and track drug/supplement stacks, regimen and diets.

Transforming yourself has never been more accessible than it is today. We have access to so much information and so many resources that there's rarely any valid excuse not to become what you want to be. The problem is that the whole process can be overwhelming, and finding what works for you requires discipline and dedication. Most results don't happen overnight, and the only way to get through months of imperceptible progress is to have a clear plan, track everything, and learn from others.

I've seen all kinds of people in all kinds of context attempting to share some regimen with others. You will find that on Oprah, in books, at the gym, at your doctors, on forums, etc. That's all fine, but why do they still have to write down the name of the product, the brand, the posology, the side-effects, their interactions, everything by hand? Wouldn't it be easier for them to write them down with a tool that understands what the regimen means, and easier for us to add them to our own regimen in a single click?

Once the system understands what I (and others) want to achieve, how I progress and exactly what I do to reach it, only good things can come out of it. It can learn (machine learning, correlation finding), it can recommend tweaks, it can help me acquire products, it can reward me, etc.

How hard is it to set-up a database of all drugs/supplements/vitamins, and let people semantically fill the why, what, when and how?

I don't think there's a lack of niches either:

\- Bodybuilding

\- Cognitive enhancement (nootropics)

\- Weight loss

\- Hair loss

\- Skin care

\- Allergies

\- Acne

\- Long distance running

\- Diets (vegan, paleo)

\- Chronic disease

\- Life extension

<comment><USER57> I've been looking into a very similar idea. There's a fair amount of prior art in this area, but I feel that no one has nailed it by including the right level of data sharing and practitioner motivation in a way that lets the ecosystem learn from experimentation and improve while not running afoul of HIPPA. If you're interested in exploring the idea more lets connect : [http://www.linkedin.com/in/loganhenriquez/](http://www.linkedin.com/in/loganhenriquez/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> RAID Arrays for online storage services.

So many services offer a free tier, maybe 5gb for free and then you pay after that. Some are much higher. Build sort of a proxy to these services so that you have a distributed and large free online storage system.

This was an idea my team had last year when we were looking closely at a photo organization and management startup. We had won a startup competition, had investors tender offers but in the end we decided not to pursue the idea primarily because the storage business absolutely sucks, and photo systems are inherently storage businesses. This idea of 'BYOS' (Bring your own storage) was one of the hacks we thought up to get around the problem but in the end customer discovery taught us that the idea had too much friction for most people. Tech folks loved it, 35 year old moms didn't.

You can simply start with a few of the larger players, use the service to connect your free DropBox, Google Drive and OneDrive accounts. There may even be a monetization option wherein as you approach saturation of the storage you push the user to sign up with a specific vendor for a discounted deal and that other vendor can be a partner company or your own storage medium.

It has to be simple and transparent though, you still want people to have that simply sync experience regardless of where the file is stored and they should be able to view all the files across all the services at one time, regardless of where they are physically stored.

<comment><USER59> Seen [https://trovebox.com/](https://trovebox.com/) ? It started out as a thing kind like this, an Open Source photo service that could use any backend you configured, but now appears to be some kinda B2B service .... shame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm responsible for purchasing our computer equipment for our startup. Every time I make a purchase on our company (@MakeSpace) credit card, I have to remember to send an email to our accountants (record the purchase as an asset, depreciation for taxes, etc).

More importantly, it's hard to keep track of what equipment was given to each employee. I imagine at a larger company this would be handled by an IT department, but sub 50 people I'm doing this on a spreadsheet myself. Would love a simple web app to record serial # of machine, receipt (that I could upload PDF), date purchased, employee, etc.

Happily would pay monthly SaaS. Please message me if anyone knows of this type of product. I'd happily be your first customer if you want to build it.

edit: Happy Easter!

<comment><USER61> Someone can sell/make you a tool for that however you can also do it yourself with a simple Google Docs spreadsheet. Your accountant will understand it as will anyone else that has to maintain it. You get versioning built in so you can see who has changed what. Plus you can make it read only.

Regarding the receipts, have a folder and just give the receipts a simple date-supplier-what-for filename. You could probably paste the hyperlinks into your spreadsheet if you could be bothered. If you can't then they are easy enough to find.

<comment><USER60> "you can do it yourself with a simple Google Doc"

Isn't this how ZeroCater got started?

The features for this (act 2) make it very interesting. Imagine one slick sell to post to CL / Ebay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> [X-post from the previous Idea Sunday thread that didn't make it to the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132)]

Idea: Git-story, a website that generates summary narratives from git commit histories and other github data.

Here's a brain-dump with some ideas for the specifics:

Use foreshadowing: "It all started with one person, X, spending months to gradually build what would one day become Y, a project forked by hundreds and starred by thousands."

When someone makes their first contribution to a project give them a brief introduction, like a shorter version of [http://osrc.dfm.io/](http://osrc.dfm.io/)

Use sentiment analysis on commit messages to say things like "Frustrations mount as...", "the developers rejoice after..."

When people work on multiple concurrent branches use use phrases like: Meanwhile, X and Y toil away on the new Z feature.

Use the time between commits to chunk them into single sentences/paragraphs. Also, add comments if the project goes dormant, or if there is a spike in development.

Use keywords in commit messages like merge, revert, resolve to generate events in the story.

When bugs are resolved look for linked issues and use the age of the bug and number of comments to say thinks like "X finally fixed the controversial Y bug"

<comment><USER63> Neat idea. It's a bit like that facebook auto-generated video, but for github.

Include a decent plugin architecture, and you could get lots of contributions to add in data from everyone's pet CI system, bugtracker, download counter, etc.

[actually, if you started with something like Rails, you could launch versions from old code, take screenshots, and stitch together a video]

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> A tablet (iPad or Android) game which is designed to be used while exercising.

Use ANT or Bluetooth 4.0LE to tie into a treadmill, bike, or other exercise equipment to get output measurements (speed); ideally, find some devices which allow two way commands (not common at all right now).

Networked games against other people, or vs. computer or past personal performance. The interesting part is a "use while running" interface for the touchscreen, requiring inputs (using gross motor skills, not fine control) to do things in-game while retaining performance. Or maybe use audio output for instructions (i.e. "press the blue button, then the red, then the green" while keeping heart BPM above 130, and targets moving on screen.

<comment><USER65> [http://toshnology.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/goji-play- making-30...](http://toshnology.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/goji-play- making-30-minutes-of-exercise.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Current "Idea Sunday" thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132) (14 points, 7 hours ago, 22 comments)

<comment><USER67> That (earlier) thread has now been killed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I frequently wonder if there is a place on the planet I'd be happier in. The idea is a site that allows me to select a wide variety of attributes and then search for places in the world that match those attributes. For attributes that I only care about only generally, I'd be able to select from a broad category. For those that I care a lot about, I'd be able to drill in to highly granular selections.

For example, I may only care that: : Government = Democracy

But for climate, something a little more specific: : Climate : Rainfall < 200 cm : Climate : Snowfall = 0 cm

And then something really granular: : Sports & Leisure : Adventure Sports : Sky Diving < 50 km

Major categories might include: • Climate • Geography • Demographics • Government • Infrastructure • Security • Entertainment • Recreation • Culture • Education • Economy

It could be marketed as a branded plugin for company web sites in travel, real estate and jobs. They'd pay for clicks and then use the results to market their services.

I've found sites that offer this, but none have been quite what I wanted. One requires you to enter the locations you think you'd like and then helps you decide. Another was pretty close, but only covered the USA.

<comment><USER69> I would like the same service for jobs I might enjoy.

<comment><USER70> They have this. It's called 'any job search engine out there'. They all let you put in these search parameters to get back jobs that meet your criteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I compiled different ideas over the week.

coMarketing: I would like to see a solution that allows smaller companies that target a similar audience to be able to put their "little" marketing dollar together and have a better chance at fighting the big guy.

Phone screen on my computer: When I am at my desk, I want to be able to use my phone from my computer. I can use the desktop interface to go through contacts, check feeds, answer texts, and even forward calls to my desk phone.

Conversation blog: A blogging platform that is based on discussion. Each blog post is a conversation between two or more people, let us stop the monologues because in real life to hear two is more interesting than one.

Alarm Band: A simple band that wakes me up with a buzz, but I just want to spend $25 for it.

PHP wrapper: I began to write a simple consistency wrapper for PHP, but I never finished. Basically it a class that gives me a clear structure on how to pass parameters for functions. I ALWAYS know to do function something (haystack, needle) then the wrapper rearranges according to the actual function requirement.

<comment><USER72> If I could figure out how to do comrketing - I would

<comment><USER71> I work for a company that targets dentists. I am always thinking if we could run a direct mail campaign with 3 or 4 other companies targeting the same audience we can reduce our cost by more than 1/3 and we can offer awesome packages to clients.

The same is true for paid search, facebook, etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Related to @mden's Idea: Tree of knowledge.

Chrono: chronological inventions and academic breakthroughs of mankind as a dependency graph. This is a lingering idea that has been coming back to me a couple times a year over the last decade or so.

What if there's a kind of semantic wikipedia that is built upon a dependency graph of inventions and academic breakthroughs. What led to the invention of the internet, to nano-tubes, etc? How cool would it be from an education standpoint to be able to jump back in time and see invention upon invention replayed (with backgrounds on how these breakthroughs came to be) up to today.

Check out what led to invention X (the galaxy S you're reading this on), played back . Or reversely, lookup which inventions were build (transitively) upon the discovery of Y. You'd also finally be able to answer definitively who was more important: Tesla or Edison ;)

Socio-economic backgrounds, anecdotes, etc. what led to invention X, and how X was important for Y, etc. An interactive "Short history of nearly everything"

<comment><USER56> You will love watching the old BBC series Connections, which is exactly about the thread of inspiration behind many inventions:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Problem: Completion rates for online courses are dismal and engagement with other students and faculty is low.

Idea: Weekly online, live discussion sections to accompany self-paced video lectures. Discussion sections have 5-10 students and are facilitated by Teaching Assistants

How it works:

Students taking a MOOC course sign up each week for a discussion section. There can be multiple discussion sections to accommodate changes in the student's schedule, different time zones, etc. Students pay ~$10/discussion, once a week, for an hour.

Discussion sections can be G+ Hangout style and taught by crowdsourced Teaching Assistants. These TAs can be grad students in universities looking to make extra money. They can assist students with HW problems, go over tough concepts, and talk about material outside of the immediate subject matter.

TAs can rev share per discussion. Example: 30% rev share for a class of eight students paying $10 each --> $24 for the TA for an hour of teaching. This is significantly higher than market rate (~$10-16/hr)

<comment><USER75> Is it really a problem that completion rates are low though? I'd argue that most people's time is better spent on things other than taking online courses.

I'm a proponent of making education accessible, but it seems that it is fairly easy to find good resources to learn just about anything online, particularly if it is related to computing. The real problem I think is motivation. Most college students don't try that hard in school, so I wouldn't expect most people taking online courses (particularly free ones) to try that hard either.

If you're motivated enough to learn the resources are already available to you. If not, I think the efforts of others to make you learn will have marginal effects at best.

Edit: I was replying to the first point about completion rates being low. I actually think the discussion idea is a good one and would be helpful for those who actually want to learn the material.

<comment><USER74> I think you're right that low completion rates aren't a problem. I don't have specific numbers, but I'd presume that most students who fail to complete an online course aren't motivated going in and are merely sampling or browsing. They'd probably drop out regardless and skew the completion rate horridly.

For everyone else, I'd imagine the motivation level is higher because of voluntary enrollment than a college student's who is forced to take certain classes.

Also, the current iteration of online education can survive on unassisted self-motivation. I can't recall the specific stat, but I believe 80%+ of students taking coursera classes already have a bachelor's degree. Most classes tend to be technical, where online resources are free and plenty. And given the self-paced nature of online classes, most students who learn best in group environments are probably pre-filtered and never sign up.

Perhaps discussions would be even more relevant as online education becomes more mass-adopted? Group tutoring for home-schooled kids, KUMON classes taught online, K-12 education where students need more hand holding, liberal arts classes where answers are subjective and can't be auto-graded, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> A meetings clock that counts UP the price of a meeting based on the the salaries of the people in the room.

<comment><USER77> What would be the effect of it?

<comment><USER37> to keep aware of how long meetings affect productivity in $ sense for business/management-minded people, I would assume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Food Golf.

(Code golf - for recipes). A community where members submit recipes. Score is a function of ingredient count and cooking time. The lower the better. Recipes are also rated for taste/quality by the community.

<comment><USER55> I am reminded of the bits of Reamde that talk about recombinant cooking - people take two existing prepared food items and mix them to get something else. EG: a can of mushroom soup, a can of tuna and a pack of ramen noodles. (Sounds revolting).

But I like the idea. Perhaps a twist could be to prepare a weeks worth of meals using the least ingredients - people are allowed a small set of regular items for the pantry (plain flour, milk, granulated sugar, salt) but have to use or reuse a limited set of ingredients to create a tasty nurritious menu for a week on a tight budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> A twitter/imageboard system where it takes 2 weeks for messages to appear once posted. The idea being that messages still relevant in 2 weeks are important and interesting ones.

<comment><USER80> I had a similar idea a while ago.

Basically: a reddit/HN clone, but at any given time only one article can be commented on. That article is replaced every day or every hour (whatever interval makes sense) with the highest-upvoted submission that doesn't have comments yet.

The goal would be to encourage deeper discussion of matters, rather than fleeting posts. I have no idea if tree-style comments would be better than just a simple forum thread. A major part of the site would also be scrolling through all of the past articles, and being able to read all of the previous discussions.

<comment><USER81> That's a really nice idea, I'm sure such a site has the potential to generate very high-quality discussions about a topic.

The only problem I see, is that the audience of HN (and Reddit even more) is big and has many different interests. It's very hard to cover those interests with only an article a day, and many might just lose interests after a bunch of days without anything interesting for them. Moving the cadence down would probably help, I think the sweet spot might be around 4/6 articles a day.

I think I'd also try to bring down the number of submissions compared to HN. HN gets a lot of those, and it's good, but I don't think it would be healthy for such a site. I can think off limiting the number of submissions an account can do every day/week, limiting submissions to accounts older than X days (this is mostly to avoid spam) and/or having a pay-for-submission system (not real money, but karma or other similar things).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Ok I'll go first.

It's an "Imgur for audio files".

Now there's times when you record an audio and want to share it. What do you do? Uhh,, umm.... Yup. exactly. There's no reliable, easy-to-use app to share audio files (not music).

So, this is a web/mobile app for easily uploading and sharing audio files, and playing them. I don't have a full plan laid out, but I'll work on it for sure.

(If you'd like to be notified when it's done, let me know: [http://eepurl.com/SRIPT](http://eepurl.com/SRIPT))

<comment><USER83> In what way would it be different from SoundCloud? No fancy commenting? Anonymous uploads?

<comment><USER84> The big thing about imgur is the community. Consider the front page of imgur. I think that's the cool thing about the idea.

You usually go to Soundcloud because you're linked there, it's not something that easily builds its own culture.

<comment><USER85> Soundcloud has a nice culture. I go there both to discover music and to listen to music I've liked. It's different than imgur but I think that partly is just due to the fact that it takes anywhere from 3 minutes to an hour to experience each 'piece' compared to an image which you can digest in a few seconds and flip through a bunch when you need to burn a minute or two.

<comment><USER82> You bring up an interesting point: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7614790)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> GitHub for mathematicians.

For every theory, define its axioms and valid logical steps. Let anyone build theorems based on these (validate them automatically), and allow people to fork others theorems to create their own.

It's probably possible to get a lot of proofs from projects like Mizar and Metamath to start with, then let the community build on top of it.

Maybe even a crowd sourced bounty program for unproven theorems, like P=NP. Let people pledge and automatically pay to whoever proves or disproves it.

I think this can really change how mathematical research is done.

<comment><USER87> > validate them automatically

That's the hard part. There is some research being done in that are really interesting, such as

* Koepke, Schröder, Cramer with Naproche [http://www.naproche.net/index.php](http://www.naproche.net/index.php)

* Paskevich with SAD (unfortunately he stopped his research) [https://web.archive.org/web/20131207185950/http://nevidal.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131207185950/http://nevidal.org/sad.en.html)

<comment><USER86> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the problem. If your users submit their proofs one line at a time, then validating each line is O(1) if they give you the assumptions they used and the steps they took.

Edit: In case I wasn't clear, I didn't mean anything like natural language processing (though that would be awesome). I meant very strict formal math where everything is explicit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Ordering prototype (3d printing, CNC machining, lasercutting) parts, reimagined. It's a major pain just to get a few parts made- first you find a company that does that, e-mail them their design, they get back to you with a quote and you either accept it or go back to step 1.

What if you could just upload your design, select a material from catalogue and receive an instant quote. If you're happy with it, order the parts and then either pick them up in person or have them delivered.

<comment><USER89> There are services like that. Check out [https://www.ponoko.com](https://www.ponoko.com)

<comment><USER88> Exactly like this (sad smile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Mixergy specifically for bootstrapped solopreneurs/micropreneurs except NO video interview or a lot of the unnecessary info.

I want something I can read (comprehensive guides) with specific background info on insider knowledge per industry or cool things they did that made the company a success.

Mixergy interviews are often too long, too much noise to sift through, and not enough core information.

Examples of things I've love to see... Say you are building a physical product... How did you go about figuring/developing the prototype. If its hardware, where did you go to get the prototype done (PCB boards, etc..). How did you figure out manufacturing, if its overseas, how did you coordinate (different language, sourcer, shipping information, quality control, etc...).

If you're in the food industry, how did you manage to get contacts to help you get your product into stores, how did you develop or manufacture the product, etc.. If you're in catering, how did you go about reaching specific clients before you were known, etc...

The things people want to know are the details that are difficult to find that could be useful. I don't care much for the stories (success or failure doesn't matter as much as the core background on how things got done).

<comment><USER82> I'd like to do this. If anyone has the connections and would like to help out, email me firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> A corporate firewall where employees can control which sites they want to stay away from.

I don't know if this exists. But some companies don't ban some sites because they don't want to appear to be too controlling.

I personally do this by changing my own /etc/hosts file, but it is too easy to override. A firewall solution my be better for technical and not technical employees to help them to control their own browsing addictions.

</comment><comment><USER92> Idea: ShowMeThere (needs better name, camanywhere?)

An phone/web app that allows you to click on a place in google maps and request a "cammer" for x minutes, you pay $x and anyone running the software on their phone that is near that location can accept the offer and start streaming video from their phone to you, allowing you to have a kind of "live" street view.

There is UI for the payer to click on arrows to inform the cammer to move here or there, and to zoom or focus on certain things, also a pre translated set of things to help communicate with cammer. Cammer gets paid after the x minutes is up.

Cammer gets cheap money for being a personal camera man for someone somewhere else in the world.

Client saves a trip out there to see something for himself.

Use cases: Want to see if an antique you are looking for is at the markets but cant get away from work?. Want to check out markets in turkey but live in australia? Want to see what the surf is "really" like right now and whether you should bother heading out? Police work/chases! heaps of uses.

For popular events and markets, a cammer could setup shop and offer high quality streams etc.

<comment><USER93> like this idea. Though it looks like Ustream is already doing it. Also the challenges with the app: How to ensure that the video was actually shot on that particular location. What if the "cammer" turns off location settings?

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> One of the biggest problem in the new field of medical apps is lack of verification: how do i as a doctor or patient know if an app works, and how well ?

Of course this problem is generic for many types of products.Reviews are a partial solution ,but it would be quite useful to have a site that gathers research and helps in creating valid research on various products.

</comment><comment><USER94> tl;dr Independent store for bookmarkable HTML5 mobile apps

This is an idea that I had recently, but for which unfortunately I have no time. I hope that some of you folks can make it happen.

The idea is that with the recent release of Chrome for Android's "Add to Home Screen" feature, there is now a way to bookmark websites to the home screen of every mobile os. Mobile sites can add a meta tag to hide the browser chrome and look fully native. Combined with fast mobile processors, this means that we can finally have native-like experience only by using HTML.

It may be difficult to build a business around it, and could make more sense if it is crowd-sourced (the database could be hosted as json on a github repo).

I haven't done much research, but I believe that an independent store which collects these apps, makes them discoverable, and instructs people how to install them would be very useful, and will do a great job for promoting the freedom of the web over closed app stores.

<comment><USER95> I am working on a user submitted solution to html5 apps now and had a question for you. Is your idea to host the apps instead of just linking to them like a typical user submitted site does? If you wanted to chat a little about it, my contact info is in my profile here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> An anonymous and representative group discussion and voting system

Practical example: Attending a conf as a woman

\- You want to ask questions during the talks but you are afraid that because you are a woman your answer will be "dumbed-down" or just different

\- Also, the guy doing the talk would like to answer the best possible question (or a random one)

So, there can be a lot of solutions to this problem, here is mine:

\- Every attendee get an anonymous account on discuss.confname.org

\- So everyone can ask questions anonymously and also it's fair because everyone has only one account

Except, that I made up this example in 5 minutes. This problem is effectively on every possible group in the world. People would like to express their opinions inside the group without risking differentiation.

I tried to describe this idea and the implementation ( [http://kioto.io](http://kioto.io) ), but it's really hard to explain. So I'm just implementing a prototype right now to better explain this idea.

<comment><USER97> This does exactly that and you don't even create an account, so it's really anonymous: [http://www.gosoapbox.com/](http://www.gosoapbox.com/) . All you have to get is a shared url for the dicussion. Their primary use case is for classroom discussion, but functionality is what you described.

<comment><USER98> SSL record to long, can't get in. Broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Chores service.

For $X, we will come and do Y chores, quickly and professionally, relatively flat rate. Y job is a typical household chore.

Particular pain point: cleaning the litterbox. I don't really like it, so it gets delayed a bit more than it should. Garbage can be a pain when the apartment building is poorly laid out.

I don't mean a maid or cleaning service. If I lived in a house, I'd want someone for random house maintenance tasks.

I'm half-tempted to do this where I live - I live near both a university and a fairly well-off suburb. Pretty sure a freshman would appreciate odd-job work not far from campus.

The catch is that I don't really have time to deal with bonding, insurance, payroll, workman's comp, etc, etc. Someone with 10-20K, familiarity with the process, lots of flex time over the next 4-6 months (when your help gets sick, YOU get to do it. =) ), and a yen for business could probably make a tidy income from it.

<comment><USER100> Think of this from the viewpoint of changing demographic: People get older and need to taken care of, which is shockingly expensive.

There are several attempts, with prototyped like housing/neighborhood scenarios, where the younger generations (students) live together with the elderly. Older people might live in the ground-level apartments, while the young students wouldn't worry about walking up 2-3 flights of stairs. They could do some shopping, basic housekeeping, watch them take the right medication in the morning. In return the elderly could return the favor by exchanging non-monetary things, like home-made food. Or they could just pay for the students to lower their rent.

All those solutions are great, but they require serious building of infrastructure, which can't be done immediately.

So services like the one described above seem to be an intermediate solution. The problem is that all those "micro-tasks" (take the cleaning the litterbox example) are too easy/short to be paid a sufficient amount of money to be done. It's an entirely different league if you pay a gardener to come to your house twice a week for 3-4 hours. And even gardeners/poolboys etc. have issues if they have to drive from client to client for 30min. or more.

It would be great if there would be a platform that allows people living geographically close together share a qualified person doing specific services. Take someone walking their dogs every morning as an example. The cost can be shared amongst 6-10 dog owners. While the time spent for walking 6-10 dogs might only double (you need time to collect and return them) instead of increasing 6-10 fold.

So the service should bundle and curate requests from a neighborhood or house. If a couple requests are similar, like "I would love someone to clean my windows every X weeks." They get bundled into a service package for which local contractors provide a quote. And other people living in the neighborhood can then pledge for the service. With every new customer joining the average price is lowered for everyone.

Kind of like a curated form of a cross between taskrabbit and kickstarter.

<comment><USER99> I _completely agree_. I think that the effective way to start this would be to get a high-rise to buy into the idea. If you have 10 floors of apartments all in the same building, you have some good time efficiency and can start sharing resources - i.e., a big bin to throw bags of cat crap in that can be trundled down the hall from apartment to apartment.

I like your angle on how it'd help the elderly. It might be an interesting way to put together a 'senior living' neighborhood in conjunction with a developer. You could contract with the developer that your labor force would handle the big lifting duties; on the buy side, the rent would be marginally higher (and spread out over the development). Perhaps that already exists though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Idea: StackOverflow for comebacks

I've always had a hard time coming up with a good comeback in conversations. It would be great to have a site where I could post a situation and have the community suggest and upvote/downvote insults and comebacks. Maybe introduce a real-time element so I could use it in an actual conversation.

<comment><USER15> Here's an analog solution to your problem: Find some of the collections of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions", a long-running series Al Jaffee did in MAD. It took the format of a cartoon drawing setting up the situation, with one person asking a question, and another offering _three_ funny answers, plus a blank to write your own. Which is super valuable, because a lot of having a good comeback is rehearsing a bunch of them beforehand, so you have something ready.

(For instance sometimes I like to wear little horns glued to my forehead while looking otherwise normal. People regularly ask me "are those real?" By repeatedly answering that question, I now know that some variant of "yeah, I used to file them down, but I've been letting them grow out because I've been busy" will get a laugh.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Yelp for Manufacturing - help hardware startups determine which manufacturer fits their needs and remove the question of whether or not they're working with someone qualified

<comment><USER56> This is actually a serious problem, and really solving it would be very, very profitable. For an example of the issues involved, listen to the Mixergy interview by the founders of TouchFire, and iPad keyboard. They describe the baroque method of hiring a manufacturing consultant so you don't get eaten alive by a bad Chinese manufacturer.

[http://mixergy.com/steven-isaac-touchfire- interview/](http://mixergy.com/steven-isaac-touchfire-interview/)

Let me know if you would like to talk more about this. Contact info is in my profile.

<comment><USER102> shot contact over linkedin + twitter. Let's chat!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> Skimmable video. Like this - [http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/](http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/)

Like any platform, there's the chicken-egg problem. I'm not sure how you'd get enough content, but I'm confident that if you had enough content, it'd be better than YouTube.

But starting off getting content wouldn't be that hard though. You could take currently existing YouTube videos and make them skimmable. And you could convince people to make videos for your site because the quality is so high.

And if you could create a tool that makes making these videos easy, it'd provide single-user utility, is important for platforms. See [http://platformed.info/](http://platformed.info/)

</comment><comment><USER104> A site where you sign up for coffee / tea / lunch with a stranger in your workplaces area.

Context:

\- I'm currently in Guatemala City and nobody talks here. A lot of people go to their office, bring their lunch, go home. You hang out with your high school / college buddies some evenings / weekends. I should know who works in the building next to mine.

\- Haven't read the book but the concept of "Never Eat Alone" has been running through my head for a bit

\- [http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/6-habits- connectors.html?cid...](http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/6-habits- connectors.html?cid=sf01001)

Inspiration:

[http://teawithstrangers.com/](http://teawithstrangers.com/)

[http://teawithtanay.com/](http://teawithtanay.com/)

<comment><USER105> Si!

<comment><USER104> Alejo! Forgot to tag you even though I was going to ask you to do the design haha

<comment><USER105> Would love to. Definitely!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> A simple service for setting up and running jobs/workers without having to run a server.

Ideally, it would have the following features:

* Pay once, run forever (pay for the job up front and never again -- no recurring billing to worry about)

* Configure once, run forever (use Docker/LXC in the background to allow custom environments and absolve the user of the dependency headaches that can arise when running multiple jobs on a single machine)

* Easy to use

I've been casually working on this as it's a pain point I've experienced numerous times (e.g., running a daily job that should cost ~50 cents per month, which is substantially below any available VM price).

Would anybody use this? Other thoughts?

<comment><USER107> This is the only service in this space I could find: [https://starthq.com/apps/crondash](https://starthq.com/apps/crondash)

It doesn't actually run the job but could be used to trigger them.

I think the idea could work if you could write the tasks as snippets of JS, think IFTT/Zapier but with a code editor.

<comment><USER106> Yes! Well said.

It would definitely need to include:

* Web code editor for jobs (JS, Python, Ruby, Perl, Go, etc., etc.)

* Results served over an authenticated API (e.g., servicename.com/api/<username>/<jobname>/files/result.csv would get you the latest result.csv file generated by your script, .../<jobname>/20140419/files/result.csv would get you yesterday's, etc.)

* Jobs could probably be both scheduled (i.e., cron-like) or triggered via a webhook

<comment><USER107> Might make sense to stick with JS to start with for the sake of simplicity.

I actually wrote a Node.js PaaS that I never open sourced & periodic short lived jobs was one of my use-cases.

Let's continue via email.

<comment><USER108> Hey guys, too late to get in on this discussion? Sounds really cool and something I could see myself using a lot.

hello at duncanmsmith.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Here's one I've had for a little while: Say you're playing a sport with your friends. You're yelling at each other.. commands likes, "pass the ball here". Or if you're out playing paintball and trying to coordinate an attack - <USER6> sound, and your opponent's sound are both pretty important.

As far as I know, such use of voice does not exist in any game. Player's voice does not really interact with the environment. So, say someone says, "come to me!" through voice-chat.. you still have to look at the map to see where they actually are.

<comment><USER110> Dolby Axon had something similar-ish:

You and others on voice chat were in a 'virtual' room and the sound was stereo/volume adjusted accordingly.

I remember that when people misbehaved on group voice chat we used to "put them in the corner"

It didn't map to the game environment but the execution was pretty nice; I fear that, if you use the game's physics, you'll quickly realize why radio- comm became such a thing

<comment><USER109> Yes for sure.. but one would have to be close to the enemy player and then he'd be dead. And ally players.. well.. maybe there can be a way to mute allies ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> I really hate the format of arguments/debates in person. I feel like they would be a lot more rational if done through email or something, where one isn't expected to respond immediately as part of a conversation.

I'd like a website which facilitated debates, allowed debaters to branch off multiple threads of debate and close threads once they are settled (ideally until all threads are closed), backreference other threads, citation lists that get automatically aggregated, etc.

<comment><USER112> Its not much good, but what you're describing sounds like [http://www.debate.org/](http://www.debate.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> A knowledge assimilator: it crawls the web and other knowledge sources and summarizes facts about any topic. The system is thus able to auto-generate a wikipedia-like page for the topic.

If employed in an corporate/enterprise environment, it reads all the documentation and then someone can ask it questions like: "What does the SDP 5.1 do?", "What is the capacity of an SDP 5.1?", "Can I connect an SDP to an SCP" etc.

<comment><USER56> IBM Watson can do most of that today, in specific fields like medicine, and is growing into a general purpose learning and deep Q&A system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> [X-post from the previous Idea Sunday thread that didn't make it to the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132)]

Idea: a new way to purchase and set up a fish tank. Currently, you have two options:

a) Buy everything separately - tank, filter, heater, plants, fish. You have to find out whether your fish and plants are compatible and your tank is big enough for what you want etc. You have to figure out where to put the heater and filter so that it doesn't look unsightly.

b) Buy a prebuilt tank with the filter and heater etc. pre-installed somewhere not too ugly. You still have to figure out which livestock you can keep, based on tank size, filter type, plants, and whether they can live with the other livestock you want. You also have to live with the prebuilt tank company's design decisions, which you might not like.

The solution: a company that offers minimalistic, sleek tanks with a modular system for adding filters, heaters, skimmers, lighting, etc. that keeps the equipment out of the way and not looking ugly. Also, an online service where they can select and order the modular tank and equipment that they want, and be allowed to choose from compatible livestock and plants. Alternatively, they can start with livestock that they want and they can be recommended the right modular tank and equipment etc. They can pay for everything all together and the items would be delivered as they are needed (with marine tanks, for example, you have to let the tank 'cycle' for a few weeks so that the water parameters normalise before you can add livestock).

What do you guys think?

<comment><USER115> Is the market size worth it? How will you reach the every-day regular-John- Smith families who aren't going to be keeping an eye out for a service like this?

<comment><USER114> I think there's definitely a market for it. Before people go out and buy fish, they usually do some research first on what it will entail, so if this site can also become a really good source of fishkeeping info and shows up on page 1 when people search for something like 'fishkeeping' or 'fish tanks' then that could be good

<comment><USER115> I guess I'm not totally aware of who the "they" are in "they usually do some research first" because I feel like a significant chunk of fish purchases come from parents of little children who are already sleep deprived and go to the nearest pet store or (God forbid,) Walmart or any other shop where they know there are fish.

If you're correct that "they usually" actually do research beforehand, there would probably be a market big enough to sustain a small online business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> Crowdsourced gardening. You create an account, taking pictures of your garden. A cloud service stitches them together into a 3D model. GPS location and the height of the various house/trees/walls are used to predict sunlight and shade. Historical weather is recorded and predictions of future weather are built in. Optionally the user can use cheap sensors or manual test kits to measure soil contents, moisture, acidity etc.

Once the data is put in, the garden becomes part of the user's "profile" on the site. Others can examine it and make suggestions about what to plant, how to amend the soil, etc. User can log the things they do and upload photos (or use automated sensors and webcam to send periodic updates). You can "star" someone's garden to keep track of it and see how well their decisions worked.

Would be a great tool for experienced gardeners with too much time on their hands, and busy newbies (who are nerds like me) to get free access to distributed knowledge to learn how to grow food in the back yard.

</comment><comment><USER117> Let's take 3D printing to the circuit board world.

A consumer machine that can be configured to takes as inputs:

1\. A set of different electrical part. (Perhaps self-contained in a large box like printer ink is)

2\. A circuit board schematic file

The machine cuts the board and solders the parts in.

And there you have it! Your own computer factory! (For limited definitions of "computer")

If this idea ever piques anyone's interest, I'd love to lend a hand with it.

<comment><USER65> [http://tempoautomation.com/](http://tempoautomation.com/) is working on a solution for the pick and place part. Maybe they know of solutions to the other parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582482)

<comment><USER66> (Note: This is a comment of dang about the "Idea Sunday" posts in the last Sunday thread.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> A platform for building websites with data you already have (or will create/update) and want to make public.

There are already a specialized niche for this: blogs. Blog platforms just take your data (posts) and display in a nice time-aware format.

But there are not alternatives for pages built with not temporal articles, tree-structured data, hierarchical content, lists of things etc.

</comment><comment><USER120> I just thought of this so I haven't exactly vetted it out yet or checked if anyone else is doing this.

A major pain I've noticed is event planning. If you are doing it solo you must call a ton of different individuals. You have to call for a place for the event, a caterer or someone to supply food, decorations, and finally invite all the people you want to come.

My idea is kind of a cross between airbnb and eventbrite. We create a service that works with only local locations and food vendors. This service allows them to post times they are available and food availability in a central location. Individuals who are planning an event can come to this web site and select what they want and where they want there event.

This service acts as the middleman easing the pain of event planning in a one stop web site and also benefits the local small businesses by connecting them with people looking for vendors for an event.

Let me know if anyone sees any problems with this or ways it could be improved.

<comment><USER108> The only problem I see with this is that most people that want to organize an event on the scale that it would be inconvenient to manage all these things on their own, would be able to afford an event planner (or they have a staff).

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> Better calorie counting.

My fitness pal is great, but it too long for me to use, I suck at looking up or even knowing exactly what I ate is.

What I'd like is an app that lets me just take a picture of my meal, then add any comments that might be helpful "ham sandwich" or "poached salmon, about the size of my palm" \-- then it magically figures out what I ate and the nutrition contents (within a day is fine)

I've seen this attempted before, but nobody still seems to be in business. I suspect this has to happen with a human powered "pictures+comments to nutrition data" engine.

I'd be willing to pay $30/mo (too low? $50?) for this and commit to paying for 4 months. If 99 other people (or 59) people committed as well, that'd be $3000/mo revenue for the day this thing launches.

1\. Would anyone else back that as a pre-signed up user? 2\. Is anyone willing to do it for us?

<comment><USER122> this already exists: [http://mealsnap.com/](http://mealsnap.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> OK, you got me in.

I've got a Software Architecture assignment which allows me to work on any kind of large scale Project (regardless of number of languages and complexity) for 3 Months. The end result will be planned, discussed and evaluated scientifically. We're two experienced devs. Suggestions for ideas are welcome!

</comment><comment><USER124> A mobile app to gamify recruitment. Users can win small amounts of credit by 1) referring friends(from phonebook) for a job 2) reviewing jobs to put them in the baskets of: not applicable, interested but not actively looking, interested and applying.This credit can be redeemed for non-cash items like: gift cards and coupons. Recruiters pay a fee(in-app payment) to post jobs. In return they get: 1) leads to candidates who applied and 2) profile summary of people who found the job interesting but did not apply or found it not applicable. For e.g: 10 applied(list of contact info), 15 found the job interesting but did not apply(of which: 70 % are web developers, 60 % have salaries more than 100k, 80 % are more than 5 years of exp. I have been working on a prototype but it still need to iron out a few wrinkles idea-wise.

</comment><comment><USER125> Full text search of Youtube videos.

How many times have you watched a video, maybe an hour long conference and wanted to go back to a point in the video where something specific was mentioned. You have to skim to the area where you think it happened, and then re-watch the video until you find what you're looking for. That sucks.

Even if Youtube allowed people to embed the full transcript of a video in some kind of search layer with corresponding points in the video that would be a dream.

Besides that I'd like a web browser built on 'the hive' that eliminates advertising. If you want to browse the web without being tracked, traced, prodded and harassed you could install the browser and a small, unnoticeable amount of your CPU is used to help power the hive. I would then like to see that operating system give a charitable donation every 6 months that says they will donate 1 month of computational power to a research organization.

One thing I've always wanted to create is a competition website like Kaggle but with real world results. Let's say I create this and go to Mount Sinai hospital in NYC and tell them that I want to run a contest. The contest is to anybody who thinks they can increase Mount Sinai's margins by X percentage within a particular area of interest. The agreement with Mount Sinai is that they have to give us all of the available data and we will open-source it. The challenge for open-source folks is to review the data and if you can find a way to increase margins by X percentage while still upholding the same level of quality, you win the prize. Let's say Mount Sinai gives us access to the entire spreadsheet of products they order from hospital gowns to radiation machines, or even lets say we fund a $100,000 bounty to anybody or any team who can reduce their emergency room wait times by 50%.

You could solve the problem in any way possible, improving hardware/software, or simply finding redundancy in logistics.

Hospitals are probably not the best examples but I hope you see what I'm getting at...

</comment><comment><USER65> 1\. Combining the mio water flavoring , which gets very good reviews in his category ,into a cap of a reusable water bottle ,similar to pillid[2]

2\. Pcb layout design, in the electronics industry, is somewhat similar to games like pipes. So why not gamify pcb layout[3] ?

3\. Recently i read some interesting research about some electronic circuit. It would have been very useful to get access to a full diagram/layout and a module to buy and play with.

[2][http://store.nalgene.com/product-p/pillid.htm](http://store.nalgene.com/product-p/pillid.htm)

[3][http://www.chipestimate.com/blogs/IPInsider/?p=2126](http://www.chipestimate.com/blogs/IPInsider/?p=2126)

<comment><USER126> UK drinks manufacturer Robinson's have just released Squash'd[1], similar to your first idea

[1][http://www.robinsonssquashd.co.uk/](http://www.robinsonssquashd.co.uk/)

<comment><USER65> Mio does look similar. the whole point is make it easier to carry it inside the bottle - less hassle, less forgetting, less things to carry.

Even better would be integration inside the reusable bottle cap such as you just press somewhere to flavor a bottle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> As a part of my venture into user interface and user experience design ([http://www.caseyash.com](http://www.caseyash.com)), I created a few concepts. It would be excellent if I could implement them, however technical individuals are rare in Tennessee.

Below are the concepts:

Pack - A travel planning tool that integrates weather information to stay alert on what to pack.

RQRES - A real estate search that uses a collaborative algorithm to quickly find a home. The application pulls 10 homes; user rates them and then are shown results that are highly relevant.

Pattern - A more difficult game of Simon. Instead of four tiles, there are nine. The game also features ways to manipulate the game board.

Wonder - Hyper-local network.

</comment><comment><USER128> Bufferbox Duplex - I sometimes find myself wanting to transfer a physical product (books, keys to bikes etc) with someone. Sometimes it is hard coordinating this and I often wish I could just put it into a box from which only they could come and pick it up.

If people are familiar with Bufferbox (YC S12,acquired by Google) this is essentially the duplex version. People can deposit and retrieve packages/items.

One can think of charging people for the amount of time the package remains inside the system or based on the size of the box etc.

Pros - if there is a secure payment system on top of this, one can essentially use this to implement a small marketplace.

Cons - Could be used for exchanging illegal goods as well.

</comment><comment><USER129> WP plugin to charge for guest posts.

As a blogger for last 10 years, I think someone should consider providing WP blogs with ability to charge for guest posts. That can be done either as a single time purchase (for a single guest post) or as a recurring payment (i.e. monthly charge for unlimited or predetermined number of guest posts per month). The purchaser makes a payment and opens an account, and then is redirected to WP where he can write a post.

Guests posts is a growing industry for a number of reasons: SEO manipulation, old fashioned PR, promotional activities, contests with multiple participants (such as writing contests), etc etc.

<comment><USER130> Matt Cutts has said recently[0] that guest blogging should be avoided.

[0]: [http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest- blogging/](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/)

<comment><USER108> I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. I feel like it's relevant to the discussion (and was about to post it myself).

<comment><USER131> Comments like the GP have been affected by the recent change we made to make some downvotes more powerful (cf. sama's recent post on this). We did this to address HN's toxic comments problem, but it has a downside: some good comments get caught in the crossfire. It's not that they're getting more downvotes than before, it's that you see it more because they're getting counted more.

The HN community has long had an informal self-correcting mechanism for this case: when fair-minded users see a substantive and civil comment unfairly faded out, they upvote it back to par. We're encouraging everybody to do this consciously. The hope is that the overwhelming majority of good comments will come to rest in positive territory, while comments that deserve it stay negative. Exactly this happened with the GP.

In general, it's best to give such comments a corrective upvote yourself and trust your fellow users to do the same. "Why was this downvoted" posts mostly add noise—especially once the comment in question is back at par. (We're seeing a lot of this.) If it turns out that it's necessary to rally corrective upvotes—that is, if casual reader attention isn't enough—we'll figure out an unobtrusive way to achieve that. For now, though, let's wait and see if it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> A sortable, queryable list of movies. A site that would retrieve a resulting (and sortable!) list of queries such as "Show me all science-fiction movies made in the last ten years", or "All Arnold Schwarzenegger movies that have won an Oscar" (trick question!)

\- Yes, IMDB exists. And has some of the functionality I'd like. But it is a slow site, replete with ads, upsells, 2003-esque "only show 10 results per page!", etc. Yes, I realize they have to make money.

\- Yes, there are millions of movies in existence, and thousands added to the pile every year. Not sure how to fix that data issue :(

<comment><USER7> Take a look at Wolfram Alpha:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/Movies.html](http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/Movies.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> Google Glass app that streams subtitles from Netflix, Hulu, or even cable TV. I rely heavily on subtitles to watch TV (I'm very hard-of-hearing), but I've found that my [hearing] friends don't like subtitles very much. It would make my life 10 million times easier if I could watch TV with subtitles or closed captioning without having to subject my friends to that as well.

I don't know jack shit about Google Glass, but this is so high on my list of wants that I'd drop $1500 for a Google Glass just for this app, assuming it worked well and as advertised.

Someone make this happen.

<comment><USER82> I remember an app demo in my last hackathon: when reading the Bible in hebrew, English translation appeared on Glass.

Your idea isn't hard to work on, but I don't have a glass to do it.

<comment><USER134> The app you're talking about is Word Lens: [http://questvisual.com/us/](http://questvisual.com/us/).

<comment><USER82> Nope. It was an app for glass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> I really want a nice wysiwyg markdown editor. Not the two column layout. I want syntax highlighting, but it should not only do colors but also semantics. Headings should be actually bigger and italics slanted.

I tried and failed to make this idea a reality. I got to partial solution using regular expressions. But it is far from functional and reliable but it is only like 200 lines!

You can check it out here: [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52646091/syntax/selectio...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52646091/syntax/selection.html)

<comment><USER136> Have you ever checked out [Mou]([http://mouapp.com/](http://mouapp.com/))?

You can turn off the live preview and it does exactly what you're asking. Just, it's not in-browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER137> A photo app designed specifically for concerts - The main feature is that the display goes dark while filming/snapping shots. As someone who goes to a lot of shows, I hate the myriad of tiny squares I see between myself and the stage and I've noticed a fairly small percentage of folks actually check focus/etc., they just stick their phones in the air and shoot away.

Bonus points for good social media integration - Read my location/4sq to know what show I'm at - Easy posting to 4sq/FB/Twitter/Compuserve.

<comment><USER109> Seems like a thankless sacrifice to use a photo app that will take pictures at a concert in a way that doesn't annoy others. How would you market this?

<comment><USER137> A mix of "Dont be this guy" ad messaging and emphasis on the social sharing side similar to Vine. Auto-sharing (or at least auto-queue for sharing) so you're also not 'texting' in the middle of the show right after you get the shot.

To be honest, I'd love to see it added as a feature in an existing successful photo app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> A highly distributed framework for building a coop cloud using OpenStack and Bitcoin: [https://github.com/StackMonkey](https://github.com/StackMonkey). Whitepaper here: [https://github.com/StackMonkey/xovio- pool/blob/master/whitep...](https://github.com/StackMonkey/xovio- pool/blob/master/whitepaper.md)

I'm working on this full time now, so it's less of an idea than a reality in progress! :)

</comment><comment><USER139> Something like Wordpress but including a wiki as well as a group blog. The blog entries would also be viewable based on recentness/score (like on reddit or HN) or by topic (like on forum software).

It would be possible to have a local mirror of the site on one's PC which would automatically sync with the live site; this mirror could also be used to set up other live sites. Thgis would be an anti-censorship measure if the site went down, someonre else could mirror it easily.

<comment><USER140> Look at the blog lesswrong.com. It's a community blog built from reddit's code. It has a wiki as well.

[https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong](https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong)

<comment><USER139> Thnaks. Here's the correct URL btw: [https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong](https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Endorse Graph: A browser plugin that allows people who are signed in with their Linkedin, Github, Stack Overflow, Medical-Sites, etc... to endorse the content of a web page.

</comment><comment><USER141> Searchable photo albums OR Google Image search for personal photos.

Basically a way to organize photos into searchable tags which are context aware and auto-generated. This way, I will not have to browse through tons of photos to find the ones shot at a concert, for example. What if I simply search for "concert" and all my photos shot at some concert are fetched. The key here is to auto-tag the photos as good (or near to) as Google does with their Image search.

</comment><comment><USER142> A system of homeless charity. I never have cash. What if I could scan a QR code to donate? What if that donation was better distributed through a central agency instead of directly to the person on the street corner? The guy on the corner gets a bigger piece as an incentive.

A distributed peer to peer encrypted chat system. No dependencies on Google or whoever for hosting. No middle channel holding private keys. Threaded conversations. Synced across devices.

<comment><USER100> Regarding the first topic: Check out Handup ([https://handup.us/](https://handup.us/)) – It's not exactly what you described, but they are kind of a middle man between the homeless, charities and you as a potential donator.

I dig the peer 2 peer chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER143> You can look at Firespotting - it is a hacker news for ideas.

</comment><comment><USER144> A safe storage locker. I travel frequently for work between a few different cities and it's a pain to constantly have to pack and re-pack, and buy and re- buy those things which I cannot pack.

I just want a locker where I can feel safe leaving my stuff in the cities that I travel to most frequently. This means I'm reasonably assured they wont get stolen as well as being afforded many of the same rights when you own or rent property.

<comment><USER60> The physical dropbox. That's what we're building at www.makespace.com.

What cities are you in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> One idea I saw posted last week that I'm scoping out and considering working on: Dataclips for everyone.

Heroku Dataclips allow you to share the results of a SQL query against your database with a simple URL. It'd be really cool as a standalone service that you could hook up to your non-Heroku DBs (local, QA, production, etc). An API would be sweet as well (imagine having a dataclip with your stack traces during QA).

<comment><USER145> I'm working on this right now. If you're interested shoot me a message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER146> Registered agents as a service. Right now hiring people out of state is a pain, despite how popular remote working is getting. There are a lot of random rules in each state, and you have to have a registered agent in a state in order to hire in that one. There are a few services that do this, but they do it poorly and not in the typical startup fashion we've come to expect.

</comment><comment><USER147> Travel Assistant While travelling I like to keep family and friends involved up to date about my travel plans - itinerary changes, delayed flights, boarded flight, landed flight, etc. Instead of a pushing updates by texting 3-4 different people, I want to be able to provide an update in one place, say, on the Travel Assistant app, and my family can receive appropriate updates.

<comment><USER100> Doesn't www.tripit.com do exactly this?

<comment><USER148> Can you notify other people of the status of your trip automatically though? I've used TripCase in the past and they don't have this feature that I'm aware of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER149> A specific place to share and watch how other developers or designers work on their projects, by live screen sharing. It should be a good place to learn from real projects development.

I came across this idea after YC said no to my Android screen live sharing service [https://shou.tv](https://shou.tv), a live video streaming service for Android gamers.

</comment><comment><USER150> This might exist but Googling for it has been a wasteland.

I follow many social media feeds that are other companies in my industry - some partners, some competitors.

I want a script or app or service to dig through their social media history (pics, posts, etc) and send me what's been most engaging.

That's it. Can probably be done in iMacros, just haven't found the time... Could be a small SAAS though.

</comment><comment><USER151> Social analytics. The idea is that you can keep track of multiple facebook fan pages/twitter accounts and see how they grow over time. How many followers overtime, how many links, ect.. You may want to see other info like from what countries the likes, follows are from. Something very simple that just keeps track of your analytics and displays a nice chart.

</comment><comment><USER152> This might be trivial. One of my friends is a serious blogger (she has around 7-8 blog sites on various topics she writes). Why not a simple blog aggregator to post in blogs into the site you wish?

E.g., You want to blog for tumblr, create a post here and then it gets auto- posted to tumblr directly.

Of course, the API issues and permissions are another headache to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER153> A cloud processing platform that would automatically edit videos for users based on algorithms. My thesis is that users will take more and more videos but the tools to edit them (adobe premiere, youtube editor etc) are too much hassle for people. The first market segment would be goPro and google glass users. Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER154> Ok, here is mine: Prototyper. \- Create a webapp that allows the users to choose their phone model. \- Based on that, generate and allow downloading of a custom app (Android, iOS) for that model. \- The user should be able to customize the software modules for that app and interconnect them, IFTTT-like.

HTH ;-)

</comment><comment><USER7> Semantic product review. Object-oriented product review if you will.

Refer to specific aspects of a product and make semantic statements about them.

Endorse what you agree with instead of repeating it.

Basically, no blank text box waiting to be filled witohut the reviewer's own unique way to format thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER119> A tool for storing/sharing information inside private communities.

Enough of the forum/blog/posts/email solutions! How can a community of people, oriented to a subject or location, keep organized data about things it cares about?

</comment><comment><USER155> Github for databases. I've been brainstorming occasionally about this idea... :)

<comment><USER116> Database version-control is IMHO going to be very important in the near future. I'd encourage you to go ahead with it!

<comment><USER155> Definitely!

So far gathered thoughts on this, documented some business and sustainability plans (some awesome ideas here), and planning a medium-term timeline to actually work on.

But this is very complex to handle on my own, and only in my spare time!

<comment><USER116> Have you thought about a database to target? I know there are 3rd party tools for SQL Server version control, but haven't been exposed to any for PostgreSQL, which is becoming my database of choice.

<comment><USER155> I have a number of them to target, part of the business plan is to cover several (very interesting) use cases, along with creating a shared workflow for these. So while some relational databases will be covered, so will other types.

Also note I'm interested in focusing open source databases first, if not only!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER156> A site which keeps track of which of these 'Idea Sunday' ideas actually got implemented and how are they doing 1 year, 2 years, 5 years or 10 years later. Will give empirical data only how powerful are ideas.

<comment><USER157> How would you keep track of the ideas that have been implemented/are being worked on? User-submitted?

<comment><USER156> I think it needs to be a mix of user submitted entries (company name which implemented the idea) and automated tracking there after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER158> 1) daily email that highlights the top 10 posts on HN (by points or by most comments)

2) simple way to share sensitive financial details with others (e.g., credit card payments, pay stubs, paypal history, bank transactions)

<comment><USER108> 1) [http://www.hackernewsletter.com/](http://www.hackernewsletter.com/) 2) Seems like there are tons of messaging apps that claim to be secure. Mark Cuban recommends Cyber Dust: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyber-dust- disappearing-chat...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cyber-dust-disappearing- chat/id690158616?mt=8) (not encrypted AFAIK but transient). There's also Telegram (though I think there's some drama around them from a competition they ran earlier this year) for secure messaging, and Google Docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Free network (data, voice, mobile) monitoring in exchange for personalized and general/statistical data based recommendations (which plan to change, which ISPs in the area are best, etc.)

<comment><USER100> Yeah it is a total hassle to research that and don't get screwed. One can basically spend days researching on that topic and in the end you'll still feel like you made the wrong decision.

The problem with this is that you (as a customer) mostly are locked down by... a) a long-term commitment (2 year contract) b) the process of changing is made so complicated (30 day grace period, waiting for technicians)

All that makes it hard for the customer to adapt to the ever so fast changing market.

The only way I see is to virtualize this. So that you would no longer be a customer of cellular provider X and internet service provider Y, but you'd be a fixed-fee customer of Z-ALL. The company Z-All then acts as a customer for provider X and Y.

It would be interesting nevertheless!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It would perhaps be better if only one person posted these threads.

</comment><comment><USER159> Hey, I created a little meteor app today just for this. [http://thoughts.meteor.com/](http://thoughts.meteor.com/)

<comment><USER160> .. and here comes the spam

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> A peer to peer mortgage marketplace.

Basically, qualified investors own pieces of mortgage in their communities.

I've seen variations of this for student loans - why not mortgages?

<comment><USER161> Realty Mogul [https://www.realtymogul.com](https://www.realtymogul.com) Real- estate Crowdfunding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER162> A twist on a simple timer / productivity app.

When you want to focus, instead of pressing start, you ask for time from someone else.

Once you've completed using that time, you get to pass it on to somebody else.

Completion depends on approval from the previous owner of the time.

As the time gets used, it gets passed from person to person, creating a "time chain." Participants get to see the history of the time chain. Established users can create new time chains and watch them grow.

</comment><comment><USER163> zipcar/uber: A service that delivers a car you drive to where you are when you want it. Maybe you call up an hour before or via an app. And/or the opposite: you have driven somewhere can don't want the car anymore - eg drinking.

<comment><USER164> Taxi?

<comment><USER163> Taxis are great for some situations but not others. 1. Say you are working late (the train service has closed) and know you'll leave in the next 3 hours. Order a car to be delivered to your parking lot and just get into it whenever your finish work. 2. How about the dreaded: other people offering you a ride since you don't have a car. You would be very happy to take a taxi but they insist. No problem; order up a car and its waiting for you when you leave the meeting and nobody will have to take "help you out".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER157> Waze but for supermarket prices.

<comment><USER165> I think Waze gets its data from other users, but in the uk we have [https://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/](https://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/) which will tell you the cheapest online grocery shopping company to go with for your selected 'trolly' (basket). (it compares tesco, sainsbury's, asda etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Semantic version of Twitter.

Every tweet is RDF.

<comment><USER166> I'm actually working on something like this, though with JSON instead of RDF. Drop me a line (email@example.com) if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER167> An app that shares the password of local wifi - e.g. for the coffee shop you are sitting in.

Perhaps neither practical nor legal, but something that would be useful when the barista is feeling snarky and you don't want to return a second time to ask for the wifi password.

</comment><comment><USER65> Tools to reduce distraction in doing research on the web.

</comment><comment><USER168> html5+flash video player all in one with reasonable pricing and no revenue- share for vast/google ads

<comment><USER109> I used Projekktor. The paid version has VAST support and works quite well: [http://www.projekktor.com/](http://www.projekktor.com/)

<comment><USER168> does vast also work in flash-mode ?

<comment><USER109> I'm not sure - I made sure that the videos I'm hosting were webm and mp4, and I've only tested it in html5 browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER169> A newsletter advertising network.

</comment><comment><USER170> A Chrome plugin for Hacker News and Reddit that does only one thing: collapse all comments to top level comments.</comment>