Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the current best solutions for the 30 YC 'ideas'?

54 pointsFreeRadical34 comments

Please see http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html and feel free to add your own.

1. Spotify (for the music element) 2. Chrome 3. Twitter/BBC News 4. service-now.com 5. 37 signals 6. ?? 7. ?? 8. Match/Plentyoffish 9. Facebook 10. eBay 11. Google Docs/ Zoho 12. Adwords/Adsense 13. University of Phoenix 14. ?? 15. ?? 16. Bing 17. Paypal 18. ChromeOS 19. AWS/Rackspace 20. Thefind 21. Mint/Quickbooks 22. Google Docs/Zoho 23. ?? 24. ?? 25. Gumtree/Facebook 26. ?? 27. ?? 28. Gmail with filtering 29. Too many to list 30. ??

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10. Auctions: http://gunbroker.com/, which was started immediately after eBay wimped out on auctions having anything to do with firearms. I've bought stuff on both and sold stuff on GunBroker.com and the latter is much better and has several ideas worth using on most any online auction site.

One thing that might be hard to replicate: firearms, ammo, etc. are serious things, e.g. you can't transfer a firearm across state lines without going through a licensed dealer and getting a background check. In the cultural sense reputation on GunBroker.com is treated very seriously; I'm not sure how this could be replicated in other areas, including ones where prices of items are lower.

8. OkCupid

I have several friends who have gotten an endless series of dates from there. I've only met one person from OkCupid, but she was pretty amazing.

All the other sites I've tried (otakubooty, aff, cl, some other ones that have already died) have been completely useless, except for some niche bdsm ones ^-^.

In my opinion CrazyBlindDate, which is run by OkCupid, is much better than the main site. But only if you live in a major US City.

An editable google doc for this: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Af5maeCRtjlnZGhndGt3bXZfMm...

Very good -- the HN format is terribly suited to such a project.

Actually, Google Docs is not too suitable for it either: you can add to the list, but where do you leave comments for entries you disagree with, etc etc? Would become a strange hybrid discussion split between HN and the Google Doc...

This is one of those cases where I see real use for Google Wave.

#3: New news

I'm a news hound. And, I started http://Newsley.com to try and find a solution to the new news problem that I had. I picked financial and economic news because it's an interest of mine that will hold my attention. Besides, advertising rates are much better for financial and economic keywords than they are for funny videos or cute cat pictures.

My hypothesis, social news sites have done a pretty good job of finding and highlighting interesting and new content (Hacker News, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, Metafilter, etc..) But, I don't think that anyone has really done a good job of offering great news recommendations yet. The solutions we've seen so far are generally human editor (newspapers), moderators (slashdot), or collaborative filtering (reddit, digg, HN).

My goal is to build a community of people interested in great financial and economic news and analysis, and then try to build a great personalized news recommendation engine for them.

There are other sites working on the news recommendation systems. Twitter sort of fills that bill, MeHive has been trying a heavy indexing/algorithmic approach, but I haven't really been happy with what the recommendations they've been able to offer me yet.

Also, if any body else is doing news recommendations, ping me. I'd be really interested in talking.

Ok, so how is Newsley currently different from, say, /r/worldnews for example? Newsley is using collaborative filtering as well. I see a bunch of links voted by the community, which I'm assuming contribute to their ranks on the frontpage.

Right now, it's not that much different. Reddit's front page can be awfully toxic at times, and I don't think people automatically look at reddit and say, "I might find some interesting economic news here if I can just wade past all this other crap."

Once I have enough users to keep the site afloat, I'm going to start offering recommendations. There's a lot more to come.

You sure those sites do collaborative filtering? AFAIK, the 'front page' is the same for all, and real CF would show you a personalised page depending on your tastes. Like movielens does for movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

Collective Intelligence. My bad. I got a little algorithmically dyslexic.

i like the style you use on that site - simple, connects with the idea of a newspaper, clean, distinctive.

Over the last couple of months, I became involved with a nonprofit which is taking a whack at #13, Online Learning. It is not technically the "current best solution", since it is upcoming: http://www.innovativeineducation.org. The website is admittedly rough, but this organization is initiating free online accredited college courses. This spring semester will be for no credit (Calc I and Organic Chem I), as it will be a trial for the technology. For-credit courses are scheduled to be offered starting in the summer/fall, back-dooring through community colleges until its own accreditation is achieved. The idea is to start with Gen Ed type classes which can be taught online and transferred to just about any school, and to offer more courses as the program grows.

Since the endeavor is structured around corporate sponsorships, Innovative in Education can afford to pay professors and graduate students appropriately to create high quality content and instruct live online. No complicated login process to access the live content; users can just tune into the classroom page at class time, and view the embedded livestream. (Of course, content will be archived as well, a la OCW).

Actually, on that note: there seem to be good streaming solutions for live action video (high FPS, high compression) and for slides (low FPS, low compression for detail clarity), but I have not found a solution that allows the broadcaster to selectively switch between the two optimizations. If anyone knows of such a streaming solution, please share. Thanks!

16. A form of search that depends on design.

The Android app, Google Goggles is really worth checking out. It really is a phenomenal idea. I hope they work hard at refining it.

28. Unblab (http://www.unblab.com)

They seem promising (I know one of the founders personally) but things are going slower than the impression I originally got. One of their products (Gtriage) is already out though. Basically they're doing data mining on people's inboxen.

Clickable: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

17. I think Square (http://www.squareup.com) qualifies. 19. Heroku counts 23. Powerset 30. Builditwith.me (http://www.builditwith.me)

I'm not sure what problem Powerset is trying to solve. It seems to me that they don't bring any extra functionality to searching Wikipedia with Google. Maybe I have misunderstood their project...?

you need to type in a whole sentence and then look at the results above the traditional search results.

for example, for "what did andrew cooke do?" - http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/what-did-andrew-cooke-do%... - the third response is "designed an algorithm" (which is what i was looking for).

it's not wonderful, by any means, but that does illustrate the semantic-ness of what they are doing (imho).

1) Rhapsody (yeah, I know hackers are supposed to hate DRM, Windows, and Real Networks, but I really like being able to pay $10 a month and listen to any song, ever made, instantly).

3) news.ycombinator.com The comment section is almost invariably better than 95% of articles in the NYTimes.

4) Google Apps

5) Salesforce

6) HelpSpot?

7) An app that could automatically convert a web site created in Dreamweaver or some custom solution into a wordpress blog.

13) wikipedia

20) google search, site:news.ycombinator.com best laptop (etc)

22) DabbleDB

While I'm probably a bit biased since I work for one of their competitors (shopwiki), I'm not sure if TheFind counts as an answer to 20. As far as I can tell they don't have any shopping guides, or at the very least not ones which are being made obvious to a user who is trying to find out what they want. I'm not going to remove them since I have a conflict of interest, but I'm going to add Kaboodle which seems to be doing the most interesting work in the shopping space.

1. Avatar, or other movies that can't be fully experienced without 3D or other tech that is only available in theaters. For music additional offerings like I Am T-Pain.

You mean a $5 pair of red and green glasses? 3D movies for home consumption have been available for a while http://www.amazon.com/Coraline-Blu-ray-Combo-Digital-Copy/dp... and 3D HDTV is expected to start in late 2010.

Interesting that "6. More variants of CRM" hasn't had much attention.

Fixes to these problems needn't be startups. Part of the fix for problem 1 is the international Pirate Party movement.

Hardly. Part of public awareness around the issues, sure.

It isn't just public awareness, it's about getting the law changed. The Swedish Pirate Party got 7% of the vote last June. If this can be replicated throughout the world (particularly in Europe, where the Pirate movement is strongest), there will be 2 effects:

1. in some countries, PP may hold the balance of power in parliament, and will thus be able to join whichever coalition offers the best concessions to their points of view. This may well be the outcome of the next general election in Sweden.

2. other parties, seeing how many votes PP is getting, and they are potentially losing, will tend to move their policies to what PP endorses. A historical example of this sort of process working is after the 1989 European election in the UK, where the Green Party got 15% of the vote; the main parties immediately started copying their polices, or at least giving lip service to them. When Pirate Parties start doing well in elections, we are likely to see the same effect.

Sure, except that "green" is something many people are interested in, whereas copyright law is a narrow issue that only artists, distributers and nerds care about.

Yourgrounds.com is in beta right now, and should be a better way to use classifieds than craigslist.

21. xero.com

I think aol is positioned well for #3.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/one-vision-for-the-new-...

They are very well positioned and have the funds. Somehow though they will need to connect all these 'Toyota' brands. I don't think they have as yet managed to do this.

13. MIT Open Courseware

30. CustomerFind.com

Disclaimer: Owned and operated by me.

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