If ideas are worthless please dump a few on this thread. | Hacker News Reader

If ideas are worthless please dump a few on this thread.

19 pointsrokhayakebe59 comments

If ideas are worthless please dump a few on this thread. Terms and conditions: you cannot come back in 5 years and use this as an evidence that the idea was yours. All ideas submitted here will be available to the entire world and anyone is free to pursue them. now i won't give any because i believe ideas are worth a lot in the head, but just more when they are well executed.

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In the 5th grade my teacher had all the students play a "game" where he drew a massive map one wall and we all picked starting locations for our "countries". Our countries grew in population with a random roll of a dice each day. Our civilization's developed by having to write little reports on various inventions. If we could figure out a good way to build an axe or how to make a boat, we worte it up and submitted it for approval. In essence it was a pen & paper style (ala D&D) game of civlization. Us kids benifited because we had to go out and research simple things like, how people actually smelt ore, and how thread is actually made.

So my idea (albeit a poor one) is a civilization-style web-based massively multiplayer video game. Map is randomly generated and number of players per map is limited. There are no pre-existing technologies or units, technologies and units are created by players and must be approved by other players (possibly players from other maps) before entering the game. The idea is the game could be open ended and vastly repeatable. The open ended nature of the game would allow for a lot of exploitation, so conquest would be minimized as a practical course of action. I imagine the focus being on economics and diplomacy.

That's pretty vague and not well thought out, but for some reason I found myself pondering it recently. Since the involvement by the developer could be minimized, by placing game management on players, the game could be free and monetized by ad revenue.

Spoiler free sports info for people who are slightly behind.

If I missed the game, give me a reliable way to find things like a replay broadcast time, or as a last resort streaming highlights video, without bumping into the result.

If I'm at work until 8pm and the game starts at 7pm, give me a news stream/aggregator that fills me in on last minute news like injuries and starting lineups, but cuts short as of the game start. That way I can dick around on the web at work, then go home to watch.

Let me see what the league ladder looked like 48 hours ago, so I can decide which of the games on my DVR are worth watching.

Give me a browser plugin that scans pages on load and hides them if they contain recent results for a team I follow. (Damn you, gmail web clippings.. come to think of it, blank over the browser if you spot something in an XMLHttpRequest, too)

I'm an Australian who enjoys European soccer and F1, so one or two fixtures a week, often delayed telecast and/or recorded at awkward times. Not sure how well this would translate to American sports.

I'd love to see this too. I, however, think we're in the minority. I know if there is a match(premiere league) that i want to see, I have to tread ever so lightly to find out match information without the scores. Luckily, here in the US, Sportscenter never covers soccer, except for about 30 seconds from ESPN Deportes or LA Galaxy news.

but i think most people here(US) want their scores NOW and don't care about the actual game, plus there are way too many sports here.

I'm not a huge sports fan, but this is an excellent idea. I, too, am an F1 fan and in America races are usually broadcast while I'm asleep. I can't subscribe to any F1 rss feeds because I'm guaranteed to accidentally open up my reader before they're re-broadcast. In this case I'd almost be happy with an intentional delay on my feed reader. That is a pretty specific feature, but I'd love to automatically hide the F1 feeds each race day.

Industries revolutionised by the internet:

1. Porn

2. Real Estate

3. Jobs

Without commenting further on #1, I have to say that I am very unimpressed by 99% of Real Estate and Jobs websites out there. They get so much traffic because a poor real estate website is still infinitely better than waiting for Saturday's newspaper to come out (same with jobs).

I expect to see a site that "gets" Real Estate or Jobs soon, the same way Google "got" search a few years back.

Jobs and rental properties are handled pretty well by Craigslist these days.

And the information that can be found using Zillow and Indeed isn't half bad either.

Beyond craigslist proper, Kexter did a really good job for a couple of years. It was craigslist apartment listings overlayed onto Google maps plus the GIS data of your choice, so you could browse apartments by crime rates, per capita income, etc. Unfortunately as a condition of using the data they weren't allowed to monetize it, so they eventually stopped updating it and the last time I checked it was broken.

renting is still annoying, even on craiglist. there's lots of room to improve.

make a porn site that uses the iTunes model of charging and i guarantee you'll make money. Lots of people don't want to sign up for a hardcore porn site, but if they could buy a few videos of their favorite performer for 99cents with paypal they would in a heartbeat.

I'm working on #2 and #3.

- Email is broken. There's no way for me to sort through 300 unread messages except to manually sort through them. What's important? What's junk? What's time sensitive? What's not? Which is social? Which is work?

- Hosted bug tracking software sucks. It's ridiculous. Make something pretty and simple-but-extensible

- Travel research online is terrible. I live and breath the interwebs, but whenever I travel, I buy a freakin' book. How ridiculous is that?

- Search STILL sucks.

email idea: tags as part of your email address. for generic mail you use your regular email address me@host.com commerical stuff or whatever gets sent there. your folders become inboxes for emails tagged with that folders name me@host.com/friends automatically gets routed to your friends inbox. you could make it so that anyone can make their own tags then give them out to subsets of their freinds as needed.

example me@host.com/coworkers me@host.com/spam (for when you use your email to sign up for stuff online)

that way lower priority folders only have to be checked when you know something is coming to them. and as spammers catch onto this you just make your tags less obvious.

This already exists - you can accomplish this with a plus sign in your address.

If your address is bill@gates.com, then bill+anything@gates.com will be routed to you (the plus sign is critical). So you can use bill+work@gates.com, bill+foundation@gates.com, etc, and set up filters based on the address the mail was sent to. Voila!

i know for a fact this works in gmail, since they advertised it, but i didn't know this was standard

AFAIK, it is part of the email standard, but not actually supported by all providers.

how come no one uses this?

thanks for the info.

- What do you think is wrong with Search? And how would you fix it?

- How would you fix email?

Bug tracking shouldn't be hosted, in general. I should be able to declare a bug in anything by posting it on my blog, and people can do their commenting/triage/fileposting/whatever else they do by using Regular Internet Technology. There is a data format standard issue to be solved and a few search issues.

A project can have a central bug tracking site for people who don't have blogs, but if I don't like that UI I should be able to switch to another.

My proposal also helps a lot when issue tracking is spread across companies. I find an in-house issue which I report to my own team; and then they want to forward it to some outside vendor. Much effort is wasted maintaining the links between the system used by the in-house team and the one used by the vendor.

http://code.google.com/p/baetle/ has some plans for the data model and format.

"If ideas are worthless please dumb a few on this thread."

How about a spell checker that recognizes context?

These kinds of comments are unnecessary on HN...we have editors to fix them.

Um, he was actually putting forward an idea though.

For sure - thats one of those hard problems that has not be well solved yet ...

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

Click the list of ideas for projects that interest you. Only a fraction of the ones proposed will actaully get worked on, and you can also do this for stuff from 2007. There's much more hacking to be done than there are hackers.

Being unwilling to share ideas and knowledge with other people is a bad thing.

I'd love for someone to make photo-sharing not suck horribly. Yes, Flickr is pretty great for some scenarios, but I still have yet to find a great solution for the following scenario:

1. I go to say, a wedding (but it could be anything) with a group of friends 2. Many people take pictures 3. After I come home, I want to easily look at, and optionally download, high quality version of all my friends photos for this event.

Right now, I see people using either Facebook, Kodak, Flickr, etc (I can't easily download high-quality collections), emailing several zips, or if they have a server, placing the photos on their and providing a link. There has got to be a easier way and I'm dying for someone to build it.

For the record, I don't think ideas are worthless. I'm just not going to build this anytime soon and I'd rather an awesome solution sooner rather than later.

1. https://ourdoings.com/makesite.html

2. Upload your own photos

3. Send friends the link and tell them to click the "Edit" tab and volunteer as authors to upload their own. (The happy couple can volunteer as owners.)

4. Approve the volunteer applications that you get.

5. After your friends upload their photos, use http://piclens.com/ to make viewing them really slick. There's a button at the top of piclens to leave the slide show and go to an individual photo's page where you can download the full version.

Cool, I'll check that out.

picasa can kind of accomplish that

a javascript orb.

stories :

you chance upon a really cool site. you want to see it's JS code. you click on a bookmarklet. you see the code (merged in one file from the different sources, with syntax highlighting, indentation, and all the bells an whistles)

you are coding a really cool app. you need a generic "User" object you go to the javascript orb search. you find a list of objects. you chose one (click). the URL in the navigator says : http://jsorb.org/example.com/lib/cool.js/User?version=55555 copy, paste the url. the object comes with all its dependencies.

You are looking for an object. you seach jsorb. you find almost what you want. object version 55555. you edit the object in place in the editor and save. object version is now 55556.

An elevator with speech recognition for people with their hands full.

- 3D Live local maps

- Incremental automated driving

- Long tail angel stock auction to get 200 $200 investors for seed funding

- Roomba + cell network + camera = cheap multi-purpose tele-operated robot. Home security a big plus.

- The "piping" for image and video processing to power the next wave of intelligent analysis.

On the driving and maps note, I'm at a large university and I'd love to be able to determine via phone if a certain parking lot is full or not.

Yeah, voice activated iPhone app, "guide me to the nearest available parking spot"

I'd be happy with v0.1 ... txt xxxid where id a parking lot id and it returns how many spots are empty. Or even just if the lot is full (all I really care about).

I believe number two is illegal in the United States. Over a certain number of investors, you start running into costly securities laws.

I'm told it's not illegal, just costly and/or complicated. You could probably manage it by buying shares in a single entity for all the companies invested in, and having that entity act as an accredited investor. It's a lot like a mutual fund then.

Come to think of it, this aggregation is almost exactly like the micropayment aggregation in Tipjoy.

No wonder I thought of it :)

http://www.halfbakery.com/

some of the ones at the half bakery aren't half bad. The last time I checked, they wanted philly cheese spread in the shape of a bagel on a plastic sheet, kinda like the way cheese comes on a plastic sheet. That way, you can just slap it on, instead of spreading out the philly cheese.

Awesome.

I don't know much about Second Life but I thought a window to it in public places and night clubs that you feed coins into to make it work would be fun. It would have a camera so that the virtual people could see out also. Other side of the window would also be in a public place in Second Life world.

I was going to start a new search engine, but Yahoo had already done that. I was going to create a new webmail service, but Hotmail was so good. Then I thought of producing a kind of souped-up forum system, but that one had been done to death as well.

Then I saw Google, Gmail and Facebook, and realised it wasn't the ideas so much as the execution ;)

My Big Idea (as I've said before) involves VR goggles which you can hook up to the net to see computer-generated images in real contexts. Or you could reverse the polarity and visit anywhere in the world from the comfort of your armchair, using computer-generated landscapes. In 10 or 20 years, the line between real and virtual will be so blurred that nobody thinks about it.

[Before anyone gets too involved in this: http://www.faqs.org/docs/jargon/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html]

It's not really an idea, if you don't have an idea for a feasible way to implement it (feasible as in consumer friendly, of course you could put 10 pounds VR-helmets on people's heads).

Although admittedly, it depends on the context. It is not an idea in the context of "doable in hardware in the near future", but it could be an idea for a science fiction movie or book.

"It's not really an idea, if you don't have an idea for a feasible way to implement it"

OK, so you agree with me that the execution is the important thing? Excellent ;)

GPS, wearable computers, wi-fi, lightweight VR goggles, etc, make this very "do-able" for the right technical talent. Admittedly, that means I wouldn't have a whelk's chance in a super-nova, but some of you kids are surely in with a chance?

Of course execution is excellent, but what I am saying your idea is not an executable idea (in my opinion). If lightweight VR goggles and low-voltage mobile graphics processors become available next month (or already are), you could jump from behind a corner and shout "here, I am the first to make good use of it and make the land-grab for this technology".

I just don't agree that all ideas fall into the non-executable category. I have lots of unexecuted ideas, but for most of them I already know how I could implement them (ie for web apps). I consider that execution plan a part of the idea. It is way different from saying "hey, I have an idea, let's create a spaceship with anti-gravity drive, or hey, let's create a perpeteum-mobile".

If you seriously think that technology for your idea is already within reach, I'd say go for it. It could be the future - who wants to carry around bricks with tiny displays forever?

A variant of your idea would be to show things on the screens of the "bricks". Ie a mobile phone with camera and GPS might be able to recognise what it is looking at and at least display some additional information for the item.

Actually it is already a good business to create goggles as you describe for industry use. For example I think airplane engineers use them when they repair some parts of the airplane, and the device shows them required parts in context.

What I think is not yet feasible to make a device that is unintrusive enough to be wearable all the time in daily life.

http://youtube.com/results?search_query=artoolkit&search... for some neat demos of OSS software to overlay computer graphics on real targets

An automated front-end testing framework in javascript. Check this out: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/coscripter/browse/about

Now, instead of having users share common tasks, you use the same idea to offers developers the ability to add automated tests. A developer loads your tool which then records the inputs by listening to all DOM events, saves the sequence and then lets you user replay it to see if anything has changed.

While the above is a FF extension, it might be possible to do this all in js (so the developer would include a remote JS file from your server which records/plays back the events)

This would be useful when the UI is undergoing lots of CSS and visual changes, but with the actual functionality remaining the same (ie, button X produces value Y in field X).

A wearable camera for blind people, that is hooked up to a computer that tells aloud what's there to be seen in the scene (for example reading street signs).

Some more ideas: http://www.lkozma.net/ideas

Good idea that's being implemented now. I think the cell phone approach is much more elegant than a wearable camera.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1850411...

A device that looks like the original Nintendo robotic operating buddy with different buttons on the side that you depress whenever you complete a workout run for the day, brush your teeth, eat a healthy meal, or other tasks of your choosing; perhaps it also has an alarm clock style setting to update a numeric field, so you can submit a value like your weight for the day. It has a USB port and when connected to your pc will update an rrd file in your home account so you can review some useful looking graphs.

I don't get why it needs to look like a robot. Unless the buttons correspond to different parts of the body that you worked out or brushed, I don't see why it can't be a box with buttons on it.

A robot that successfully implements ideas found on this thread.

I'll probably get voted down for that one. How about a news site like reddit/digg/(maybe even HN, but expanded) that can successfully deal with the masses.

There's an area I believe is ripe for improvement. Fell free to take this idea and run with it. Just give me an admin account when it's ready.

A Browser based (with js, no plugins) screen sharing. Something like VNC for the web, for real time tech support.

Yes - and second that with a usable white board interface - Livemeeting sucks so badly!

i second the whiteboard. this could probably be done based on the VNC source.

security settings from the browsers prevent it. how, technologically speaking, does your browser have access to the whole screen's framebuffer?

You have to use java or flash or some kind of plugin which can access the windowserver.

Parallel supercomputer applications for the developing world:

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-a...

A google search should yield a number of ideas, as well as reading a few articles on read/write web and other places. My advice: A) Find a pain B) Combine that with a trend (different from setting a trend) C) Start making it

a) dum/p/

b) I believe ideas are worthwhile when combined with good execution. I have several, but I'm holding them for a time when I feel I can commit to releasing a well-made product.

is there an instant messenger that also has a scribble pad next to the text that both people can write on?

http://thecoccinella.org/ "Coccinella is a free and open-source cross-platform chat client with a built-in whiteboard for improved collaboration with other people. "

(uses jabber)

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