Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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At least someone got it :)

The other day there was a thread about someone asking what their idea should be valued at, without any background on the idea or their own capacity to execute (or even their skills).

I really strongly believe that an idea has no value at all, simply a big fat '0'. And chances are that if you have a particular idea that 10 other guys have it too.

By throwing these out there (the good with the bad and the ugly) I'm hoping for two things: That people will not 'hoard' their ideas and feel free to discuss them and that you get an idea of how bad the ratio between 'good' and 'bad' is. Take in to account the 900 or so that didn't even make the cut of being listed here and you have an idea how bad most of the others are ;)

The worst possible idea is one that you hoard and spend a ton of time on when someone could shoot it down in 30 seconds by pointing out a fatal flaw, those ideas can actually develop a negative valuation because you'll keep sinking more time in to the zombie.

Usually a week or so after having an idea I go 'what on earth was I thinking that that would be a good idea', some last a little longer, even fewer actually get implemented and a small fraction of those develop traction. It's like a distillation column.

Thanks.

And please do share your own list(s) of ideas!

   I really strongly believe that an idea has no value at 
   all, simply a big fat '0'. And chances are that if you 
   have a particular idea that 10 other guys have it too.

And if 10 guys implement the same idea, everyone gets the benefits of competition, too, including additional innovations on the idea.

A quick review of my thoughts on some of the ideas which stood out to me:

ajaxbricks - nice, kinda like the way you program the lego NXT (labview). Anyone with enough patience and desire to learn this, might as well just learn JS and PHP though. Potential though.

ArticleBody - good. I'm stealing this one.

AutoTagger - ditto. Care to share your code?

Dead Mans Knob.... just sounds wrong. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=knob

Also I'm pretty sure it's been done, just can't find the site.

E404 - http://archive.org/

fwitter - http://tweetbeep.com/

HackerContests - Great, want to start it? My resume: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/08/php-cv/

OptInSpam - Clever, you should be able to get some press coverage on that concept. Not sure if anyone would sign up, but it's innovative.

vm4rent - nice idea! legal?

wwspeech - chatroulette could have been this. Good idea, potentially huge.

edit:

ProofItWasThere - I had this idea too! Was thinking along the lines of 'verified screenshot', eg for people wanting to prove things about their server stats, ad revenue etc, or for when sites screw things up, etc.

re. autotagger code, yes, I might, mail me and I'll explain one of the potential hangups there

re. dead mans knob: that's a literal translation of a dutch word, not sure what the english translation is, it stems from a button that train drivers have to keep pressed or the train will coast to a stop (in case they have a heart attack).

nice you like hackercontests :) Yes, I'd like to see that one happening very much. HackerBacker too, but that one is much more involved.

re. proofitwasthere: I was expecting such a response for pretty much all of them :)

In American English it is referred to colloquially as a dead man's switch.

"dead mans lever" is probably what I would call it. :) Amusing transliteration though.. I'd keep it.

HackerBacker is probably fraught with legal problems, which absolutely sucks because it would be a great thing to do.

Registrate has promise though.. you could add the ability to upload photos of your stuff to it. Then work on ways to convince insurance companies to work with you. So subscribers could simply select their insurance company, enter a policy #, choose what they are claiming for and enter a claim etc.

I would participate in a hacker's contest !!! I love this kind of stuff, just like google code jam, but maybe I would be good at it ;)

ArticleBody - Instapaper and Readability do this, but definitely can be improved.

AutoTagger - OpenCalais does this, again opportunities for improvement of course.

Still a nice list of ideas.

Dead Man's Switch-type sites are around in some capacity but I can't remember URLs either.

Quite similar, one of the lame ones on my list (working title: LockBox) was a vault where you could record a few (electronic) things that friends/family might need after you passed (funeral wishes, how to distribute your things, basic passwords, where you hid jewellery, etc).

Someone could hit the site and enter two email addresses - the vault owner's, and their own. An email would be sent to the vault owner (identifying the person attempting to unlock the box) and if a link in said email was not clicked within 24-48 hours (or whatever it was set at), the vault key would be sent to the requesting person.

Target moody teens that obsess over what music might be played at their funeral, who gets their collection of whatever, what happens to their dog, etc.

I totally agree. The value of ideas is zero, but by making a list like this, you start to build your own internal filter for ideas. That filter, in my opinion, is actually quite valuable.

For reference, I've posted about 200 ideas over the past three years at http://astartupaday.com . And yes, the majority are crap, but there was one idea that got some traction and now I'm executing on it full-time as part of TechStars.

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