Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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 ;)

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