Idea dump, December edition | Hacker News Reader

Idea dump, December edition

jacquesmattheij.com

57 pointsjacquesm35 comments

(69) The Never Ending Story

I came up with and specced out something like this for a school which never got passed the planning stage. The idea was more simple in that there was a seed story, and then the kids took a word or phrase from the seed story and that was the title of their story, with the chosen word/phrase becoming a link (it was a user-friendly wiki in effect). This could be repeated to infinite depth and words/phrases could link to more than one story (or partially overlap etc).

I still have it in perpetual inactive development.

I've seen a few things online that sound similar to this idea; http://editthis.info/choose_your_own_adventure/Main_Page is one; they mostly follow the "Choose Your Own Adventure"-meets-Wiki route.

I watched a Never Ending Story play out long ago (possibly it was on a Lulu.com forum?). Absolutely horrible. You mix in bad writers with worse writers, and just when you come across a half-decent page some other author whisks the story off in a totally different direction.

What if people could continue the story tree horizontally, and continue on the part they found most interesting? Then the parts with the most "continuations" could get a higher ranking and therefore shape the best story at the (never)end.

That does sound like it could result in an improvement, but the tree would grow quite large I imagine! :) Each writer would have to read each horizontal version to decide where to continue, and I'm betting there would be multiple continuation points, too, so it would start to look like the exponential story, especially with a virtually endless supply of writers. Crowd-sourced writing is a fun idea, but I think at best it might be an activity writers do to stay creatively loose.

Maybe you could alleviate the problem by introducing a distinction between 'writers' & 'editors'? Or maybe have people collaboratively write an outline then let a good writer write the whole story?

> people collaboratively write an outline then let a good writer write the whole story?

MSPaint Adventures[1] is like this. Generated off a SomethingAwful thread suggesting story ideas/outline, and then written/illustrated by another party.

[1] http://www.mspaintadventures.com/

I'am implementing such kind of thing atm.

Some few things are missing, but overall its ready to use (e.g. test). Feel free to try around. This is not livedata atm, everything can be resetted.

Written in Ruby/Ramaze btw.

http://palavr.kommunism.us/

(64) ABtimise - see also genetify, snapads

Not saying that it's a problem that "the simpsons did it", just that it might be interesting to see what their approach is and what can be learned from it.

(66) Unbrainwash

Isn't this Fox News... Fair and Unbalanced :)

On a more serious note... I wonder if it is possible to measure bias of each news source and use some sort of language processing to combine bias.

Google is certainly thinking about a similar topic... see yesterday's article about sentiment analysis: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-cus... (it was on HN too somewhere...)

I have an idea: Take Facebook's approach to groups (the auto-add feature), and apply it to a dating website.

It might turn out that this approach could replace siloed dating websites (e.g. Christian, Jewish, BBW) into organically formed dating groups all on the same website.

It's like taking the idea of http://thread.com/ one step further.

Yeah, I don't see how 66 is ever gonna work as long as it's done by humans.

Sure, so long as you're willing to accept that "unbiased" will only mean "pointing out when everyone else's biases come into play*. :D

(67) ClickApp

I built something similar at a previous job. I never really thought that anyone outside the domain it was built for would use it.

Now this has got me thinking about it again...

I wonder if it could be marketed to the same sorts of folks who use SurveyMonkey and whatever that contact form builder company is called (it pisses me off that I can't remember the name of it at the moment).

maybe wufoo?

That's it.

I've always thought it would be interesting to take the genetic algorithm approach on Facebook ads. But instead keep the ad display the same, and do an A/B on customer demographics and interests.

The surprising and amusing patterns you find would alone make it worth it.

(63) Chattical reminds me of my own project a while back: http://askcue.com feel free to try it. As a sidenote: if I remember correctly I had the idea around december in 2009.

Should just make an app for facebook for dating :) have all the people you need.

These ideas are intended to be fun little weekend hacks and not serious businesses right?

Figured I'd ask because I clicked hoping for something else and wondered if I was the only one that did so.

They're free, if you want fully worked out business plans instead of sketches that's fine too, but I'll have to charge you by the hour or something complicated like that.

Would you consider the 'fun little weekend hack' called 'reddit' a serious business ?

How about optimizely ?

Gazehawk ?

Twitter ?

From tiny start-ups big companies may grow. Which one that's usually the bigger question but all of them started out reasonably small, something that three guys could probably hack out in great detail in a few weeks at best, maybe even just a weekend.

Take it easy, I'm not demanding anything of you, I was just curious as to the scope of the ideas and was wondering if anyone else mistook the intent like I did.

You don't have to invest so much of your ego into it.

As for Reddit, they're got serious infrastructural and financial issues, so you've used a pretty bad example there. It was by the grace of god and the success of Reddit Gold that they were even able to expand their rather pressed team recently.

Twitter isn't profitable (yet?) so far as I know.

Don't know anything about the other two.

If you're going to get uppity with someone about the perception of your semi-regularly posted spaghetti-to-wall ideas, and counter with something with examples like that, you'd be better served by using profitable examples if you think profit is some kind of universal validation for them. (Again, I can't comment on the other two. No idea.)

Which is what I was originally wondering anyway, if they were intended to be services/sites with a profit motive, or something you thought would be fun hacks.

I consider both to be valuable things to share with other people, and my last collaboration was in fact, just a fun weekend hack. I enjoyed it greatly and would love to find an idea for something similar soon were it not for the book I am working on.

Anyway, you came off as a bit on edge there when no offense was intended and I'm a bit shocked as I'd expect better of you from what I'd previously seen in your contributions to the community. I'm not perfect by any means and in fact angle for devil-side advocacy, but I never mean to hurt feelings in the process.

If I offended you, I apologize. I do in fact appreciate what you share with us, even if bending over backwards with appreciation wasn't my first conversational priority.

I'm getting tea and logging off until I get some hacking done.

Cheers.

To be fair, you said "serious business" not "profitable business."

Lots of serious businesses are not currently profitable and lots of unserious businesses are (the Cheezburger network of sites pulls in something like 7 figures).

There is no ego involved, you again miss the point. What I'm saying is that you are looking a gift horse in the mouth, you don't have read / use any of those, that's how all ideas start out, imperfect, no business model, just as a glimpse of what could be. You would never find a worked out business plan at this level because it literally is an idea dump, the short notes I make when I have an idea, just enough to catch the gist of it so I don't forget what it was and then I go back to whatever it was that I was supposed to be doing in the first place. It's the byproduct of an over-active imagination.

From the steam engine to the lightbulb to google it starts off with just a half-formed malleable idea.

Adsense is what makes google profitable (context sensitive ads), not search.

I wrote up ten of my ideas with some more detail, if that's what you're looking for: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/10/ten-ideas/

Thank you very much for sharing those :)

My pleasure. I'd love to hear from you if you decide to give one of these a shot! :)

In response to your imCaptcha idea, have you ever seen http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ ?

yeah I played with that a while ago; a clever way to experiment with crowdsourced image labelling. It would be interesting to see their results.

I've been wanting to do something like #8 on your list for a long while now. One day... :)

I like the password handler. Simple and useful idea!

I came up with the zooming desktop on my own about a year ago and thought it was the most original thing ever. I guess I underestimated the prescience of the hacker hive mind.

The end game is for applications themselves to use the expanded space. No windows, no scrolling. You open a document and it just opens right there, along with some UI to edit it. I'm sure it would need a lot of experimentation to get right. And it may or may not be possible to get existing apps to work this way.

If you click the link "the previous thread" at the top of the page, I think your question will be answered.

Ass much?

Contribute much? If you're going to take issue with what I said, explain your stance or don't respond.

Also, how do you like HN Office Hours? Any ideas/suggestions?

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