Ask HN: If you think ideas are not worth a dime then post yours here | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you think ideas are not worth a dime then post yours here

48 pointsuast2354 comments

This is probably one among the most cliched discussions but more often than not people just escape it either by talking in favor of it or against it. If someone seriously thinks that ideas are not worth a dime, then that idea should be out in public without any fear of being copied.

I personally think that ideas are more than a dime, unless it's an outright clone. And I am not saying it because of the fear of being cloned or copied; I am rather saying it because discovering/inventing a useful idea is so rare. So it's the scarcity which makes it valuable and not the fact that someone might steal it.

EDIT: Important point missed. The discussion applies more to the people who can implement their ideas on their own.

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1/ Calculate which mobile subscription on the market would be cheaper based on your mobile activity of previous months. Needs a way to keep track of hundreds of subscription rules and way to easily scan and OCR paper invoices and/or pdf invoices.

2/ Offer free salary calculations. Charge employers for sending paper salary slips (PDF versions are for free) and employment related and legal counseling. Also offer free self-service portal for employers and employees. Barrier: requires a lot of knowledge of local employment, fiscal and social security regulations. Reward: if you can break the barrier you'll probably be the first and make a killing.

3/ Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent the entire history of that cent's online usage is freely accessible (radical transparency.) As soon as the cent is withdrawn that history will be lost of at least will be frozen for ever. This way when I want to accept a payment from you I - or my application - can scrutinize the history of the cents you offer me. If there's something in the history of a certain cent that I don't like - example: it's been used to buy X, Y or Z - I'll reject that cent. Other people can step in and tag transactions or even a party in a transaction in a certain way so that I can configure my application to reject those tags. This simple mechanism introduces a new negative feedback loop in our economy that we don't have but need in our economic system.

>>Calculate which mobile subscription on the market would be cheaper based on your mobile activity of previous months

Is there a way to do that? From what you are saying it is like tracking the number of incoming and outgoing calls and keeping track of the bill. Wouldn't that be a privacy issue, and also do the service providers agree to provide such data ?

>>Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent

I like the idea, but what do you mean by online cent? Square takes the payment by credit card, so it goes directly to merchant account. Isn't it? So where does it get converted to online cent? Correct me if I am wrong! This can be compared better to paypal; that is where the money gets converted to online cent.

> Wouldn't that be a privacy issue, and also do the service providers agree to provide such data?

There are a number of popular services which ask that you give them your passwords. Failing that, you could ask them to install an Android app or to have the user manually upload the data. Invoices were mentioned in devijvers's comment.

I think the transparent money idea is a clever one. Bitcoin does this although I'd say it's a side-effect rather than a feature and you have to accept a whole lot of baggage. Applying this to money would be clever. I haven't thought it all the way through but it feels like you'd get tripped up by the fungibility of money. If I use some of my tainted dollars to get a loan and then use those loaned dollars to buy something from you, haven't I bypassed your filter? (As long as they guy making the loan doesn't mind getting paid with tainted dollars.) You could try to make the loan provider tag their loaned dollars with the tag of the payment, but I'm not sure how you'd enforce it. Not to mention that fractional reserve banking means that "new" dollars are being created and destroyed all the time. Still it's an interesting idea and bears further thought.

1 is cool. I worked at a company where we discussed doing this with carriers for their corporate customers, where obviously you have all the historical data and tariffs. On the technical side every bit of activity was an event, so we could easily replay it through a theoretical tariff, and we wanted to use genetic algorithms to come up with new, better tariffs (which were pretty complicated as they involved various different international voice and data rates). You might think it was in carriers' interests not to do this as they make tons of profit on their customers overspending, but apparently not.

We never ended up doing this, however, and most of their tariff discussions continued being back-of-cigarette-packet calculations.

The idea and technology would actually be applicable to all sorts of domains - utility bills, for example.

For 1/ if you're based in the UK you can use http://www.billmonitor.com/ which analyses your bill every month for you

I like 3, but I'm not sure how it would be executed but you would first need crazy volume. Please push forward on it! I'd love to brainstorm with you for fun. It seems like it would need to be one of those things that came as a side effect of something else you were building. Not sure.

You would have to do the tracking independent of the owners of the penny, of course.

And there is more value to this than providing a new negative feedback loop. If someone believes that the source of the money is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money, then such a history is very valuable to them. For example, I'm sure there are some religiously organized charities that don't want mafia money for donations, especially if such money was going to fund construction for a house of worship, etc.

I see this as being potential very valuable in the oil-rich Gulf countries.

On 2, how is this different from salary.com. Maybe one of its competitors have an API you could use.

1) Mobilsense

http://mobilsense.com/

I worked there for a summer a few years back. They do exactly what you described.

An idea is a starting point. If you were to have a race to success, having an idea would put you farther down the road than starting without one.

That being said, the idea is worthless if you don't actually start running. Building a team that can run much faster might eventually swamp any gains you get from having a good starting idea. That team might also discover a new path that leads to a new and much better goal, therefore leading you to choose to abandon your original idea.

A bad idea can ruin a good team by having them run in the wrong direction for too long.

You seem to believe that people don't value ideas enough and therefore are testing them. You will often get free ideas from people who can't or have no intention to run with them. This does nothing to prove they have no value, they simply have little value to that particular person.

I think the idea vs. execution argument is the hacker version of the nature/nurture question. For most things that matter, both contribute to varying degrees.

>>You seem to believe that people don't value ideas enough and therefore are testing them.

Kind of. While I am a programmer myself and agree with the fact that ideas might have little value compared to execution; this is more of a case where the person with idea does not know how to execute it. If the person is executioner himself, then I think that ideas are equally important.

Okay, here is one:

You sign up with the company. You give them a bunch of different categories of budget, and whether or not its a hard budget that you can't go over or a soft budget that can.

They send you a pack of credit/debit cards highlighting the category. Say a big red "Eating out" card, or a light blue "Groceries" card, etc.

All of these debit your bank account you've linked to the service (a la paypal). On the service you setup "sub accounts" (which I'll hereafter call accounts). These are debited when you use a card, but only up to the amount you've authorized for the month on hard accounts. If you have say "33.49" in luxuries, and you try to charge 36 bucks, it denies it and sends you a text, "You only have 33.49 left in luxuries". If you try to make a charge in a soft account (aka one you're okay going over, but that it takes out of a different budgets, say Groceries will take out of dinning out), the charge will go through, and take any of the excess amount out of the account specified as the overflow.

There would be a webapp and smartphone app that would show all these balances on all these accounts you set up so you could see up to the minute how much was left on the cards.

Basically, 21st century envelope budgeting with no book-keeping once you set the budgets, with cards that work on the web or in restaurants or at any store.

It would be useful to everyone who's bad at balancing checkbooks, or money management in general, from teens to just people who are too busy to really worry about it.

Please oh please make this system :OD

Maybe it will be possible to make apps that work like that on mobile devices equipped for NFC payments, and the cards won't be needed?

NFC won't be near enough widespread for this sadly

That's cool. Maybe a key idea here is not the different cards but the ability to track certain expenses by delegating categories to certain people. What would happen if any credit/debit card generated a text message when declined?

That's well and good but have you ever legalized marijuana?

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

So rather focused on my current company for anything to be fleshed out past the hand waving stage. Here are two that I would like to tackle but don't have the resources for. Both games which are not my field but which my daydream is to setup a small indie games company for when I one day do an exit and have some money...

First one is along the lines of a tower defence but instead of attackers you have a crowd wanting to protest. The 'people' are quite good sim's in that they should behave according to research - lots of people crammed in are more violent than a widely spaced crowd. You, the player, will get different scenarios - protecting a visiting dignitary, policing a conference centre, a town square etc. etc. an obviously your level ups will be increasingly heavy duty riot control equipment: vans, water hoses, helicopters etc.

Second one was a sandbox type game like minecraft or dwarf fortress with the addition of seriously mega threats. For example a dragon living in an area that cannot be defeated without either building and planning serious defences (over a period of days or weeks) or massive co-operation. Games are either too formulaic or immediate - but there are lots of people prepared to work on long term construction projects in these kind of games, would be interesting to tap into that.

I still think execution is 90% of the battle with an idea and I am going to have a crack at both of these given half a chance. Don't think either of them are million sellers but far too many games are clones of one another and it's good to introduce new concepts

#1 has been done at least once, but it's not very good. Lookie here: http://asia.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/riotpolice/review.html

1- As a heuristic, find an existing successful product (for example invoicing, accounting, crm...) and tailor it to a smaller national market (for example France, Germany...) or to a specific niche (accounting for trainers, invoicing for plumbers...). That should give you a lot of ideas!

2- a tool to conduct online interviews. Right now when recruiting companies use a phone screening before flying the candidate in. By conducting an interview online, you can (for example) have him code the solution to a problem in real-time, how he thinks about it etc. So much more efficient than phone interviews, and a much better predictor for candidate quality.

3- a service to outsource video making for webapps. people making webapps often need demos of their products, but would rather not spend valuable time learning how to make a video, voiceover etc.

There would be a lot more. Ideas are a dime a dozen :-)

Tailoring it for a niche segment sounds like a feasible solution, or else it's a redo, isnt't it?

1. invoice - freshbooks, curdbee 2. online interviews - interviewstreet 3. video for webapps - can't recall the names, but I got more than 5 proposals for creating a demo for my site theaterex.com

I understand that everything has a room for improvement, but the ground breaking ideas have far more value than we see

I've seen http://demogirl.com do #3 (demo videos for apps) and #2 http://interviewstreet.com

For #1, I can upvote you only once. I've been having this idea for a while now. Customized accounting app for a niche audience. That's going to be my next app once I finish my current one.

I've had this idea of giving every person I meet a quarter. Naturally, this idea is worth far less than a dime.

But seriously, my real idea is that expressing quality with monetary terms is silly.

No, it's really value that is being referred to here. People say 'ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything'.

It really depends on the originality + depth of the idea. If you think of something like "a cool social network", then yeah, it's worth (less than) a dime. But if your idea is a somewhat detailed version of Google's search engine algorithm, and you're the first one to think of that, then it's probably more valuable than what the cliche prescribes.

Personally, I believe that good ideas that result in successful businesses are worth keeping to yourself, as long as you plan on making something out of them.

A tool to help small companies to find potential contracts with the government. The main issue here in my country is corruption, and how to gain enough traction.

Like http://www.onvia.com/products but for each country.

It's something I've been working some time, because I think the NLP involved in analyzing and extracting some structured metadata of the mandated docs is really interesting.

1) Sub $100 3G handphone only for use with Skype. My thoughts on this. A fair number of people don't know how to use the computer and Skype for video conferencing (eg my daughter's grandparents). This handphone can fill in the void provided it is cheaper than the smart phone. How it can work.

Upon purchase of the phone and 3G plan, SkyPe log in details will be saved into the phone, eliminating the need to log in. Contacts from SkyPe will be shown on the address book and it can proceed to act as a normal phone.

2) 30 second Music sharing/sampling. Most of the time, it is only a certain section of a music that plays over and over in our head. The idea I have is to select 30 seconds (I believe this is the maximum to avoid infringement of copyright) of the part of the music I like and share it with my friends and say "Check out this song, it is great. This is the part I love".

It can also be used for song samples where the wisdom of the crowd determines which portion of the song is the one that people likes instead of the current way it is done, which is the music store determines the sample

Alright, just this two for now and see how it goes, unless anyone is interested in others that I have

Go to the bank and get four $100 bills. Using a xacto knife, cut out all of the serial numbers of the bills. Then, cut off 1/4 of each bill in the follow method:

  * Cut 1/4 off the left hand side of the first bill.
  * Cut a rectangle out of the next bill using these coordinates:  Top: 1px, Height: 100%-2px, Left: 25%, Width: 25% ... where 1px is about 1/8 inch.
  * Cut a rectangle out of the third bill using these coordinates:  Top: 1px, Height: 100%-2px, Left: 50%, Width: 25%

You now have:

  * One bill with the left quadrant cut off.
  * One bill with a big rectangle cut out... but is still barely in tact.
  * Another bill with a big rectangle cut out.
  * Three 1/4 pieces that you tape together to create a 4th mutilated $100 bill.

Go to the bank, and retrieve your hard earned $400.

Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Will_a_bank_replace_a_half_ten_dol...

I had the idea in 1997 that you could use a scanning tunneling microscope as a hardrive needle. Have a perfectly flat surface in a vacuum and divide it up into a grid. If a square has an atom sitting on it then it counts as a one and if not its a zero. Having a single atom as a bit would be a major milestone for storage. Unfortunately I only have a highschool education and not much money so never had any means to really pursue the idea. Intel and others are doing research on it now, but as far as I know no one was working on the idea at the time I thought of it.

I also had said a number of times to my girlfriend that i want a robot that could fold laundry. She would always look at me funny. Then I felt vindicated when colin angle (iRobot) said in an interview that the next task he would like solved with robots is folding laundry.

#1 sounds nice, but I'd guess we're limited by the mechanical precision of the needle to track single-atom wide surfaces.

People introductions is a nascent field. Nobody has owned it yet as all the companies in the field are just getting started.

So far we've seen the trust model: http://sonar.me lets you know when your FB or Twitter friends of friends are in the room. Then there's the recommendations model, like okcupid.com recommends people to each other to date, but take the dating out of it and add foursquare checkins for location down to the venue level. Not sure if anyone is doing this model.

There's Agora (http://agoraapp.com), but I'm not really sure what they do to tell you whom to meet.

http://grubwith.us is doing an excellent job in the dining niche.

execution matters, being first to execute is often an advantage, ideas without execution are worth no more than thoughts, but if you plan to execute on an idea then keeping it secret so others with more resources, speed, talent are less likely to execute on it first has (some) value.

Put tourists in touch with locals. Couchsurfing.com without the couch, and marketed much better.

Video Game Idea: I would love a really good co-op shooter scenario. If anyone ever played Rainbow Six, Crysis or any good single player FPS with a story line/scenarios that had AI help or felt like could use more players.

I would love to talk with friends or even strangers to do certain missions/scenarios.

OK guys, we need to rescue these hostages. There are between 20-30 terrorists holding them in the building. You can enter via doors, roof, sewers, vents, whatever. You come up with a strategy and chat in real time as you all execute. You can be together bursting into a giant gun fight or coordinate really well separately.

I'd say that ideas are not worth a dime unless it's actually implemented. I mean, if a person with a fantastic idea doesn't know how to implement it, or doesn't even try to- that idea's useless.

However, no matter how bad that idea is- as long as a person tries and implements it- that idea becomes priceless. I say priceless because every idea that you can turn into reality means that you've gained experience, and more in-depth knowledge about that particular idea. As cheesy as it sounds, knowledge is priceless.

I think there's an opportunity to do any type of idea now that uses bitcoin and reduce the need to bootstrap altogether - just accept donations from bitcoiners (even without a prototype,) who would be happy to give a small portion of their stash if it means increasing the value of the remainder. Eg some site called bitcoinstartups.com could list them (something more streamlined than http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?board=12.0)

My idea: Turn your challenge into a website were people can contribute and harvest ideas for free.

Maybe like

http://captainobvio.us/

The best products solve niche problems that the solver is familiar with and is personally invested in solving. So if I have 3 good ideas, I'll do one and give the other 2 away - that way all my problems get solved!

This is called commerce, and it doesn't have to be the cutthroat fixed sum game that corporate culture has made it.

The goal of business should be quality of life and prioritizing problem solving, not getting richer than the next guy.

So there should totally be an idea exchange!

[marked-for-deletion] baked. <http://www.halfbakery.com/editorial/help.html>;

(The [marked-for-deletion] part is a joke, by the way. It makes sense if you know the site.)

Create a database of every product in every store and make it searchable. Make a search engine that tells you where nearby the product is available for purchasing. Some of the bigger retailers provide this already on their own websites.

Make a better calendar. There are plenty of ideas posted online on what makes for a better calendar.

My idea: make hiring a team easier, stop using spreadsheets and emails to manage the process.

I want a blog where I can put in IP addresses of my family so they can't see certain posts..

I can do this. Are you ok with signing up for a blogging service that allows privacy control per post? Or, are you looking to use this on your own Wordpress like blog?

Dating guidebook/flowchart app. Tap the situation you're in and it gives you some tips.

I have a brilliant idea: I have found "the cure" for CF (cystic fibrosis) and it's a video game! (Now I just need to learn a programming language and write it.)

In this case, I don't think it can really be effectively copied/stolen. I have spent the last 10+ years getting myself well when doctor's claim it cannot be done. My oldest son has the same diagnosis and he is healthier than I am, so it is clearly replicable. The real reason I think the idea is important: I have spent at least five years trying to talk to people and put what I know into words on a website. And, for the most part, people just don't get it. I have concluded that I need a more information-dense delivery mode. I think writing a simulation (aka "game") will do the trick, or at least be far more effective than what I am doing currently.

Like with so many things, "the idea" may be just one piece of the tapestry of things which breathes life into a viable business or project. I was excited to hit upon this idea but remain frustrated at failing to execute (in part because getting myself healthier is still a big part of my life and I also have a full-time job). So I like this idea -- and it's so far not gotten me anywhere.

Peace.

Games which do more than entertain are exceptionnal which makes your idea exceptionnal too.

As CF is a genetic disease, how does a game help ?

As CF is a genetic disease, how does a game help ?

To teach lifestyle changes more effectively than the written word can.

Genes don't determine outcome by themselves. Environmental factors play a role, a more significant role than most people seem to realize. Ants and bees know this and use this information to create queens from normal larvae -- ie ants and bees are adept at taking the same genes and getting a vastly different outcome. So it can be done.

(EDIT: There's a website listed in my profile which might give you some idea of what I do for my health. It doesn't convey enough though, so that's where a game would come in, assuming I can ever get there from here.)

Twilio that works reliably for everyone in places like New Zealand.

Why doesn't Twilio work in New Zealand?

xxx

Darklight. A darknet which trades scalability and reliability for invisibility by masquerading as HTTPS, SFTP, SSH, and other cryptographically secure, common Internet protocols.

It's such a blindingly obvious idea that I assumed for three years that somebody had already come up with it and I just hadn't found it, and I think that it's not worth a dime because it's obvious and also the kind of thing that the open-source movement would have jumped onto immediately.

Office/Lunch Hours

Have everyone make a profile with their "open hours" where they're free to have lunch or meet up with someone who wants to discuss things of interest with. Don't make it formal, just make it so that people can see what times you're free that week, and shoot an email if they want to talk about stuff. Leave it vague and general because you never know what utility this could serve - hell people might just want some companionship, not startup advice.

i thought this already existed. [googles...] here it is: http://hnofficehours.com/

Yeah, but I'm talking about something more general and less hacker nature. More like a dating/social thing than an expertise request. HNOfficehours seems more very rigid. Some people just want to meet new people, and make a potential friend. Hard to do that when the theme of the site is getting feedback from an expert about a specific topic. I'm talking about a site where you can list the times/days you're free and got nothing to do, and are open to doing something with someone - could be catching a ballgame, playing ping pong, practicing martial arts, etc... A Cross between Meetup + HNOfficeHours.

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