Show HN: Needed Ideas for things to build, so I built this

I like it. To limit spam, use twitter for auth and connect ideas to twitter profiles, then let people flag other people as spam - and hellban their account.

If you don't want auth, you can still just let people flag spam and hellban machines spitting out spam.

Edit: You can also use basic ratelimiting - maybe only allow 1 post per 10 seconds.

I tried

    As a SQL injection, I want a '); DROP TABLE Statements;--

And got a 500 error... you might want to look into sanitizing the data

Brilliant! I've always had an idea in the back of my mind for a website that allows people to tell you "what they want". I like how you have the "as a" part of it, so rather than someone saying "I want this", they say "as a X, I want this". I think it prompts people to be more concise and clear about what they want.

But there are some obvious things to address... - how to deal with malicious/unserious users - how to organize the information in such a way that it's easy for entrepreneurs and "makers" to navigate to problems they'd like to solve - make it easy for people to use this on the spur of the moment. people are best at telling you what they want on the spur of the moment, rather than having them think back to what there problems were

Some ideas... - maybe you could do some type of language processing to keep track of how many times someone said "I want X". (you can't literally match the characters because there are multiple ways of saying "I want X") - making it easy to use on the spur of the moment probably means making a good mobile version of this. (I don't have a smartphone, so I don't know if you did already) - I'm not sure how this would be done, but I've always had the idea of having some sort of browser add-on where you have a keyboard shortcut for an "idea bar", so you could just press cmd+i, type in your idea/problem, and it'd be sent to a database/site like aswhoiwant.com. you could also keep track of things like what site the idea is coming from, maybe some stuff about the user etc. this might lead to more serious use. EDIT: I like what _lex1 said about spam - I've thought about it a little, and to reduce spam and increase seriousness, you'd probably have to make it less convenient. maybe don't show people the streaming list of posts. but it'd be good to show people a list of their posts along with how many upvotes they got. maybe there should be a list of posts that you could upvote, updated every hour or so. maybe one list for popular posts(with most upvotes for day/month/year), and another for new ones.

As much as it saddens me to say this, I think this needs a CAPTCHA to keep the "hackers" from spamming it to oblivion. Cool idea, though.

Everyone's talking about auth to limit spam, but I think a more interesting approach is to let people click to flag spam, then train up a little naive Bayes classifier.

Cool idea. Seems pretty similar to http://www.tweetspiration.com/. After putting a decent spam-filter on this, maybe there's a way to introduce crowd-supported mechanics (ala upvotes, comments, relevant mentions/hashtags)?

you should add an algorithm to filter out the spam and make an app out of this. you could change the theme every day, e.g. tomorrow it could be "if I had [..] I would [..]", etc.

can totally see this taking off

Did you release this anywhere else? I'd be appalled to learn all that foul language is coming from HN.

EDIT: Very sad. Nothing more to say.

I tried testing some XSS stuff and got 500 errors, you might want to make sure you are catching encoded < > stuff

Interesting to see the amount of different inputs that people are trying. Swastikas and attempts to DROP TABLE aplenty.

Is it odd that I find the exercise to prevent the spam far more interesting than the product itself (not a criticism)? No traditional captchas, no oauth tie-ins... just good-old-fashion machine learning, graph analysis, hellbanning, negative captchas, etc

I guess that it isn't something you intended, but you've build great entertainment site. As your user I want you to archive these pearls of humour and let me upvote'em. Time to pivot ;)

As a spam-filter to mail I want a spam-filter to aswhoiwant ;)

If you need ideas for things to build, you can look at http://firespotting.com - Hacker News for Ideas.

This is pretty fun, I just posted a random want, I dont know where this is going but it seems promising.

Not sure this is being used the way you expected / planned, but it's still pretty cool. :-)

I've just been watching it for about 5 minutes, pretty entertaining actually.

My wants are not being acknowledged. I want to see my wants on the list.

Idea: if the "as a"-field starts with a vowel, change the "a" to "an".

You should pivot. This is more useful as a joke generator.

I'm the 555 guy. Let's talk about semantic communication.

Great idea really! Just the spam is a problem...

watching this really shows you what some of the lurkers on HN are like. I'm glad they tend to keep quiet on HN itself.

phew, someone just automated it and is spamming you hard. this is interesting to watch, thanks :P

what did you use to build this?

Methinks it needs a captcha...

boy there was a lot of talk about bananas when i took a look.

sounds like tailors want wang. Get on it, YC.

can you limit the posts?

this is really cool!