A Hacker News For Ideas | Hacker News Reader

A Hacker News For Ideas

firespotting.com

256 pointsnewernpguy72 comments

The concept isn't new and unfortunately the execution isn't either. The issue with sites like these is the poor signal to noise ratio. We're all capable of blind speculation and these sites seem to be riddled with "ideas" that are nothing more than a faint unattainable wishes.

There are people out there with real problems. They've lived the pain and have stories to share. There are also people out there that if they took the time to listen to that story and ask questions they might be able to formulate a real idea on how to fix or lessen that pain. And if they find a solution to a problem that people are willing to pay for, they'd have the seed of a business.

That's the site I want to see built.

Hacker news for problems would be great then.

Yeah. I really like the idea of someplace to wax poetic about unformed/really out there ideas, it really jogs the brain into super creative mode, and is just super fun to do.

Yep. And while I was composing this reply saying the community could help consolidating the problems and stuff, I realized it already exist, it's called StackExchange.

They should add it as a section to their site, similar to how we have the ask section here.

Or perhaps a kickstarter or indiegogo, that is driven by those with a problem, rather than those with a solution? Someone could post a "project wanted" and others could join in, until a critical mass is achieved and someone with the right skills sees it as a validated product and choose to build it and is okayed by enough backers. At that point, the funding from those that said "okay" kicks in and away the project goes.

Interesting idea but it'll need some work. Let's say I have a problem - it takes too long to get from point a to point b. Do I propose a solution to the problem or just post the problem? If it's the former, my suggested solution may be too far reaching or not far reaching enough (teleportation vs make faster cars). If it's the latter, it may be easy to get people to agree a problem exists but hard to get them to agree on what a good solution would be.

Of the two, the latter is probably the better option. Perhaps I list a pain point along with the amount I'd be willing to pay to have that problem solved. Others do the same. There's no tipping point because it's unlikely that by simply having a problem I'd also know how much it would cost to solve the problem.

At any point, users/companies with the skills to solve the problem can propose solutions along with their minimum funding requirements and relevant credentials. I can select more than 1 solution and whichever solution reaches their minimum funding requirements first gets my pledge.

Or instead of trying to compete with kickstarter, this could simply be a step that happens before campaigns are launched on KS. People list their pain points and the amount they'd be willing to pay to have them solved and then you charge companies to add their solution/link to their KS campaign.

Yes, there would have to be some negotiation/matching on price. I'd see it as an iterative process, whereby a set of backers post a problem, with or without a cost estimate. The solver puts forward a proposal with estimated costs and each backer chooses whether they want to accept that proposal. The process then iterates until a tipping point is reached in the funding.

Good idea to see it as an addendum to an existing service rather than a service in its own right. Or an amalgam might work, whereby the "kickstarter for problems" is a separate service, but on reaching the tipping point the project morphs into a regular kickstarter project, that has already reach its tipping point. This would require each backer to also have a kickstarter account (if not the kickstarter project would come up below its tipping point), but it would save a minimum viable product from the complexities of having to handle money.

  There are people out there with real problems. They've lived the pain and have stories to share.

The difficulty there is that many of the people with stories to share can't express them in a way that is meaningful to the people who could solve the problem. It's a division between the haves and have-nots of logical expression.

Which is why you haven't seen a successful idea website. It's not a simple problem to solve. But I don't for one second believe it's not possible. My point, however, was to explain why merely posting "ideas" isn't a solution. It just happens to be the easiest to implement.

The reason we haven't seen a successful idea website like that is because it's a classic marketplace problem.

Such a solution would have to evolve out of an existing platform that has already attracted a diverse community. My guess is sites like Reddit or Quora are best positioned to solve this problem. I have seen several questions on Quora that were basically along the lines of, "I have problem X, can you recommend a tool to solve it?" Either people provide suggestions, or a developer comes along and says "Hey I have this problem too, I'm going to build a solution and let you know when it's live in a few weeks."

I could imagine HN creating IHAP (I Have a Problem) posts where somebody shares a problem they have and others from the community can either provide suggestions or offer to build a solution.

What I can't see happening is a new marketplace forming around this concept. Why would I post a problem to Firespotting, when I'd get a much better response posting to HN or Quora?

Totally agree on noise/signal issue, however ... well-thought out, validated ideas are precious. There's probably a small cache of such ideas that people are willing to share, but that'd be a very small cache. Not sure if it'd justify creation of a full-scale news or discussion site. If anything, it'd be more like a infrequent curated newsletter.

Full fledged "ideas" aren't what you'd post. What you would see would be discussions about problems. A site for open consultations where people can express pain points in their daily lives. Of course you'd have to make it conversational enough to where people without the ability to adequately identify and express their pain points can do so with ease. Often people don't realize a pain point until a solution is available.

People with the power to reduce/remove such pain points would stand a better chance at identifying real need and business opportunities.

You can do this with your friends, co-workers, family, or neighbors. You may find a few problems to fix and may even come up with a few solutions. And you might get lucky with a viable solution.

But, expand that premise to the country or the world. Now you're talking about learning about problems you didn't even know existed. Problems that you personally might be able to solve. And you have a community of "solvers" waiting to help. The "co-founder" website finder is built right in.

Everyone's ideas are 'valid' to them, thus validated (in their minds). And "well thought-out"... we've all run in to people who've been thinking about their ideas for years, but that doesn't mean the ideas are really implementable, or that the problems are truly solvable (or solvable beyond that one person).

As a lover of blind speculation I would love to see more of these. Can you point me at a few nice ones?

Sort of like https://www.innocentive.com ?

Funny, I just ran across this site: http://www.quirky.com/

The video is kind of like what you are talking about. Interesting company, don't you think?

FWIW, http://fundprojectswith.me/ from Agriya looks better approach to me.

I liked the way Quirky works.The company has a long way to go,but it should do it before 3D printing becomes mainstream.

I completely agree with your second point. The emphasis should be on problems rather than the "ideas". That's how real innovation works. Ideas are cheap, abundant and mostly unimportant. Problems and challenges are the real thing.

People have a weird habit of treating Hacker News like a glorified CMS, when in fact it's a community with a distinct CMS. The CMS is actually quite awful for mobile or touch-based viewports, so Hacker News sometimes works in spite of its CMS.

That's why these things die, because there's some assumption that using the Hacker News CMS will somehow build an active community on its own.

We're seeing the same thing going on with all the forum/comment CMS being touted recently, but people are giving the CMS way too much credit for the - hypothetical - success of a community-based site.

You can still argue that the arrangement of a particular CMS will be conducive to certain types of discussion over others. E.G. The adversarial type of discussion we see here would be far less effective without threads.

For hackers, this makes perfect sense since every "fork", if you will, needs to be followed to the conclusion of its job. Threads ensure ancillary points are confirmed, refuted, altered or somehow interacted with.

Likewise, having the reply form page show the parent's message content ensures quick reference to the points (quoting, another hacker favorite, becomes easier).

In a way, the layout and functionality of a CMS is communication feng-shui.

I personally prefer forums (linear, non-nested comments) to what is on Hacker News, but people disagree vehemently on this, so that will be litigated for years to come.

Ironically, pg has implemented measures to prevent deeply threaded discussions, so he seems to be somewhat aware of innate disadvantages to using this format of discussion.

I think that, by and large, CMSes at best can serve to remove obstacles to creating content and having discussions. It still falls on the community and admins to nurture a culture and atmosphere that resulting in said content and discussions.

Generally, though, there are nested/threaded comments (HN, reddit, Disqus), and there are linear (forums), and between the different CMSes in each categories, we're overstating the differences vastly, especially with regards to advantages and disadvantages. In other words, types of CMS can have a huge difference, but individual CMSes of the same type don't differ as much as the people touting them would like us to believe.

Places like NeoGAF and Something Awful are practically held together with scotch tape, but they're still amazing communities in their own right.

What would be nice is being able to choose between nested or flat layout, and to have folding. I actually like the "expand" feature Livejournal and other forums currently use which just appends the next level onto the current thread... though all of this would probably require javascript which a lot of HN users wouldn't really like.

Still, I think the more users can customize their own experience, the less likely they'll be to complain about it.

The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone.

Hacker News never really has so many comments that you can't read through them all in a minute, and if a discussion would grow too large, because it's a threaded discussion system, you might as well give up discussing the story anyway. Just look at "scandal stories" like those related to Heroku and such.

Because Hacker News is karma-based as any other comment CMS, I would be more inclined to write my comment as a reply to the top-ranking comment instead of posting a top-level comment myself, since I'm likely to gain more karma from this. This completely destroys the flow of discussion.

Comment CMSes will always be gamed by people, but this would probably be the most significant improvement to the quality and linearity of discussions.

Options for viewing a discussion differently don't work very well, because then people start discussing in wildly different ways, which makes for a huge mess. That's why, again, a linear/forum CMSes are superior when it comes to discussions, although they don't lend themselves perfectly to a link/self-oriented submission system.

The biggest change I think could be made would be to lock the display order of comments based on submission time alone.

That actually would be really helpful, basically have a newcomments option for each thread. The URI could look like /item?id=n&newcomments

I am not a fan of something like this. I think we do not have a good word for the "idea" part that actually has legs. I have tried to talk about this on HN from time to time.

There is something important in the concept portion of a project or business. I hate the meme that "Ideas do not matter, execution is everything." But I think we currently lack a sophisticated mental model for hashing out the important parts of the idea or conceptual model or mental framing. Lacking that framework, a project like this seems doomed to be a place to toss out silly ideas of no real merit that aren't likely to get developed.

I propose that if you want this to get traction and become meaningful, the site needs to become the place where that sophisticated framework gets discussed and developed.

For a while, I've been assembling a giant collaborative google doc of hackathon/startup project ideas with my friends that's been quite successful: http://hackathonprojects.tk/ Notably, we've developed a syntax for linking ideas to each other, so that people browsing the site can see hard-to-see relationships between people and projects that others have found. I've also been working on a dedicated web platform for this purpose (to facilitate ideation): IdeaOverflow. When you start typing in an idea, it uses MIT ConceptNet 4 as well as the manually established graph of ideas already present to attempt to suggest related ideas in the database.

I have larger aspirations as well... http://ideaoverflowideplan.tk/

Email me at jcole@mit.edu if you'd like to work on this with me by the way! Basic django (or php! or js frontend!) skills are sufficient to be useful, though making a good interface to explore graphs is also a high priority... http://arborjs.org/ is almost right but not quite.

Your link did not work http://hackathonprojects.tk/

> jacobsstuff.tpclubs.com not found

Any chance of getting it working again, it sounds interesting?

Creating a Hacker News clone for X does not actually create a Hacker News for X, because HN is the community, the people, not the product itself.

Yes PG has created an awesome backend and easy to use front end free of complexities that other forums have, BUT its value is in the people, not the product.

I think this is a good example of why you can't just bolt on the UX from another site to a new concept and expect it to work. I looked at the page and just hit information overload.

Yeah, I really wasn't sure what it was about, what I was being asked to do, etc.

Is it supposed to be GetSatisfaction meets Hacker News?

Anyone remember http://www.halfbakery.com? I guess it's still going.

What defines an 'idea'? The topics are so broad that creating a forum would lead to information overload, as pointed above by lysol.

For example, I have an idea to harness solar energy and power my gadgets, how would I file it? What tags would I use? It would get very messy very fast.

Then again, ideas want to have sex, and a messy environment can lead to a breakthrough. But forums are too linear, perhaps brainstorms are a better approach. My startup, http://www.wikibrains.com (beta) is aiming to 'engineer serendipity' by having users share content or brief comments on a 'per topic' basis or string search. It is a difficult task.

Is there a HN for Designers? I peruse Behance and Dribbble for ideas, but since I'm a programmer and not a designer I really need read discussions and tutorials on Photoshop, Illustrator, design theory, color, etc. I would think that there's enough material. Occasionally, really good stuff like this appears on HN:

http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/

I'd like a daily dose.

Yes, there's Designer News[1], an elitist version of HN caught up in as much controversy[2] as in low traffic volumes.

[1]: http://news.layervault.com

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5331766

I have a DN account and it's hardly an elitist designer forum. It's more like a Twitter link dump.

I tried to register but it's "invite only"

I guess I can be happy to just follow it for now.

I had a good laugh over the terrible design that Designer News has. It helps to reinforce the appearance that many who call themselves designers have no idea what they're doing.

Reasons: the light gray on white info font is impossible to read on some screens. The dark blue on blue top bar is one of the worst I've seen for legibility. The icon for 'login' is a smiley face. The random circle icons to the left of some posts are entirely meaningless for casual observation.

There's http://forrst.com/posts It's invite only (and I'm out of invites...) Haven't been there for a while but there were some good design discussions over there. It's more of a forum than newsfeed though...

We need a Hacker News for problems, not ideas. Let people state their problems, and see what's effecting peoples' lives the most.

It seems backwards to me. Why "ideas?" Why not "problems?" Think bar room, not board room.

Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but since you're working on a HN-like site I'd be curious to know if you gave Telescope (http://telesc.pe) a try?

And if you did, what made you decide not to use it?

Thanks for the pointer. Did not try teles.pe - basically Firespotting started as an exercise to create a "hacker news clone" on EC2 - and Google guided me to the arc script implementation on EC2. Basically this link:

http://nicholasblee.com/blog/hacker-news-clone-on-a-free-aws...

There's formal processes for formulating ideas. Loosely described as "the creative process" or "design thinking" which to me largely mimic the Waterfall development process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking#Design_thinking...

I don't see discussion style sites like hn or reddit being successful at coordinating something like that. At least explicitly. It feels more like a punt. As if provided you can get enough people looking at something, magically it will work itself out.

How about making it a Hacker News for non-techies? I have a lot of friends reading HN who know nothing about programming are only interested in the other stuff (startups, marketing, science in general etc).

Shameless Plug: There's a community for those interested in science, especially Math, Physics and Computer Science - http://functionspace.org

Clicked out of interest but hit a signup wall. You should put the posts up front.

I've always wanted one for musicians. Good sites are so hard to find...

Ideas > worthless

Opportunities > valuable

Create a site to discuss actual opportunities and signal to noise would be very different. Also, the site could look like shit or Craigslist and nobody would care.

A site to discuss ideas degenerates into nonsense very quickly. I mean, when I look a floating helium balloon clock was the top-voted item. Right.

The problem is that people are not likely to discuss real opportunities openly. Opportunities have a direct link to real business. Ideas usually don't.

That ideas are not inherently valuable (in the way many people think or assume) does not make them "worthless."

Yes, opportunities are valuable... but only if you have the resources (skills, time, etc.) necessary to take advantage of them.

Platforms for businesses to share real problems are already out there. Go sign up to forums for accountants, CPAs, real estate agents. What do they struggle with, what common themes are are there, what part of their job do they joke about loving (because they hate it so much)? Go sign up to student forums, teacher forums, landlord's forums. Buy their magazines, go to their meetups. It's all out there already.

So many ideas that are discussed in forums like that are already patented. 95% of the time, the product never made it to market, 4% of the time the product did make it to market but wasn't successful. I've done patent searches for friends with "new ideas" and it turns out someone patented it 40 years ago.

full disclosure: I have a patent, that ended up in the 4% category. On to other things...

I like the site and while I couldn't see myself using many (any?) of the ideas, it sure did trigger a flood of related and/or symbiotic ideas.

As an aside, I'm not so thrilled about the "Mens suit that turns transparent when lying". It's based on heart-rate, what if you almost step in front of a bus and your BPM increases due to the shot of adrenaline your body produces?

This system favors people with a network of friends who solicit and coordinate up-votes! Don't tell me it doesn't happen on HN.

However, I liked the concept enough to submit an idea myself, http://firespotting.com/item?id=340

Now, can you please up-vote my thread :p

Thanks for trying ;). What would be cool is if we had a concept similar to startup weekend applied here. People post problems and community posts ideas to solve it which get voted up and eventually it turns into an open-source project on github ;). I'm happy to help with it.

Also, I think we could really come up with an idea network that's similar to StackOverflow across domains.

Amazon Cloud doesn't seem to scale, site is slow. Please use better service platform. (Yeah, I know.)

This is like Highdeas without the "hey weed sure is cool" posts.

I'm not sure if that's an improvement.

It'd be better with proper meta tags. Think: people come to HN, click your link, and bookmark your site. Will they ever remember what the heck "firespotting.com/newest" was about? Not likely, unless you add some decent meta!

Having a 'leaders' section that encourages people to vie for submitting the most content doesn't seem to send the right signal this early on.

Slightly off topic - that kind of design (cloning and changing colors a bit) - where it stands on copyright/trademark ?

Looks like nice idea. is it supposed to be a sunset of hacker mews?

Why is this built using tables? Jesus Christ people! It's harder to build these sites using tables than it is using semantic HTML and CSS, why struggle to make things broken _and_ harder?

I think it's because the author quite literally copied HN, by looking at it's HTML source.

Holy fsck, I just dumped core upside down looking at the HTML source of this page.

Heh, have you seen the source of this site, the one you're posting on?

Also, if the new site can avoid comments like this, it might actually have a chance =)

Nothing is wrong with tables! Tables actually make things easier, no floats etc..

Trust me, I'm a web developer by trade. Make me build a layout using divs and CSS and I can do it in no time, easily. Tables on the other hand...is a disaster.

Tables were intended for tabular data. Using them for layouts was just a hack until css and layers came along. IIRC, they render more slowly than layers because the browser needs the entire table before it can determine the layout. In any case, once you start getting into complex tables nested in tables, the code becomes a nightmare... and the vertical alignment in data cells is usually defaulted to center meaning you have to use 'spacer' cells just to make things look right.

...it's been aeons, though, since i've even dealt with table layouts so for all I know none of what I said is still true for modern browsers, but I still think they're not a good idea.

Here's the biggest problem with these sorts of ideas:

http://firespotting.com/item?id=341

awesome

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