Ask HN: Idea Sunday | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Idea Sunday

369 pointsrokhayakebe567 comments

A small HN experiment. Every Sunday, a thread will be started to share product ideas. Why? Because many people have ideas they will simply not have the time to implement, and many need product ideas to work on.

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A way for employees to push back against their coworkers when they email too much crap to too wide an audience. In other words, I wish my Inbox had a little voting widget next to each message:

    +------------------------------------+
    | 4,376 people received this message |
    |                                    |
    | [Cool, it was ]   [It was a waste] |
    | [important and]   [of my time to ] |
    | [worthy of our]   [  read this   ] |
    | [    time     ]   [   message    ] |
    |                                    |
    +------------------------------------+

Then, as votes are collected, the sender (and maybe everyone else) gets some kind of feedback on how their message was received. Maybe the report could include a total of how much time was spent reading it: "Your coworkers spent a total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in employee time. Sending it was therefore a moderately bad use of company resources" .. or, if the voting was favorable, "1722 of your coworkers enjoyed reading your message. When you were deciding whether to hit Send or Discard, you made the right choice in clicking Send."

Edit: As I've said in the past when posting ideas on HN, if you think this is worth doing, please run with it! I make no claim on "owning" the idea, and all I ask is that if it makes you a billionaire, you commission of bust of me to install in your parlor. (Bronze or marble only, please.)

I love this idea, except that the conclusion about something being a moderately bad use of company resources doesn't necessarily follow. The benefits of things like team rapport are hard to quantify, but that doesn't mean they should be dismissed as waste. The same goes for things that certain individuals feel are a waste.

Taking jokes, just one subset of such emails, as an example: For you, a particular joke may be a waste, but having the team culture be such that it is open to jokes, may provide benefits beyond each individual joke.

Still, great idea, and maybe the objections I raise could be overcome just by the right wording.

:) reminds me of the "warning" message that used to appear in "rn" before you posted a message to a usenet group:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

Ah the old days.....

>"Your coworkers spent a total of 36.4 hours reading your message. It cost the company $1458 in employee time. "

This in itself could be a nice plugin for your mail. You need 3 values to be able to calculate it:

* Number of employees the mail will be sent to (hard with aliases, easier with Outlook PDLs)

* Average fully burdened cost of employees (managers should know this, or you can default to something like $120K)

* Estimated time to read (based on wordcount and an average reading speed)

From there you can get the "hours wasted reading this mail" and "cost of this email".

EDIT: You could go above and beyond and use an open rate percentage to more accurately determine the cost, but that's not something an email client could record, it'd be server side.

Nice idea but the big problem I can see is that nobody will want to vote their bosses emails as a waste of time. Also in large corporations a lot of long emails will be sent that relate to company policies etc that nobody reads in practice but the purpose of the email is that it protects the company in the event that an employee says they were not aware of policy X.

On the other hand, some E-mails are actually not crap and get lost in the waves of mailing list spam and build reports. While we're fixing E-mail, here are a few suggestions that would correct a major problem with E-mail, the ability to miss/ignore it:

1. Non-optional delivery/read receipts Various clients have these, but it would be nice if these were universally supported and could be made non optional. This is useful so that when I don't get a response and have to go hound someone, my first question doesn't always have to be "Hey, did you get that E-mail??"

Speaking of responses...

2. Response required flag Be able to mark an E-mail as requiring a response from a specific recipient. Such E-mails could be presented differently in the recipient's client, highlighted or called out in a different color. Client software could generate a TODO list out of them, issue reminders if the E-mail has been un-replied-to for more than some configurable period of time, etc. The longer the message is ignored, the more annoying the presentation might be. This highlighting could be silenced by either a. replying to the E-mail, or b. clicking an "ignore" button (which also sends notice of the ignore action back to the sender). The sender could also cancel the flag after the message is sent.

3. Response required by date As an enhancement to the above, instead of a flag, a date/time by which a response is needed. This could allow the recipient's client software to display these E-mails in a sane priority order.

I love the idea of getting feedback on what you sent. It took me posting to HN and Reddit to realize how unimportant most things I work on are. It's one of those things that should be obvious but aren't until you are confronted with numbers.

- A variation: to have emails you want to send go in a pending pool moderated by a team of trusted confidants, to avoid sending out email that is a waste of time.

If the voting doesn't work it should be possible to gather other metrics such as how long the message was visible on the screen - in other words did the recipient actually read the email. Over time it would learn the users typical reading speed. Another would be how long was it sitting in the inbox before it was read. A smart email client can detect when the recipient actually notices that the email is there.

With these metrics it could then work out which members of the company send out the least well received emails. There are certainly some people where I work who have a very low interesting email ratio. These people would be prompted to sort this out.

One risk would be the employee that just sends out jokes would of course appear to be highly effective. Some algorithms would be needed to filter out work vs play emails.

To creep employees out, these metrics could be readily available to management and used in their performance reviews as part of all the other data obtained about them!

Here's a version of that that we did using our Django app. You create a new email with a unique ID and get a link to vote that you can put somewhere like your email footer. We've posted some of the code here: https://github.com/FlowStacks/email-voting and the email voter is here: https://flowstacks.com/emailvoter/

Great idea and I think this would be awesome as a GMail extension/addon (ala Rapportive). You could even have it only appear for messages from the same work domain.

It'd be absolutely necessary that voting was anonymous.

It's a nice idea but I think it would be a little too burdensome for every single email. Maybe if the mail was going out to >N people where N is configurable by the organization.

I think one of the reasons why no one's ever done this is that with traditional email, it's impossible for the sender to know how many people one email has reached, or will reach. But I think Threadable (recent YC startup) could actually do this.

It might be cool to make it like a neutered spam button. Instead of actually training your mail app to reject it as spam or notify any spam registries it could just function like clicking the "waste" button and cut out the "worthy" button since it is sort of default.

Attent by Seriosity has an interesting solution to this: http://www.seriosity.com/attent.html. They create a scarce currency that companies use internally to send messages.

Isn't Gmail Priority Inbox a solution for this use case? I don't use it, but keep an eye out on it's classification efficiency, looks like it does a fine job already.

That's actually brilliant, thanks for sharing!

There is an easy platform for this.

http://ideas.ozonebit.com/

Check it out!

I want to search for furniture, and other products, based on dimensions. My girlfriend and I furnished a new apartment recently, and had to be space conscious.. This spot next to the couch could fit a 10" wide table. It's not easy to search for that, yet the information is there. My original plan was going to use the Amazon API and take a search term and page through looking for dimensions that fit. I still think it's a great idea, but obviously not huge, and I don't really have time to build it. If you do, hook me up.

In college, I won a business pitch competition with the idea of using a digital laser measure to measure the dimensions of any space, and then only show you furniture that fits within that space. It had some other aspects, but that was the gist of the idea. It looks like Ikea and others are slowly working their way towards that ease of use, but it's still a ways away.

There's an app called CSTM that takes this concept to another level with custom built furniture. The furniture is more expensive thusly but also more unique. http://cstm.co/

Taking a pic of your room and seeing nice furniture virtually added so you can easily test different styles.

This is less an idea, more something for someone to think about.

We need to figure out how to defeat the internet echo chamber effect.

Notice how often, when a community gets started between a small group of people(such as early Reddit or HN), it's a place of intelligent, productive discussion, where people measure what they say instead of just spouting extreme rhetoric?

Yet, once these communities grow, you inevitably see the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem, where it seems like the point of discussion is more to get the most approval instead of trying to argue a point, and where anyone with a disagreeing opinion feels unwelcome even if they're willing to put a lot of effort into their response?

I haven't quite figured out how to solve it, but I really want to. I've been a part of several online communities like that now, and it always ends up the same way. Once it gets big enough, finding good conversation gets very rare.

I think you misunderstand communities. Vibrant communities are full of people who share a materially common set of opinions about various things. They engage and interact within that world view.

At the same time people evolve and communities evolve. Sometimes you move away from the community, sometimes they move away from you. Either way, you can end up feeling like an outsider in a group you once considered yourself to be part of the 'in' crowd.

Because a large part of anyone's current point of view is driven by past experience, communities often segment by age but sometimes segment by politics or world events (the mechanism is that people take away different things from the same experience, it "changes" them in different ways, and that puts into further out or closer to other members of the community.

The internet "echo chamber effect" as you call it is defeated by visiting multiple communities and watching and noting the differences. That your favorite 'hang out' on the Internet has become distasteful to you can no more be "fixed" than you can will your favorite eatery or bar to exist for all time.

Things change, people change, places change. Keep moving and an open mind.

I think I have a solution to this, something I called Reddit150. You have divisions, like in soccer or american foot ball leagues, where the highest rated members can be promoted to the "higher" league and also demoted if their contributions are not good enough. People from a lower division cannot comment on a higher division, but everyone can view all divisions, this would result in situation where the media would always reference /r/science from the Alpha rankings for example, the prestige of maintaining your position would ensure a higher quality of content at all times. I called it Reddit150 because that is a typical number of names a human can remember for our social structure before it starts to breakdown, the member number in each division number would have to be in the order of 150k or possibly something that adapts with the total user base.

This is also called Eternal September[1]. And I think the Spiral of silence[2] adds to the problem, as people not only see their own opinion echoed, but also stay away from expressing it if it's not in line with the community.

The only solution to this I've seen so far is making it harder for "ordinary people" to discover the community, as HN tries to do it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

Developing a site conducive to good conversation, in general, needs work.

It's not just the echo chamber. It's the spam, the repost/duplicates and the following discussion, the trolls, the downvoting-for-disagreeing, gaming-the-system-for-'karma', the caring-about-karma, the offtopic-but-'funny'-jokes, paid-posters, etc.

The fact that every site fails when it becomes sufficiently popular says that good conversation is hard, and harder still while maintaining anonymity - and even then, exorcising anonymity doesn't seem to have helped the quality of Youtube comments.

There are various measures like hiding comment scores or capping karma that help but there's no site out there that combines them all.

I have an idea: Remove visible karma. Your personal karma is invisible to you and you have no feedback on how a post did. Karma is still used to kill comments, but everything above a certain score (say 5) is ranked arbitrarily (say MD5 of unix timestamp of comment).

Alternatively, make it public what everyone voted up on. That way everyone is open to criticism for what they voted on, and like people do on Facebook, they'll try to curate their upvotes so that they look sophisticated. Hopefully that will modify their upvoting behaviour.

I can only think of one solution: moderation. And that does not scale very well.

The only way out I see is a paid forum, so that the site can hire full time mods. I'd like to build something like this one day, but its such a herculean task that I figured I'd need at least a year of runway to make it work.

In the starting days of Reddit and then HN this really bugged me a lot.

One of the solutions I wanted to try was to partition the user base on a similar way that posts are filtered to you. That is based on the up votes you give. Now I'm not sure if it happens here but at least on Reddit you have it on your customised first page.

I believe that it isn't the user base that gets worse but that it gets much more diversified and people entrench themselves in groups and the "How bout dem Cowboys" problem arises.

Think of it as user and posts clustering, the secret sauce would be how those clusters interact, I don't have a tentative answer for that. This idea would top current aggregators by valuing discussion and intervenients in the same way that posts are valued.

I'm currently building a solution to this which is still in very early beta. Using machine learning, I'm working on solving the Goldilocks problem of community affinity (not too close, not too disparate), aiming to fix the hivemind problem that reddit has and the strictness that topical communities like HN have.

I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few moments to spare!

Code: http://code.fraction.io Beta: http://beta.fraction.io

I'm part of a community that limits how much you can post and (up)vote in a day. The points for these actions are shared. There is no down-vote.

There are two kinds of users, regular ones and "elders" of sorts. First few were established years ago and they can vote on others to become "higher tier" users as well. How much votes you need depends of how many people can vote.

The registration is not automatic, but you fill out a form with an open-ended question and selected users (mentioned above) can vote to approve the registration.

The system has threaded discussions where every post is equal. So you create a post and it can become a new "topic" (or forum, or however you want to call it). These can be nested of course. Whether something is a comment, topic, list of topics, blog, ... depends entirely on the template used to view that entry. You can manage privileges (rwx) to these subtrees (or any single node in the tree).

I don't think you can solve it because it's not the platform, it's the userbase. Although voting systems to highly encourage downvoting/upvoting based on whether you agree or not. An idea I've had is to rank all content separately for each user, by predicting what content they will upvote or downvote.

At first it sounds like this would exaggerate the echo chamber effect, but I think it would do the exact opposite. There's no reason to downvote or upvote things because you agree or disagree, downvotes only affect what you see in the future and no one else sees them. And instead of different ideologies being pushed away into different communities, they all exist in the same place, occasionally interacting with each other and mixing.

Did anyone experiment yet with a tree-like comment system (just like the one on HN) that completely hides comment points (even in the profile pages and to the users themselves)? To me it seems that, contrary to the intentions to achieve high quality comments, the crowd often optimizes for low effort and high score. Maybe the lack of publicly visible reputations points could reduce that high score mentality. Maybe we are all wrong with this kind of behavioristic approach.

Spam and trolls would still be punished and one would still have the benefits of having the most favored comments at the top.

I just had this idea: How about making it really easy to be promoted to a volunteer down-vote moderator for an hour or so, just a button away. The task would be to downvote comments with mean and extreme language. The down-votes would count twice during that time and the actual moderators would be able to monitor what the volunteers are doing and to act accordingly in the event of misuse. That maybe results in less work for the actual moderators and at the same time it’s maybe more effective. I think, I would happily do this on a lazy sunday afternoon as a service to the community.

The issue isn't just about the internet echo chamber though, it's a more fundamental thing that people seek out news sources and opinions that reinforce their own biases - totally the right thing to tackle, but it's not just about internet communities.

The solution: the more you up vote, the less it counts for.

You can't. Not without banning those responsible for that kind of behavior or severely dis-incentivizing them somehow from coming to the community.

I think more generally, if I understand what you mean correctly, that that is really nothing more than water-cooler talk. Talk meant to be pleasant rather than investigative.

I also think with that said, it's really only a property of small communities because once it reaches a certain size, the amount of substantive things to discuss and hash out doesn't scale with the number of users.

A solution for the "too many tabs open" problem. Need a way to save my history in an organized and interactive manner, with a nice looking UI. Sort of like the old WebMynd (http://webmynd.com). I find that most of my tabs are open as a form of reminder. If I close it, I'll forget it and might as well not have seen it. Same if I hide it away in some kind of bookmarking app. I think it would be best to apply a UI layer over my entire history in a way that makes it easy to search and recall things that I found interesting int he past.

Need to store all data locally for privacy reasons, and have a way to logically group urls by content and bring them back to the front occasionally (maybe with some kind of gamification?) so they don't disappear.

Did you have a look at the Firefox add-on Tree Style Tabs? It puts the tab titles on the left hand side, allows for grouping them and seems to be very stable. There are also a couple of add-ons that allow for exporting the tabs. That combination works quite nicely for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

If you use Chrome, check out OneTab.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

Use Firefox's tab grouping feature. :)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tab...

It would be great if each tab belonged to a project and I could add new tabs to a project when I open the tab.

If I could, all at once, close all tabs that aren't part of the project I'm working on, that would free up resources for the things that currently matter.

And if the browser could keep track of how much time I browse for a specific project, I could use that to track how much time I spent on each project.

Not a perfect solution but might help: The Great Suspender:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

"Unload, park, suspend tabs to reduce memory footprint of chrome. Tabs can auto-suspend after a configurable period of time or be suspended manually. Tabs can be whitelisted to avoid automatic suspension. Suspended tabs are retained after closing and reopening browser, preventing many tabs from all reloading after a restart."

Have you tried Onetab for Chrome? It has some of the functionality you're looking for in that it pulls all of your open tabs into one tab and vertically orders them on the page for you to go back and access later. Neat tool, I use it quite a bit. http://www.one-tab.com/

I second 3rd3's suggestion of tree-style tabs. (I ended up with mine as a narrow strip on the right that expands when I mouse over.)

But I'll add that I mainly solved the "as a reminder" thing in other ways. I use Instapaper for a "read later" queue. For to-do-ish stuff, I use KanbanFlow to wrangle short-term tasks, and Trello to manage a deeper backlog. For "maybe I'll want this someday", I use Pinboard.in. Events and related links go into Google Calendar. And for "don't forget X" things, I sometimes use a dry-erase marker on the bathroom mirror, so I glance at things while brushing my teeth.

Now I've got my open tabs down to things I'm actually doing, and it has been a huge relief. Now I don't have to search through a bunch of open windows and tabs trying to find that one thing.

I'd like some UI element that lets me know how long it's been since I read/used a tab. I tend to open lots of tabs and then browse them as is convenient later. Sometimes this means tabs get "lost" (i.e. become stale before I read them). This would let me know which tabs I might have overlooked or should close, bookmark, etc.

I've started using Pocket for this.

They need a better browser UI, since they seem to have been focusing much more on their mobile apps, but their recently-added "highlights" features accomplish the "bring them back to the front occasionally" part of your description.

Opera, up to 12 has the best tab management, groupings, etc that I've ever seen. It's a real shame the new webkit based Opera still isn't up to par. As such I'm in the same place as you hoping for Opera's tab management but left with hundreds of unidentified tabs in Chrome. Plugins help a little bit but nowhere close to Opera's innovative management. Hopefully they'll restore parity soon.

Agreed! I'd love to have something like this. I discussed it a bit in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714341#up_4715785

Maybe this? http://twin.gl/

I made something that addresses this: www.seekaizen.com. I haven't advertised it before and it's mostly just friends/me that use it, but it seems like you might like it. Let me know if it fits your use case.

How about tab grouping? Or multiple windows?

I use SessionBuddy to manage this.

perhaps a followupthen for tabs?

I have a strange fascination with knowing exactly how I discovered a particular artist, film, website, etc.

I'd really love a browser extension that could keep track of how the user reached a given site. Then they could go back later and input, say, a YouTube URL, and it would show exactly what lead them to that song.

I started writing such an extension myself, but I was clearly out of my element. So when Mozilla shut down their Firefox Add-on Builder, I lost motivation completely. For someone with experience created extensions, though, I imagine this would be pretty straightforward.

EDIT: no, using the browser history is not good enough. Browsing is a non-linear activity (especially with multiple tabs open), and to visualize your path through the web you need a graph, not just a list of sites.

> "I'd really love a browser extension that could keep track of how the user reached a given site."

I used to love to have this. I called it "browser history", but then Mozilla decided it made the browser so terribly slow that you can now no longer really configure how long history is retained. After a while it just disappears.

I used to have my history all the way back from 2006...

I've seen this a few times, once as a firefox addon which is no longer available by the looks of it.[1]

I'm pretty sure Mosaic tried a similar thing about 20 years ago.

The other time I saw it was in the form of a DAG which appeared in a panel above the address bar which could be selectively hidden. The graphics were crude as I think it was rendered in GraphViz. I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this - tried searching for it again with no look. Pretty sure it was in a video demonstrating an experimental browser, but I'm lost as to which. (Maybe I dreamt it)

I just found another while searching too.[2]

[1]:http://www.technotraits.com/2009/09/browse-firefox-history-i...

[2]:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fromwheretowh...

I have this exact same fascination and the need to know how exactly I discovered a website, etc. I used to think I was alone, finally I know I'm not. I guess I gotta make something for this, as I would not only be helping myself, but others as well.

Same here! I've found that people often have really interesting stories surrounding their discovery of a favorite album (for instance), especially when they have strong emotional or sentimental attachments. I think it'd be really cool to tap into that and even help people recall things that they might not otherwise recall by showing them the "path" by which they arrived to an album, the date when they first listened to it, etc, and then collect those stories to share. Could also become an interesting approach to content discovery—through personal stories instead of similarity algorithms.

This is a very cool idea - for me the application would be more in research, when quite often I stumble across an idea, or go back to read an open tab, or read my Pocket, and when I want to see how I discovered it, can't figure out how I got there. Just a simple graph of history chains would be great.

This already exists for most browsers. Pressing Ctrl+H should take you right to it.

Keep Writing. I, sometimes, would like to write on a subject but I fear no one will read the material. If I had X people simply suggest to "keep writing" I would be more willing. Keep writing is something like Medium but it allows someone to post text (news, fiction, stories, anything) that is not complete. Writers set a (hidden) number of votes they should reach before they keep going then they publish what they currently have.

While it doesn't address the problem of not having an audience, you might be interested in the Iron Blogger concept: http://blog.lazerwalker.com/blog/2013/12/24/one-post-a-week-...

That's a fantastic idea. It might be tricky to find a balanced reader/writer dynamic but it if it worked it would be very cool.

Check out http://helpmewrite.co/ - submit the title, lets people vote.

What about riffing on the Povio idea (http://pov.io/) where people "ping" you to request a photo, but in your case they instead request you to write something on a particular topic?

So someone might request a blog entry on the most interesting accommodation you've stayed in overseas, or the biggest waste of money you've experienced, or the most memorable meal, etc.

I'm interested, but where would an author get people to vote on the piece? While a fiction story could get votes from various communities, I imagine it would fail for specific posts? Feel free to email, mail at namanyayg dot com

I've been having this in my mind for a while:

A nice way to organize & share my knowledge. I know that lots of people have a self-hosted wiki or similar where they write nice tricks, something that they learned about and might be useful in the future, nice ideas...

Well, I'd like something like this, but more "social". Pages could be shared (or public), anyone could write a comments on something (I'd love to see comments a-la Medium), and it would be nifty to have a way to "fork" and submit a pull request for every page.

I guess it could also have the usual "follow user" that will show all of his pages in a dashboard, a "trending pages" for the most seen pages and similar.

It isn't really the normal use for it, but I made my own subreddit for this - I only use it as a personal repository of information, but it would suit pretty much all of your requirements, and it has stats on usage etc built in :P

One key component would be SEO juice. The knowledge should be easily findable by others, even if people use different words to describe what they're looking for.

An open question would be how to make the site sustainable monetarily. About.com is this idea (but non-wiki editable) and they've plastered so many ads on the pages that it's become nearly unusable.

I like the idea a lot, and have started the most barebones version of this at http://aboutfact.com . If anyone else is interested in chatting more about this, let me know.

It's funny, Notedock[1], one of the things I'm currently working on is kinda like what you've described. The original vision at least.

It's currently being offered as something like a self-hosted wiki or similar as you say, but has some hidden, unadvertised "social" features.

Like sharing pages to other sites in the Notedock system. And pages can also be public (you can choose to set individual pages as public or private). Here's an example of my "public" site: https://jb.notedock.com/public Members of that site, and the members of sites each page is shared to can add to the Comments section. But for public pages, there's also a Disqus[2] option at the end (which I've turned off for my public site).

The original vision also included being able to "follow Notedocks" instead of "follow users" like you've described. What I didn't have in mind was the Medium type comments and "forking". So it's leading me to think that we probably have/had the same inspiration, but different ways of implementing this.

[1] https://notedock.com

[2] http://disqus.com/

I like this. Some ideas that come to my mind:

Text analysis. Automatically match pages with similar content, so that even if everyone just posts their own stuff it will be connected to the rest automatically. I think the problem of a wiki-kind-of knowledge base is that pages are easily orphaned, especially if people just do brain dumps. Nobody wants to spend time tagging content, and you also don't want to manage a site-wide structure. It would be great if the content would organize itself. Could also be used to automatically link terms within text (to the most relevant page about this in the network).

To extend on the "nice tricks, something that they learned about": Let students (or even professors) put their lecture notes up, structurally and visually enhanced. KhanAcademy and edX do a great job providing professionally produced courses, but maybe my friend or I can explain a specific problem better in easier terms, and you'll be even able to comment on it or provide a fix for some error.

Smallest Federated Wiki[1] is something you may be interested in.

Smallest Federated Wiki is a distributed wiki. It allows anyone to fork a page by clicking the fork button; this copies the page to their own wiki and they can edit it. The original wiki owner(s) can then decide whether to merge the change into the original page.

Ward Cunningham has a few short videos about it at http://wardcunningham.github.io/.

[1] http://fed.wiki.org/ and https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki

You might want to take a look at Smallest Federated Wiki (https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki)

example wikis: https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki/wi...

This falls under the "Why didn't anyone think/built of this yet?" Where is the global knowledge base? I am sorry, but it is not wikipedia. Wikipedia is what all us know/think to be XYZ?

What you are describing is a place for you to share everything you know about a subject, and I can use to find what 200 other people know about it.

This is simple and extremely powerful.

A team and I built something like this (www.pilot.me). It's written in Ruby and we're looking to hand it off to new owners. Unfortunately, there is a government stakeholder who put some money into it and they'll probably need a small amount of money to release it completely. andrew dot peek at gmail if you'd like to know more.

Did you take a look at https://coderwall.com/ ?

some influencial tech blogs (in order less famous) in France use a lot this delicious-clone : https://github.com/sebsauvage/Shaarli.

It's a one-click bookmarlet with public/private separations, RSS built-in for syndication, and there are implementations of dashboard multiplexing sources : http://shaarli.fr/.

No comments though (the author seems against it).

As the proud owner of mypro.tips, I'd be totally down to create this. Piggybacked off GitHub Gists, maybe?

Interesting.. I can finally put my domain have.tips to good use.

You just described a wiki.

Idea: Airbnb for food. An app where you buy meals cooked by your neighbors.

I see two big trends these days.

1) People seems more willing to connect back with their neighbors and community.

2) People have less time but want to eat more healthy.

Imagine this scenario:

While going back home, a student could check on the app what's available to eat for tonight. Next to his place, there's a family willing to sell the extra tacos for a few bucks. The student would then just stop by and pick them up.

Obviously, there would be quality rating and the possibility to reserve a few days in advance.

Major legal problems with this, unfortunately (at least in the US). You pretty much HAVE to have a commercial kitchen in order to legally sell food in the United States, as well as be licensed by the state. It is cost prohibitive. Some states have what are called "cottage food laws" that enable individuals to sell food cooked in their home kitchens on a small scale, but there are many restrictions. (For example, in my state, you cannot own any pets, and the food can't be the sort that goes bad if you don't refrigerate it.)

Granted, what Airbnb does isn't altogether legal much of the time, but food safety is taken much more seriously than hotel taxes and zoning laws. If you did build a startup like this, the second it started to become popular, I expect that you would get shut down.

http://us.dinnersurfer.com does this. It's only a few months old and may not have that many users outside of its native Denmark yet, but it has potential.

hah. I am surprised you have not heard of any of these!!

http://www.quora.com/Food-Tech-Startups/What-companies-are-d...

In the Netherlands, this exists. Thuisafgehaald.nl

Wish granted: cookening.com

A programmer social network. I find myself with two distinct sets of friends on Facebook: my tech friends and my normal friends. With my tech friends, I just want to post neat snippets of code as statuses and share github gists on walls and whatnot. So I'd like basically github with more social elements thrown in.

Imagine seeing a cool repo, then being able to friend the owner, and open a chat box to have a quick chat about it right there on the page rather than having to go to another communication method.

EDIT: I know this super similar to github. Really I just want github to implement the equivalent of friends, chats, and public profiles people can post things to (a la facebook wall).

This could be solved by something like Google Plus, if circles could be defined by topics that people subscribe to rather than by people you want to send a message to.

e.g.: I want to know what Jim thinks about coding, but not politics

That's why we've built http://DoerHub.com . We have hackers, entrepreneurs, surgeons, PhDs, and doers of all kinds posting and contributing to projects. The purpose of the site is to enable everyone to share what they are working on and grow it with help from others who care about the same topic (teammates, advisors, beta users, feedback, single-task contributors, word of mouth, you name it ). You can already message anyone, but we're adding group chat and anything else doers request that makes collaboration easier. You can just connect with GitHub.

I'm part of a huge Facebook-group (maybe 2000 members) with only programmers in my city. It's really great and the only thing that I like and enjoy about Facebook nowadays.

I think GitHub is in a strong position to do this. They can easily turn it into something more social that allows you to add friends and share codes in your feed.

Dude. I've often thought about doing exactly this, but I felt like there was probably something already out there and just haven't taken the time to research whether that's true or not. If there's not, and there still isn't by the time I finish launching my current project, I might just look into taking this on next!

I built something like this about 4 years ago called BigStartups.com. It was built to help network the startup community and was moderately successful. Unfortunately, there were co-founder issues and we shut it down. I often think about what it could be in todays world if we kept working on it. Oh well...

https://gitter.im/ ?

This sounds like something, that if it started to gain traction, could be replicated by Github almost instantly.

http://www.coderwall.com seems similar to that.

Could these features be added to Github via browser plugin? (I really don't know)

http://forrst.com/

Facebook Groups work well for this for me. Twitter too. And IRC...

Geeklist, Coderwall, Github, sub groups on FB/Twitter

https://geekli.st is trying to be that.

koding.com

It's called Github

Popcorn Time for quality children's programming - Bill Nye, Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar. Shows that are entertaining AND educational, none of that advertising filled, sassy attitude, Disney Channel crap.

edit: Seems like there is some interest in this. If anyone wants to discuss this more, email my username at me.com

This extends to regular quality programming as well.

Sometimes I spend 30 minutes looking for a good movie before giving up and watching The Bourne Supremacy again because at least I know I won't regret the 2 hours I invest in it.

I would pay $1 bounty every time someone just recommended a good movie that I end up liking.

1 million more...

Given the source is open, it may be more like curating a list of children's programming torrents and providing a delivery system for people to add their own child appropriate work.

I wouldn't be opposed to ads but not the sort you currently find on kids tv hawking toys

Jyst compiling lists of Youtube vids

+1!

This a million times.

Parents all over the world approve this idea.

An app that allows you to have a meeting with someone anytime both of you're available for the meeting.

So it's schedule-less.

Example:

You want to talk to Paul. Paul wants to talk to you. But not as much.

Paul is ranked "a1" in your book and you are ranked "b5" in Paul's book.

Paul notes that he is in a "b5 and above" time period. Maybe he just got done exercise so he is more interested in talking to anyone (you are a b5 after all). Or maybe he is sitting in the dentists waiting room and has time to kill and is ok if he has to stop the conversation right away abruptly.

In your book Paul is an "a1" so he can call in the middle of the night and you will take the call.

Paul marks his availability as "b5 and above" and then app proceeds to start to contact anyone who matches.

Someone else is ahead of you at b3 so they get the first call. Next guy is at b4 but he doesn't answer. So you are next at b5 and your phone rings and it's Paul.

You have your conversation.

Advantage: No need to schedule calls by time. They happen by importance.

With granularity on both sides.

Why I like this:

I can make the most efficient use of time. Some people are more important and you want to take the call anytime anyplace. Others are less important and you are more picky. Also ability to use time that normally goes to waste. And prevents you from having to think "I've got a minute who should I call".

I really like this idea, although I'd be unlikely to mark my availability often. Maybe have a 'get me a meeting now' button, which raises your availability until a meeting matches.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/will-someone-please...

  - When will the next bus/train be at this spot?
  - a non-DRM ebook reader with Project Gutenburg installed
  - auto convert from client/server to webapp or phoneapp
  - grocery delivery for us not in SV,Seattle,etc
  - reservation-only restaurants that have tables avail now
  - auto turn cell phone to vibrate in certain locations
  - auto forward cell phone to close land line (work/home)
  - old Google maps
  - a no wifi or cell Palm Pilot replacement
  - cell phone direct to .txt email for all but certain callers
  - mini-blogging platform: 400 chars < every post < 800 chars
  - yelp you can actually believe
  - forum software that filters trolls
  - forum software that filters idiots
  - salad bar locator
  - buffet locator
  - televisionless / audioless restaurant locater
  - chess with n moves forward/back what if 
  - shock nearby driver on cell phone not paying attention
  - missing commercial airliner locator

> - When will the next bus/train be at this spot?

I think Oona Räisänen solved that already: http://www.windytan.com/2013/11/decoding-radio-controlled-bu...

> auto convert from client/server to webapp or phoneapp

What? Client/server is a network model, webapp and phoneapp are applications. You mean like a web/phone app that you can use to talk to random server applications or something?

> old Google maps

More specific..?

> auto turn cell phone to vibrate in certain locations

There's an app for that

> auto forward cell phone to close land line (work/home)

You can do that with VoIP.

> forum software that filters idiots

That would be a major breakthrough. Hellbanning probably does a good job already though.

> shock nearby driver on cell phone not paying attention

The police calls that a Taser.

One thing I have noticed is that if I look at my phone while driving but hold it lower out of sight no one reacts. But if I hold the phone up so I can actually see where I am driving while glancing at the phone, people honk and act like they want to kill me. So I often just try to hide it, even though I feel much safer holding it up so that it is in the same field of view as the road. So this is an example where people think they are helping righteously but they are actually making the road more dangerous.

Anyway I think that cars should come with heads up displays that overlay information on or in front of the windshield in front of you without obscuring the road.

Also I should get a hands-free setup.

I had an errand service and a lady would pay me to get her groceries every week. I think I charged $10/hr. She would also give me a stack of coupon items to pick up. Her way of rationalizing the expense was that the coupon savings was usually more than she paid me. I would buy all the crap and she'd just write me a check for that amount plus my fee.

> buffet locator

There's probably a market for a Buffett locator as well.

cell phone direct to .txt email for all but certain callers

How much would you pay for such a service?

Many people on hacker news have explicitly asked for this: a platform for listing your open-source project that needs contributors. I tried here:

https://github.com/jw2013/gittribute

But nobody cared. Perhaps I was doing it wrong or I have not do many/any promotion. Anybody wants to take this idea and solve it for us I will really appreciate it.

The monthly "who's hiring" guy should post "which open source project need help" as well.

for what it's worth http://solvers.io was featured on HN recently and seems quite similar.

http://solvers.io is this for charitable and scientific ideas (by me and davedx)

https://openhatch.org/ is this for open source software in general

http://up-for-grabs.net/ is trying to make it so that new contributors can easily find projects that they can contribute to.

http://www.codetriage.com/

http://collabfinder.com/

Downloadable sounds for electric cars.

Electric cars must make noise under new EU rules:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26857743

Aesthetics is another (arguably more marketable) aspect of car sound.

Have you seen The Dilemma? About two guys (tech founder and business founder) working on a system for giving traditional muscle car sound to electric cars. (And some romantic comedy type stuff too.) When I saw it I thought - that idea would really fly. Whilst silent cars may be great for the majority (especially those living near busy roads), there is still a sizeable group that will pay extra for a great engine/exhaust note combo. See also recent criticism about the sound of the new hybrid Formula 1 engines, including from world champ Sebastian Vettel "sound like sh*t". There's a definite market there, but obviously depends on the electric car market itself.

For blind people, they must make a sound that person recognises as a car. So they can't download their favourite bands latest single.

From the article:

> MEPs agreed that in future the vehicles must be fitted with devices to make them "sound similar" to cars with combustion engines.

So you'll have a limited choice to choose from.

But personally I'm hoping they can make them a bit less rough and more of that smooth "Hummmm" you associate with luxury cars.

Michael Stipe had that idea back in 2004: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/28/electric_car_rington...

All those fart app developers will have a new home!

blink and sound when the pedestrian is detected is way better for him/her and the driver.

That's an April's fool, right?

How about a program that watches for certain input patterns, takes calendar, location and maybe camera data to determine the best times to deliver push and email notifications without interrupting.

Maybe one could figure out moments at which the user would be interrupted the most, for example shortly after opening a new window or tab, or shortly after switching programs, since these moments are risky for forgetting things (if the same psychology applies): http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2011.571...

It would probably make sense to prohibit interruptions during intense writing. I also thought about an option to blacklist certain apps or websites like Skype, Facetime etc. and to whitelist activities that don’t require focus like browsing news websites or playing a game.

A service for blind/partially sighted people where they can use a smart phone to connect to a service where volunteers (if any are connected) describe what they can see from the video streamed from the smart phone.

The volunteers are given ratings afterwards, and their video streams checked against their descriptions by other volunteers.

Monetized later via a paid service where the person is reliably connected to trained describers rather than volunteers.

Have a look at bemyeyes.org it is just that its in public beta: https://beta.bemyeyes.org

A web API that consumes phone camera captured photos of nutritional labels, and spits back a structured JSON response of the data.

Primary consumers would be developers who're building products that depend on the user inputting this type of data - or warehouse logistics companies who could catalog this sort of data and middleman it to everyone else.

This would make my idea for a mobile app that renders pictures of the sugar/salt/fat content in foods by OCRing the label a trivial problem, and it could lead to many other applications like a shopping assistant for diabetics, athletes, etc.

https://assemblymade.com/golden-fleece

Dibs. I'll start working on it. If anyone wants to help out, message me or email me karan[at]goel.im

The product should already have a UPC code that is trivial to capture. From there, it would be a simple matter of looking up that code to map it to its nutrition information. There may even be databases (eg: FDA) where this is available. MyFitnessPal seems to have the nutritional info on just about every product I've scanned, and I can't tell if they crowdsourced all that data input and/or if they seeded it with some database.

This adresses a pain that I suffer:

An app to easily compare SQL execution plans.

I believe the better way would be graphical. I have needed this on MS SQL Server, SQL Sentry Plan Explorer has helped but lacks this comparison. Today I do it by diffin execution plans on XML format.

On my wildest dreams I would have a REPL accepting a DSL that would allow me to query the different DMV's (those are SQL Server data management views which give you insight on the inner state of SQL Server, Red Gate has a nice site on them http://sqlmonitormetrics.red-gate.com).

If it already exist is some form or platform please share.

An IaaS provider which meets "paranoid" security requirements -- essentially, being able to remotely provision a box in a trustworthy way, and know you "own" that box at least as much as if you'd carried it to colo yourself.

Then, the ability to secure those boxes (and boxes you drop off in colo) against tampering short of powering them off.

(tech details: Intel TXT, TCG TPM, cheap HSMs, Intel SGX, etc.)

Hey, interesting, I'm a researcher working in this area as it happens. Have you any particular classes of application you'd want to use this for? What level of performance hit would you be willing to take? Would you be happy to just have a mechanism that enables you to determine after the fact that you've been hacked or data has leaked due to a misconfiguration, or would you mainly be interested in mechanisms for preventing such issues ever happening?

PrivateCore has a product to do this for OpenStack:

http://privatecore.com/vcage/

Not sure if any IaaS providers are offering services based on it yet, though.

Baby near me

Amenities near by with baby facilities, possibly with user ratings.

All of my recently baby-ied friends complain about finding places to go, especially groups of recent mothers meeting up in the middle of the day.

As a (relatively) new dad, I would find this very useful. There doesn't seem to be a central repository of such places and the ones in my city (Cincinnati) are really badly organized, maintained, ect...

There is Wow dad, and there is mum version called Wow Mum (maybe Wow Mom). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.wowdad.ui

For some reason I like this idea, not sure why but seems like something that could help my wife immensely as well as other mothers.

A place where developers can post their already launched projects, and business/marketing/sales people can get in touch with them if they're interested in becoming a cofounder . I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets all excited about building and launching new stuff, but after that, I'm kind of clueless about what to do, so I move on to the next.

Biz/Marketing guy here: I'd actively use this for multiple motivations. -Financial support, especially if project has potential for eventually passive returns. -Growth marketing portfolio, for leverage on future marketing projects and consulting work. -Positive impact, dependent on nature of project. -Cofounder pre-trial: work together with smart hackers with potential to collaborate on future projects if fit is good.

Thinking of ways to position this and sources to share it already.

Really: if someone were interested in building something like this out and able to seed initial dev projects, I'd be happy to help.

This sounds good. As a developer I frequently churn out stuff that I have no idea how to sell or grow.

Let the sales guys look through a list of stuff that has been made by developers, and if they find something they think they can add value to then a connection can be made.

Have you tried DoerHub? We're three hackers and we're building it to bridge doers across disciplines via the projects they are working on. It's free. It's connected people who would have never ever met otherwise (surgeons, hackers, researchers in pharma, commercializers, farmers, activists). It's built by doers for doers, and you are welcome to join us, contribute, provide feedback, or help in any other way.

Same problem here. Sideprojectors tries to solve this, but hasn't worked for me so far.

http://www.sideprojectors.com

1. License Tesla or Prius chassis/drive-trains and put Golden Oldie car shells on top of them and sell them to retiring boomers (think Pink Cadillac). Industrial Design IP of exteriors should be expired.

2. A commercial version of PostgreSQL server that has row-level security and natively replicates with SQLIte over HTTP(S). Easy offline mobile apps.

> A commercial version of PostgreSQL server that has row-level security and natively replicates with SQLIte over HTTP(S). Easy offline mobile apps.

This, if done well, could be awesome. How you would effectively guarantee row-level security?

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot is a database whose rows are only readable by the users that generated the data in those rows. Essentially, the data in each row is encrypted with a key that's generated from the password of the user.

Data breaches are bad because, among other reasons, nothing in the database is encrypted. If each row was encrypted with a key only recoverable from a user's password it would solve a lot of problems.

A way for me to organize hundreds of gb of porn.

Seriously, porn organization is the 1 thing I haven't been able to master over the years. A way to detect what your current preferences are and map them to a video or image set would be revolutionary.

The only part there that seems like it's actually hard (ooh er) is encoding information about the content of a given video or image file; I don't see any better way to do that than tagging by hand, which is going to take a while for a sizable archive.

Once that's done, it seems like keeping track of frequency and recency of access, plus user ratings which gradually go stale over time in order to model familiarity breeding disinterest, should suffice to give you the rest. In order to avoid the complexity of hooking into whatever image/video viewer you use, you could run your ratings collector as a background process which uses inotify or your local equivalent to keep track of accesses to the files under curation, and by some method decide when to request you input ratings. (I'm seeing a notification area icon with a bubble popup saying "Click here to rate the last 15 porn videos you watched." This thought amuses me, God knows why.)

Then it's just a matter of asking for more of what you've been watching lately, or stuff you haven't seen lately that matches some collection of tagged interests, or what-have-you. I don't know what you use as a UI for your porn collection, but a simple first approximation might be filling up a temp directory with symlinks to the content matching a given query, and then popping up a file browser on the directory -- in any modern OS, this should give you a pretty good overview, thumbnails and all.

A way to organize anything at all would be a nice start. The real problem is people trying to force arbitrary relationships into hierarchical models always results in mediocre solutions. When are we going to start taking graph databases seriously? (+ Graph filesystems)

"Pay for friendly email".

I would pay for faked friendly emails and messages. You'd need to price it low enough to be sensible. There would have to be strict no sex rules; and protection against scamming. I imagine it workin a bit like camming does now - there's a "menu" of available people with mini biographies and the user picks one and selects what kind of service they want (early morning motivational; late night inquisitive; etc) and pays up front for X messages. The message writer sends the messages and the site takes a cut of the payment.

This is a service, it is not an i troduction or dating or real friend site.

Hey how about "problem monday" then. It is said that often times you should not start with an idea, but rather with a problem. So maybe posting problems could lead to great ideas...

Many (most) good ideas don't solve problems but improve something, create new way to have fun etc. For example, I wouldn't say that Minecraft solves a problem (unless you define "problem" in a weird way).

A way to submit any legal document, and for a fee have it returned but explained in plain english.

What do you guys think about this? And what do you think are the most common use cases/legal documents?

> A way to submit any legal document, and for a fee have it returned but explained in plain english.

SNARK: I understood this to be called a "lawyer".

NOT SNARK: Legal language is so recondite, complex, and heavily dependent on external dependencies defined elsewhere, that short of very smart AGI I despair of there ever being a programmatic way to translate between legalese and plain language with any hope of maintaining fidelity -- and, given the import which legal documents tend to have, a bad translation may well be worse than none at all.

I've actually been working on this. Dutch, unfortunately, but here you go: http://lucb1e.com/rp/js/en%20dan%20nu%20in%20het%20Nederland...

Quick translation of the text on the page:

Title: And now in plain Dutch

Intro paragraph: Contracts are always written in a very cryptic manner. So what do they say in short, plain old Dutch?

Status of the project: beta. I've "translated" 2 out of 38 paragraphs from one contract I've received, and that was a lot of work already. Those paragraphs work fine now, but it still needs a lot more work.

I'd get lawyers to write up explanations of common blocks of legal text. Then you just find them in the contract, and provide an interface to view the explanations alongside the text.

For extra money, you can highlight a section of text, and a laywer will tell you what it means. Once a few people have asked about some phrase, you can include it in the general data bank.

Make it easy for users to hire a lawyer through you for more extensive work -- that gives you a massive revenue stream, even if only a few people take you up on it.

I think the legal world needs to create abstractions and simplifications similar to the programming world. There should be standard definitions, that are simply referenced, ideally these standard definitions are available online.

For example: "No theft agreement" - employees/tenants/whoever shall not steal, etc etc etc

Not quite what you asked for but Word Rake removes extra text (extra adjectives, phrases, filler words) to get you to something more concise and readable. They have a focus on legal docs. http://www.wordrake.com

related, but not quite the same.

http://www.Upcounsel.com http://www.rocketlawyer.com/ http://www.legalzoom.com

Tenancy agreements and job contracts would probably be common uses. I like this, nice idea!

Telepresence for travel. One use case is that I don't have time to travel to location X, but would like to be part of a group who is hiking, etc there. Could see this being quadcopters with cameras with dual controls (remote for me and possible to be overridden by someone on site if there is an issue).

Second use case is my disabled daughter who I can bring back videos of places to, but it's not quite the same as sharing the moment, and of course would give her a sense of freedom to be able to zoom in and look at something I might not have thought to capture.

Given connectivity issues to many of the places I know "I" would like to be able to go to virtually, I suspect part of the problem will be convincing folks that it doesn't ruin their wilderness experience to let other folks attend virtually. Given that you would then have fewer travelers impacting the environment I would consider this a net win.

I did wonder if anyone would watch real-time first-person hiking. Bit like the slow TV movement. My brother has done a few hikes with a GoPro set to capture a photo every few seconds and the results can be quite cool. With storage and power, you could probably capture something. Streaming would be a lot harder in even slightly remote areas.

A device that sits in your toilet (under the water level) and detects trace amounts of blood or other stuff that shouldn't be in urine or stool

Toto is way ahead of you; their patents has already been issued and expired: https://www.google.com/patents/US5111539?pg=PA25&dq=5111539&...

This is an excellent idea. Lot's of cancers can be prevented this way.

Crowd meets Class Action Lawsuits. A mobile or web app that shows many class action lawsuits in one place. I'd like to be able to go to one place and see a large list of pending class action lawsuits and their corresponding meta-data (deadline for joining lawsuit, company, details, link to website with more details, etc)

http://www.classactionrebates.com/

A real, smart browser bookmarking system. One that looks at your bookmarks, and based on content (and/or other factors) categorizes and organizes your bookmarks for you without intervention. Due to issues around privacy, should either run locally or be part of a large, anonymized data set if it needs to use a SaaS. Even better would be a real standard for tagging URLs that bookmarking system could just use on their own (kind of like CDDB music genres or similar.)

A website for employees in a company to share SQL queries and their results, like Heroku Dataclips. You can write your query in your browser, the results will be shown, and you can just copy/paste the URL to a coworker for him/her to see the results.

I'm already working on this, contact me if you're interested!

+1.

very interested in using it.

http://sqlfiddle.com/ sort of does this, but not in the way Dataclips does.

Rahil, have you thought about extending this idea to a place where you would post a DB schema and SQL queries and let the community optimize it. Companies will use this to tap into the expertise of many database engineers.

There's the excellent https://github.com/epantry/django-sql-explorer if you're running a Django app.

- Browser plugin that lets you have private group conversations around other peoples' posts. Pure evil, I won't do it due to pesky ethics. (Think "people gossiping about how ugly someone is in their selfie behind their back" as primary use case.) UX would be injecting thread inline on major sites, first would obv be Facebook.

- Better wedding planning software

- Tool to go through LinkedIn "Who You Might Know" recommendations to assist in job hunt

Your first idea was done before and FB shut it down http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/miss-being-able-to-comment-... http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/facebook-threatens-to-sue-t...

I love the first idea, and I might just be catty enough to implement it. I'll be sure to follow up w/ you if I do (:

Your first idea is basically whytheluckystiff's "hoodwink'd".

A wiki-style spoiler-free website for catching up with TV series/books.

For instance, you've only watched Game of Thrones up to series 2, episode 3. You're about to start watching it again but can't remember what Daenerys was getting up to.

You go to the Game of Thrones page on that website, pick your series and episode, and choose "Daenerys" as a tag filter. It brings up all the major plot points relating to her up to S2E3.

This does seem like a rather interesting idea.

However, how might one implement this while remaining concise? For example, say a user tells the Wiki they are in S1E02; the Wiki would provide a synopsis of the events relating to the specified tag up till that point in the series. However, imagine a user tells the Wiki that they want the same specified tag up until S3E10. That surely complicates things as far more major plot points are likely to have occurred. How would this be handled? Would it just be what the user at S1E02 was told plus everything after and up until S3E10 tacked on to the end?

To further illustrate this idea, consider the following: User receives two (2) plot points when selecting S1E02 User receives seven (7) plot points when selecting S2E07 User receives (13) plot points when selecting S3E01 ...

It would be interesting if the synopsis provided could summarize dynamically based on what point the user was caught up to in the given series. I've no clue how that would be implemented, though, short of someone going in and writing a response that would keep it concise for every episode that a user could select.

(This isn't my most concise comment on the internet. I'm sorry.)

A search engine for knowledge and facts.

I think there's huge value in a search engine of knowledge and facts, where all sources are verified. A search engine that is objective and contains no opinions, crappy blogs or tweets, content farms. A search engine where you can't game your rankings through SEO techniques or through higher add spend.

Google is amazing. Google Search is going to be here for a long time. I doubt anyone will be able to come up with a solid replacement. But one of the current problems with Google is that they have too much information.

So far, i've put together a tiny version of this concept, which i've found very useful when i'm trying to learn new things or do some research. I would love to see some smarter people turn it into something more.

I've previously said that I'd like to see a fork of Wikipedia.

The new version would remove the toxic meta community. It would focus on narrow and defined topics ("science", "art over 50 years old") and would have rigorous fact checking and sourcing. It would aim for truth and accuracy, not whatever the hell WP currently does.

It would also have much better introductory paragraphs for every article.

It's been done. Wolfram Alpha[1] specifically.

Also look up "linked data" (I'm not sure if DDG uses linked data or not[2]).

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+many+people+speak+B... [2] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=linked+data

edit: so "Hacker News" doesn't allow even basic HTML? Meh meh meh.

This new site called Meterfy came out on Friday (I think) that is trying to be "Wikipedia for numbers." It currently only allows submissions of individual numbers as facts, but if something like this could handle datasets it could replace entry level analysts. For example, thousands of people (and algorithms) pour over earnings reports to find out different information about companies. Much of this work could be done by fewer people, freeing up the productive efforts of the others...

You could focus first as a search engine for everything baby or medical related. As a new dad I can't even count how many times I've searched for something like "what temperature should I bring my baby to the er" and find pages of mommy blogs and user comments. In instances like those I need accurate instant answers, not page after page of "my son had a 103 fever for 6 days and we didn't bring him to the doctor and he seems fine".

Reminds me of OpenCyc [1]. I'll need to have a closer look at it someday.

[1]: http://www.cyc.com/platform/opencyc

This would require a full blown company, and a big one at that, to get it right. Not really a hackable idea that a reader could do in a few months of spare time.

Search on Wikipedia? Or what sort of facts&knowledge?

What about Freebase? http://www.freebase.com/

I like live shows. I would like a website that lists all the live shows in my area. Like "show me all shows at Shoreline". I haven't found a single site that tells me this.

I actually launched a webapp for this just a couple of weeks back: Netbiljett at http://netbiljett.se . The user can create searches that Netbiljett keeps an eye out for, and sends them an email the moment an event shows up. (I also show all currently available events matching the search term, but the heart of Netbiljett is helping people not missing out on what they are interested in.)

To get what you asked for, try searching for "live konsert stockholm", which translates to "live concert stockholm". If you add "fredag" (Friday) you'll only get events occuring on a Friday.

I should mention Netbiljett is only meant for the Swedish market, so I never posted about it on HN. Was that a bad move? (Also, "Netbiljett" translates to a rhyming "Onlineticket" in Swedish.)

I'd love feedback.

I spend a significant amount of time looking up live shows, but what about the Ticketmaster website for Shoreline doesn't do this? As far as I know, everything at Shoreline has to go through Ticketmaster/Live Nation. If the venue doesn't have their own calendar, most of the time Ticketmaster/Live Nation does. My personal solution is just to go through all the venues individually that I'm interested in. In the bay area that's about 15 spots for me.

Are you looking for a "show me all shows in San Francisco"? I haven't found a good solution to that either, and things like Eventful, Pollstar aren't the greatest as they simply show too much.

http://www.ticketmaster.com/Shoreline-Amphitheatre-tickets-M...

I've recently started something like this, but so far it's in German only, and only recognizes zip codes from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (it does a proximity search, not strict search by city).

The main problem is getting the data. I thought that ticket affiliate programs would give me the data in machine readable form, but so far no luck (one of them does, but it's far too expensive).

In case you're still interested, it's http://konzertgeek.de/ (source at https://github.com/moritz/soonish-p5 ).

If anybody has ideas where to get the data from, please tell me!

I built this many years ago (http://techcrunch.com/hearwhere), and shut it down a few years later. As others have mentioned, BandsInTown and SongKick are both in this space, along with MANY others. Before I let the domain expire, I'd get e-mails every month or two either from people wanting me to bring back the service, or from people who were building a new one and wanted advice. I haven't figured out why people aren't satisfied with what's out there.

So I'm not working on this but I'm working on software that might be the base for this? An Open Source collaborative wiki calendar http://ican.openacalendar.org/

As others have said, data is the main problem. Sometimes it might be best to focus on a small area or niche. There are lots of sites like this but the ones that succeed generally seem to cover one area or niche (or both)?

I wrote something for that (and more events than just shows) years ago. didnt have the time to populate it myself while it was in its infancy though so it never took off. looking back, I probably should have focused on a small number of event genres (maybe just nightlife) instead of trying to list everything that was going on in the county.

These sites tend to be labors of love: http://showlistdc.com/

Have you checked out bandsintown.com ?

I'm working on this. Seattle has launched, more cities on the way. discovershowgo.com

Songkick?

seatgeek sends out a weekly email

I think 'Ask HN: Idea Sunday' is a great idea, I am definitely looking for a project to work on and this is very helpful. Look forward to seeing this continue.

examine.com meets google scholar

Place for all scientific studies to be elucidated with plain english explanations, analysis, information on shortcomings, links to related studies, open questions, links to further information. Would be community created content, but needs some sort of community voting/moderation system to surface the best content and empower the most knowledgable/trusted contributors.

Ideally this would be where you go when you see sensationalist headlines in popular science magazines -- here you can find out what the study actually means.

Anything like this out there?

I'm trying with http://www.sciencegist.com

The difficult part is getting contributions and building anything sustainable around this idea. You can reach me at info@sciencegist.com if you want to chat.

There's also http://usefulscience.org/ and http://sciworthy.com/ but I think they both have staff to write content.

Im having trouble organising the information I consume. I have tried using a mix of Google Bookmarks, Youtube's watch later, GDocs, Evernote, Pocket, Dropbox (for pdfs/books) and tldr.io.

There has to be something that encompasses the full 'learning process': find content, read/watch/listen it, summarise its most important points, list actionables, revisit it in the future...

This maybe too personal to standardise, but even a 'convention over configuration' approach would keep people like me from feeling stuck.

This sounds like the problem I had, which I'm trying to solve with https://nachapp.com - instead of my attention being split between several apps which focus on specific TYPES of content (i.e. everything you listed), it focuses on a specific WORKFLOW - acting as a central high-level hub, based on the core concept of achieving personal goals (which I think would be the same thing you mean with "learning process").

It isn't trying to completely replicate the storage of everything you have in the apps you listed. Instead, it's trying to focus your attention to what your real goals in life are, so you hopefully end up with quite a minimalist approach, where you're discarding a lot of info that's essentially a distraction, and really able to focus on only saving the stuff which is relevant to your goals, and keeping a hierarchical list of actionables as your method of recall for the content, instead of it being scattered randomly across a dozen apps.

If this sounds like an attractive solution to you, would be great to talk about this a bit more (you can reach me through the site's contact form), because I want to work out ways to make the app smarter for covering that exact workflow you're talking about (discovery -> actionables).

Note that the app may look pretty "simple" from the landing page, but it is also very much aimed at power-users (I personally have a couple of hundred active steps+goals).

A way to get notified of new book reviews for my book across Amazon, Audile, iTunes, and GoodReads. Even better if it could also track sales from Amazon, CreateSpace, and Audible in one place.

An ESP (email service provider) geared towards people publishing content instead of marketers. Marketers are certainly the bigger & better market, but they have hundreds of options to choose from. Almost no one targets publishers.

(ping me if interested... I know more than anyone should about email)

Create an RFID and/or NFC (Near Field Communication) READER that can mount on a DSLR and dump read data into an IPTC field.

An automated "backup" service for your website that crawls around and builds a static copy of all the pages it can see. If the site goes does (or if you push a maintenance mode button) it switches to the static site, maybe with a small warning message. You'd probably need to run the DNS or integrate with DNS services to make that easy to implement. The key is it needs to be stupidly easy to set up.

(ping me if you actually start working on this)

A mobile app that combines flight info with airport food listings and reviews. Let's you put in your flight numbers for a connection and will make recommendations based on the time if your layover, gates you are flying into and out of, etc.

Just for developers: Something that allowed you to change the IP your request resolves to with a modified URL instead of editing the hosts file, like this: 127.0.0.1::http://mysite.com/

Benefits: Not as much work, not as permanent, you can use multiple at once, you can easily see where you are connecting.

I think this is something web developers would pay a few bucks for. I know I would.

Waiforpaperback.com Informs you when alternatives printings are available could monetize by showing similar titles in monthly summary emails

Anyone been to an airport lately? All open outlets are swarmed upon by people charging and keeping watch on their phones to make sure they don't get stolen.

How about mini lockers with miniusb and apple chargers in each locker. People swipe a credit card and can rent a mini locker to charge their phone is.

I realize how low tech this is but it's less so than people babysitting charging phones.

Office package for Internet and open source era. MS Office concept was good in 1990. Google Docs just replaced local drive with cloud drive.

Tools for developers are really good. IDEs and DVCS are pleasure to work with. But try to work on a spec, RfP, Offer, etc. with Word and Outlook. Online wikis are quite good but it is not possible to send them via email to a third party.

My idea for a text editor: * storage: wiki text files + embedded git repo * save all to a single file, but with possibility to access and edit the contents via web server / web app * possibility to squash all edits and send a clean copy (branch) as an attachment * possibility to incorporate changes sent back, thanks to DVCS * two edit modes: WYSIWYG and markdown style for experts * two client modes: standalone with thick client (based on Webkit) and html5 client * possibility to access and modify the contents via APIs (Java, Ruby, ...) * optimized for screens, not for A4 / US letter pages

You get the idea. Corporations would love something like this.

A data driven and personalized alternative to credit scores.

Credit scores lack transparency, usability, and are often inaccurate representation's of a person's financial health/responsibility. Especially regarding student loans, credit scores are useless...all a 20 year old's credit score tells you is how much his parents planned his financial life for him

A voting system based on the Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System behind Bitcoin. The major reasons votes couldn't be conducted electronically is because of trust issues and today we have a technology that solves that. I think this could potentially disrupt voting if properly executed.

Turn a crowd & their devices into a huge stereo system!

Spotify released iOS SDK. Can someone make an app that will just have one button? Just play the goddamn music. I think Spotify works on the wrong level of abstraction. It should work exactly like a radio. Many people just want to listen some good music for running, relaxing etc. They couldn't care less about following artists and making playlists.

Also, I'd like to be able to play it while I'm on a train. Pre-fech 30min of music to play when I'm underground and I have no internet connection.

If there is a hacker (London-based ideally) that want to work on that idea give me a shout on lukasz.madon at gmail.

https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/spotify-ios-sdk/

An idea originally by sdrothrock which I've been thinking about for the past few days: An app which can be trained to recognize certain sounds. You record a few examples of that sound and then it listens and gives an alert when it hears it.

Another idea, allow deaf people to "visualize" sounds. Just displaying the raw sound wave is too redundant and difficult to interpret. But what if you could display a higher level representation, perhaps obtained by unsupervised learning.

Even cooler if you can attach rough labels to the sound like is done by some object recognition systems (example: http://i.imgur.com/anp7RY9.png).

The second idea is probably unrealistic but the first is possible.

Something like a Yubikey but:

1) with a battery or supercapacitor or something, so it can have a proper real time clock

2) with a much much better website. Yubikey needs to split the site into Enterprise users, individual users, and developers. The documentation for enterprise and individuals needs ro be much shorter and easier to understand. The documentation for developers should be as good as possible, including permissively licensed sample code in sensible languages.

I really hate the current password set up.

I want to carry my token with me and use that, and a passphrase, to unlock everything. Log into my computer, decrypt the drive, open email, perform root level actions, etc etc. i want it to work on my windows, linux, and max OSs. Across browsers. Etc.

Considering this is Idea Sunday, would anybody be interested in validating my idea?

It was originally posted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7519592

The idea is simple:

+++Create an invite-only jobs mailing list similar to HN-standards+++

Companies want the best and talented workers wants to find the most rewarding work, so why not keep the 2 well-maintained with the best firms and the best workers?

If you're interested, read my thread above or simply go here and help me validate the idea:

https://www.surveymoz.com/s/109791NPJFT

All feedback welcome and I will reply to anyone that has any feedback (good or bad) on the idea.

A peer-to-peer broadband solution to replace ISP dependence. Perhaps this could be used on a small scale at first for hacker communities and then grow from there. Challenges would be on interconnecting between p2p community centers without relying on major ISPs. A hyrid approach might be needed at first to establish connectivity.

Previous efforts:

Netsukuku - http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-i...

P2P Foundation Blog - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/

Fair warning, I'm kind of a sarcastic person, and most of my ideas tend to reflect that...

If you actually want to work on one of these, go for it! Just please let me know as I'd like to hear about it (and if you'd like, maybe help out where I can). Contact details in my profile page.

My three latest ideas with variations:

#1: Kitty cooker social game (please don't actually build this): Basically Cow Clicker meets prisoner's dilemma. Everyone gets a cute little kitten. In order to earn in-game currency (find a synonym for "cat poop" for a currency name, please), you must cook your friends' kittens. Your friends cannot cook your kitten if you have cooked theirs first. If all of your friends decide to abstain from kitten cooking for the day - you either all get gold, or all of your kitties get cooked anyway. In game currency can be used to buy cat clothes, cooking paraphernalia, recipes, etc. Recipes are a tradable item, effect earnings, might cost resources to use, and have a "cool down" period. Variant: Puppy kicker.

#2: A toolbox of satirical marriage help apps. I really don't have a lot of tool candidates, but they're easy to think up. For instance, "argument score keeper."

#3: Rent-a-sheep (name taken, needs something else): Presale of wool from individual New Zealand sheep. I live in New Zealand. There are lots of sheep here. Imagine a site where the landing page is a paddock of little fluffy sheep trotting around (SouthPark style animation, maybe?). When you click on a sheep, up pops a bio showing a photo of an actual sheep, from an actual farm in New Zealand. For a fee, you can "rent" this sheep, thereby receiving its wool production from that year. In the mean time, you'll get little auto-generated notifications about your sheep, perhaps including photos. You should also be able to choose how the wool is processed. That is, scouring, dying, spinning. All to be done in small batches.

Much easier variant: Small-batch customized supply chain for New Zealand yarn sold to yarn stores in the USA (aka create your store's own brand of yarn). Interface looks a bit like a slot machine - choose type of wool, then choose scourer/washer, then choose either/both dying service and spinning service.

Both variants should be very "connection" focused. That is, if you're renting a sheep, the site should do everything in its power to make you feel a connection with that sheep. If you're a yarn store owner, you should know a bit about the people who are performing each of the services, and you should hopefully have a window into how they're processing your yarn.

Put a drain at the top of toilets to prevent overflows (like sinks already have)

"FootTraffic.com", a social network/foot traffic planning site.

The idea is that brick-and-mortar stores/restaurants/hairstylists/etc that are located close to one another can communicate and coordinate days of the year (or month) when everyone in the area who is participating offers some sort of discount or sample.

It incentivizes consumers to make a day out of going to an area of town that might not otherwise get a ton of business.

Could lead to an interesting community of people travel around the world exploring and going to FootTraffic days.

Tracked changes for gmail. So instead of replying to an email in text and then changing the color/font/size of words, tracked changes will do it for you similar to how it does in Word.

A device that would let people sleep in public while letting other people around them think they're awake (business meetings, boring lectures, etc.)

This could either be glasses with realistic eyes painted on them, or opaque contact lenses (that would then require the bearer to be able to sleep with their eyes opened -- but if no light enters the eye it should be quite possible).

There are many situations when you can't really leave the room to take a nap and yet you feel as though you'll die if you resist sleep a minute more.

An easy way for mole mapping at home and having an personal electronic journal about it. It should be possible to share a link with your dermatologist containing your mole mapping.

Crowdbetting/Crowdtrading (etc)

A sports betting website that uses crowdsourcing to make the best bets. As a user, you predict the outcome of some match, but your final bet isn't necessarily what you chose, but what the crowd data indicates is the best bet.

Much like the CIA found crowdsourcing to be very effective in forecasting global events (http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-...), I think there's a good chance you could successfully crowdsource things such as betting on sport results.

The way the CIA thing works, I assume (the article doesn't get into much detail), is you have 3,000 people, you ask them to make some predictions, and in the end you select the top 1%. When you compare the future predictions of these top forecasters with those of CIA analysts, you find that the average Joes tend to be more correct (even though they have less information than the CIA analysts).

So you can do something similar with sports betting. You have a group of top forecasters and their predictions for some game assume some probability distribution (like, 30% bet on the home side, and so on). By comparing this distribution with the average odds set by the major brokers, you can identify where the odds have been set incorrectly (according to your crowd) and exploit these weaknesses. For example, let's say that your crowd says that the odds of the Away team winning should be 2:1, but the brokers set the odds at 4:1. Then, this would be a good bet to place, assuming the crowd is 'more right' than the brokers.

I use Spotify for listening to music, it pushes data through to Last.fm, but I suck at actually checking Last.fm for its (very good) new music recommendations.

So take one of those recommendations from the Last.fm API and email it to me each week. Add affiliate links (iTunes, Amazon, etc.) and take a little cut each time I buy something I discover through this.

Better yet, if Last.fm just implemented this themselves I'd be so happy.

API documentation tool: If you have a REST(ish) API, the tool would allow you to:

* Describe the authentication

* Enter all the objects, methods, URL endpoints, and parameters of your API

The tool would then:

* Generate pretty documentation, including example requests/responses

* Include a working web-based API console (like Mashery has)

* Auto-generates client libraries in Ruby, Python, PHP, Node, Obj-C, etc. and keep them updated in GitHub

Bonus points for bootstrapping the API information from your Rails routes file.

A really good iTunes/MP3 de-duper. Should have the following all in one package: - Talks to the iTunes library file (IE - doesn't just edit the filesystem) - Undo/non-destructive final delete. - Smart/fast search that reflects how iTunes handles duplicates. Should smartly leverage the following: - Filename compare: filename/filename-1/filename-2 - Files with identical sizes, then binary compare - Metadata compare (title, album, time) - Allow auditioning of tracks - Smart delete options - Select all lower bitrate duplicates, select all filename-1, select all duplicates from path X. - Preserve/combine metadata from duplicates (IE - combine play counts, ratings, copy tag if tag in target is missing, etc). - Clean out missing items from iTunes library. - Vast amounts of idiot-proofing (list files/entries to be changed, confirmation dialogs for any modifications, etc.)

I've yet to find an iTunes manager that has all of the above - Most fail at the smart de-dupe search so when I get pages of results, I still have to audit each entry.

GetMeHome - A non-driving-centric nav system for the 2am crowd to safely get home from a night out. Requirements:

- UI geared for too-drunk-to-read - Big buttons, no text entry, large-type text, low clutter images.

- One button actions/options - "Go home", "Find open bathroom", "Find hotel", "Prefer Train" "Cab OK"

- EASY turn-by turn navigation for walking (large font street names with "turn left in 2 blocks"). Always update auto-routing. Bonus points for avoiding sketchy areas or using obvious landmarks ("Turn left at Bob's Transmission Shop").

- Location/time alerts for mass transit "Get off here" or "Wait here for 1:30am Blue Line Train to Hillsboro"

- Alarms for "Time to leave the club for next train" - Loud/big alarm for "Leave now for last train!"

- Since most phones seem to die around 2am, steps should be taken to be as battery conservative as possible - Walking = less frequent server polling. Also cache simple directions locally and turn off network features altogether if battery life is super low.

(edited for readability)

I would like to see something like PhotoSynth applied to video. PhotoSynth is a program that infers three dimensional objects from two dimensional photographs.

In particular I'd like to see this applied to public events, like sports. I'd love to re-create, say, a music show or a live football game in 3D based on livestream video coming from people's phones.

Heroku add-on for hosted Varnish (the freakin' awesome reverse caching proxy). You'd be able to speed up people's sites and potentially even save them money by allowing them to run with fewer dynos. Ideally you'd be able to tweak the config and view stats/graphs through a web interface.

(ping me if you actually start working on this)

A cheap hardwire device that I can take to the gym and not worry about breaking it. There are lot's of great workout tracking apps but I won't risk having my expensive smart phone smashed in order to record my workouts. I see more people using pen and paper even with all the amazing apps out there.

I'd like a way to skim through videos. Playing at 2x or 4x doesn't really do the trick.

For contrast, if I'm skimming through an article, I can quickly scan for keywords, look for paragraph breaks & sentence breaks to get the gist of what a particular section of the text is describing.

How can I skim a video the same way? I'm more interested in a solution for a 30 or 60 minute recorded lecture or conference keynote than something that let's me skim a music video or blockbuster movie. So the solution here may be more suited to one form of video than another.

https://skimo.tv/ seems to be trying to hit the mark, but from what I've seen, they've got a long way to go. And I'm not 100% sure that pulling a few short video segments out of a long video is the solution.

A package/dependency manager for C/C++. In my limited experience working with C/C++ projects, the most painful part was always getting the project to actually build (downloading all dependencies, figuring out how the Makefile works, etc.). In other words, a npm/brew for C/C++.

There is an easy platform for this.

http://ideas.ozonebit.com/

Check it out!

A single interface/application that can be used to do anything. An actual implementation of http://zombo.com.

I don't want an account on 1000 different sites, nor do I want 100 apps on my smartphone.

It can be done. Just not through incremental changes.

A more accessible desktop client program for "Bitcoin IPOs". Useful for crowdfunding. Kind of like this but less messy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133147.0

I had an idea for a "plug and play" tor relay. This would be suitable for computer literate folks who are committed to privacy and such, but not necessarily up to installing linux and tor. Trick would likely be keeping this to around $50 or less. Thoughts?

Uber for delivery via drones. Kind of reaching, and I know it's not practical yet, but the general concept is cool. I wouldn't be surprised if Uber did it themselves first since they have a knack for trying weird delivery stuff like ice cream or flowers or whatever.

You would open your Uberish app, punch in the weight of what you need delivered and where to deliver it to, it would give you an estimate, and come to your house to pick it up and make the delivery. Really not that far off, I believe the FAA has or is relaxing the rules on commercial drone flight below 400ft and the Parrot drones are capable of following waypoints on their own to a destination, and coming right back home when they're done.

A matchmaking service for business owners to digital marketing and/or web development companies.

A business owner is not going to know everything that the digital company is explaining to them or selling to them, and since there's no large digital companies that are the gold standard, but just a very fractured industry, it's hard for them to really know what they're getting.

The matchmaking company would advocate for the business owner. The matchmaking company would really understand the web development and digital marketing landscape, but they are not selling the services themselves. They would ask the potential agencies the really hard questions that the business owners wouldn't know to ask on their own.

Netflix for Sports. But not quite the same. There wouldn't be just 1 subscription were you get all. You would be able to pay per game and as well a pass for all games of a certain team. You would be able to watch any games live or any other time of your convenience. It would be cool also to have just 'a show main highlights of the game'.

Prices per game should be relatively cheap, like 1.99 or 2.99; except some cases like championship finals.

I would try first to secure the rights to show some of the European soccer leagues and championships as they should be easier to get than any of the main American leagues. Hopefully none of the US networks have an exclusivity agreement.

Manual route planning for walkers/runners/cyclers.

My idea was that there are lots of fitness style apps that track where you've gone, how fast and so on, but I haven't seen anything that lets you plan your route out beforehand, see how long it'll be and then estimate how long it will take. I was thinking drawing a simple overlay on a map interface. I recently got back into walking/running and wanted to slowly ramp up what I did, but wanted a route I could get all the way through (not run until I can't, then have to still get back) so wanted to plan ahead, and also allow for cuts through parks, bush trails and so on.

Something to keep in mind whilst sharing your idea:

Your idea may be great and may appeal to a science/tech community on HN, but be wary of building something where the audience is very small (if you plan on commercializing it).

Although quite a few of the ideas have some "mass appeal", some of them also seem so narrow that you'd be better off building them as OSS projects and releasing them into the wild (as they'd never achieve huge commercial success).

Just for the sake of guidance, plan on what you will do with any ideas you follow through with (go commercial or open-source it).

One more pain point I'd like to solve. Something that can process my pictures, and tell me what wildflower(s) are in them. Sitting down with a guidebook is tedious, and sometimes it's hard to tell which version from a book or site is closer to the picture you have because of the angle. So I end up adding meta data that it's a picture with blue flowers. Not to mention that there are some longer term ecological studies that could be done if I can see how often flowers or plants turned up in a certain area 10 years ago compared to now...

- Movie Quote Search - Search for a movie quote and it brings up the part of the movie where the quote starts. User can then adjust the length of the clip they wish to share. No longer than 30 seconds.

- Mobile App - Timed Deals for local businesses. Company registers their deal and how many they wish to offer. A potential customer who follows certain types of products may get the promotion, The catch is, Promotion only last 30 seconds(max) and you have to buy it right then.

Anyone wants to help me with any of these I'd love the help.

I don't know if this already exists or not, but I'd like an app for iOs/droid that shows all of my installed apps and what permissions they need -- in a comparison/grid format. It's easy to agree to all kinds of stupid permissions when you're first looking at an app, but later on, having dogFood 3.0 phone home all the time when it's never used is not-so-good. I'd like to go back periodically and look at all of my apps, at one time, from a permissions standpoint.

* Hearing aids that can run off body heat. Not even sure if this is possible, but I've heard of watches that can recharge their batteries from body heat. You know how expensive and annoying it is to buy batteries for a hearing aid?

* A better credit report system than Experian/TransUnion/etc. The current system is flawed on a number of levels -- not the least being that someone can file a claim against you and you have very little recourse. Something with a little more accountability and a little less emphasis on distant history. For instance, if two years ago I lost my job and fell behind on bills, but now I've had a steady job for a year and have been paying down my debt, that shouldn't rule me out for buying a car or a house. In other words, just because I might have been financially unstable in the past does not mean I'm financially unstable now.

* a HUD for subtitles/closed captioning on TVs, so hearing people don't have to see subtitles while deaf/hard of hearing people can see them. This would be especially awesome in movie theaters.

* A Fitbit clone that actually figures out what I'm doing, rather than just counting steps. (For example, it knows my height/weight/gender, and it knows that I took X steps in Y minutes, so it should be able to calculate Z pace and conclude that I'm running.)

* Something that makes tracking caloric consumption EASY. For instance, I'm at a friend's house and we have some mac 'n cheese. I open up my LoseIt app, and I see several options: Kraft Mac 'n Cheese, Velveeta Mac 'n Cheese, KFC Mac 'n Cheese. Well, you know, we made this mac 'n cheese from scratch. Which one of these is the most analogous to what I just ate? At this point, I'm just guessing, right? So make an app that makes those guesses for me. "What'd you eat today, Jemaclus? On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being super healthy, how healthy do you consider what you just ate?" Then check out all the values for macaroni and cheese, identify the options that most closely match the health scale I gave, run some calculations, and come back with an estimate on what I ate. If at the end of the day you say "You ate somewhere between 1900 and 2150 calories today," that's better than saying "You ate exactly 1937 calories today," when honestly, I was just guessing about those portions to begin with.

Use ultrasound to measure shoe size and also see how we'll shoes fit. Sell to shoe stores.

(I heard they used to do this with X-rays before people knew better. )

A screencast app (or browser extension) specifically to create those short gifs showing product interactions that have been showing up recently.

A sentiment search engine. Suppose you type the name of a restaurant or a camera or a protein supplement - you get condensed view of "sentiments" with scores in different categories. Data is scraped from individual reviews, shopping sites etc. Additionally you get information about the original source of information so you can carry further research if you want to.

Back when we were in an accelerator, I was blown away by how many tools were being used by the other startups ( over 300 teams ) that i've never heard of.

So i came up with http://Vettted.com as a way to harness that data..and ideally create conversations about how each team used each tool specifically.( that part still needs work )

Any takers?

Smartphone Email Client with Chat UX

For Mac, http://www.uniboxapp.com/ comes close, but basically an a app for my phone for Email, grouped by sender, sorted by last message received per sender.

Most personal email nowadays are one-liners, so this UX would work well for them.

Expanding, senders could be organized into groups, etc.

I wish there was an easier way to peal oranges

A "Movies I've been meaning to watch" queue. Sort of like Netflix's queue, but not limited to a particular provider's catalog. For each movie, show the cheapest (legal) way to stream/rent/buy it. Add price drop alerts. Monetize through commissions and/or ads.

A website that lets you watch the second episode of many television shows. The pilot episode, I feel, is usually not indicative of the direction/feeling of the show, or is concerned with setting up the backstory, whereas the second episode sets the direction for where the show is going.

A notepad that can send my handwritten notes to the cloud. It should have a mini-scaner embedded into the top cover so when I want to backup a note, I just close the notepad, push the cover, remove the first page, close, push again.

None of these ipad apps can substitute the good old pencil drawings

A service that facilitates company matching of employee donations to non-political charities. Ideally, the service should make it as effortless as possible for all participants: employee, company, charity. This could be generalized into a kind of philanthropic social network.

There was a discussion on an earlier thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489401) about bringing App Stores to servers. Would people use and/or pay for something like this?

odesk for physical low/no skill physical labor. Some things just require muscle: moving, yardwork, lifting large furniture, etc. Would be nice to be able to see who's near you and hirable on an hourly basis. Bonus points for verified background checks, etc.

Homework Tutor App - App that allows kids to take a picture of a homework problem and submit a question about it. Then the picture and question get submitted over to MTurk. 3-5 answers come back within minutes from folks on MTurk.

Do this for me and I will subscribe.

I will send a box full of my letters in month to you, you scan them and make them searchable online for me and send the box back with a label.

Later when I need something, I can search online and know which box it is in.

A social network where the users get paid for the advertising they do.

A video game that looks like this: http://www.jonasginter.de/360-grad-video-mit-6-gopro-kameras...

A demo mode for browsers.

Incognito / private mode kind of solves this, but form autocompletes, and browser history when I enter a URL doesn't always contain stuff I want to show in front of my clients.

TaskRabbit for businesses

a simple, motion-sensitive sleep alarm. i just tried to find one, but they all require a phone or tablet. they're nothing simple and stand-alone with a very basic interface.

I will slowly update this over time:

https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas

Search function for browser tabs. So hard to find pandora in the haystack, and I need a short cut to search through all the interesting things.

stop-the-data-orgy.com: A service that makes it easy (2 clicks) to migrate my email storage from gmail/googleapps to to s3/dropbox.

Two for today:

-a site to upload Evernote notebooks to share/view online.

-a service that saves all your snapchat stories on the cloud

An app that shows me where my friends and family are.

(Like Google Latitude used to do)

A Dribbble for video creators/animators.

a service for creating simple wedding invitation pages with a unique URL. no ads or sponsored links

I'm in!

Open University.

A massive repository of all books needed for any career.

No teachers, no videos, no homework, nothing, just the books, free, forever.

All shaving machines are crap. I also need to stop biting my nails.

awesome idea!

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