Please Evaluate My Startup Idea | Hacker News Reader

Please Evaluate My Startup Idea

2 pointsgreekguyinnyc9 comments

I was working with a poorly written code yesterday and had an idea for a startup. What if there was a online tool that you could submit a poorly written and indented code such as "while(1){ if (1){do(x);}}" and it would give you back a nice and correctly indented code like

while(1) { if(1) { do(x); } }

I was working at financial services company(Goldman Sachs) a while ago and they had a helper "software" that did this. Any software that was checked in had to run this helper tool which made all code at GS feature the same look-and-feel which was really really great. I even remember the indenting was always 4 spaces.

What do you think about this kind of online tool? I don't have time to do it myself, so if anyone wants to do it, please go ahead :). You also make money by, say, charging for a code that's 2000 lines or longer. Maybe Paul Graham would even give you money for that :).

Please let me know what you think.

IMHO you need to distinguish between a start-up and an idea for a website:

(01) A start-up is a business venture. It takes as input money, sweat and tears and can give you an output from a big loss to a few million dollars or more.

(02) Your idea is actually for an on-line tool. There are actually many tools that can do this for you, google for example javascript beautifier or your language + formatter. Most professional programmers will also be working in IDE that automatically does that. I cannot actually imagine any programmer paying for this!

By the way guaranteed, you will make zero money from Python developers!

It seems I wasn't able to make the code look like indented (Hacker News software automatically changed it). In the indented code while(1) should be on first line, "{" on the second line, "if(1)" on the third line, etc.. I'm sorry for that.

indent with two spaces for HN (works for submissions too). e.g.

  while(1) {
    if(1) {
      do(x);
    }
  }

Is there a guide to styling things on HN somewhere? I still haven't figured out how to do italics, and frankly feel kind of retarded everytime I can't do it.

<i>doh!</i>

Check out the fifth question in the FAQ linked at the bottom of the page.

Man! I even checked that and must have skipped right over it somehow. Thanks.

like astyle? http://astyle.sourceforge.net

why would anyone pay for what they can do with, say, indent utility or emacs for free?

StackOverflow does this for free.

If you post a code sample and don't properly indent it, someone with high rep will correct it in within minutes. Such nice people.

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