Ideas I would like to build / see built | Hacker News Reader

Ideas I would like to build / see built

arandomurl.com

36 pointsdaleharvey35 comments

> Canvas/WebGL/JavaScript Game

I made a bunch of small JS games/puzzles using Processing.js (which uses Canvas/VML). The exact rules are slightly cryptic by design. I definitely loved making them and intend to make a bunch more this year:

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?nored

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?gold

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?piggy

http://chir.ag/projects/prc/?vanish

I hope you enjoy them.

those are brilliant, exactly what I was talking about, thanks for sharing

On a related note, there's a new sub-reddit called SomebodyMakeThis. (a sub-reddit being a user created subsection of the link aggregator Reddit)

http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/

Not to hate, but these are vague ideas overall. Those are the kind that are a dime a dozen. ;)

They are pretty vague so far, I just wanted to jot down general ideas that I keep having and forgetting over time, thought itd be handy if they were online for others to try as well. It will be updated and refined pretty regularly.

"... but these are vague ideas overall. Those are the kind that are a dime a dozen. ;) ..."

Vague & dime a dozen maybe, but don't discount them all without trying or thinking about some. For example: Having a "timed-task" function could be applied to solve a lot of time wasting in many areas.

I love the idea of a game which limits the time you can spend playing it. You might have something big with that one.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Google Talk. For a while I suffered through the tangled mess that was using jabber transports to connect to other protocols because it was so minimalistic and slick. I'd love to see Pidgin or Psi reimagine Google Talk's UI while keeping the extensibility of the backend.

Also, you might be interested in a free game by the name of Skyrates (http://www.skyrates.net). It's not really an MMO, but it was made for people with not much free-time in mind so it doesn't favor people sinking a lot of time into it.

Re: Calender Web Service. How about Tungle? http://www.tungle.com Allows other to schedule with you with no signups. It also works with many calendar apps.

My latest addiction isn't an MMO, but otherwise fits your description pretty well: http://np.ironhelmet.com/

For the first idea, have you checked out tinychat? http://tinychat.com/

tinychat seems to let you host your own chatroom, whereas I was looking for a chat client that can connect to irc / xmpp (and possibly msn / facebook), somewhat more like meebo

You could take http://cgiirc.org/ and point it at a http://bitlbee.org/ server.

WYSIWYG HTML Editor == Dreamweaver

To be fair it has been a long long time since I have used dreamweaver. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it wont have improved a whole lot (as the rest of the CS Suite havent either).

It used to generate terrible html, and in the case when you wrote your own html it munged it badly, its css and javascript editing were mediocre, I remember it not even handling css definitions properly.

even a live preview window in emacs would cover quite a lot of what I want, remember project to embed firefox into emacs a while ago, probably time to go search it out.

Seamonkey is a good wysiwyg editor. You can visit any page, save it, and do edit HTML. It's not excellent but is better than raw text editing for ux mockup ideas.

Or the old fashioned alternative: browser & editor side-by-side on your screen.

Browser rendering the same HTML file that is loaded in your editor.

Edit.

Save.

Hit refresh in browser.

Optionally: add a simple, development-class web server (like web.py).

Bingo, done.

I guess I feel like the "editor" and "render" parts of the problem are already solved. I'm not sure that we gain more than we lose by trying to smash them together into one gob. For debugging/tweaking an existing web app, sure (then use something like Firebug), but for general development from scratch there are a lot of benefits to using a real browser and real editor.

Most or all of these already exist in some form. E.g., Campfire, ikiwiki, etc.

calender => calendar

Attention to detail, buddy.

heh cheers, I had even ran it through after the deadline but still managed to miss it, fixed

I'd like to see also: a web browser, an OS, a "spreadsheet" (term I've coined, I'll explain in a follow-up post), also some sort of FPS, also some sort of markup format that's like HTML but not presentation-specific...also, I'd like a language like C but with classes. And, a pony. Thank you.

I'd like a language like C but with classes

C already has classes. They're called structs. And methods are called function pointers.

Disagree C has classes. No "class" and no inheritance or polymorphism. C++ and Objective-C have these things. But I understand what you're saying. There is the very well-known structs+functions technique which gives a partial stand-in for full OO.

My post was meant to be funny yet true. I read the OA and thought all of the ideas he listed already exist, and was surprised it made the front page on Hacker News. Then I thought to myself, "Oh, it must be because it's a joke, the OA was trying to be funny." Perhaps I was mistaken.

Disagree C has classes. No "class" and no inheritance or polymorphism

C has perfectly good inheritance:

    struct child {
        struct parent p;
        // new variables go here
    }
    struct child foo;
    struct parent * bar = &foo;  // perfectly valid C

Looks like composition and a struct alias, not inheritance to me.

Is my C that rusty?

For example, say that the "struct parent" type (which in your example has no members) had a member named z. In your example, I expect to be allowed to do something like this:

    (*bar).p.z

which is composition. But not:

    (*bar).z

which would be member inheritance. Because bar/foo/child all lack a z member. Only "parent" has a z member. Am I wrong?

It's valid C to cast a structure to the type of its first element. So in the example of

  struct child {
    struct parent {
      int z;
    } p;
  } foo;

you can access foo.p.z but not foo.z -- but you can access (struct parent *)(&foo)->z, so you can pass foo to anything which expects a struct parent.

I'll assume you're right. Thanks for pointing that out. Your C sounds fresher than mine. I used it heavily from 90-95 or so but later moved on to higher languages like Java and Python. If what you point out about the syntax is accurate, I find that to be a counter-intuitive design decision.

It works because C structs are just contiguous bits of memory, interpreted as various fields. A pointer to a struct points to the start of that contiguous bit of memory.

  Child Struct:
  +---------------+-----------------+
  | parent struct | child fields    |
  +---------------+-----------------+
  ^
  \--- pointers to the struct point at the start

You can cast this child struct to a parent struct, which is like saying 'interpret memory starting here as a 'parent' struct'.

This works: The memory from location to location+sizeof(parent) IS a parent struct. The child fields following the parent struct are simply ignored.

It works because C structs are just contiguous bits of memory, interpreted as various fields

Well... almost. C structs can have internal padding -- but the C standard doesn't allow padding before the first element, so that first element is guaranteed to begin at the beginning of the struct.

Thanks! You learn something every day :)

OOP != Class Inheritance

Ok, so what else is it? My understanding that the new Go language is not officially called object-oriented because it supports only interfaces and not inheritance or type hierarchy.

Go has true message passing, which is far more important to OOP than anything to do with data modeling, and Go's composition model for data is far more object-oriented than the usual Linnaean classicism. Pay attention to Alan Kay, not Stroustrup or Gosling.

If you really want to know what OOP is / was / can be, read Cardelli and Abadi's A Theory of Objects. The first half is available online, and covers the parts you'd care about: http://books.google.com/books?id=4xT3LgCPP5UC

heh looking back I should probably change the title, some of these I would like to see built because there isnt something available that satisfies me, others are just things I want to build because they would be fun.

What about a social network especially for people who haven't owned Apple (stock, hw and sw) and never will?

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