My list of ideas, if you're looking for inspiration | Hacker News Reader

My list of ideas, if you're looking for inspiration

jacquesmattheij.com

214 pointsjacquesm138 comments

I love this. Some of the ideas are, frankly, junk. But there are a few gems (and a few which I'm stealing and putting on my own todo list), but more importantly I love the openness of just sharing ideas instead of doing what I do and keeping them tight close to my chest.

And what I think is junk, someone else might see gold, or have just the right connections to create a decent product.

This is what being a hacker is all about - open sharing of ideas. And this blog post is just that, in its rawest form. Awesome.

Here's another page which I like for the same reason: http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

At least someone got it :)

The other day there was a thread about someone asking what their idea should be valued at, without any background on the idea or their own capacity to execute (or even their skills).

I really strongly believe that an idea has no value at all, simply a big fat '0'. And chances are that if you have a particular idea that 10 other guys have it too.

By throwing these out there (the good with the bad and the ugly) I'm hoping for two things: That people will not 'hoard' their ideas and feel free to discuss them and that you get an idea of how bad the ratio between 'good' and 'bad' is. Take in to account the 900 or so that didn't even make the cut of being listed here and you have an idea how bad most of the others are ;)

The worst possible idea is one that you hoard and spend a ton of time on when someone could shoot it down in 30 seconds by pointing out a fatal flaw, those ideas can actually develop a negative valuation because you'll keep sinking more time in to the zombie.

Usually a week or so after having an idea I go 'what on earth was I thinking that that would be a good idea', some last a little longer, even fewer actually get implemented and a small fraction of those develop traction. It's like a distillation column.

Thanks.

And please do share your own list(s) of ideas!

A quick review of my thoughts on some of the ideas which stood out to me:

ajaxbricks - nice, kinda like the way you program the lego NXT (labview). Anyone with enough patience and desire to learn this, might as well just learn JS and PHP though. Potential though.

ArticleBody - good. I'm stealing this one.

AutoTagger - ditto. Care to share your code?

Dead Mans Knob.... just sounds wrong. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=knob

Also I'm pretty sure it's been done, just can't find the site.

E404 - http://archive.org/

fwitter - http://tweetbeep.com/

HackerContests - Great, want to start it? My resume: http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/08/php-cv/

OptInSpam - Clever, you should be able to get some press coverage on that concept. Not sure if anyone would sign up, but it's innovative.

vm4rent - nice idea! legal?

wwspeech - chatroulette could have been this. Good idea, potentially huge.

edit:

ProofItWasThere - I had this idea too! Was thinking along the lines of 'verified screenshot', eg for people wanting to prove things about their server stats, ad revenue etc, or for when sites screw things up, etc.

re. autotagger code, yes, I might, mail me and I'll explain one of the potential hangups there

re. dead mans knob: that's a literal translation of a dutch word, not sure what the english translation is, it stems from a button that train drivers have to keep pressed or the train will coast to a stop (in case they have a heart attack).

nice you like hackercontests :) Yes, I'd like to see that one happening very much. HackerBacker too, but that one is much more involved.

re. proofitwasthere: I was expecting such a response for pretty much all of them :)

In American English it is referred to colloquially as a dead man's switch.

"dead mans lever" is probably what I would call it. :) Amusing transliteration though.. I'd keep it.

HackerBacker is probably fraught with legal problems, which absolutely sucks because it would be a great thing to do.

Registrate has promise though.. you could add the ability to upload photos of your stuff to it. Then work on ways to convince insurance companies to work with you. So subscribers could simply select their insurance company, enter a policy #, choose what they are claiming for and enter a claim etc.

I would participate in a hacker's contest !!! I love this kind of stuff, just like google code jam, but maybe I would be good at it ;)

ArticleBody - Instapaper and Readability do this, but definitely can be improved.

AutoTagger - OpenCalais does this, again opportunities for improvement of course.

Still a nice list of ideas.

Dead Man's Switch-type sites are around in some capacity but I can't remember URLs either.

Quite similar, one of the lame ones on my list (working title: LockBox) was a vault where you could record a few (electronic) things that friends/family might need after you passed (funeral wishes, how to distribute your things, basic passwords, where you hid jewellery, etc).

Someone could hit the site and enter two email addresses - the vault owner's, and their own. An email would be sent to the vault owner (identifying the person attempting to unlock the box) and if a link in said email was not clicked within 24-48 hours (or whatever it was set at), the vault key would be sent to the requesting person.

Target moody teens that obsess over what music might be played at their funeral, who gets their collection of whatever, what happens to their dog, etc.

I totally agree. The value of ideas is zero, but by making a list like this, you start to build your own internal filter for ideas. That filter, in my opinion, is actually quite valuable.

For reference, I've posted about 200 ideas over the past three years at http://astartupaday.com . And yes, the majority are crap, but there was one idea that got some traction and now I'm executing on it full-time as part of TechStars.

   I really strongly believe that an idea has no value at 
   all, simply a big fat '0'. And chances are that if you 
   have a particular idea that 10 other guys have it too.

And if 10 guys implement the same idea, everyone gets the benefits of competition, too, including additional innovations on the idea.

A few comments about your list:

AdFreeZone - There is (or was) money in this. Slashdot at one point allowed you to pay $5 to remove ads (still might for all I know). I think Kuro5hin.org did something similar. I don't know how this is still relevant with AdBlock though.

Or did you mean something more than a community in a website? Somehow I can't help but be reminded of the "walled city" in Tad William's "otherland" books.

AfMijn - There are a couple of auction sites that implement short bidding periods. Google just found me bidz.com for example. I think finding a way to verify users as serious in an affordable way is what would get in the way of somebody implementing this.

ArticleBody - There is a service doing something similar, but I can't remember what it's called. Actually, it might be a firefox extension I'm thinking about.

DeadMansKnob - In the UK knob is a slang term for penis. Saying dead mans knob out loud will cause a lot of laughs.

exes4all - I know I've come across something like this before. It turned into people telling each others secrets and trying to hurt their former partners.

FossBounty - Sites like Rentacoder have escrow services. I don't remember seeing this applied to FOSS code bounties & it would be interesting to see it happen.

hardhacks - See instructables.com and plenty of other niche electronics hobbyist sites etc.

NoSEO - I wonder what Gabriel Weinberg might think about this.

WeWatch - YC funded a startup that was doing this a few years ago. I don't know what happened to them.

By the way, thanks for sharing :)

> In the UK knob is a slang term for penis.

hehe. Oops...

I never knew that.

Actually in the context of calling someone a penis, you spell it "nob". But yes "deadmansknob" with a "k" would definitely raise an eyebrow even written - let alone spoken :)

>I don't remember seeing this applied to FOSS code bounties & it would be interesting to see it happen.

I've used Rentacoder to get some FOSS work done before but the problem was everything had to be arranged elsewhere because Rentacoder is just overrun with spammers and idiots "e.g. I want a clone of facebook and I'd pay as much as $50!".

> ArticleBody - There is a service doing something similar, but I can't remember what it's called. Actually, it might be a firefox extension I'm thinking about.

You're thinking of the Readability bookmarklet ( http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ ) most probably.

That was it, thank you

Here's an idea: Get a drummer to play a track. Stream that to other musicians, each of which adds their bit and streams it out to others, and finally to listeners who can hear a real-time concert played by distributed musicians. The upstream musician sadly has no feedback from the other musicians, but the variations on each track could be really fun.

turn it into a pyramid. A famous musician plays the first track. Then it goes multi-player. Dozens or hundreds of copies are made. On each copy, a user adds her own bit, and then it's passed on to another (at random? team-based? grouped by style or ability level?), and another. You end up with dozens of pieces of music on the same basic framework. Vote on which version is the best; the winners get to record it properly alongside the rockstar who made the first track.

Bonus: you now have many variations on the same musical theme, each of which can be decomposed into tracks for each instrument. Give them to a DJ, see what she can make out of it.

I had a similar idea: Musicians upload bits of music (could be a riff, drum track, solo, vocal, whatever) and collaborate on combining them, altering parts as necessary, etc. You can then mix the bits together into a final track, get feedback on your parts, and so on.

To make money you could sell the final track on iTunes or press CDs (t-shirts?) and the site will track which musician gets what, or else just charge $10/month for access.

Yes, I was definitely thinking many outputs from one single original drum track. The voting and winners are a great idea! Half the appreciation could be what different muso's do with the idea.

or, doing it live: chatroulette for jam sessions.

It would be live, just streamed one-way. The issue with something like chatroulette (2-way) is that you'd always be a bit out of sync, so it has to go from A->B->C->listeners, with B, C and listeners being 1 or more.

Every heard of Kutiman?

Wiki [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutiman]

Official [http://thru-you.com/#/videos/1/]

Yeah, I love that video. Absolute work of art.

This actually sounds really cool. It could be like git but for live sounds, e.g. someone "checks out" a song, forks it, adds their bit and republishes it.

FretWars.com by @zedshaw partly does what you say. Great resource, but mostly for guitarists.

One idea i've really been thinking about is traffic analysis over time.

Where I live, traffic is highly variable. If I leave 5 minutes later one morning, there might be no traffic at all, but if I left another 3 minutes after that, I would be stuck in heavy traffic. If there was some way we could track the rate of traffic over time (say, plot out the mph between 7am-8am) every morning, I bet after a month we could figure out the ideal times to leave for work.

Google maps already uses crowdsourcing for its traffic data, so maybe that's the way to go. I would need a large sample size though. I researched a few cities and Houston, TX has sensors that use the toll RFIDs to determine traffic conditions. There are tons of other applications for this data, too. Think of shipment or delivery companies (UPS...), among others.

Partner with somebody making the in-car direction/GPS boxes? They feed you the data on where there users are at each moment, you extrapolate route and time, and model traffic patterns.

[do those GPS boxes tell a central server where they are. can they? If it's "just" a privacy issue, the benefit of traffic monitoring would be enough to get people to sign away their location data]

Or just partner with a taxi or delivery firm: their dispatchers already do a fair amount of this monitoring manually, and they already track everything they can about what their drivers are doing. Plus B2B, so /much/ easier to charge serious fees.

From my few years of experience analysing London traffic data, it was clear that traffic follows an extremely predictable hourly pattern day after day, week after week, year after year. Except for specific holiday periods.

Look on the air quality section of the US EPA site - they might have some traffic data.

I've got FossBounty about 90% built (in Rails). Really, I could probably roll back to a version before I started integrating with RPX (which is now Janrain Engage) and launch it today.

Haven't touched the code in close to a year because I've been so busy. If anyone's seriously interested in taking my code and running with it, send me an email.

Mine focuses on getting lots of different people to put money on the same bounty (I explained it as "Uservoice with Money", ie. instead of Uservoice where you vote with points, people would vote with money.)

The idea was that usually an individual person isn't willing to pay enough to make it worth the dev's time, but a whole bunch of people might be willing to pay $20.

If anyone does this please post something on HN. I would like to use such a service right now for all the project ideas I want to see done but wont ever get around to.

Some wicked ideas here. I'm intrigued about (41) NonStarter. The starter in a cars engine is massive considering its relatively simplistic purpose. Did you elaborate on this one by any chance?

PS:

(43) NotFb

A place for facebook hold-outs or people that have left Facebook for whatever reason.

Diaspora.

I think I have non-starter worked out to the point where you could try it.

That's the reason why there is an 'open ecu' somewhere else in the list, most ECU's are sealed tighter than a gnats arse to avoid liability.

There has been some work on an open ECU though.

Another advantage of this would be retrofit start-stop trickery on existing cars while removing parts :)

Fuel saver as well as an emissions boost.

And I always thought it was a great name :)

I'm genuinely interested in hearing more about the non-starter. I've stripped hundreds of starters over the years and every time I thought, there must be an easier way of doing this!

I think you would seriously struggle with an open ECU. There are multiple reasons for this but the two main ones would be:

1) Manufacturers charge a ton for mechanics to use their software to acces their ECU and there is a recurring subscription charge for said software so you would be competing against a very monopolistic market.

2) Every car is drasticly different. A universal ECU would need to be a remarkable feat of engineering for it to be able to handle a honda civic as efficiently as it handles a Ford F150. Considering the amount of responsibility ECU's now hold in a vehicle, creating one which can handle parameters for all cars would be almost impossible and probably ridiculously expensive.

re (1), there are actually some movements against this, most notably in the EU where such monopolistic practices are actively targeted

re (2), yes, but there is less variation than you may think

yes, but there is less variation than you may think

Is there though? Valve timing, fuel injection, emission control, idle. All of these factors are vastly different from vehicle to vehicle and the majority are variable dependant on how other elements of the engine are performing.

Those are all variables though.

A well written piece of software would have those as presets that you could choose from a long long list of makes, models and engine codes.

Personalize the ecu to the car and you'd have an adapter problem left to deal with.

(voltage levels and pinout).

Most of these parameters are not even part of the ECU's firmware, but field-modifiable configuration even in original ECUs.

non-starter. I wonder if the car manufacturers aren't interested because starter motors are a nice little consumable?

Unlikely, they'd jump on the weight and cost savings.

Most starter motors are re-wound, not replaced so the manufacturers don't see a dime of the secondary market.

fair enough, I'm not a driver so it was just a thought.

Retrofitting this might prove challenging, because many motors do not have crankshaft position sensor and instead only rotation sensor and ECU interpolates actual crankshaft position while motor is running. Also you probably need individual control of spark plugs, which also often is not the case (for example they might be connected in pairs to save cost of individual inverters).

For motors without an encoder it would be difficult, that's true.

As for the spark plugs, that's true, but usually the injector rails are 'crossed' from the spark plugs so only one cylinder will actually fire.

A few (an AMG v8 and a Toyota? at least) direct injection motors already choose the correct piston to start firing. I think they all still use a starter but it would be much less of a stretch to implement this on one of them.

Has anyone implemented the HN ranking algorithm for twitter feeds? Basically, if the same tweet gets retweeted, then it should show up higher. On the other hand, brand new tweets have a pretty high score initially because they are new, so you should still be able to achieve a mix of a "live stream" and bubble good links to the top.

Regarding idea #52 SoftBricks (Bricks that contain software components that you can connect just like lego pieces).

I had a very similar idea more than a decade ago. I wrote a business plan and shopped (unsuccessfully) for venture capital. Here's the title and first paragraph from my plan of Nov. 18, 1998:

Proto-pliance: A concept plan for a company which designs, manufactures, and sells hardware and software for rapid prototyping or customization of electronic devices

The basis of this plan is developing electronic blocks or "bricks" that can be used to build simple, useful, custom electronic devices in as little time as half-an-hour to a few hours, with the help of a person who can do light weight programming. No electrical engineering, soldering, or firmware programming required. One proposed business name, Proto-pliance, a blend of prototyping and appliance, is used in the broadest sense. The "prototype" may be put to real uses; the "appliance" may be any kind of electronic or electromechanical device. The business designs, manufactures, and sells hardware (the bricks) and the required software (development tools).

I suspect that hundreds of other people have had this same idea (BugLabs and several others fit the bill), but I'm disappointed to see that no one has managed to make a big success out of this. This is a seemingly really good idea but it hasn't panned out.

Amazing how many of those on the list have been implemented/are in some stage of implementation.

I suspected there would be some of that but not to this extent.

More proof of the value of ideas ;)

As for this particular one, buglabs is in the right direction but the granularity is all wrong.

I see a brick costing no more than a buck or two, $5 tops.

Buy them in bags, not fancy boxes :)

The only slightly more pricey ones would be the ones capable of displaying something or having complex inputs.

This one:

(17) Cameria Anagram of America, the 'free world' where you can join in groups to roam the internet at large. Any page you visit you take your 'followers' along with you, and everybody shows up as little avatars on top of the pages visited. Now known as 'crowdsurfing'.

Made me wonder if those avatars couldn't be represented by some mischievous vandals that could interact with the page somehow (thinking of the Asteroids bookmarklet that was mentioned here a while back).

I had a version of Cameria working but it used a (very nasty) xss hack to allow the avatars to appear and to facilitate the chat balloons above each avatar, maybe this idea could be revived using layers and node.js ?

It was pretty weird in the beginning, but after we got used to fooling around with it we actually found some neat use cases (remote collaboration).

Co-browsing for shopping, etc has been long-done, right? I remember wondering about that years and years ago.

A questionable idea on my list was weather widgets where the weather would be depicted by the attire of a character. A core set of code would run it all, but could be branded according to a celebrity, cartoon character, etc. e.g., on your CelebX fan site, CelebX would be in wet-weather gear for storms, shorts and singlet for a heatwave, etc.

I had a basic idea the other day and built it today - just a bookmarklet that will take a page (news article, for example) and load it in Spanish in the left half of the browser, and English on the right, as a way of trying to learn the language: try to read in Spanish, but you have the back-up at hand for when you get stuck.

This was to work across sites, allowing you to click links with abandon without breaking up the group.

http://yubnub.org is good for this. e.g. to compare german and english versions of a wikipedia page: "split {url wp topic} {url wpde topic}"

something user-friendlier would be nice, though. better still, something that would try a few tricks for finding (human) translations of whatever page you're looking at -- going through sitemap files, following wikipedia translation links, whatever other schemes there are out there.

There are plenty of other things you could do in the same field. And could charge money for: many people's jobs consist of reading online information in a foreign language, and they would pay for any help they can get.

A lot of people say that ideas have no value yet never share any of their own.

It's really nice to see someone practice what they preach.

ArticleBody already exists, it's called Readability:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

It's a bookmarklet

Comments on the list:

(22) ClosedClub -- make the $10k some kind of charitable donation; that way users can feel proud, rather than suspecting they're suckers. More generally, online variations of the club that prices out the riff-raff seem like a potentially very profitable area, but tricky to get right [and pretty unpleasant, but that's just because I'm a crazy leftie]. There's no non-tacky way of showing wealth online, the way you would in real life with expensive furnishings and an upmarket location. Second Life came closer than anything else, but on the web? Giving users personal assistants/moderators? [unemployed journalists hired as personal chroniclers or proofreaders?]

(25) CustomCrawl: hell yeah, this is a great one

(31) F5News. Like this too. build it on top of digg/reddit/whatever. Perhaps as an independent site pulling the content (in another frame, or whatever). Perhaps as a greasemonkey script or browser addon, that you can click while on the site.

(48) ProofItWasThere -- like it, would use it. Something you could build in a weekend [maybe I will].

(8) Afrux -- a) needs a name change; I read it as 'affreux' ('terrible' in French, which is one of the most commonly-spoken languages in Africa). b) also, is 'africa' homogenous/distinct enough for this to make sense? [maybe yes, I just don't know] e.g. egypt obviously has more in common with Syria than with Zimbabwe; even if you keep it sub-saharan, what's the common thread beyond language support and working with old hardware?

(56) TorrentLeaks -- there's a lot of space for something in this area. [wikileaks is great but very problematic, and in any case this is a domain where you really don't want a single point of failure]. Not sure how you'd target this specifically towards leaks, rather than all the other things torrents are used for

Heres a couple from my ideas list:

WhatIsThisSiteAbout.com - Flashes an image of a website homepage for 5 seconds and the user has to guess what the site is about. Feedback can be used to hone the site so that it makes a better impact in the future. (Someone told me that a similar site might already exist?)

iPhone Training App - An app that uses GPS to figure out how quickly you are moving and the route. It could maintain a history of your previous walks/runs and then use sound clips to motivate you (i.e. saying whether you're going good, or if you're going too slow etc)

Friday Drinks - A variation on a little app I built (http://meatinapark.appspot.com/). Shows nearby bars on a map and then you can organize Friday drinks with (facebook) friends. I could probably modify my own app. One day....

Online Mirror - A webpage that can be used as a mirror. Handy if you have a webcam but no mirror!

Hotel style room service for your own home - A cleaning service more akin to a hotel, where they restock certain items in the fridge and bathroom etc...

Jacques, thanks for the ideas. I had thought of building something similar to (5) AdProfs, but left it on the backburner. You reminded me. I have a need for something like this myself right now, and so I'll be working on prototyping today. My intended scope is pretty small, but we'll see where it leads.

I'll update you if this goes anywhere at all ;).

Very cool to see that sort of effect from this! Let me know if you get it to work, I might have some inventory for you.

(49) Registrate actually exists as http://immobilise.com. UK only, but I assume there are ones in other countries. Definitely worth registering as the police check stolen property serial numbers on it. Also, I recently heard about a very specialist stolen property locator service — http://www.kegwatch.co.uk/ — which specialises in the metal beer barrels delivered to pubs! If there is a market for barrels, there is a market for everything, even collectable ties :-)

Regardless, an excellent, fun and inspiring list, thanks for sharing!

I've always wanted to do a DIY ECU. The interrupt rate you have to service at full revs would probably overload anything running Linux, but you could use a dedicated microcontroller running an open firmware with a USB connection to a Linux system for system tuning (like BeagleBoard, Sheeva, etc.). If for some reason you couldn't legally make it open, or couldn't get it off the ground, you could change to licensing to kit car manufacturers and race teams.

Possibly relevant: MISRA-C, the automotive standard for firmware written in C: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C

Here's another idea, for what it's worth: a home router that would also filter out ads and act as an antivirus. I would pay good money for this.

At my home there are not less than 6 computers, each with two-to-three browsers that need an ad blocker, and all running some kind of anti-virus software (except the two macs).

I understand incumbent anti-virus companies would rather sell me the same product four times, but there could be a disruptive startup selling the router...

And ad-blocking software is currently free, but I think people would actually pay for an ad-blocking (physical) device. I would.

My ideas:

- Voice over crowdsourcing: A 99designs type of site where you submit your video and script, and voice professionals submit a recording.

- Bathroom finder: A mobile device app that finds the nearest public restroom.

- Javascript manager: Many media sites load 10-20 external scripts, and occasionally they interfere with page loading. The manager would not only manage rotation, but also optimize loading and swap sources for slow loading scripts.

actually, I've had a different idea: create JS packager, something similar to bundler/apt/ivy. and of course, it might optimize scripts a lot (for instance, you can specify only certain parts of JS lib to be imported into your project).

it can be implemented in any language, but all the languages may store a single repository for JS, since it's not like with java/c libs or ruby code.

While we're talking ideas, is there any way to see a users Twitter feed? e.g., I can hit twitter.com/username to see what they've written/RTed, but I've never spotted a way to see what they would be seeing. e.g., Twitter through their eyes. Options are: it's right there and I've never seen it, a service already exists, or it's not something that anyone else cares about!

You could set up an alternate id and follow everybody they're following.

Not quite the clean and simple process I was thinking could be made! Was thinking of something more like what Favstar does for favourites.

Not sure re restrictions on API access, but I guess an external service could retrieve a list of whoever they were following, then run through that and get a list of recent tweets, and then combine them all in date order? Surely someone's done it already? I've always been surprised that you couldn't just do it within Twitter itself.

A service to do this was recently created. Check out Twtroulette.com

OK, thanks! I'll share some ideas of mine too:

distributed ISP using long-range wifi and mesh networking -- technology should be just about there, and there are plenty of papers on "incentive compatible routing" so you can automatically pay people fairly for setting up efficient routers. Compete with Comcast etc.

frugality helper, fun financial planning software that helps you reduce spending, maybe through social / achievement-style means (give points for making dinner at home)

news recommendation (worked on this for a while; lots of ideas for making it work, but I needed a really good realtime news recommendation algorithm)

internet food shopping redux (I hate food shopping, and would love to do it over the internet, if it wasn't even more painful than in real life)

minipapers: for a given field (e.g., computer science systems), every day the site posts a new academic-level paper that can be read in 15 minutes by someone moderately knowledgeable in the field. So not a long paper, but one which presents a new idea in accessible form. The site is for "casual academics" -- people who like following research, but don't necessarily work in academia and don't have time to read full-length papers.

statistics for the non-statistician: most people suck at stats, but they'd like to know whether a particular conclusion can be made from some data. Give them the tools to do so (plug data in, ask question) without requiring them to know what a chi-square is or a t-test (but help them learn it if they are interested). Explain confidence intervals etc. using plain language.

calculator sharing: allow users to create simple forms which evaluate a simple formula (temperature conversion etc) and share them on a website with others. In other words, a one-dimensional spreadsheet with sharing functions built in. iPhone app would be important here.

ratebike.com: there are no good bicycle rating sites. I registered this domain intending to do something with it, and haven't yet.

webapp IDE: a full-featured html/javascript/css IDE for building webapps. Has a model of what content is static and what is generated; fills generated content with sample data; allows you to break one page into many template files; understands enough Django/Rails markup to recognize foreach loops and so on. Flashy feature is showing structure of html pages (block-level elements) in 3d, where each block is separated along Z from the previous one, so you can rotate the page and understand its structure better. CSS & JS edits take effect as you type.

Fixing technical recruiting: job postings suck; people seem to get good jobs through referrals. Recruiters make a lot of money. It seems like there is room for an app which either helped recruiters or did the job for them. Perhaps this can manage hiring flow on the company side too: tracking, sorting and archiving resumes; managing the interview/hiring process; allowing interviewers to keep and share notes on candidates.

"Greasemonkey deployed": for freelance web consultants, if you have a good prospective customer, you might want to show them a demo of your work on their website. Right now if you want to do that, you have to download their site, rehost it, and make your changes. This site would instead allow you to rehost a target site (via proxy) and insert arbitrary javascript on the rehosted version. That way the consultant can say "Here's how your website would look with my work", and it can be tested live.

writing helper: smart grammar fixing, catches & fixes most errors that people often make. has an api, so you can feed comments on your site through it. (Don't know if this is hard, but it seems like it wouldn't be too bad, especially if it were conservative.)

> webapp IDE

The closest I've seen to this is Aptana Studio ( http://www.aptana.com/ ) , which is far from what you suggest, but is at least is on the same track.

> Flashy feature is showing structure of html pages (block-level elements) in 3d, where each block is separated along Z from the previous one, so you can rotate the page and understand its structure better.

Far from flashy, this would be AWESOME.

http://www.cloud9ide.com/ and https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/ come to mind, although the former seems more like an IDE. there used to be a vanilla Eclipse IDE running in a web browser that was built on top of qooxdoo, but i can't find it right now.

Super lincolnq, that's a really cool list.

The news recommendation one is one that I actually discussed with someone only yesterday, with a very concrete application in mind (finance business).

Calculator sharing: maybe a layer on top of google docs?

minipapers is cool, but lots of science is really hard to get without sufficient background. The jargon alone can make a 1 page summary in to a 10 page explanation.

Food shopping suggestion: a simple checklist of the stuff that you normally would buy, then try to anticipate the frequency with which you order things to preset the checked items.

"minipapers is cool, but lots of science is really hard to get without sufficient background. The jargon alone can make a 1 page summary in to a 10 page explanation."

This is a problem -- but an important, widespread, interesting problem, where an innovative service with carefully-tuned UI could make a major difference. e.g. create interfaces that can expand/contract their level of detail according to the user's background. A term can be expandable into a one-sentence definition, and/or linked to external explanations. A sentence can expand into the corresponding paragraph from the article. many more things along similar lines -- none earth-shattering, but good execution could get you a nice market.

roadbikereview.com and mtbr.com are good sites for bike related reviews.

mtbr.com seems to link to roadbikereview.com. From a consumer's point of view, they are both effectively spam. It's organized terribly, there's no content (photos, specs or reviews) for most of what is listed. And it looks like crap. I guess they "exist" for some definition of exist. Is there actual content on these sites that I can't find?

There is a reviews section on both sites that have pretty decent contributors. I've looked up many a component/bike there to get a good idea on what's worth it and what isn't. Some items even have photos, and some people have posted how much they paid and where they bought it from. I wouldn't count them out as "spam". There's useful information buried under a site from the 90s.

Did you mean something like this for bikes? http://snapsort.com/

The one time I tried food shopping online (not very popular or affordable in Australia) it was such a glacial process to spend 4-8 clicks just to track down each item.

What if you started with a textarea, in which you added an item per line. You could be specific ('500g Barilla fettuccine') or vague ('pasta'). On the next page, 6-10 search results would each be presented in a vertical DIV (like a shelf of books). Instead of each click holding up the whole process, each DIV/IFRAME could be dealt with independently until resolved/ordered. The more specific items could be resolved and ordered quickly. The vague ones might need a bit of drilling down. Any resolved (ordered or cancelled) item would be replaced by the next thing on your list.

Partner that with shortcuts to things you order regularly and so on and I think it could speed up online shopping somewhat.

This is why I wish FreshDirect had an API.

That calculator sharing thing seems to me like instacalc.com (great tool by the way)

Thank you, never heard of them before. That keeps bugging me about the web, stuff that exists for years and then suddenly it comes on your path.

If only someone would build a tool that would let you put words into a text field and then it would basically "query the internets" you wouldn't have this problem.....Add it to the list ;-)

Even better if large companies like Google or Microsoft were to do something like this.

Oh, awesome. So my idea does exist. Excellent.

Minipapers is a great idea. In many papers the core idea is buried in many pages of ceremony. It would be great to have papers that tried to convey the idea to the reader as quickly and clearly as possible, rather than striving to be mathematically correct, starting with an introduction to the field and motivating the research with current buzzwords.

I loved this idea as well.

Your distributed ISP idea is already being. Well here in Cape Town, South Africa.

The URL is http://www.ctwug.za.net/ .

frugality helper I like this idea. It could be something along the list of EpicWin (http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/). Do you happen to have this idea worked our further.

Nope, I have no idea beyond that. It wants to be social, I think, and integrate with social platforms, but beyond that I don't know.

Fixing technical recruiting: (...) Perhaps this can manage hiring flow on the company side too: tracking, sorting and archiving resumes; managing the interview/hiring process; allowing interviewers to keep and share notes on candidates.

This is exactly where I am going with job4dev.com. My progress has been slow this summer, but I'm planning to get the resume sorting and interview tracking done by the end of the year.

cool! I don't understand how the site works from merely visiting it; it does differentiate itself by listing what look like actual GOOD jobs. What is triage and how does it work? It looks like I need an account to participate.

Hey, man. Thanks for checking it out.

The triage is still in very early form. While most of the Brazilian listings are posted by actual users, we are still trying to break out of the chicken-and-egg problem everywhere else around the world.

To do that, we are pulling job listings from different sites. However, there is some "post-processing" to be done:

- we need to get information about the company (we only publish job listings from companies we know about).

- We need to add tags to the company page and the listing page.

- We try to break the job description into two parts: one describing what is expected of the candidate, the other describing what the position is about.

So, "triage" is some sort of post-processing queue. We are doing to get these job listings from other sites and to put in our format. We are automating it as much as possible, but there are always some detail that needs to be done by hand.

If you create an account, you'll see that we barely put any copy to explain how it works. I'm just dog-fooding for now. As I find more ways to automate or semi-automate the process, the better this triage system should work.

I don't want to put too much effort on it, though. Even if this system gets to be perfect, we would be no better than any job aggregator like indeed or simply-hired. I'd rather have companies coming directly to our site because we are offering some different service (the hiring process management) than by being a "better aggregator".

(39) HardHacks A place to show off your real world hardware hacking skills.

This sounds like somewhere between Hack A Day (www.hackaday.com) and Instructables (www.instructables.com). Could be interesting. Take the hardware hacking level of hackaday and allow the user submitability of Instructables.

I really like the idea of showing the impacts of boycotts and protests and helping the organization of these actions (GrassrootsBoycott) -- have you put in any additional work/thought into this idea?

Yes, but I will work that out in a separate posting, that's too much for a comment and will take a couple of hours to document.

Re: AutoTagger

See [Wikipedia Miner]'s 'Wikify' -- tags text like a Wikipedian might, adjustable sensitivity, downloadable open-source not reliant on outside service (like OpenCalais is).

Sculley seems to be saying the following about Jobs:

- Straddles the line of micromanagement vs. personal communication with workers. (Interested in every detail of the process.)

- Acknowledged all workers (memorized first names of Mac team).

- Directly communicated with all workers. Example was telling developer that their code isn't good enough.

- Is a perfectionist.

- Kept teams small (Mac team limited to 100) and fired people if needed new talent on the team to keep team to that size (enforced accountability).

- Hired well.

- Focused on simplification.

- Got rid of the bad.

Hmm.. I may have drank too much tonight.. but.. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?!?!

Wrong thread reply.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566

And, not to get too deep, this might point out why my not-so-wonky friends get confused when I abruptly thread cut and bring up a new topic in conversation. They're usually like 'Huh?'

Thanks for the link. I swear that I clicked on the right thread. I wonder if HN is moving so fast now that it is either easier to post to the wrong thread somehow, or it is actually posting to the wrong thread. Or maybe I'm just getting old!

WTF- this is not the thread I posted to, I swear. I'm sorry.

I've seen that happen before.

They made ordered lists for things like this. :)

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ol.asp

SequenceHunter exists. It's called BLAST.

http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

Number 52 (SoftBricks) reminded me of Bug Labs.

http://www.buglabs.net/products

That is very neat stuff, thank you for the pointer. I have one application ready to go in to one of those. Neat :)

edit: on second thoughts, forget it, the prices are way off the scale.

I like the dutch auction model. I wonder whether it results in significant difference in prices paid.

"This got built and is in daily use."

That gives me another idea! A web monitoring tool that will hit all your projects on a daily basis, solely so you can make this claim about anything you have ever written!

Post your ideas on HN and see what gets upvoted.

Tag: HB HN (half baked hacker news)

Your list has some interesting ideas, but I think that (10)ArticleBody has been executed very well by the bookmarklet ViewText at http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fviewtext.org%2F

I'll add the list:

A FF and/or Safari extension to emulate the text focus that occurs when double tapping on a column of text on iOS devices. If you haven't seen it, it zooms the page to the width of the text column and is one of the best features of the iPad. It would probably be best implemented through a right click. I haven't played with extensions yet so I have no idea how difficult it would be, any thoughts?

Thanks for that link, I'll run my test set through it.

neat idea, that zoom!

The bookmarklet wasn't reachable from the frontpage so I edited the link to one with the bookmarklet. I use it all the time, but the zoom would be better.

Thanks for linking this. I've been working on ViewText as a side project. I'd love to hear feedback and ideas. Currently, you can request the content of an article in html, json, jsonp, xml, and pdf formats.

It also works on RSS feeds.

Ronnie,

Do you want me to score your code relative to what I've been able to do with this so far on my test-set ?

Sure, that's fine.

Might you be willing to share your code/approach? How does it differ from Readability's algorithm?

I took readability's algorithm (in JavaScript) and ported it over to C#. It's not a direct port of course, as lots of things in C# are done differently than in JavaScript, and I didn't have the browsers DOM to work with. In addition, readability performs the processing while on the current page, leaving elements in place. For me, I just have the HTML string to work with. That's the biggest difference, otherwise I followed their idea on how to extract the main content.

Why not make this idea itself into a crowd-sourced startup idea generator website? It is somewhat ridiculous that so many folks think an idea itself has value apart from circumstance, context and execution. Perhaps by getting everyone to share as many ideas as possible, then everyone can see that there are so many good and similar ideas that they have little individual value.

Just a simple UI. One leader board page where crowds vote up/down ideas just like these. At any given time you can scan the whole list of all the wild and crazy ideas people have come up with. Ideas that have been implemented or which are similar to existings site get pointed out. This could also serve IP prior art discovery purposes. And whatever ideas have the most votes could be products worth making.

we are working on that http://www.thinkshot.com , its's exactly what you are describing with some added features, we should be ready in the next 8 weeks

Great list and a useful read, you should open your comments up, I bet you'd get a lot of reactions.

I am getting lots of reactions!

Mostly by mail, but plenty here too.

(28) got me thinking, the technology is ready to get DJ's to telecommute to the parties.

the technology is there and has been for a while, problem is it sucks for the punters and it sucks for the DJ. Customers in commercial clubs and at parties want to be able to go up and talk to the DJ, request their favourite song etc.Yes you could do that with a webcam, but it's not the same. From a DJ's perspective there's nothing worse than feeling disconnected from your crowd and this would massively exasperate that feeling.

hell, the technology has been there since the invention of the telephone.

I agree the experience would generally suck, but there are cases where it would work, either as practicality (save on air-fares) or as gimmick. The DJ for your chillout room is up a mountain in Nepal; as well as the music, the scenery is projected onto the wall. Everybody feels peaceful by proxy.

I meant that the bandwidths are available to give the remote DJ enough immersive experience to do his job well. A couple of hi-def video streams and a high quality sound stream. I'm not going to develop it, I just noted it might be in the realm of the doable now.

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