
Ask HN: Idea Sunday - jw2013
Kick start the first Idea Sunday of May.<p>(PLEASE upvote if you like this post to be seen by more people, as someone in the previous Idea Sunday mentioned the post with less points than number of comments will be penalized in ranking. Thanks.)
======
dang
Ok, when people start racing to post these at midnight, and beg for upvotes,
this experiment has jumped the shark. I'm going to bury this post and ask you
all not to post more of them.

Only one account (whoishiring) is allowed to make regular feature posts that
we don't kill as duplicates. (That's to prevent race conditions.) Should we
make this "Idea" thread a regular feature? I've thought about it. I think the
answer is no.

Experiments are worth trying, but this one has gone on for a month now and I
don't think it has cleared the bar [1]. Having all these ideas in one place
makes the whole less than the sum of its parts. The threads seem to have
gotten less interesting as they've become more regular.

I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who disagree. But our job is to optimize
HN for curiosity and I don't think the quality is high enough here. Ideas are
better in the wild. Let's discuss them as they come up organically, rather
than try to organize an idea-fest.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682938)

~~~
DanBC
I agree about the frustration of having multiple threads posted by different
people. These threads should be killed.

A once per month thread would be useful to me. Would it be possible to
accommodate that?

~~~
krapp
It seems to me that the ability to merge threads (either automatically or
through moderator action) would benefit this, and the problem of multiple
posts on the same subject in general.

Although I don't agree with seeing popular, user generated content as a
negative, but it's not my sandbox. I think it's at least better than yet
another Techcrunch post or ceaseless bickering about class warfare and
internecine SV politics.

Also, perhaps these threads should automatically expire weekly.

------
neilxdsouza
A search engine for the legal system. I had sent this idea to YC 2013 and they
asked me to submit a video, but I felt I don't have the creds to apply.

Take each section of a country's law and convert it into prolog clauses.
Queries can then be run on the legal engine. For defendants it gives you
insights on how to build a case and for prosecution it identifies relevant
sections and evidence that needs to be provided to have a successful
conviction.

The same can be applied to divorce, patents, property etc.

My idea was to use an Erlang map reduce system to help fan out the queries
which are dispatched to an underlying Prolog knowledge base (Erlang supports
something like Channels/Ports).

I have a bias towards ideas which have a social impact.

The business case is: In a country like India there are over 20 million
pending cases in courts.

Imagine both sides of lawyers and the judge all having access to a system like
this - cases could be resolved a lot faster and time spent building
defense/prosecution would be a significantly smaller.

Implemented right, this could somewhat level the playing field and allow
poorer people have access to some sort of legal advice, which today they would
not be able to afford. Monetizing the system could be charging for queries as
you probe deeper and deeper into the system/advertising for lawyers.

I think commoditizing law has immense potential and should have a very large
business potential.

I always wanted to implement and Idea like this as Open Source, but here in
India nobody would fund ideas like this. I'm putting it out there as I believe
it's time has come.

~~~
zodiac
Lots of what lawyers and judges do involve interpreting and arguing for a
certain interpretation of laws - eg, whether Aero is merely renting an antenna
to individual consumers or performing a work publicly to all of them as a
whole. Case law also sets all sorts of legal "tests" that involve human
judgement (eg proportionate force in response, what a reasonable person would
believe). How will your search engine deal with this?

~~~
blazespin
I don't think the tool is meant to be exhaustive just assisting.

I think the base idea is very inspired, but I'd avoid prescribing a technical
solution at the beginning and just propose different approaches. The general
goal of giving lawyers a formula for inputting a case with a certain grammar
and format and getting a useful output of laws and precedence seems amazingly
useful.

------
Fizzer
A/B testing for the masses.

Here's an example: Say a someone is deciding which shirt to wear. They whip
out their smartphone, launch the A/B app, takes a picture of themselves
wearing each of two shirts. Within 30 seconds, they have an answer of which
shirt hundreds of people liked better. While they're waiting for the reply,
they're prompted to rate other people's pictures. This is as simple as seeing
two pictures and tapping the one that they like more.

The number of use cases is endless. You could be shopping for eyeglasses and
trying to figure out which look better - just try on both right there in the
store and get a response from the A/B app.

It's not limited to fashion, as people could use it for any subjective
comparison.

~~~
travisfischer
This is actually pretty interesting. I think many people have thought of a
product along these lines and, as mentioned by others, there have been several
versions of this tried.

I think the key is in the constraints you have outlined.

Obviously it's a mobile app. You take two pics and post. You then vote on
other's ABs. Every vote you make on someone else's AB earns you a vote on your
own. If you want a bunch of opinions on your AB you keep voting on other's.
You can post to your social networks to get your friend's opinions as well.
Maybe it ties into the social APIs and reads comments to extract out votes for
A or B. Maybe some viral growth potential there.

I like this. I might use actually use it. Wondering if it is important to be
able to choose a target segment of voters for your own AB or if the
classification of "human" is good enough in most cases.

~~~
Fizzer
I've thought about segmenting as well. For example, teenagers don't want to
rate pictures of grandmothers all day -- they want to see people their own
age. You could segment it by age and region for starters.

------
GavinB
A service that sits between my bank account and subscription services that
only accepts charges that I've preapproved.

This would let me keep track of the services that I have so I don't end up
with subscriptions to sites or services that I've forgotten about. It would
also let me revoke permission to charge the account at any time. No need to
cancel a card if one won't cancel or changes the fees--you just revoke their
permission individually.

~~~
drsim
Direct Debit in the UK does this. You can cancel any instruction at any time,
usually through your online banking where all instructions and charges are
listed.

It is widespread and the norm for subscriptions.

~~~
smsm42
In Israel, the same arrangement exists. I was very surprised when I learned
that in the US you give to the company your account number and they basically
can initiate money pulls any time they like and the bank does not have a list
where you say who is approved and who is not. That seems to be kind of
backwards and insecure. I know there are probably ample reasons for that but
I'd feel much better if it was arranged like that. Paypal and Amazon Payments
and other systems like this provide partial solutions but why banks wouldn't
do that? Looks like something that belongs there.

------
amjd
Links to previous weeks' Idea Sunday posts for reference:

Last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7654771)

2 weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616910)

3 weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7582077)

4 weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7541601)

~~~
blazespin
Up voted .. karma grab, yeah, but I was just looking for this.

~~~
amjd
I was looking for it too. I posted it so it would help others. Not necessarily
for karma. :)

------
bradchoate
"please", a command-line interface for natural language commands. So, like
Siri, but for your terminal. Ie:

    
    
      $ please push the changes i've made today to the master repo
      $ please archive this directory into foo.zip
      $ please clone the bootstrap repo from github
      $ please find any files under ~/ matching 'foo-*.txt' and containing 'bar'
    

Sure, all of these can be expressed using CLI tools we have today, but isn't
it time we had an interface layer that abstracts away all of the fiddly
switches and just did what we said?

It would offer a pluggable interface for extending its capability and
vocabulary.

~~~
wingerlang
I'd wager that ANY person who actually uses CLI tools to do things does not
want, nor need, to write full sentences to do these things. Everyone that uses
CLI tools always says they do so because it is the fastest way possible to do
X. That point becomes moot once you have to write sentences.

~~~
icebraining
I don't know - I live in the terminal, and I definitively wouldn't use it for
regular commands (sed, grep, tar, etc), but if it was smart enough, I could
see myself using it for software that I rarely use and which has complicated
options.

For example, I'd rather type

    
    
      please convert movie.avi to h264 at 720p with subtitles from movie.srt 
    

than having to read the man page of avconv each time.

Bonus points if it could print the translated command before running it - it'd
double as a learning tool.

~~~
anewhnaccount
Or even if it'd only output the translate command line. Like a better apropos.
A nice idea for sure.

------
mjnaus
A service combining the flexibility and ease of use of a CMS site (Wordpress,
Drupal, Joomla, etc) with the speed and security of a static HTML site.

The CMS version would be a private site (not accessible by the general public)
which is compiled into a static HTML site which is publicly accessible.

There should be a way to deal with formerly dynamic elements, such as
contact/comment forms, site search, etc. (possibly using third party APIs)

There also should be a way to deal with updates to the CMS version of the
site, so that these changes are detected, compiled and processed into the
static version of the site.

~~~
mjnaus
These solutions seem to, kinda, take a stab at the concept, but what we're
really after is something way simpler. Think a simple text field into which
you type a URL. Then this service would visit, crawl and compile the entire
site into a static HTML site (with options to enhance the final version of the
static site).

This would have to work independently of the platform used to build the
original site and ideally the service would also provide a means of getting
the newly created static site onto it's hosting platform (be it Dropbox,
Digital Ocean or whatever other platform you want to host the static site).

~~~
dukedougal
Httrack does this.

~~~
mjnaus
Yep, they do. However not as a service. With Httrack, I'd need to download
their software first, and then run it whenever the site's been updated. I'd
like a online service that handles it all for me.

~~~
dukedougal
It would be trivially easy to put the front end on HT track.

------
fragsworth
DNS for the Post Office.

When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain
Name", but change the address associated to it. _Once_.

Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on
if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their
account settings.

~~~
hashtag
I've seen similar ideas to this (central location to change/update all your
addresses on file) over the years. I decided to just hack my own solution to
the problem since I move and travel a lot and it became a pain point long ago
rather than wait around for a viable solution to come forward.

~~~
rafamvc
Can you explain What was your solution/hack?

------
bradchoate
If you like the movie reviews on The Incomparable podcast (the recent WarGames
episode, for instance), perhaps you'll agree with me that there should be a
web site/app that offers full-length, fan-created movie commentaries that can
be played while viewing the movie.

Business model should probably be subscription (who wants spot ads thrown into
the middle of their movies?) or something simple like $1 per commentary. The
service should seek out talent to create the commentary tracks and pay them
for their work.

~~~
bambax
I don't know about movies (maybe) but for sports this sounds like a great
idea; instead of listening to the same old commentators you could have your
friends or inspired amateurs, or famous people or who knows who? commenting on
the game.

Some kind of youtube-soundcloud-twitter mashup with a strong focus on
realtime.

Not sure how it should work but there should be potential.

~~~
tibu
I like the sports idea. The question is where do you get the content from.

------
Sephr
What's stopping us from making something like
[http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-
ever/](http://www.yankodesign.com/2013/01/29/best-keyboard-ever/)? Samsung
came out with a phone in 2010 with an e-ink keyboard (Samsung Zeal). Are there
any unsolved obstacles preventing this kind of keyboard from becoming a
reality?

I would imagine such a keyboard, even at a $300 price point, would be
massively more successful than the Optimus Maximus ever was.

To entice users even more, it could probably be made water resistant by not
including any ports and using appropriate switches. It could come with a USB-
powered inductive charging matt that you place the keyboard on top of to
charge.

~~~
sakuraiben
Something like this? [http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-keyboards-keypads/razer-
deat...](http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-keyboards-keypads/razer-deathstalker-
ultimate)

~~~
Sephr
The main benefit of e-ink is that the display only needs to be powered when
you change the content. This enables you to greatly conserve battery life much
more than the active displays on that Razer keyboard allow (if it was
wireless).

From the description, it seems like the keys do not use displays and only the
interface on the right uses displays.

------
drham
A website that allows maintainers of open-source projects to flag/create
tickets where it would be helpful for others to help out.

I personally want to make more OSS contributions, but often I find it hard to
find projects where I can contribute meaningfully. Meaning specifically that
they are projects that have problems that match my expertise, are actively
maintained (my patches will be appreciated), and have unresolved tickets where
assistance would be useful (they are looking for outside help).

I imagine there are at-least some OSS maintainers who would like to recruit
more contributors as well, and a site that would help match both would be
beneficial for everyone.

~~~
jarofgreen
Get started: [https://openhatch.org/](https://openhatch.org/) :-)

------
nhebb
An online organizational space for HOA's. It would allow HOA members to view
the budget, see the monthly meeting agenda, file proxy votes, see any open
issues, and vote on board members.

I have the feeling (based on personal experience) that some HOA managers
prefer to operate in obscurity, so it may be tough to market.

~~~
danieltillett
Damn good idea, but as you suggest I can't see the managers being too keen on
it.

~~~
nhebb
I saw a suggestion on reddit once that you can canvas your neighborhood to get
proxy votes for any HOA meeting. Using the proxies, you can bring forth a
motion, second it with one of the proxies, and then (typically) win the vote.
So the marketing campaign could push this idea to frustrated HOA members.

------
covercash
My idea is to make Idea Sunday and Screenshot Saturday monthly posts instead
of weekly. Maybe the second weekend of each month so as not to crowd the
hiring/freelance posts at the start of the month?

Also have them posted by an "official" account so it doesn't turn into a karma
grab.

------
callmeed
I was inspired by Marc Andreessen's post this weekend about news/journalism
[1]. So, here's my idea for an editorial news site:

The site would be called "5 ON 5"

and every post would be based on a current news topic. In each post, 2
writers/bloggers would argue opposing views of the topic (point/counterpoint).
BUT each argument must be written in a BuzzFeed listicle style format. For
example:

5 ON 5: UKRAINE "5 reasons Obama needs to stay out of the Ukraine/Russia
crisis" vs. "5 things Obama needs to do for Ukraine right now"

and

5 ON 5: FACEBOOK F8 CONFERENCE "You should put Facebook's anonymous login in
your app. Here's 5 reasons why." vs. "5 reasons Facebook's new anonymous login
is bad for developers"

I like it because it could work for any news category, it could be for
analysis and prognostication, you could presumably get great guest writers,
and it's "smart" spin on the viral crap BuzzFeed/Gawker puts out.

[1] [http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-
andreese...](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/marc-andreesen-
why-im-bullish-on-the-news-105921.html)

------
thebenedict
An issue tracker for freelancers and small teams that is designed to be used
collaboratively with clients, without burdening clients with unnecessary
detail.

Clients see a list of user stories or other deliverables and can discuss, and
file issues and bugs against them. Developers can track their own bugs, finer-
grained tasks and issues privately. These two sides of the software are linked
for the developer, i.e. as a developer I can add detail and break down a
client request into smaller stories without exposing the client to the gritty
details, and keep track of which client request(s) different issues and
stories are related to. Also useful for filing issues the client doesn't need
to know about, say, bugs I find before they do :)

The problem this solves is that I have to maintain two issue trackers, one
focused on user stories and features (usually a google spreadsheet), and
another for more technical tasks and bugs (usually pivotal tracker). I want to
keep it all in one place. I would be surprised if this doesn't already exist,
but I haven't been able to find it.

------
shawnps
A code review tool specifically for Golang projects based on many of the
contribution guidelines listed here
[http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html](http://golang.org/doc/contribute.html)

A few months ago when I made some contributions to Go I realized I like their
code review process and tools much more than the typical GitHub PR workflow.

------
blazespin
Collapse this for HN. I know this is redditty, but I sorely need it when I see
an idea that spans a conversation longer than the page. Can't even tell by
indent if I have got to the next idea. Sort by new would be nice as well so I
can look for new ideas posted.

~~~
rahij
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhanc...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
enhancement-s/bappiabcodbpphnojdiaddhnilfnjmpm)

It does the job (and some more nice features) pretty well.

------
simondlr
VRCoin. It's a blockchain that simultaneously doubles as storage for items a
decentralized virtual space. You require the coin to store/remove items from
the space [namecoin for coordinates essentially]. I think once VR takes off
there's going to be a desire for a virtual world that's not owned by any one
specific entity. The blockchain acts as decentralized storage as well as spam
control, so people don't just place dicks everywhere (or rather it would be
costly to do so).

------
pubby
An MMO where all content is created by players using a wiki-like interface.
Editing privilege is tied to a "creation skill" that levels up with each
approved editing action.

~~~
yzzxy
Worldbuilding as a game mechanic could be amazing. I have this totally
evidenced belief that there are tons of people who are master worldbuilders
and are poor at writing fiction/narrative or dislike doing so. I'd love to
find a way to open up content creation to such a demographic.

~~~
lukejduncan
Didn't Neal Stephenson try something like this? Google is failing me on this,
but I swear he tried doing some wiki based community built world.

~~~
yzzxy
I believe you may be thinking of the The Mongoliad[0], which was a communal
narrative effort he founded/was in involved in. I'm not totally sure of the
original format of the storybuilding process, but I do know they are now
available as ebooks.

[0] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mongoliad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mongoliad)
(Wikipedia because I think it better explains the nature of the project than
the homepage)

------
fudged71
A/B testing for physical products, making hardware more agile.

Market validation and iterative development for hardware can take a long time.
Product developers are jealous of the fast iterations involved with software
development. I've recently learned that despite being lower quality, people
value the novelty of 3D printed goods. And we know that consumers value co-
creation [1].

We know that early adopters tend to be early adopters of multiple kinds of
technology. So if your user base for a new physical product also largely have
3D printers, you could bring your users into your prototyping process. Send
out 2+ versions of your product without them knowing which version they
received.

You can ask for feedback within 2 days of pushing out a design with real
users. From the feedback you can start a new iteration, which you can then
push out to your users as a tangible update within a week. You could even pay
for the small cost of material used.

This platform could start with STL files, and then in the future use a common
3D printing API such as the one we're building called PrintToPeer. Early
adopters would even be incentivized to get a 3D printer to be a part of the
development cycle of new products.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect)

------
personlurking
A few Idea Sundays ago I suggested an idea [1] for a location-based city guide
for tourists (with comment voting and based on discoverability).

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617048)

Here's another such idea (based on finding answers)...

____

A clean, dead-simple search engine that connects to information from Q&A data
about the city you're in. So it's a Q&A site (again, with comment voting)
regarding tourist-type questions and answers. The user can ask a new question
ahead of their trip and hope for answers but the real use case is where the
Q&A database is extensive enough that most questions are asked and answered
already.

Ex. - Enter the Paris section. Type in the search field "hours Louvre" and the
first and best answer would be the opening and closing times of the famous
museum. No other clutter on the page.

Ex. 2 - If GPS-enabled, type in "bus Louvre" and it'd bring up the most
relevant answer. "Take the 765. Every 30 min. Next one at 9am."

Short, sweet and simple. Only thing is, it'd need a Wikipedia-style editor
allowing for corrections when answer is no longer current.

------
theseoafs
Relational binary data serialization.

Cap'n Proto is a great piece of engineering that got quite a lot of things
right. (For those who aren't familiar, Cap'n Proto is a data serialization
format that is able to be very fast by encoding data in the same way modern
processors encode data normally - with fixed width data types and pointers.) I
think it would be nice to have a data serialization protocol that uses the
same general concepts, but addresses a couple limitations in that format,
including:

\- Cap'n Proto doesn't allow you to edit messages in a robust way. You can't
change the size of a list/string in a message, you can't replace one object
with another without leaking "garbage", etc. The data model is simply not
designed with fast editing in mind. \- The data model is document based so it
is inconvenient or impossible to capture certain kinds of relationships with a
schema.

My idea is to address these limitations using the battle tested relational
model and the massive amount of knowledge that's been accumulated about how to
efficiently implement relational systems. In this serialization format, a
message would be a veritable relational dataset, complete with a schema and
multiple tables. Messages would be organized into pages, each page
representing a node in a b tree, as in a normal rdbms. You can add, edit, and
delete rows as necessary, and just send the binary encoding of the database
over the wire directly. The utility of this system is obvious: a client could,
for example, read an entire database from one server, add a row to a table
(without parsing the rest of the message, which are in other tables on other
pages), and forward the new database directly to another server. Being able to
quickly edit even large datasets in this way would be a huge boon.

------
pallavkaushish
I'm starting to work on a marketing tool which will be a combination of
displaying popups like Bounce
Exchange([http://bounceexchange.com/](http://bounceexchange.com/)) and
Tweetganic([http://www.tweetganic.com/](http://www.tweetganic.com/)) or
[http://snip.ly/](http://snip.ly/).

Currently Social Media Management tools like Hootsuite provide a link shortner
so it's relatively easier for them to integrate a service like
[http://snip.ly/](http://snip.ly/) however they don't.

The product I'm thinking to create will allow anyone to manage, split test
their pop ups and promote themselves using a service like snip.ly. An
analytics module will accompany the product so all the data can be
meaningfully used to enhance the campaigns.

Hope I was able to clearly explain my idea. Would detail out some more if
anyone is interested.

------
JacobJans
Think about how many cool videos are made with the Go Pro. Snowboarding
videos, skydiving videos, etc.

Now think about how cool it would be to have the type of frozen fly-around
video that you see in moves like The Matrix. In fact, it should be super easy
to create such a thing. Instead of just a photo, why can't we have a frozen
moment in time, virtually in 3d?

In fact, I first thought of this idea in terms of wedding photography (an
industry in need of a lot of innovation, btw.)

What I propose is a "string of cameras" that you can easily place anywhere,
and will simultaneously shoot a photo. All of those photos are then instantly
turned into a video.

Cameras have become low-cost enough that a product like this could be produced
at a mass market price. Yes, it is a niche product, but so is the Go Pro. But,
the best argument for this idea is that it would be really damn fun to play
with one.

Someone, please steal this idea. All I ask is that you make it happen.

~~~
nmikz
This came to my mind when I read your post (360 pics taken with many phones):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD26Mrf1mck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD26Mrf1mck)

------
kevbam
Food inventory for the ordinary home. A synced cross platform app that allows
a normal home to monitor: 1)What food has been bought? 2)What the expiration
date is? Warnings when food is going out of date. 3)What meals can be made
based on the food “in stock”?

I hate throwing away food and often buy food I already have or that my
girlfriend has bought. I have been trying to think of ways to monitor what
food is at home and to reduce the amount of food wastage in our home.

I think an app that allows you to scan shopping receipts, the contents of
which are automatically loaded into a database and synced across multiple apps
would be very useful.

It could be monetized using the freemium model, e.g. more complex
functionality the more you pay and also by integrating with online shopping
engines such as instacart.

Any feedback on this greatly appreciated.

~~~
thebenedict
I've thought about something similar but get hung up on data entry. How do you
make it not miserable to get food purchase data into the app, given that food
doesn't have an RFID tag in it, and not everything (produce) has a barcode? I
like the receipt idea - partner with grocery stores to print a qr-code with a
machine readable list of items and (maybe) expiration dates. Having to do any
kind of manual scan on each item I bring home from the store feels like too
much behavior change to become part of my everyday routine. Maybe there's an
opportunity to do it for institutional kitchens where inventory is required by
default?

It would be fun to build the fitbit and basis integrations. Also, Randall
Munroe offered a different approach:
[http://xkcd.com/1109/](http://xkcd.com/1109/) :)

~~~
kevbam
Yes, data entry is the gap. I have been thinking about that and it seems like
there are a number of solutions that would allow you to read the text from a
photo, vivino.com is an example of an app that does this very well with wine
labels. I wonder if you could take a high quality photo of the receipt and the
app would add the contents of the receipt to the db based on this? I know its
not going to be seamless and may take a bit of manual work at the beginning.
Partnering with a grocery store or multiple when the solution picks up
traction could also simplify things significantly.

------
vsakos
A browser-based chat where the messages are encrypted in the browser so that
only the conversation participants can see the messages but not the server,
it's just storing them. The messages would be encoded by AES and the key
exchange can be done with RSA. The database would store the encription key for
every user for every conversation but encrypted with for example the user's
password or RSA private key, and the private key would be also encrypted the
same way, and when these keys are needed, the server sends them to the
browser, the javascript decodes them with the user's account password and
voilá. So it would be a browser-based Skype with Mega-like encryption.

~~~
wfn
Something like [https://crypto.cat/](https://crypto.cat/) ?

Supports multiparty OTR, etc.

Server doesn't see message contents. Ephemeral key exchange via OTR (hence
supports perfect forward secrecy), though of course there's always the problem
of trusting the fingerprint, i.e. someone (e.g. the server) can just MitM the
whole thing.

So ideally, one should verify the OTR fingerprints of the other parties via
some secondary channel.

You can also run the server on your own infrastructure.

P.S.

> _key exchange can be done with RSA_

any particular reason for RSA, and not ECDH key exchange?

~~~
wfn
[hrr, can't edit my own message anymore, it seems]

errata: mpOTR (as implemented by cryptocat) does _not_ seem to support PFS
right now, which is quite a big deal.

------
caseyash2
With the growth of electronic commerce and mobile commerce, fraud is going to
be a factor for all businesses that have a web presence. Online fraud takes a
variety of forms but charge-backs appear to be the most preventable. Using a
multi-layer strategy of various prevention and detection methods (fraud
scoring model, device profiling, new type of authentication), merchants
install a plug-in and do not have to worry about monitoring transactions for
fraud.

Based on a few sources, fraud has been staying around 1% of e-commerce
revenues.

~~~
instoftech
Like this? [http://siftscience.com](http://siftscience.com)

------
hashtag
A single site that aggregates and live demo or video demo of open source
projects...

Skimming through and reading each open source project to figure out exactly
what it does or having to read code, install it, or run it in some form just
to get a better idea is a pain in the ass (personal opinion). It would be
awesome to have a way to go through projects fast and _see_ what they're about
before starring at their repo. Reading descriptions is not as awesome as
seeing the product when possible.

------
elij
A site to discover content using an algorithm that ignores metrics we have
begun to game (likes and viewings) and instead builds rankings based on
pairwise comparisons.

Would allow discovery of new good content that hasn't employed growth hacks
and will also differentiate between equally rated content.

[https://aeolipyle.co](https://aeolipyle.co) (algorithm complete -- need to
find good use for it.)

~~~
michaelmior
I'm curious: pairwise comparisons of what? It's not clear to me what your
algorithm does.

~~~
rcfox
If I understand correctly, this sounds like an idea that I've been thinking
about for a little while.

Essentially, you do binary search-insertion into a list, where the comparison
function is a prompt to the user asking "Is A better than B?" (If it's too
difficult to judge "betterness" between two items, you could just as easily
swap in a different comparison. "Is A funnier than B?")

One thing that people always ask when I mention this is: "What if A and B are
equal?" Well, then you answer no, because A is not better than B. If your
answers are consistent, then A and B will end up next to each other in the
list.

~~~
elij
yup -- I believe this is a better user experience in terms of capturing
ratings (by capitalising on the availability heuristic)

What you're describing technically would work when each person compares every
item (and would fall into the domain of condorcet methods).

However in practice the election becomes a graph (rather than list or x/y
table) with cyclical dependencies and conflicting comparisons -- it becomes
quite hard to resolve -- but it can be.

~~~
rcfox
I envisioned starting with an empty list, and populating it with the user's
comparisons as they come in. That way, you don't have to deal with unrated
items.

Cyclical/conflicting comparisons are a function of faulty users, the algorithm
can't take the blame for that! ;)

------
nl5874
Created an opensource plugin architecture for currently Chrome, but can be
Firefox as well. Consists of repositories and plugins you can enable and
disable. These plugins will add extra functionality to an existing website, or
change layout for example. [https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-
chrome](https://github.com/dutchcoders/eight-spice-chrome)

------
dannyking
A Google-reader like service for your YouTube channels subscriptions. I'd like
to have a list of videos from my subscriptions I can turn into a video
magazine I can e.g. watch each Sunday.

It's super annoying that to keep up with your subscriptions on YouTube you
have to click on each channel and manually work out which videos you've seen
and which you haven't.

~~~
hashtag
You can subscribe to Youtube feeds with any RSS reader. I've been doing it for
a long time now. The built-in Youtube subscription blows hardcore.

------
goshx
\- a "Prezi-like" software for software documentation. You can navigate, zoom
out to the project specs, zoom in for the code;

\- think about how google maps show you the time a given route would take in
the current traffic. What I want is the possibility to see what the time would
be in a future date and time, based on historical data (no, google maps does
not have this);

~~~
RMacy
this, but for diagrams

------
nl5874
With StackTray (opensource) you can manage all your EC2 instances from the OSX
statusbar. Currently only Amazon AWS is supported, but planning to extend with
PaaS, but also DigitalOceaan, Google Compute Engine and Azure.
[https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray](https://github.com/dutchcoders/stacktray)

------
zercool
A site with free, open, community driven practice problems and solutions. Sort
of like a wikipedia for questions. I could imagine this being a key ingredient
in the future of OER. Would be cool to see something like this integrated with
[http://metacademy.org](http://metacademy.org)

~~~
jwcrux
Don't the stack exchange sites already serve for something like this?

~~~
zercool
Good point, actively contributing answers certainly helps practice a skill
area. But I can't imagine thinking, "I need to practice tree traversal
algorithms: to Stack Overflow!"

------
iamwithnail
I bought "thecoffeeprophecy.com" On a whim a while ago... Suggestions so far
have included a straight to kindle thriller, tripadvisor for coffee shops, and
a service where I cover myself in coffee grounds on webcam and predict things
for people. Suggestions welcome...

~~~
roryokane
Predict, based on the spread rate of Starbucks franchises, how long it will
take for a new Starbucks, closer to your home than the current nearest, will
be built.

------
cheetos
I'd like some way to listen to Hacker News.

I know that's ambiguous, and I'm not sure how it'd be implemented. But I often
listen to podcasts when working from home and often wish for a way to consume
Hacker News in the same way.

~~~
lukejduncan
a16z has a great podcast. It's not listening to HN, but it's in the same
spirit =)

------
thecooluser
I'd love the LeechBlock extension for Firefox to be recreated as a Mac
application. There are similar distraction-blocking tools but none that allow
you to set time-based rules for the blocking to take place.

------
pirer
An anonymous linkedin My only interaction with other people if it there's a
business/freelance opportunity. Invite only and where names appear when the
deal is real.

------
samelawrence
I continue to keep this updated over time:
[https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas](https://github.com/samelawrence/ideas)

------
udayadds
A Bitcoin like protocol for sending/receiving real money (USD, INR). Why to
pay 2% to banks and card processors when we can use blockchain for the same.

------
blazespin
Hack Raid - world of warcraft raids meet hackathon. Visual raid management
tools allows raid leader to manage teams on quick projects to prove out
interesting hacks that could form the basis of real companies. Contributors
pick from raids they want to join based on the merit the leadership and idea.
Time period for raid is compressed but very focused.

------
karangoeluw
You're early for a Sunday.

~~~
icebraining
Nope, it's been almost five hours since 00:00 UTC :)

------
cyanbane
A service that sits on top of/aggregates sports clips and learns from the
clips that I watch/view/like/share to determine if a sports clip is relevant
for me, irregardless of source (even if just providing links to third
parties).

~~~
cyanbane
Not sure why I was down-voted on this. I assume someone is doing this and
isn't looking for competition? ;)

------
mauricio-OH
A payment form that supports subscriptions and one time payments. It has
options for taxes and it comes in English French and Spanish. Moonclerk but
with taxes and languages. Chargify with a beautiful form and languages.

------
noisy_boy
A stackexchange like site for personal finance.

~~~
saryant
You mean like the personal finance Stack Exchange site?

[http://money.stackexchange.com/](http://money.stackexchange.com/)

------
doubt_me
Hacker news 2.0

An actual tech news column with reporters and a sleek website and or maybe a
podcast here and there

I mean seriously why hasn't that happened yet

~~~
minimaxir
The reason it hasn't happened yet is because that's a full time job, the
initial costs are high for AV, the profit margins are razor-thin. (or, at the
least, the money a person with the skills to write quality tech journalism
would always be far less than the money they could earn by applying the tech
skills for technical tasks)

------
SatyajitSarangi
A meta-data file over VLC player where people can add additional information
about a movie so that others watching the movie can skip right to that part.
Say, a movie has a few funny scenes, or action or even sex, and you only are
bothered to watch those parts. Then you can use this file to see at which time
period these scenes exist in the movie, and jump right into it.

Not exactly a startup idea, but something that can be useful, eh?

